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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KarinsDad" data-source="post: 6382654" data-attributes="member: 2011">It's NPC introduction under the guise of minor PC interaction. For some reason, the adventure designers thought that it was important to show, not tell. This approach is pretty heavy handed though.Are there any more of these overwhelmingly powerful "pulled punches" encounters in the module?I see a pattern here. Push the tougher reoccurring villains onstage really early on for foreshadowing reasons. Instead of letting the PCs know about the reoccurring villains ahead of time, shove them into the PC's faces so that the players will get an emotional attachment to them.The problem with this approach is that the monsters are so powerful that these artificial "pulled punches" encounters are the result. The monsters cannot truly be badass because it would TPK the party. And, the PCs cannot truly be allowed to shine because the monsters cannot truly be defeated, or they will not be reoccurring villains.Interestingly enough, this is the first major DMing gig for my high school aged daughter. She ran a few one shots in the past, but this is the first time that she took the reins over as the DM for a longer term campaign. So if WotC's real intent with 5E is to get brand new players and DMs, here is an example of a brand new younger DM. My daughter recognized flaws in this module (or at least flaws to her) and decided to drop one of the major future pieces out completely.So far, I'm not impressed with this adventure as the flagship adventure for 5E. It's just not polished. A lot of forced situations, a lot of super wimpy encounters, a few super powerful encounters, not a lot of NPCs to interact with (or at least, not so far in our game). When we talked to some of the NPCs, they did not even have names and I could see my daughter scrambling a bit to come up with quick names. It really feels as if they never playtested it and worked out the kinks. This is supposed to be the flagship 5E adventure and it just seems subpar so far (granted, we only got as far as the rear guard encounter).I was also unimpressed with that encounter. Let's put the NPCs on hills with braziers lighting up the bad guys and have the PCs out in the dark where they can easily ambush the NPCs. And lets have most of the NPCs awake in the middle of the night. I do not know if my daughter changed up that encounter. Maybe it was supposed to be a daytime encounter and she added in the braziers because the PCs attacked at night. I don't know. I told her after the game how to spruce that up and make it challenging. Instead of having the light next to the tents, have the lights on the perimeter and a few guards patrolling inside the lights. That way, they can see out, but enemies cannot see in. That entire encounter was one of those guards saying "shoot me, shoot me". Weird. Our PCs were outnumbered 2 to 1 (12 bad guys) and one PC got heavily damaged down to 4 hit points. Most of the other PCs were hardly even touched. It was such a cake walk. In fact, my second level wizard could not even cast spells. He had already cast Mage Armor, two Detect Magics, and an Identify spell that day (the day after the fight with the half dragon), so he was pretty much a non-factor in the fight and the PCs still mopped up.It really is like the encounters are simplistic in nature, sometimes a bit nonsensical, and maybe designed for brand new players, not for experienced gamers who are more apt to spot encounter flaws.</blockquote>

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