D&D 5E Convert ROTRL or wait for Out of the Abyss?

[Wik]

Your DM has to be willing to adjust.p

Oh, I adjusted the hell out of the adventure.

That's going to be as true for Abyss as it is for Runelords or Worms. Some parties wind up lacking in one area, others wind up having unforeseen synergy that makes certain encounters trivial. In either case, the DM has to be able to adjust by either tweaking the party (adding an NPC to cover some healing, for example, or adding an important 'escort' NPC that the party has to worry about keeping alive.)

That's not my problem with RotRL. I dislike how insanely rail-roady it is. How most of the good stuff in the adventure is buried in location descriptions, and not in the adventure itself. How the very best things about it are when the adventure gives the PCs a chance to fail - the rest of the time, it's just kind of boring. I mean, you don't even know the name of the main villain to module, what, four? five? We played the whole thing, and the players have no real idea of what the adventure is actually about.

Some groups may have the good fortune to be able to run a series of adventures as written, but my experience has been that even the best module needs to be tweaked to suit your party.

We play in a lot of adventures completely as written. And have a blast. RotRL fails (for me) not because of the mechanics (though there are some issues) but because the story itself is flat after a few levels. And if I'm buying an adventure that big, I want it to cover a lot of ground, because if I have to do a bunch of work to to make it suit my party... I'll just write my own.

So far, wotc is batting .500 right now for their adventures. So OotA is gonna be a coin toss. Fair enough. But Paizo modules are pretty consistently not my cup of tea. Over-written NPCs, adventure sites where the PCs are expected to hit every encounter (often in order), and huge swaths of background text that has no written-in means of being relayed to the PCs. Not to mention the sheer rulesiness of their products that makes running them a headache.

 

[Inchoroi]

I agree that if you run Runelords straight out of the box, it's very railroady. You can fix it though by peppering more clues, as well as making a sort of "Character Hook" paper for your players, so they can know kind-of what to expect as far as plot goes, and can make characters accordingly. Doesn't always work (I'm looking at you, Dan) but it makes things easier. In addition, I suggest trying to involve their character backstories into the adventure as well. One of my player's has a hate-on for the Skinsaw Cult, so I expanded chapter two a bit, to where they have to investigate and then take out all the [spoilerwarning] Brothers of the Seven [/spoilerwarning] in Magnimar. I also included a few NPCs that were somewhat important to the character's backstories in Magnimar and elsewhere, and tied them into the adventure in various ways--for example, another character's best friend spent a few weeks in Turtleback Ferry, and has one of those tattoos from...whatever Lucrecia's boat-casino was called, which escapes my mind in Chapter Three.

 

[garnuk]

Fair point, Corpsetaker. Based on what we know, what type of module do you think Out of the Abyss will be? I don't know enough about how the two differ.

In terms of what I'm looking for, in this case my main thought is that going with Out of the Abyss will just be much easier as I won't have to convert.

Based on what we know so far my guess is as follows.
You will be sent to the underdark to discover the cause and truth of rumors about Demon Lords running amock in the underdark. You will fall through some hole and feel like alice in the underdark of maddness, since the demon lords will have made everybody there go mad. Drizzt will run off to Menzoberanzan to deal with the threat of the drow coming above ground and one of the Demon Lords taking over the place. While he is doing that, the party will go from area to area discovering the cause of the madness, and finding some clue that links to who is creating some crazy magic spell which allowed the demon Lords to enter the Underdark. Once discovered, the party will have the chance to undo the magic or close the portal, and send everything back to normal.