D&D 5E How long did your group take to finish the official WotC adventures?

[volanin]

I've been planning on DMing all the official WotC adventures for a while now, but time is not on my side currently. The first adventure I DMed for my group was Hoard/Rise, and it was a blast (with many custom modifications), but it took us 1 year to finish + 6 months hiatus due to player vacations (for a total of 1.5 years).

Now, I've been thinking about running Lost Mines of Phandelver or Curse of Strahd (the two most upvoted adventures everywhere), or actually any other that might catch my attention since I've bought them all. They're just sitting on my shelf waiting to be played.

I usually DM 3 sessions per month, 3 hours per session, and that might be the reason Tyranny took so long for us. What are your experiences? Which official WotC adventures did you DMed/played and how long did it take for your group to finish it?

 

[akr71]

LMoP took about a few months - I don't really remember, but probably closer to 3 or 4.

HotDQ & RoT took somewhere between 18 months and two years and lots of customization.

That's playing nearly every week, but short sessions - around 2 hours or so, with my wife and kids. Sometimes life gets in the way and we can go a few weeks without playing.

My 'adult group' plays every month or so - sometimes longer. We tried Dungeon of the Mad Mage and after 8 months or so, barely got past the first level of the dungeon.

 

[hawkeyefan]

You can likely get through Lost Mines in a few sessions, depending on how many of the sidequests you include, or if you expand on things at all. It’s certainly the shortest adventure of the 5E line, without considering Adventurer’s League modules.

Curse of Strahd is probably about twice as long as Lost Mines, but depending on how you play it, could be made significantly shorter if you wanted. You could llay just Castle Ravenloft, for instance. But, if you really trimmed it down then you’d probably want to start the PCs off at a higher level so that they can actually compete with Strahd. They need all the XP/advancement that all the other locations in order to be strong enough at the end.

I think this is true of many of the adventures. Storm King, Princes of the Apocalypse, Out of the Abyss, the Waterdeep adventures....they all have lots of ancillary material that could be removed if you really wanted. You’d just have to adjust for difficulty accordingly.

 

[Nebulous]

It's a good question. We tried to play 2-3 hours once a week. Doesn't always work out that way, but that's the goal. Princes took a year to get through, levels 3rd to 12th. I'm running Phandelver for a second time now with a new group, but I'm fleshing it out and taking it slow. We are 18 sessions in and they're not at Wave Echo Cave yet. So we have been playing 4 months and I can imagine having 2 left.

But I see some people on here blitz through a full sized campaign in 6 months, I don't know how they do it.

 

[cmad1977]

I’m running CoS now, we’re nearing the end. I think we started... in March?
So about 6-8 months of fun would be my guess.

The players certainly haven’t done or seen EVERYTHING in Barovia.

 

[Nebulous]

I’m running CoS now, we’re nearing the end. I think we started... in March?
So about 6-8 months of fun would be my guess.

The players certainly haven’t done or seen EVERYTHING in Barovia.

That's what I want to run next after Phandelver. I ran the original Ravenloft a couple years ago and adapted it to 5e and it was great.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Generally, about one-and-a-half years. Tyranny of Dragons and Out of the Abyss took that long, and Tomb of Annihilation is looking to line up in a similar timeframe. That's playing either every week for two hours or every two weeks for about 4-5 hours. That also includes varying amounts of additional content thrown in.

I suspect that if you solely used content from the modules, you could get through in a much shorter time, but you'd have to railroad pretty darn hard to do so.

 

[volanin]

But I see some people on here blitz through a full sized campaign in 6 months, I don't know how they do it.

I also see this here a lot, and I'd REALLY like to know how they can manage that! =)

 

[ccs]

We've only "finished" 2 of them.
Most of our games run on a regular schedule of 4 (ish) hour, weakly sessions.
●Tomb of Anhililation - about 15 months. Although that time frame included two Christmas seasons and all the assorted missed sessions due to vacations etc. So actual play time probably = about 12- 13 months.
●Storm King's Thunder - About 8 months.
But, due to a Christmas season & assorted missed sessions probably closer to 6 months.

We've completed most of Yawning Portal. But as standalone adventures in between campaigns or intermixed into them.

Strahd - after just over a year of play the party pretty much had a TPK. Multiple dead, 1 being chased down in the woods by overwhelming force, my character removed from play in a creative way. And we hadn't even gotten to the REAL adventure - going through the castle.
The CoS story had effectively ended for this group of characters & we voted to move on (to SKT).

 

[toucanbuzz]

Curse of Strahd (9th level): average 2-3 sessions per month, around 5 hours each, took 1 year + 1 week. That's roughly 150 hours. They engaged in most material, about 1/2 of Castle Ravenloft.

Out of the Abyss: (14th level): as above, around 1 year. We switched to story XP because the 2nd half doesn't have enough printed material, even with random encounters, to hit recommended levels for the finale.