D&D 5E Consolidated Rankings Of 5E Modules

[pontifexexmachina]

Hi! First time poster here, but I've been a lurker for a while. Today I ran across two old threads from here that have rankings of 5E campaigns:

D&D 5E - Rank the Official 5e Adventures

Online, I've seen several rankings of the official Wizards of the Coast 5th edition adventures. But I don't recall having seen one on these forums, at least not recently. I've seen votes of the favorite (usually Curse of Strahd), but not a ranking of all of them - or a top 5. I'll post my...

www.enworld.org

D&D 5E - Rank the Official 5e Adventures (Updated)

Nearly a year and a half ago, I posted the linked thread asking everyone's ranking of the official 5e adventures. Not wanting to necro the thread, I thought I would update it in this post. I'm curious your thoughts. (New additions to my list are in red text.)...

www.enworld.org

I combined those rankings with a handful of rankings from YouTubers that ranked campaigns and blog posts ranking campaigns to create a consolidated ranking. Since 27 of the 39 rankings I collected came from here, I thought you might be interested in the results.

The Results:

1. Curse of Strahd
2. Lost Mine of Phandelver
3. Tomb of Annihilation
4. Rime of the Frostmaiden
5. Tales From The Yawning Portal
6. Dragon of Icespire Peak
7. Wild Beyond The Witchlight
8. Candlekeep Mysteries
9. Ghosts of Saltmarsh
10. Storm King's Thunder
11. Tyranny of Dragons
12. Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
13. Out Of The Abyss
14. Lights of Xarysis
15. Baldur's Gate: Descent Into Avernus
16. Dungeon Of The Mad Mage
17. Princes Of The Apocalypse
18. Critical Role: Call of the Netherdeep
19. Strixhaven: Curriculum Of Chaos
20. Rise of Tiamat
21. Hoard of the Dragon Queen

As you may have noticed, some people ranked Tyranny of Dragons as one campaign, some people ranked Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat independently. The people who ranked it as one book liked it a lot more, but I'm not sure that means Tyranny of Dragons is as good as this ranking represents. The older an adventure is, the more rankings I have for it, and the more reliable this seems to be. Which is a big reason I'm posting this: I'm wondering if people here (especially people who ranked before) are interested in creating/updating rankings to see how that affects the rankings.

(A note on method: I used the Kemeny-Young method, which is a Condorcet method that decomposes each ranking into a set of pairwise comparisons and finds the overall ranking that best satisfies the pairwise comparisons. The nice thing about Kemeny-Young is that it's insensitive to how many items are on each ballot, which works great here because people had very different amounts of modules ranked.)

 

[aco175]

@pontifexexmachina welcome to the boards officially and glad you moved from just lurking.

I can see most of the rankings. I guess everyone would change them a bit. I have not played curse of Stroud in 5e, but I know a lot of people talk highly about it. I wonder how the other settings from old will stack after a couple years. Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Spelljammer. There must be some sort of adventure book with the world coming.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

It's somewhat fair to have Tyranny of Dragons listed separately from Horde & Rise - WotC printed an (unfortunately limited) one-volume edition. AFAIK (I never did a side-by-side comparison), it had a completely reworked chapter one, which was one of the things that was heavily criticized about Horde. So it's actually possible that the one-volume Tyranny of Dragons really IS better than the two books as individual offerings. Unfortunately, that version is out of print. (Which I've always found strange - I thought that the one-volume version would replace the two smaller books, as publishers tend to reduce skus after awhile, but it seemed like WotC went back to reprinting the first two versions, rather than the one-volume).

 

[Gradine]

I understand why Hoard of the Dragon Queen gets so much hate, but I don't agree with it.

 

[Clint_L]

Good list - I like lists! I really liked Call of the Netherdeep; I would have put it much higher. And I would have put Witchlight much lower. And I would have put Phandelver at #1. Overall, though, the list as shown pretty much tracks.

 

[ad_hoc]

I understand why Hoard of the Dragon Queen gets so much hate, but I don't agree with it.

Agreed. I had a good time with it. A couple of the encounters don't work because it was written before the MM was finalized but otherwise it is a good adventure. I like how episodic it is.

Princes of the Apocalypse was dreadful. I put a lot of work into it and I still didn't like what it was at the core. It was just a slog.

I liked Curse of Strahd a lot and Rime is my favourite of those I've run.