D&D 5E Best 5E Adventure?

[Zardnaar]

As the title says. Igot a nice present a few weeks ago and what do you think is the best (or even good) 5E adventures? I have the 3 AP ones and the Quests of Doom book and I would have to say the winner is......

Lost Mines of Phandelver.

Several of the Quests of Doom adventures would also be contenders.

Of the official adventuresI would rate them as.

LMoP
PotA
OotA
RoT
HotDQ

HotDQ I think is an outright bad adventure, OotA requires a bit of work it seems and I kind of want to run it but can't really be bothered atm. Ithink I owuld want to run PotA but are currently playing it so its a no go le sigh.

Of the Quests of Doom Adventures several are along the lines of LMoP, easy to drop in anywhere. my favorites dsofar have been Bad Moon Rising, Irteps Dish, and THe Dead from Above in terms of ye olde dungeon hack.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

I fully agree with your order.

 

[delericho]

LMoP
OotA
PotA
HotDQ
RoT

for me.

"Lost Mine..." is the best adventure WotC have produced for some years; possibly the best D&D adventure WotC have produced ever. (Though note that that's WotC, not TSR!)

I consider the first half of OotA to be on a par with LMoP, or perhaps even better. Alas, I found the second half under-baked, and the climax was hugely disappointing - bad enough to ruin the whole.

"Princes..." just didn't grab me. I don't know why. It was okay, but...

And I actually rate HotDQ more highly than RoT. One of the things I like seeing in adventures is when the designers make sure to note many different ways the PCs might solve a problem. And while I found the sequence of chapters in HotDQ overly prescriptive, I did like that there were a range of options called out within most of the chapters. "Rise..." struck me as little more than an inferior knock-off of Dragonlance.

 

[pukunui]

Lost Mine isn't perfect but my group did enjoy it. I'd say the best part of it for me was how easy it was to run. As Chris Perkins said, it practically runs itself. I did very little prep for it.

I disagree that HotDQ is a bad adventure, but we've been down that road a million times before. We haven't gotten to RoT yet, so I can't really comment on that one.

I'm with [MENTION=22424]delericho[/MENTION] re: PotA, though. While I like parts of it and have been mining it for material for my episodic campaign, I don't think I'd like to run or play it in its entirety. I think it would just get way too repetitive.

As for OotA ... I think I'd rather play it than run it, mainly because of the amount of work required to run it. So far I've just been stealing parts of it for my home campaign as well. (I ran the Neverlight Grove section as a standalone Halloween adventure, for instance.)

 

[wedgeski]

I wouldn't like to rate OoTA or the Tiamat adventures without running them. I long ago learned the lesson that adventures often play completely differently than they read. Having said that, I just joined a HotDQ campaign, and will soon be launching an OoTA campaign, so should have a better idea soon.

Princes is running fine so far, but I'm using it mainly as filler for a more custom campaign. I have to say that the opening investigative sections of the book are terribly organized. I had to write a multi-page crib sheet to keep the clues and NPC's straight. That's a big failing, and harks back to what I said about adventures playing differently than they read. However, the crunchy bits of Princes are excellent, and in general it's playing well with my group. There's no doubt in my mind that Princes is best used as a grab-bag of locations for a home-brew campaign.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that I agree. Lost Mines is by far the best adventure so far. It launched the 5E era for us with great style.

 

[delericho]

I wouldn't like to rate OoTA or the Tiamat adventures without running them. I long ago learned the lesson that adventures often play completely differently than they read.

Very true.

And yet... even a run-through isn't definitive, because you never see the path not taken. An adventure could be a horrible railroad but if your players never try to jump the tracks you'd never see it. IMO, that's still a design flaw, even if circumstances never reveal it.

 

[wedgeski]

And yet... even a run-through isn't definitive, because you never see the path not taken. An adventure could be a horrible railroad but if your players never try to jump the tracks you'd never see it. IMO, that's still a design flaw, even if circumstances never reveal it.

That's the start of a different discussion. For another time, maybe.

 

[MerricB]

I've run Hoard twice and I'm just starting Rise for the second time. And I love the adventures - Rise is in my Top 5 of all time.

But neither of them hold your hand. Like Vault of the Drow, you have to work to make them yours.

Princes I'm most of the way through and I have massive problems with its structure, though there are redeeming features.

I have hardly looked at Out of the Abyss.

Cheers!

 

[Mepher]

My group switched to 5E this summer and they played Lost Mine. I myself didn't make the plunge until this fall when I took back the reigns of DMing full time. The group wanted to play 5E so I decided to take the plunge. I wish I had done a little reading before hand because I decided to start with Horde of the Dragon Queen. My time is limited right now so I wanted a long term adventure path that I could run each week with minimal preparation....this is NOT that. I think I spend more time shoring up this adventure to make it coherent than if I just wrote my own adventure. Add to the fact that (and I know I will be the minority here) but I am just not a fan of the 5E system. It feels like D&D rewritten for the video game crowd where every player must have 10 options to do every turn. My players all like it so at the very least I will finish HOTDQ, but after that who knows. Maybe I will move onto Rise or maybe I will just go back to running my own sandbox world.

 

[jayoungr]

Also consider where you are with rules familiarity when you run or play something. Whichever adventure you do first may seem clunkier because you're interrupting the flow to look up rules and stuff, while the later ones may seem more immersive because you have the spells and abilities more or less memorized by the time you get to them.