D&D 5E Curse of Strahd (and limitations on 1st level play)

[pukunui]

I know it probaby isn’t a popular option but CoS is a very poorly executed adventure. The original Ravenloft was great and designed for levels 5-7. Padding it out and making it for levels 1-10 was a bad, bad decision which simpy makes a very frustrating experience for many players (including me). You are sucked into Ravenloft but sorry, you can’t do anythting about it till you grind your way up to approriate level to deal with the actual adventure, WTF!

I get very frustrated when adventures set up a situation then do not allow you to actually deal with it till you’ve been dragged though numerous sidequests.

I agree. It's especially frustrating given the playtest version of CoS was for levels 8-11, not 1-10. Someone somewhere along the line forced them to stretch it out, and it shows.

Just want to remind you that it is not a 5e issue. If an adventure is easy - that is an adventure or DM issue. It is fairly easy to make 5e challenging.

I agree with this as well. I've been DMing 5e since it was the Next Playtest, and I've lost track of the number of PCs who've died. I've had several TPKs or near TPKs at various levels. I've occasionally encountered a particular PC build that is hard to challenge (there was a goliath moon druid in my Tyranny of Dragons campaign, and this guy in my current Mad Mage campaign), but overall, I haven't had much trouble making 5e challenging for my players.

 

[James Gasik]

To me, this can be the problem with CoC. In ways, some sessions/adventures require not just suspension of disbelief, but for characters to not act like 'normal people coming to the reading of the will'. I'd guess most of us, if we were in town for a funeral and reading of the will, and the police came to us and warned us there are lunatics on the prowl, or even criminals targetting strangers, to stay in and lock the door, we would.

That scenario should lead to something like the movie 1408, being trapped inside the hotel and being unable to leave

This is partly my problem with the game, but I can't bring myself to enter the game being someone who is already aware of outer gods and the supernatural- which continuously hamstrung my attempts to be useful, since the game basically says "know occult stuff or more dakka". My second session I was a high school athlete whose sister was killed by a star vampire stalking a town leaving me the only witness, and I spent 75% of the session in handcuffs being suspected by the other characters of being a serial killer!

One of the characters, being a cop, decided to hit the star vampire with the entire contents of the armory and a police van, to no avail; in the final act we found out how to perform an occult ritual to seal the thing in a well which the GM handwaved because none of us could make the roll to actually perform said ritual in the first place!

I haven't played the game a fourth time; I know it's popular, and in theory I should like the game's setting, but I finally concluded I'm a bad fit for it.

 

[MGibster]

I know it probaby isn’t a popular option but CoS is a very poorly executed adventure. The original Ravenloft was great and designed for levels 5-7. Padding it out and making it for levels 1-10 was a bad, bad decision which simpy makes a very frustrating experience for many players (including me). You are sucked into Ravenloft but sorry, you can’t do anythting about it till you grind your way up to approriate level to deal with the actual adventure, WTF!

I enjoyed CosS, but I am in agreement with this criticism. The original I-6 module didn't have a lot of fat on it and even as a campaign CoS could have a good bit of it trimmed off for the better.

I get very frustrated when adventures set up a situation then do not allow you to actually deal with it till you’ve been dragged though numerous sidequests.

I think it's best to look at CoS as a campaign rather than an adventure. One advantage of CoS being a campaign is that you've got time to have Strahd screw around with the PCs for a greater period of time. Give them time to really, really grow to hate him.

 

[Bill Zebub]

Switch game systems to Shadowdark, and everything will be working as intended.

 

[Stormdale]

I enjoyed CosS, but I am in agreement with this criticism. The original I-6 module didn't have a lot of fat on it and even as a campaign CoS could have a good bit of it trimmed off for the better.


I think it's best to look at CoS as a campaign rather than an adventure. One advantage of CoS being a campaign is that you've got time to have Strahd screw around with the PCs for a greater period of time. Give them time to really, really grow to hate him.

Or simply annoy the players and frustrate them more and more. We got so annoyed we ended up giving the npc to Stradh as we were over the adventure. We had fun but in the end we gave up on it.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

I enjoyed CosS, but I am in agreement with this criticism. The original I-6 module didn't have a lot of fat on it and even as a campaign CoS could have a good bit of it trimmed off for the better.


I think it's best to look at CoS as a campaign rather than an adventure. One advantage of CoS being a campaign is that you've got time to have Strahd screw around with the PCs for a greater period of time. Give them time to really, really grow to hate him.

There’s actually a bigger problem is that in previous editions the Ravenloft setting was never a place where danger lurked Around every corner and high level monsters jumped from behind every bush and shrub to kill you. It was a realm where the horror was out of sight and lurking in the background and most villagers lived their lives without encountering such horror.

CoS is well-regarded but for me it was the start of how badly Ravenloft has been handled in 5E, turning the place into a ridiculous theme park rather than a cohesive setting. (I blame Perkins and the reactionary assistance of Hickman for that). Pre 5E most Barovians didnt think Strahd was a vampire, post 5E it seems to be common knowledge. (A major difference and really indicative of how they changed the theme.)

 

[Retreater]

Switch game systems to Shadowdark, and everything will be working as intended.

This group specifically has repeatedly expressed no interest in switching from 5e.
They have mentioned going to boardgames at some point in the future. Or just hanging out and watching movies.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I've run CoS twice (two games simultaneously)... and the only potential issue that I saw with the "Starting at Level 1" thing was the party being sent to Madam Eva immediately upon arriving in the valley. I know why the campaign does that-- because that's exactly what happens in the original I6... but I do think that is the one thing that contributes to how @Stormdale feels. The party is told at level 3 "The issue is with Strahd, go find these objects to deal with him!" and yet even if they somehow manage to get all the objects at Level 3 they still probably would need/want to "level up" before going after the vampire. So there definitely is this sense of needing to just ignore the "Big Bad" and elephant in the room while the party becomes powerful enough to actually eventually do something about it.

And this is why I'm pretty sure that if I was ever to run the campaign (and I'd certainly love to, as it is my favorite of all the 5E adventure paths by a large margin)... Madam Eva and her card reading would not happen till way, way later in the campaign. Give the players several months of game time being stuck in this dreary land, dealing with all the issues of Kresk and Vallaki and being harassed by Count von Zarovich in all manner of irritating ways (because he's bored and just sees the party as a new group of playthings.) Really put the screws to them to make them WANT to escape the Baratok Valley. And only then... once they've decided they finally want to get out... introduce Madam Eva and the potential solution to their escape.

Now all that being said... I also do agree that even this has the one potential hiccup in that we are asking/hoping the party to decide to want to leave the valley as the ultimate conclusion of the campaign, when the characters have nothing concrete to return home to. They may have built their characters with a backstory of something to go back home to... but that's just a tell, not show (and is the issue with starting the CoS campaign at levels 1 or 3.) And this is why entering Ravenloft at level 5 or 7 has a bit of an advantage, in that these characters have had countless hours of playtime in their home setting first-- probably a lot of stories and connections having been built there-- and then they get pulled out and stranded in Barovia. Thus they now have more of an urge to want to go home because they've actually played everything that they have waiting for them at home.

But of course... if you do that, then you run the risk of the players revolting that their stories back home have now been put on hold while they are stuck in the Mists... and then you run the risk of them just rushing through everything to get to the end, thereby losing everything that's cool about the full CoS experience. The same exact issue many players of Tomb of Annihilation had, when the time crunch of the Death Curse prohibited much more exploration of Chult.

In the end, to run the game as well as possible it all requires a careful balancing act on the part of the DM to find that adventuring sweet spot for their players. The downside for most tables of course being that from the sounds of a lot of comments here on the boards, many DMs don't want to actually work that hard at the balancing act, they want to just plug and play (and then they get annoyed that the adventure doesn't work for them.)

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I think being lost in the Mist (or just general haunted dreams) could be used as storytelling device to help the players come out about the life they left behind in the Mist.

Have them tell the story of their PC by having them recall their family or friends or accomplishments.

A bunch of vampiric nothics could also feed on the secrets of your characters. I often use nothics against my players and ask them ''tell me a secret about your characters''. Then have the nothics toy with the characters by revealing or haunting them about their secrets.

This way you can ''force'' your players to realize how much their character would want to go back.

 

[James Gasik]

Ravenloft, as a setting, has had a few issues over the years. In the beginning, it was simply D&D in a gothic horror setting, dealing with classic horror villains, ranging from those based on historical figures to Universal monsters. But it all hinges on frightening the characters; this world is familiar but also alien. It works against you at every turn; it doesn't want heroes, it wants to see heroes fall and become monsters.

Crushing hope and evoking terror and despair are hallmarks of the setting, just as much as it's villains.

But frightening a character requires frightening the player, and unless the player has buy-in, there's only so many ways to force this. You can use mechanics like 2e's fear and terror checks, but that's cumbersome and annoying- nobody wants their behavior and actions dictated to them.

So quickly it was settled on that the way to make Ravenloft frightening was to make the monsters stupidly overtuned. Contrast the way the Dark Lords are statted (quite conservatively, for the most part) in the original box set to the Monstrous Compendium foes, where you have variant Werewolves that can only be hurt by gold weapons (??), Greater Wolfweres that heal all damage at the end of each combat round, and all manner of things you really don't want to fight- in a game where fighting monsters was effectively the way to succeed.

There's a reason many players I know, when the topic of playing a Ravenloft game comes up, will sigh and groan, because they see the setting not as a fun trip into darker territory, but a "weekend in hell" slog where you better bring your most optimized characters and get used to being toyed with by the Dark Powers. Because Ravenloft isn't about your story. It isn't about your characters. You've been dropped into someone else's story, and you may play a part in it, but the Powers will desperately attempt to preserve the status quo in the end. Any victory is fleeting.

Not only is this not like standard D&D, to treat it as standard D&D is a REALLY BAD IDEA, in my opinion. Ravenloft is a setting about stories. Dark, twisted, often frightening stories. The DM spins a tale, perhaps one as old as time, and the players are basically Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; characters in the story who can comment on it, and play a role, but have little agency.

And that can be fun, don't get me wrong, but it doesn't play well with the concept of character classes and subclasses that are 85-90% combat abilities when most of the monsters aren't things you want to fight, and even if you do, cannot be fought conventionally. You can't defeat Strahd with sword, holy water, or a stake- you need his brother Sergei's sword, and the Holy Symbol of Ravenkind just to have a shot at it!

(Also, when employing a stake, don't forget to bring a mallet, rib cages are tougher than you think!).

In a game like this, experience should absolutely be granted by milestones, and if your players made combat characters, you should get them (and you) out of Ravenloft quickly- it's going to be a miserable experience.