A game is defined by its stakes. The better the stakes are, the better the game. This applies throughout life, and while you do not need amazing stakes, you need stakes.
5E adventures have stakes, but they don't really care to go into detail about the stakes.
- In Rime of the Frostmaiden, we have the winter-focused stakes, how the winter-focused stakes aren't really fleshed out, and in some places, are forgotten. Its been two years of almost total night and severe cold, but the responses from the people living here AND the environment don't do a good job of showing just how bad two years of apocalyptic winter are.
- Compare this to Curse of Strahd, where Strahd is a constant threat, corruption is a constant threat, and everywhere the player's go, they see the corruption of Strahd in different levels. In the above, the contradictory information makes it so the stakes are cheapened; in Strahd, where the stakes are fully fleshed out in different ways, the stakes are intense.
Rime of the Frostmaiden is not a terrible adventure, but it is not as good as it could have been. This applies to Storm King's Thunder (which does a poorer job of establishing stakes as compared to Frostmaiden), the Elemental Evil adventure, and so on.
Now, this is overarching stuff. There's a lot of smaller things I'll discuss later (if this thread doesn't die) when I have more time about improving adventure design, but overall, WotC needs to always make sure the premise is gripping, the stakes are high, and that it is not only plausible, but interesting that it is the PCs who need to handle these problems. This is where some adventures, like Tomb of Annihilation, fail. In ToA, an apocalyptic Death Curse is wreaking havoc in Faerun. A powerful, ressurected adventurer hires a group of level 1s to solve the problem. In a world like Faerun, where adventurers are fairly common, why resort to sending these low-level PCs into a dark continent with no information? The NPC doesn't tell the party about the undead, nothing on Chultan history, or about any other dangers they could face - she just teleports them there and says "Have at it." This is a poor opening to an equally poor adventure, and the adventure would have been a lot better if the stakes were more sensible for the PCs.
For example, when I played Tomb, and I played it for
2 years, it would have been cool if all the players were ressurected and were desperately looking for a way to break the curse. Or maybe the players are related to the NPC, either through backstory or current events. Or if the NPC was getting desperate and had already sent out a bunch of parties already, and now resorted to sending level 1s to solve her problem.
To a lot of people, this kind of stuff is fun for them to come up for themselves. For me, it is too. However, when you pay $50 for an adventure, you expect the adventure to be
GOOD, COMPLETE, and requiring
MINIMIAL NARRATIVE DESIGN on the part of the DM. There will always be narrative design required; this is D&D after all, and this is where the fun comes in! But if the opening hook is weak and the stakes are non-existent, it makes me wonder why I bothered buying the adventure in the first place (other than for stripping it of parts, which is a valid reason!).
