D&D 5E The Flaw in Each Campaign Adventure (Spoilers)

[tetrasodium]

While I have never ran an official 5e adventure as written, or even close to it’s entirety...I have stolen bits, be it a map, a NPC, a whole complex or chapter from each adventure except SGT.
(well and Avernus).

Were Official 3e adventures better in people’s opinion?

For me, outside Sunless Citadel, Red Hand of Doom, and Expedition to Castle Ravenloft, the rest of 3e modules fell flat. Dungeon Magazine, was flat out awesome then, though.

They tended to be shorter & the good ones more tightly contained. Shadows of the last war & grasp of the emerald claw are two I've pulled from recently & they are only about 30 pages each but those 30 pages are meat & potato's so I as a gm can quickly get enough understanding to assess how I want to adjust the plot & what kinds of filler/linking plot stuff I want to add without needing to worry about if 'm going to screw up an entire chapter 50+ pages later. Sometimes you would see longer ones that were pretty much a collection of shorter adventures that didn't try to oversell the plot with too much filler, dse2 blackspine is one I can remember & here is the ToC from it

Spoiler

Without saying anything that might touch nerves... The biggest difference is that 5e HC adventures bake in the filler in ways that can make it more newbie friendly but more difficult for certain gm styles. The individual TyP adventures are mostly if not entirely in tact even if some might be pulled context free from larger adventures.

 

[S'mon]

Princes of the Apocalypse
My beef with this adventure is its repetitiveness. I don't think I could run it as a full campaign. That said, I love "Trouble in Red Larch" and have used it to kickstart two separate campaigns now. I remember some people saying they start every campaign with The Village of Hommlet. For me, it's Red Larch!

I have also used elements from this adventure in different campaigns to great effect.

For my group, I emphasised the intro material and side quests, with the temple of elemental evil somewhere to raid, not slog through clearing the sub-levels, which I agree could get repetitive. I used fast advancement to level 10, which opens up the whole adventure as a sandbox (I boost the cults over time so the weaker ones stay challenging).

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm fairly certain that the cheap ones are unreliable, the expensive ones are good. So you get what you pay for.

And you could always return to the city and hire a better one.

And you can always search each hex systematically even with no guide at all - you will find it eventually (and by the time you do you do you will have accumulated lots of XP).

But it all depends on your players. Some will grow frustrated when presented with a challenge that doesn't involve killing stuff, whilst others will relish it.

 

[ccs]

Hoard of the Dragon Queen:
Overall, I love the opening of this one. The only change I'd make is to have the characters already in the town instead of approaching it as the cult attacks.
The second chapter is pretty good as well. Having weathered the attack by the cult, the party takes the fight back to them.
After this though.... Things just devolve into a loop de loop tour of the Sword Coast. (Kinda) great for brand new players getting their 1st taste of the FR. Not so much for the rest of us.
I've been a player in 3 different groups trying to run this. 3/4 of the way through the group loses interest trailing after the cult while obviously more powerful NPCs & factions do... nothing? Even brand new to the game players spot this.
I've never gotten to RoT.

Storm Kings Thunder:
I played this one. And generally I liked it.
But why are we helping a Cloud Giant when Cloud Giants have just attacked the town???
Followed by why are we allying with a "friendly" Frost Giant & letting the Cult of the Dragon ferry us about in their airship?
And of course the whole thing couldn't just be about the giants doing evil *** & restructuring their Ordining. Oh no, we must have a shape shifting blue dragon involved....

Out of the Abyss:
I like the opening premise. Captured by the Drow & escape into the underdark.
My players though just couldn't enjoy helping the assorted evil underdark races. They were absolutely fine with the demons wrecking them. So we ended this one once they escaped to the surface.

Curse of Strahd:
I love the original Ravenloft adventure from 1e. I've run it many times. And its sequel House on Gryphon Hill several times.
I do not love Ravenloft, or even Barovia, turned into a campaign setting.
I played most of this one. Unfortunately it was a colossal waste of time as it turned into a virtual TPK about a chapter before we reached the castle & the group said "Let's play something else". So 9 months of playing around in the Disney World of Horror tropes without the payoff.

Tomb of Annihilation:
I ran this one start - finish. As has been said, the weakest bit here is the opening premise of the Death Curse & it's clock.
Hmm, a jungle full of lost ruins & treasure guarded by dinosaurs, undead, undead dinosaurs, & snake people. You're adventurers, do you need any other reason to go exploring???
And then you stumble into the actual ToA.
Solution? Just omit the death curse, the clock aspect, & with it the question of "Why did they send us low lv schlubs vrs much stronger NPCs?"

Decent into Avernus:
I'm prepping to run this one.... Oh boy, do I have my work cut out for me.
1st, they've got to be trolling me with this opening premise.
The leader of the Flaming Fists has gone missing, swallowed up when a neighboring city was drug into HELL, and the roughly 5th lv characters (who are not members of the Flaming Fists themselves) are expected to go rescue him because the remaining Fists can't manage under the 2nd in command. Despite being this renowned merc company that sends detachments out Realms wide. ????

And then the PCs travel to Candlekeep for essentially a cut scene to get the info/mcguffins to get to Avernus. Page filler, another tour of the Realms.

Once in Avernus? These clearly unprepared, under lv, characters are sent off to explore the Hellscape - instead of the more powerful NPCs present. It actually tells you that these NPCs are willing to fight & die protecting the city but will refuse to go with the PCs to actually save it.
Yeah, I get it. The characters are supposed to be the stars of this story. But that doesn't make the lack of heroic action on the part of the higher lv NPCs any less retarded.

 

[Stoutstien]

when 5e first launched LMoP got my hopes up for how published campaigns would be handled in 5e. So far LMoP and some of GoS are the only campaign modulars that I enjoy running.

 

[sim-h]

I've run both Princes of the Apocalypse and Tomb of Annihilation up to midpoint or beyond before running out of steam (we may continue ToA at some point). My experience is very different to yours. For me the flaw in both is the grind factor.

PotA - grind through endless dungeons
ToA - grind through endless jungle and shrines

I am now running BGDiA which has swift milestone levelling. I think it is going to be a very different experience! The players are loving it so far especially as I am using the Beadle and Grimm set plus Syrinscape sounds!

 

[sim-h]

None of the groups I've DMed hired a guide who could help. They all got betrayed by the yuan-ti. Haha.
But it is a pretty weak connection even under the best circumstances. IIRC, the party has to guess they need to find Omu, guess who knows where to find it, guess where that person would be, etc. It's the weakest part of the adventure.

Just not my experience at all. Hire Azaka Stormfang who gets you to Orolunga in return for going to Firefinger afterwards for her. Sage at Orolunga points to monastery of Kir Sabal for people who know where Omu is. Go to Firefinger, Kir Sabal, then Nangalore for the black lotus. Fly to Omu.

All that took ONE YEAR of real time play however! (fortnightly sessions, missing a few)

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

I'm currently running Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus and while we're only a few sessions in there are a couple of minor things I noticed on my read through.

The initial hook is very railroady. It even mentions how Zodge sends a hit squad after the characters if they do not do as they are told. The Flaming Fist is too busy to deal with cultists but they can spare some mercs to tail the party? But this is very simple to remedy and the solution is even in the book itself: the shared dark secret. My players decided that they had planned and failed to pull off a heist, so I had it that they are being blackmailed. Someone behind the scenes is using the party hoping to use them to get to the shield. The party isn't fully aware of this yet, they just know that either them being brought back together is one heck of a coincidence or somebody knows their secret.

The second issue is once the macguffin is found in Baldur's Gate the party goes on a long trip in order to progress. From Baldur's Gate they go to Candlekeep to talk to a specific NPC and then from Candlekeep they are flown to a tower to talk to a different NPC that actually transports them to Avernus. I get that down time after finishing the major arc of Baldur's Gate is a good think to let the characters relax before literally going to hell. But this travel sequence feels really unnecessary and I plan to shorten it as I'm not even running the adventure set in the Forgotten Realms.

 

[Enrico Poli1]

Hoard of the Dragon Queen & Rise of Tiamat:
Badly organized, railroady, too cliché. 2/5

Princes of the Apocalypse:
Utterly boring. 2/5

Out of the Abyss:
I can't stand the illogicity of the plot. Demon Lords stranded in the Material Plane? Wandering, alone, doing nothing in particolar? Crazy naughty word. 2/5

Storm King's Thunder:
Pointless. Really, nothing makes any sense. 2/5

Dragon Heist:
It's not an heist, it's a treasure hunt. Modular but stiff and poorly connected. 2/5
(4/5 as a Waterdeep mini-setting)

Dungeon of the Mad Mage:
Old-style megadungeon (go buy Eyes of the Stone Thief to discover what an excellent megadungeon looks like). Prolonged dungeon-delve is tiring. 2/5
(4/5 as an Undermountain mini-setting)

Tales of the Yawning Portal:
Dead in That does not beling here.
Also, some adventures could have a better conversion (Against the Giants and Tomb of Horrors were nerfed) 4/5

Ghosts of Saltmarsh:
The only good adventures are Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and The Styles. Nevertheless, the whole is better then the sum of it's parts. 4/5

Lost Mines of Phandelver:
Does the job right as a starting adventure; the last dungeon is boring. 5/5

Curse of Strahd:
Ravenloft, but better. Some minor corrections are needed to return to the spirit of the original. 5/5

Tomb of Annihilation:
A sandbox done right, with a time limit that gives the right amount of pressure, and a lethal dungeon in the end that captures the original feeling of the Tomb of Horrors. Modern masterpiece. 5/5

Descent into Avernus:
Planescape done right. Legendary in scope. With an open-ended structre that consents very different experienced. 5/5

 

[cmad1977]

I’ve found that the ‘fatal flaw’ in most published products are the DM running it.