D&D 5E How We Beat the HD, HotDQ, Spoilers

[aramis erak]

It only attacks from distance with its breath attack rather than getting up close and personal with the characters. No teeth, claws, wings or tail. And it runs off when hurt rather than getting even.
That sounds like pulling punches to me.

It also has good story reasons for doing so. When I ran that encounter, I made certain that, as it left, it called to Cyanwrath, "I've had enough. I'm going home. You'll have to fight them yourselves." (Then again, half my PC's spoke draconic, so this was a wonderful chance to reward them for that.

 

[Wrathamon]

I agree with KD on the war and sport thing, but disagree that the dragon was a badly designed encounter. Haha

I think it can be badly run.

 

[Rod Staffwand]

I finally got a chance to flip through a friend's copy of HotDQ and see what all the fuss was about. I like the cult raid setup, but I thought the action and events were far too scripted for my liking.

The dragon encounter is not even close to combat as war. The setup mentions that the soldiers can't hurt the dragon, which is directly counter to the stats of both the dragon and the soldiers. It goes on to say that the dragon is deadly and to demonstrate it's deadliness beforehand so they know what they're dealing with. Sounds way too contrived to be combat as war.

The half-dragon champion encounter is equally contrived. I would never run such an encounter as a DM for the express purpose of giving the players crappy options so they have a vendetta against a villain. It's clumsy and manipulative. I only use "No Win" or "Very Unlikely to Win" scenarios if they occur from bad luck or poor decision making. As a player, I've ended up in my fair share of such scenarios. I Kobayashi Maru'd my way out of some of them and flat out ran from most of the others.

In one game a high-level death knight/lich put a wall of force around himself and my level 8 character. I lasted a round or two before getting soul-drained. The matchup isn't that different from the half-dragon scenario, except that we went looking for trouble (and found it). The lich became a hated one organically, rather than being forced upon us with "YOU WILL HATE THIS RECURRING VILLAIN!" in big letters. We came back about 4 levels later with an undead-killing staff and had at him to fun results.

 

[KarinsDad]

Mouseferatu had an interesting piece in one of his blog posts that contained this gem

He's discussing the Temple of Elemental Evil, but I think this is even more relevant for HotDQ. My reading of it makes it seem very sandboxish. There are few things that must happen to progress the story, some episodes more so than others, each problem has so many ways to skin a cat it looks like a hat factory and there are plenty of hooks for trips into the blue yonder. But most of the complaints I've seen about it are that people are feeling conned or railroaded, things I don't see on the page.
Ultimately there is a linear element to it, the pace of the narrative is driven by external events outside the characters control, but to do otherwise would be to provide no challenge. Fall too far behind the Cult and they are lost, that can be hard to recover.

I do not understand how your post relates to mine that you replied to.

I suspect that the Dragon exists in 99% of the games run, good DM or bad DM.

The Dragon, in my mind, is the main problem in Greenest. In fact, the only other issue I have with Greenest is the Half Dragon encounter and that one is merely lame. The rest of the encounters are fine as far as I know.

If we are discussing railroading, I think that the Dragon is a main engine. Players feel railroaded when they do not feel like they have a choice. Good DM or bad DM, I think that some players feel like they do not have a choice and have to go to Greenest.


I don't think that the dragon part of the discussion has much to do with the quality of the DM. It has to do with the quality of the adventure design.

For those people who did not even question their PCs going to a town with a dragon flying overhead, I have to wonder why not? Are you not roleplaying your PC at least to the point that it would be discussed? Or are you metagaming that this as the direction being shown to you by the DM, hence, it's the adventure and it's all good? I do know that in the Mike Mearls video, the fact that a dragon was flying overhead was not even much of a consideration. Course to be fair, it did not look like he had experienced players there.

Mearls also mentions that the town is engulfed in flame. So much for the town "not really burning" posts. It might not be burning in the module, but I bet it was at some tables.

 

[KarinsDad]

It also has good story reasons for doing so. When I ran that encounter, I made certain that, as it left, it called to Cyanwrath, "I've had enough. I'm going home. You'll have to fight them yourselves." (Then again, half my PC's spoke draconic, so this was a wonderful chance to reward them for that.

That sounds fun.

 

[Iosue]

For those people who did not even question their PCs going to a town with a dragon flying overhead, I have to wonder why not? Are you not roleplaying your PC at least to the point that it would be discussed? Or are you metagaming that this as the direction being shown to you by the DM, hence, it's the adventure and it's all good? I do know that in the Mike Mearls video, the fact that a dragon was flying overhead was not even much of a consideration. Course to be fair, it did not look like he had experienced players there.

It's a question of framing. The question was never "Should we go to a town with a dragon flying overhead?" The question was, "There's a dragon attacking the town. Looks like people are in trouble. How can we help?" This led to carefully approaching the town (much like the group Mearls ran the game for), at which point we saw kobolds attacking a family. Hey, kobolds we can handle! And boom, we're off to the races. Yes, we were very concerned about the dragon, kept tabs on it, and no one went into the town expecting to square off against it. But the DM told us it was flying high overhead, occasionally swooping down to strafe the keep with lightning, so it was not an immediate threat that prevented us from approaching the edge of town to see what we could do to help the townsfolk.

 

[KarinsDad]

It's a question of framing. The question was never "Should we go to a town with a dragon flying overhead?" The question was, "There's a dragon attacking the town. Looks like people are in trouble. How can we help?"

Which sounds like you did not seriously consider the first question.

If Mount St. Helens is about to erupt and there is a town on the side of the hill, one would think that at least one person in a group would say "Err, guys. The volcano is about to erupt. We really shouldn't go that way.". To basically ignore that very pertinent point seems odd.

Sure, a discussion about helping people would also be discussed (which happened at our table as well), but if not every PC is "a hero", then doesn't it make sense for at least a pros and cons discussion about the dragon to occur? Our should we enter the town discussion lasted for a good 15 minutes or more at the table and there were several factors brought into play, including helping the people and going near a dragon. The three alternatives discussed were 1) sneak in right away, 2) wait until after the dragon leaves, then go in, and 3) just walk away. We picked #1 which I think a lot of people at various games picked, but at least we had the discussion. The setup does seem suicidal.

I found the Mearls video where the dragon was basically ignored as a threat at first to be almost like a one shot as opposed to a campaign. In one shots, the PCs often do all types of things that I wouldn't have my PC do in a campaign adventure, just because the players are not expecting to play the PCs for long (and of course his video was a one shot).

 

[Iosue]

If Mount St. Helens is about to erupt and there is a town on the side of the hill, one would think that at least one person in a group would say "Err, guys. The volcano is about to erupt. We really shouldn't go that way.". To basically ignore that very pertinent point seems odd.

Not every group will consider a dragon flying overhead to be equivalent of Mount St. Helens about to erupt. Your group seems to have appraised the situation as much more directly life-threatening than mine.

I've seen footage of the 2011 Japanese tsunami. People running towards the oncoming wave of water and debris in order to aid stragglers, the old, and infirm. They did not discuss the pros and cons of doing so before running to help. They just went, at great personal risk, but obviously not believing they were especially likely to die. Just regular folks, not even adventurers (or fire/rescue/police). The decision process was essentially like that. "You see a dragon overhead!" "Yikes!" "You see the shapes of people running amongst the houses." "Maybe we can help them!" "How do you want to approach the town? By the main road?" "We'll move stealthily along the river, making for these trees on the outskirts of town." Like that.

 

[Sailor Moon]

Sounds to me like KD and his group needs to stay away from published adventures and just stick with a homebrew kitchen sink game where the monsters and challenges you face are somehow always at their power level so they can be defeated. Sometimes modules have a theme and the writers want you going in a specific direction.

 

[Derren]

As with most of the events in Greenest I think it's there to set tone for later in the book. Take the duel with Cyanwrath. Done well you end up with an arrogant villain that you look forward to providing just desserts, done badly it's just an annoying fight. Whether you win or lose there are repercussions.

Actually no, except for the small chance of a PC dieing there are no reprecussions wether th pcs win, lose or not fight at all. Even if they kill the HD, it simply gets replaced by a no name HD in a later adventure.