Here are some points that came up, which might be pertinent to what's going on.
1) A near-TPK in the first session took out some of the characters that had the start for some interesting backstory. To get the survivors to adventure with the replacement characters took some major suspension of disbelief, and the party personalities haven't gelled yet.
That's one of the things where 5th edition doesn't quite know what kind of game it wants to be? Is it a game about combat challenges, or a game about completing a story?I realize that TPKs and near-TPKs are often a part of the overall D&D approach and appeal (and same for PF, OSR, etc.) but I honestly think they just wreck narratives in a super boring way. If I was running a game and most of the players got wiped, the campaign would probably just be over, or at the very least I'd have to reset and essentially start over.
That's not a new problem. The question of whether D&D is more of a game or more of a story engine has been around essentially forever, and everyone has their preferences and will gladly tell you how you are wrong (myself included) for doing it your way.That's one of the things where 5th edition doesn't quite know what kind of game it wants to be? Is it a game about combat challenges, or a game about completing a story?
When you try to do both at the same time, you either end up with a game that hits dead ends, or combat challenges that you can't actually fail.
The typical and traditional solution to this problem is to design content that doesn't follow a script to lead the PCs to a predetermined outcome (or one out of three), but instead simply keeps rolling forward based on what just happened. Good modules should provide content that works whether the players succeed doing certain things or not
If you want to tell a story, and you think you need character continuity for that, then take death and especially the TPK off the table. Choose a different consequence for failure. The DM holds all the cards and can decide that these bad guys decided to ransom the party, or these good guys showed up in time to save the day, or this deity intervened, or this devil offered a bargain, or whatever.
There is a lot of "the game playing you" in this thread and in the context of an RPG, it is kind of silly.
They’re excellent, from what I’ve seen of their Curse of Strahd stuff.There's a YouTube channel I like called Lunch Break Heroes. I used several of their expansions to Curse of Strahd, and they've been working on expanding several of the locations in Rime of the Frostmaiden as well. Here's a link to their RofFM playlist: