D&D General How would you feel if Official Adventures only covered 3 levels?

[aco175]

I always thought someone could take one of the defunct newspapers and turn the presses into making modules. The newspaper may not be the best paper to make modules, but it is cheaper and you can make battlemaps as center fold-outs. Heck, you can even have pages that pull out to make folded ships and castle walls. Even in black and white it would be cool. They would be perceived as cheap, so likely would need to keep cost to under $10.00 each.

 

[Burnside]

I've ran several 5th ed adventures and played in a couple. I am currently running the Dragonlance adventure.

The early bits had you level up every 1-5 fairly quickly. Saw some slowdown with 5 and 6 then ramped back up so the party does the last chapter at level 10.

Basically, the group either gained a level every session or every 2 sessions. Modern adventures, one and done. Start a new with fresh characters that take the rapid rollercoaster of 1-10 again. Rinse and Repeat. Why does WotC do it this way?

Would you prefer a whole adventure that just takes you from 3-6? Then another that does 6-8. Etc? There doesn't really seem to be a reason to make these adventures (like the DL one) to have you gain power so quickly aside from "Now you get cool powers bro and can fight the Mega Dragon at the end!"

Sure you dont get all the sweet later level powers but you still have a ton of fun in just those 3-6 levels.

It's made me realize why the keeping putting out stuff where "Everyone and everything is magical!" because you just need to go adventure for a week and you'll be level 10 with magic coming out of every orifice. Much like EverQuest, yes every banker and leathersmith etc are level 99 warriors or mages. They just took a 3 week vacation and hit the troll dens and came back with power.

How long are your sessions?

I've run or played all of these official 5E campaigns:

Lost Mine of Phandelver (many times)
Curse of Strahd (3 times)
Tomb of Annihilation
Waterdeep: Dragon Heist
Dragon of Icespire Peak
Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus
Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden (3 times)

My sessions average ~4 hours in length, and I'd say that on average it takes four 4-hour sessions to level up when playing any of those adventures once you hit level 3. It does tend to take only ~4 hours of play to hit level 2, and a further ~8 hours of play to hit level 3, but after than pretty consistently ~16 hours per level.

Unless your sessions are 8+ hour marathons or maybe have very, very little RP, it's hard for me to imagine leveling every 1-2 sessions in any of those campaigns.

I haven't run Dragonlance: Shadow of the DQ or Vecna, so maybe those two have particularly fast pacing.

 

[Staffan]

Having just finished Vecna: Eve of Ruin, I think this is an intentional design decision to keep the story moving. While I personally prefer 3-5 sessions per level, APs generally don't have that much space per chapter. If you run using XP, no APs provide anywhere near enough to level.

That's one reason I prefer milestone advancement, at least in plot-based adventures. I've seen the alternative in some PF2 adventure paths, where they put in a whole bunch of filler encounters just to provide enough XP to "honestly" get the appropriate levels.

 

[payn]

Im a Traveller fan; how about no more levels at all?

 

[Horwath]

honestly, every adventure books should be written for 1-20 adventure separated into several stories that are connected but can be played by themselves.

1: start at 1st level, story concludes at 2nd level(recommended for new players)

2: start at 3rd level, story concludes at 5th level

3: start at 6th level, story concludes at 9th level

4: start at 10th level, story concludes at 13th level

5: start at 14th level, story concludes at 17th level

6: start at 18th level, story concludes at 20th level

 

[Morrus]

The question here, if you take out all the hyperbole, is "Why does WotC make adventure paths instead of modules?"

The answer is that they do make shorter adventures--they've put out several anthologies.

 

[NN]

Or: why does wotc make paths instead of sandboxes?

 

[UngeheuerLich]

My problem is that after a few days of in game time, you are surpassing everyone around you... In power and in wealth.

Yes, adventurers are special. But I wish, adventures have more down time in between.

 

[TiQuinn]

Economic issues aside, I'm in favor of shorter adventures because it leads to people having completely different campaigns with different modules rather than "I played Tomb of Annihilation" or "I played Curse of Strahd". The downside is it's yet another demand on the DM both from a cost side as well as a prep time side which they may not want. It's one thing to buy a mega module that takes the party from levels 1 to 12; you buy the adventure, you read it, you prep the portions that need prepping and everything is there in that one book. In days long past, you maybe played Keep on the Borderlands, then you hunted down a couple of low level adventures from Dungeon Magazine, and then you ran the Slavelords series, then you had a couple more module out of Dungeon, then you tackled the Giants trilogy, etc. That was very satisfying but it also meant wading through a lot of modules that may or may not be what you need.

 

[sevenbastard]

I think 5 to 6 sessions per level is probably about the right rate of advancement.

So yes.

But I think I'm in the minority.