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Message: <blockquote data-quote="evilbob" data-source="post: 6851913" data-attributes="member: 9789">Couple thoughts:Absolutely right about the module encouraging you to head straight to the castle.  I figured I'd handle that by having Strahd show up on the road and beat the crap out of them and laugh and fly away.  That should make them realize they need more stuff.  Also, emphasize Madame Eva.  She tells them all the things they need to gather first.THANK YOU for the thoughts on the Amber Temple.  Not only is it a high-level dungeon crawl with lots of weird NPCs, MULTIPLE liches, anti-thematic, and full of loot (every single spell in the PHB, for starters), it was also filled with tons of detail that any non-evil party will likely never, ever see.  That whole section confused me, too.  Easy enough to skip it.  (And the side quest to bring back the evil woman?  It seemed excessively difficult and unlikely.  I feel like the Amber Temple is more like:  ok, you won, but you love the campaign and want more?  Here's more!)Fighting Strahd is always very, VERY tricky.  When I did this back in the 3.5 days it was always sadly super-binary:  either Strahd got off his dominate and the battle was lost, or the cleric turned him and he was dead.  I agree that constant hit-and-run can get tiring.  Heck, a LOT of the castle can get tiring; it's such a huge dungeon and there's only so long you can go at "max tension" before it's just not fun anymore.  I ended up cutting huge swaths of the 3.5 castle (which was also BIGGER) because it just got boring for all of us.  The countryside was more interesting because it was always something new and different.  The castle was just the same - constant traps trying to kill you, lots of save-or-dies, etc.  This time around the castle is smaller and seems better regulated.  There's also many more reasons to go there, leave, and come back later.  I feel like that's how the adventure may have always been intended; you need to leave and come back a few times to break it up.This time around I'm actually worried that the campaign will peter out before they even GET to the castle.  I mean, besides the fact that levels 1-10 is a HUGE campaign already, there's SO MUCH STUFF.  I guess they made it so that you could always re-run it and never do all the same stuff (since the cards will send you to random places all over) but it's so big that I doubt someone is really going to run levels 1-10 over and over just for different stuff.</blockquote>

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