D&D 5E One of the biggest problems with WoTC's vision of published adventures

[Inchoroi]

Right up front, I want to say that this could very well be a generational problem, and not nearly universal to most tables. Secondly, I think the published adventures (Tiamat, CoS, OotA, SKT) have a lot of good things about them, and for the most part we've enjoyed playing them.

However, here is my problem. Probably the biggest problem. All of those published adventures go to level 10 or 15. When you're done with them, your PCs are pretty much done. Time for retirement. I played TSR D&D as my main edition from 1981 to 2012. One thing about TSR D&D is that the level ranges 4-10 took a long time. You could go on several adventure modules and still be within that level range. Just finished the entire Slaver Series? No problem, we can still go play Ghost Tower of Inverness, and when done with that, go play White Plume Mountain. The DM would tie all of those together in his or her own campaign world with a central plot. Maybe after completing the Slavers, your PCs enjoyed their spoils while you went on another campaign with different PCs and a different DM, then came back later to reuse those original PCs in another adventure.

I really miss that with 5e's official published campaigns. The campaigns above that I've finished? I really doubt I'll ever use those PCs again. We've never really played end game levels anyway, not that there are any epic level adventures put out yet even if we wanted to... And you can't really take a 15th level PC and play them in lower level adventures.

With TSR D&D, we'd play a PC for an adventure, then a different PC in a different adventure. It allowed us to get more hands on experience with different character themes, and choose our favorites without spending dozens of sessions on the same campaign with the same PC. Maybe after playing 4 PCs in 4 different modules, I decided to use Norlay as my favorite when we did future adventures. In the current campaigns by WoTC, you can't really do that. It would be like switching PCs every chapter, and that doesn't really jive well with how the adventure progresses organically.

Maybe that's why I would really like to see a return to the old school style modules.

You know, I have to agree that it is a slightly annoying problem. To suggest something different, though, for you, the OP: take a look at Frog God Games current offerings, and Necromancer Game's past offerings. They have a very old-school feel. You'd still have to address the leveling speed, but at least you'd have the right adventures for what you want.

I've considered changing the requisite amount of XP for each level, but suspect that my players would kill me if I tried.

 

[jrowland]

As an aside

I am currently running HotDQ with a group of heroes kind of like the Justice League (not at all really...but you'll see):

Each player has 3 characters. Each "adventure" they choose one to play. Since the opening of HotDQ is a meat grinder, I actually beefed it up and killed about 5 PCs...no worries, we still have 7 PCs. By they time they head of to the North, maybe we'll be down to 1 each. Then, they can make another PC in Daggerdale (I'll be stretching this campaign out, mixing it with SKT, and Dragonspear castle) and so on.

Episodic, switch characters, re-use old ones (assuming they survive) etc.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I can understand the criticism that [MENTION=15700]Sacrosanct[/MENTION] made in the OP. And I can understand why some folks feel that way...I even agree a bit.

But a big part of it is also nostalgia, I think. The old modules were pretty slim, ranging from like 8 to 32 pages for most of them. String about 10 or so of them together and maybe you'd have the same amount of content as the current adventure books. The closest example we have is Queen of the Spiders from back in the day. That was 6 modules in 1, and it clocked in at about 150 pages. If I recall correctly it covered about 6 levels....about 1 per module. If we look at a chapter as the modern equivalent of a module, the amount of content seems pretty comparable.

Seems pretty close to what is going on these days, although not an exact match. The level advancement, especially across the first few levels, is faster in 5E.

The biggest difference to me would be the variety of threats your PC likely faced back then. The adventures these days have a more unified theme throughout, instead of only loose links from module to module.

 

[OB1]

I'm wondering now that at this point whether you could run four of the campaign concurrently? Can you intersplice Lost Mines, Tyranny of Dragons, Princes of the Apocalypse, and Storm King's Thunder so that you can do certain chapters of one before following a thread to an early chapter in another?

So I have a bit of experience with this. After our 4 PC Tyranny of Dragons campaign ended at 13th level, we were talking of moving on to PotA, but only myself and one other player was interested. We ended up taking our ToD characters directly into the adventure, and while some challenges have been trivial, others have felt right on the mark (and according to the DM, need little adjustment on her side), and it's been a blast playing the adventure as a buddy cops (half-orc EK and Dwarf VP) and forgotten hero's drawn back into action by a new cult. We are through 2 monasteries at this point and leveled up to 14, DM is leveling us when she feels it's the right time, not based on xp. And now we will be adding SKT into the mix as well, with the idea of taking on both end games back to back at level 20.

Bottom line, experiment and don't be afraid to go outside the lines! 5e isn't so fragile that it breaks if you don't follow it to the letter. Mash up the adventures, slow down progression, play with fewer high level PCs, or just wing it.

 

[The_Gneech]

I agree the problem is not the length of the adventure, as most DMs have methods to deal with it, but more importantly when it WOTC going to do something different versus another re-hash of adventures that have already been done. In that sense, we really are living in the past.

Well-said, I've been feeling this myself since "Revenge of the Revenge of the Giants" module came out on the heels of "Return to the Return to Ravenloft" (which in turn followed "The Temple of Elemental Evil Minus the Temple")...

I love the old stuff, and I love seeing it brought forward. But dang, I want some NEW stuff!

-The Gneech

 

[AngryTiger]

The problem i have with the adventures is that they are more like campaigns than adventures. They start at low level and go all the way up to high level, and are way too long. I can't just drop the adventure in my campaign because they are much higher level than the assumed starting level of these modules. Either i have to rewrite most of the encounters to fit the right level, have everything be way too easy for half the adventure or start a new campaign.

I like variety and cool new stuff in my games, and even though the adventures have some very cool stuff in them, they drag on. Fighting same enemies, and having same theme for too long and the players get tired and want to move on, and so do i.

Yes, i could rip out the cool stuff and use them without the rest of the adventure, but that takes too much work and the books cost way too much for it to be worth it. In the time it takes me to read trough the whole thing, figure out what the story is about, and find the cool bits, and tailor them for my group, i could have wrote entire adventure on my own.

The other problem i have with most modern adventures, is that they take too long to prep. Some people complained that The lost mines of phandelver didn't contain all the needed information. I think the opposite, the adventures have too much information, it takes too long to read the whole story and what each room in every single place contains. I only need to know the basics and make up the rest as i go along. There is limited amount of stuff i can remember and every time i run premade adventure i have to stop after every room to reread forward what was next. Short couple line notes per room would be enough to tell the room purpose, what monsters and what loot it has.

These days i just find a cool hook and make rest of the stuff up instead of trying to run premade adventures. I find it takes less work than reading and prepping the adventures overloaded with information i don't need.

 

[Jester David]

You have an unusual idea of "some".

Several of those adventures belong to the 3e adventure "series" that was meant to be an Adventure Path. Several were large 96-page books, pushing the limits of "short". Several were less adventures and more a series of encounters linked to a map, with the map being as much the selling point.
You're also including several free adventures apparently published on the WotC website. These are less adventures and more encounters and side treks. If those count as "adventures" in 3e, we can certainly count Adventurer's League modules now.

WotC didn't really sell many short adventure modules in 3e a business sense.

Even 4e had 20 adventures in the first 2 years it was out, and only one of those was for an entire level range (dungeon delve, 1-30). So no, I don't agree that this is the same situation that's been going on for 15 years. The numbers clearly show otherwise.

4e published 6 "short" adventures. Three four each tier and a couple others.
The remaining adventure products are pretty large, being either big hardcovers or boxed sets. (Or being part of boxed sets, like the adventures in the DM's Kit and Monster's Vault).
I don't know where you're getting the "20" from, let alone in the first two years.

 

[Jester David]

The constant call for small modules baffles me.
First, because the difference between the big adventures and several collected small ones is pretty much presentation. Storm Kings's Thunder is pretty munch twelve or so separate dungeons loosely collected. Princes of the Apocalypse was 13. You can run them independent. The difference is you don't need to invent a connective adventure stringing the dungeons together (and it costs a fraction of the price of a eight small 32-page adventures).

Second, the decision to stop doing small folio adventures was partially based on feedback from stores, who didn't like them as they were harder to sell, being less visible when stored sideways on shelves. I've seen this with Pathfinder: it's impossible to flip though Player Companion and modules in a store and finding a particular one is a pain.
Heck, speaking of Pathfinder, even they've cut back on small one-off modules in favour of just APs. Pathfinder is the adventure company with a hugely dedicate fan base and even they can't get fans to reliably care about small modules.
They just don't sell well.

I mean, the DMs Guild has a ton of small modules, many tied to the Adventurer's Guild and many by noted authors and they still have trouble selling a few hundred copies. Only two AL adventures have sold more than a thousand copies and even Frozen Castle, published by Kobold Press and a sequel to Hoard of the Dragon Queen and by the author of that adventure has sold less than 1000 copies. Money was likely lost making that product.

Yeah, I started playing AD&D in 1980. And I remember multiple characters that I must have played for years! Except, my D&D friends graduated and went off to college in 1984 and I graduated and went to college in 1985, and really, those last couple years we spent a lot more time on girls and beer and a lot less on D&D. And all my friends had their own "world" (container for modules) and took turns DMing, and I had a different character or characters for each world. And then, we also played some B/X D&D, and Traveller, and Star Frontiers, and Top Secret, and James Bond, and Gamma World. When I really think about it, I did play a lot of different characters but I didn't play any of them very long -- there just wasn't enough time for that to be true. Some of those characters just made a big impression. Same thing in college, except we hopped from one RPG to another even more.

Some of it was likely free time: being able to spend six or eight hours every weekend gaming.
Pacing was also likely an issue, blowing though combats and modules and adventures at a rapid rate.

But I imagine much comes down to "first love". It doesn't matter how incompatible you were, as flawed and juvenile as the time was, your first girlfriend holds a special place in your heart. Because it was new and novel and usually didn't have a proper end, so you thought about it far longer than you should have, dwelling on the relationship longer than any relationship since.

We're people here to actually game like they did in Jr. High and high school it would likely be incredibly unsatisfying. As much time spent goofing around as playing. Doing silly things and being ridiculous and disruptive.

 

[Horwath]

Good thing about 5e it's bounded accuracy. So you can adapt your Campaign for 5 levels higher no problem. You can just increase number of monsters or casualy go through Monster Manual and add some.

lvl20 characters in end of lvl15 adventure won't be overpowered with some little tweaking of monsters. All they have is few extra tricks and more HP.

 

[Demetrios1453]

The constant call for small modules baffles me.
First, because the difference between the big adventures and several collected small ones is pretty much presentation. Storm Kings's Thunder is pretty munch twelve or so separate dungeons loosely collected.

That is something I was going to bring up. The six giant settlements in SKT could be lifted straight from the adventure, with virtually no changes, and be dropped into any campaign as typical lairs for each type of giant. This could be done for the finale fight as well as a typical blue dragon lair. Also as you stated, certain parts of OotA could be treated just the same.

It seems to me that WotC is going for interconnected set-pieces when it comes to the hardcover adventures. This serves a dual purpose: if you run the adventure straight through it provides a steady diet of interesting and new encounter locations; or, conversely, each piece can be lifted independently from the adventure and run on its own as an old-fashioned short module for all intents and purposes. So, people, stop wondering where all the official short modules are - they are right there in the hardcover adventures, waiting to be used!