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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Helldritch" data-source="post: 8108743" data-attributes="member: 6855114">I think that WotC does a good job. Not great, but good.Strangely, most of the AP of 5ed are really but really good story wise. But...1) Hooks are not the best I have seen. As usual, it all rests on the DM. With that said, any AP needs to be tailored to the specific group you're running. ToA was a mockery hook wise. Why on earth would high level would send low levels to find out why resurected people were slowly dying... I did not start the adventure itself before the players were 5th. But I managed to TPK them earlier (round level 4) and got them raised by an other party. The players were happy, but when I introduced them to the AP, they now had a real, but a really good reason to go there. 5th level characters are believable and I made sure the patron was not too high level. If I could do it, so could have WotC.2) A Sand Box is fine. But for many, it is not enough. Look at their most successful AP: "CoS, ToYP, GoS (and DotMM, but that's my opinion on that one)". Tons of map, and Good map keys. More content does not mean better. It just means more work for the DM to fill up or to complete. When I buy an AP, I should expect a minimum of work, not a maximum. My notes/additions for HotDQ/RoT, SKT and OOtA are almost as big as the book themselves! Don't get me wrong, the books are good read and the lore is interesting, but the work required to be done is almost as big, if not bigger, than homebrewing. The Sandbox aspect should not be bigger than the actual encounters required to play it. ToEE 1ed was a master piece of both dungeon crawling and if played right, would give insight to the players as to what was going on and how to put factions against one an other. Yes, 1ed adventures tended to be heavy on the rail road, but they were very clear and well defined most of the time.3) A flow chart would be nice, but at the same time, you need a wee bit more than that. The more sandboxy an AP is, the more complex the flow chart will be (or at least it should). The best AP reach a good compromise between sandbox content, rail road and actual dungeons/encounters/maps. Too much sandbox content only leads to confusion if said content isn't properly organized and so far, organized content is not the strength of the 5ed AP save a few exceptions. It is almost as if we are required to buy the "how to run X" from the DM guild...4) More random encounter tables for the adventures. This is self explanatory but I know that random encounters in many younger gamers are seen as a bane. Yet, many great adventures in my games came from random encounters.What I feel, is that the books should come into two parts. One should be the Sandbox and the other one should be the maps/encounters (random or not). Yes this would up the cost of AP, but it would be easier (I hope) to create such campaigns. An other solution would be to print adventure from level 1-5 as the sandbox explaining the premises and setting of the AP with a relatively small adventure to get the characters up to level 5. The second book would go from level 5-15+. A bit like Dragon Heist and DotMM did. A wee bit more connection between the two books would have been nice but so far, these two adventures linked together required the least work from me to correctly prepare (and I have two groups, so the main enemy in each group was different). It did required work, but the amount of "required adaptation" from one group to the other was minimal to what other APs required. The final word, however, would be that the AP should be more organized and the adventures' hook should be more fleshed out. Many hooks in AP are lacking and assume too much or way too little... It maybe the downside of having more than one person writting the actual adventure...</blockquote>

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