D&D 5E Princes vs Tyranny

[pukunui]

The original ToEE is a very problematic product, as it was unfinished when Gary Gygax left TSR. Frank Mentzer finished it, and it's sort of okay, but the concept behind it is much stronger than the execution. It can be great, but it needs a DM adding in a lot of action from the NPCs and reacting to what the players do. Yes, a good DM will do that anyway, but without much in the way of suggestions it's a lot of work.

You can feel the difference as you go from Hommlet to Nulb. Hommlet has a lot of detail (and spies and the like), but Nulb is empty. All in all, it's a disappointing adventure.

OK. I'm glad it's too expensive for me to purchase in hardcopy then! Although I did drop a pretty penny getting hardcopies of both the original T1 - Village of Hommlet and the 4e revision.

I ran Age of Worms when it first came out, and I completely agree. (For my mechanical problems with the 3E AoW see here: How Paizo made me hate 3E). Age of Worms has some fantastic sections - The Prince of Redhand in particular - but in a lot of ways its the archetypal Paizo AP: you need to optimize your PCs incredibly to face the challenges.

Yes, the Prince of Redhand was fun, although the rails were still pretty clear there too, especially where Lashonna was involved - you go to her house and she's not there, but oh she's going to be at this party, so you go to the party but she's late and when she does arrive, she says she can't talk then ... Sigh!

When we went to that jungle ruin where Kyuss became a god, the dungeon crawl was decent, but it still felt like all we were learning was back story. There was nothing there we could actually use to affect the plot in any way (unless we completely missed it).

 

[jayoungr]

[MENTION=54629]pukunui[/MENTION], I really enjoyed your post! Like you, I've been finding the Tyranny of Dragons modules to be a better experience for my group than their reputation would suggest, and I'm glad you've articulated some of the good things about them.

If/when you do start to run it, I invite you to check out and hopefully participate in the enhancement thread (here).

 

[pukunui]

[MENTION=54629]pukunui[/MENTION], I really enjoyed your post! Like you, I've been finding the Tyranny of Dragons modules to be a better experience for my group than their reputation would suggest, and I'm glad you've articulated some of the good things about them.

If/when you do start to run it, I invite you to check out and hopefully participate in the enhancement thread (here).

Thanks! Yes, I've had a preliminary browse through that thread. I've also looked through the "errors" thread on the WotC boards in which Steve Winter (Huscarl) provided some answers to some of the issues raised, though I must say that I found most of them to be pretty easy to resolve on my own, especially the map issues.

In fact, the only question I was left with really was what the point of being able to travel to Escarlotta's tomb was. There's nothing in there for the PCs to find or learn, and I'm not entirely sure how they'd even go about learning her name, let alone figuring out it that it can be used as a passphrase. It's almost like it's meant to be a sort of gotcha trap: Oops, you said the name of the giantess whose spirit runs the castle while in this particular tower. Now you're trapped in her tomb, from which you won't be able to escape unless you correctly guess that you have to say "Blagothkus". Mwaahahahahaha.

 

[mserabian]

errors thread

Can one of you guys post a link to the errors thread on Wizards site. I can't seem to find it.

thanks

mal

 

[jayoungr]

Can one of you guys post a link to the errors thread on Wizards site. I can't seem to find it.

The original thread is here:

http://community.wizards.com/forum/product-and-general-dd-discussions/threads/4130531

And EnWorld has a summary article here:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/conten...EN-Author-Steve-Winter-Clarifies-A-Few-Points!

 

[TerraDave]

From the moment I looked at HotDQ in the store, I thought it was an ambitious adventure.

And that that has probably been its biggest problem.

 

[SilverfireSage]

I think a lot of people had problems with Tyranny partially because it was sloppy and partially because a lot of the fun of D and D is player agency. Tyranny, from its encounters to the campaign itself, robbed players of any agency they had. It wasn't just a railroad, heck, Princes is a railroad in the way that there's a specific adventure they have to do, it was a railroad that handcuffed you to the car. And yeah, that's fine, but if you're going to do that, you have to make sure that the adventure is amazing. Tyranny wasn't quite amazing due to sloppy writing, so people were more harsh on it than usual.

And I wouldn't view the "repetitive" nature of Princes as a bad thing. To me, its more cohesive, like everything fits together to make a realistic place that changes and flows based on the characters actions. Tyranny is disjointed, you jump from place to place with little context, and it feels more thrown together. I still enjoyed it, but Princes has impressed me quite a bit more.

 

[pukunui]

Tyranny, from its encounters to the campaign itself, robbed players of any agency they had.

I would say that players have more agency in Tyranny than they do in Age of Worms, which is almost universally praised as a classic AP. I'm finding the latter to be much more of a railroad than Tyranny appears to be just from reading through it. For one thing, the actions PCs take in Hoard can have an effect on the help they're able to get for the final battle in Rise. That's some real player agency right there. I can't say with any certainty that anything my Age of Worms PCs have done has had any effect on the campaign at all. I would also say there are plenty of little things sprinkled throughout the episodes that enable the players to have quite a bit of agency in how they tackle each episode - eg. posing as cultists and/or gaining the help of allies (like the rebellious lizardfolk in the swamp) can make some episodes much easier.

I didn't find the writing to be sloppy, either. Most of the issues I found had to do with the maps, but even then, it's all relatively minor stuff. I'd say that Princes actually has worse map issues than Tyranny does. (See my other thread about that.)

And I wouldn't view the "repetitive" nature of Princes as a bad thing.

I hate repetition. I have a feeling I would quickly find this to be boring grind. They could've made each cult so much more unique than they did. Imagine, for instance, if the water temple and/or node were completely underwater. What if Feathergale Spire looked more like the "air beacon" in the concept art at the back of the book? That would've been rad.

 

[pukunui]

So we just finished the Lost Mine of Phandelver tonight. Everyone thoroughly enjoyed the adventure.

I presented them with two options:

1) Play Princes of the Apocalypse with their current 4th level characters
2) Play Tyranny of Dragons with a new crop of 1st level characters

They were a bit torn, as they were enjoying their characters and wanted to keep playing them, while at the same time they really liked the sound of ToD better than PotA. I suggested a third option, which was that we play ToD with new characters, and if everyone still wants to keep playing D&D regularly after that's finished, we could pick up their LMoP characters again and play PotA with them. They seemed to like that idea, so that's tentatively what we're going to do. Obviously, we'll revisit that after we've finished ToD.

I also offered to let them use a pregen again or make a new character from scratch. One of the players has already opted to just use the same pregen, but with a different name and backstory and such. She enjoys playing the game but isn't so interested in the nitty-gritty of making a character from scratch and such.

 

[DongMaster]

1) Play Princes of the Apocalypse with their current 4th level characters

How many players do you have in your group seeing how their characters ended up at 4th level (something I hope mine will be instead of 5th)?