D&D 5E Thoughts On The Meh 5E Adventures.

[Rabbitbait]

Because my fascination is adventures, I'll still buy them. Though most of the adventure compilations are lying unread at present. (Too many things, not enough time!)

I'm fascinated to see how Vecna goes. I really, really hope it has better QA than The Shattered Obelisk.

Cheers,
Merric

I'm really excited by Vecna. I said on one of these threads many years ago that my ideal adventure would be one that traverses the many D&D worlds hunting for the rod of seven parts. And behold, here it is.

I agree that the QA needs to be better than the shattered obelisk. I'm lazy as a DM and I don't want to spend time patching mistakes that should have been addressed by the editors.

 

[Ancalagon]

I've been playing more attention to the "connective tissue" of adventures - and by adventures, I mean the campaigns that WotC have been releasing.

A good story, fascinating setting and plot, great encounters - all important, all good. But a number of adventures are ... badly assembled. SKT's is a great example of that. If it has the right DM, it can be amazing. But it takes a lot of work, and not all GMs will manage to pull it off.

The best "assembled" adventure I've seen so far is Dungeons of Drakkenheim. While it does have great NPCs, encounters, settings etc, what is truly remarkable about it is how well put together it is. Each "adventure" within the campaign (a lot of them are dungeons, but not all!) is prefaced with a series of hooks, and ended with a "consequence" section - what happens if the PCs succeeded, failed, etc. So as the GM, you have a lot of flexibility to get your PCs to a particular spot, and have guidance on the consequences of this adventure on the greater plot, no matter how this chapter turned out.

The authors clearly thought about "how would various GMs use this at the table", and it makes a huge difference.

 

[MerricB]

I've been playing more attention to the "connective tissue" of adventures - and by adventures, I mean the campaigns that WotC have been releasing.

A good story, fascinating setting and plot, great encounters - all important, all good. But a number of adventures are ... badly assembled. SKT's is a great example of that. If it has the right DM, it can be amazing. But it takes a lot of work, and not all GMs will manage to pull it off.

Adventure structure is very much a fascination of mine. And SKT is bizarre. Some of it is great - but so badly designed. Other parts make you wonder if sections got cut out.

The basic structure of the adventure becomes a lot better if you start with Lost Mine of Phandelver (especially if you add in Essentials Kit sidequests).

You're adventurers on the Sword Coast. You start in Phandalin, then start doing more quests outside the town, until you're wandering the Sword Coast doing more adventures and no longer based in Phandalin.

Then you come upon a town being attacked by giants. You help defend it, and get a bunch more quests on the Sword Coast from the NPCs you rescue. Great! (This is a continuation of what you've already been doing for five levels).

As you do these quests and gain nice rewards, the random encounters in the wilderness become more and more populated by giants. What's going on?

Then Harshnag turns up to recruit you and tell you what the real threat is: With the Storm King distracted, there's no-one to impose order on the giants and they're all doing bad stuff. How can you fix this? Get to the Storm King and get rid of the bad influences. But the Storm King is hard to get to - the only way is through a magic item held by each of the lesser Giant chieftains.

You pick a chieftain, infiltrate their lair (or lay waste to it, because adventurers) and grab the item.

You get to the Storm King's stronghold, discover the intrigues, and eventually realise what is making the Storm King so distracted. You deal with that, and - hooray! - normal giant behaviour returns!

At least, that's how it should play according to my reading of it. But a lot of it is so badly explained or obfuscated, or divergent readings are used which just make it worse. (I've seen several DMs kill all the NPCs in the giant raid, then wonder why the adventure falls apart in the next chapter).

I love the adventure, but it's not explained that well. (And the less said about A Great Upheaval the better. It's not a bad adventure... and parts of it are inspired... but from a storytelling perspective it introduces the giants way, way too early).

Cheers,
Merric

 

[MerricB]

The best "assembled" adventure I've seen so far is Dungeons of Drakkenheim. While it does have great NPCs, encounters, settings etc, what is truly remarkable about it is how well put together it is. Each "adventure" within the campaign (a lot of them are dungeons, but not all!) is prefaced with a series of hooks, and ended with a "consequence" section - what happens if the PCs succeeded, failed, etc. So as the GM, you have a lot of flexibility to get your PCs to a particular spot, and have guidance on the consequences of this adventure on the greater plot, no matter how this chapter turned out.

The authors clearly thought about "how would various GMs use this at the table", and it makes a huge difference.

I've just started playing - not DMing! - Drakkenheim. I'm fascinated to see what our DM makes of it! (Everything I've heard about is great).

Cheers,
Merric

 

[Mistwell]

We've been running through both of the Waterdeep adventures (Dragon Heist and Mad Mage) for about two years now. After finishing the main adventure in Dragon Heist we use that as our surface home base, and delve into the dungeon below often on missions for various factions in Waterdeep.

I know our DM has modified things and probably uses some third party adventure expansion support stuff, but dang it's made for a superb adventure. We currently have a list of about 8-9 goals, almost all involving different levels, are mapping the teleportation portals on each level, being hunted and doing some hunting, etc..

Tomb of Annihilation has been fantastic. Also been doing that for about 2 years and we're nearing the end.

All of the Tales from the Yawning Portal are very good.

Wild Beyond the Witchlight was fun for my kid and her friends and younger relatives.

 

[Zardnaar]

We've been running through both of the Waterdeep adventures (Dragon Heist and Mad Mage) for about two years now. After finishing the main adventure in Dragon Heist we use that as our surface home base, and delve into the dungeon below often on missions for various factions in Waterdeep.

I know our DM has modified things and probably uses some third party adventure expansion support stuff, but dang it's made for a superb adventure. We currently have a list of about 8-9 goals, almost all involving different levels, are mapping the teleportation portals on each level, being hunted and doing some hunting, etc..

Tomb of Annihilation has been fantastic. Also been doing that for about 2 years and we're nearing the end.

All of the Tales from the Yawning Portal are very good.

Wild Beyond the Witchlight was fun for my kid and her friends and younger relatives.

DM sounds good. I would probably play DotMM, Wildlight better than no D&D right?

I don't like running megadungeons. Different DM, get to play learn something give it a shot

 

[Ancalagon]

I've just started playing - not DMing! - Drakkenheim. I'm fascinated to see what our DM makes of it! (Everything I've heard about is great).

Cheers,
Merric

awesome!
I don't want to derail this thread, but I hope we get to talk about it one day!

 

[RangerWickett]

I've been playing more attention to the "connective tissue" of adventures -

But a number of adventures are ... badly assembled.

When EN Publishing did the adventure path War of the Burning Sky in 2007, it was pretty linear with just a few NPCs who recurred and a few narrative throughline between adventures.

When we did ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution in 2011, we upped our game a lot. I had a big notebook to keep track of all the linkages between adventures, the branching character arc possibilities of about 40 NPCs, and a suite of character hooks we encouraged GMs to use to weave the PCs into key moments of every single adventure.

When you play adventure 6 at 11th level, you go to a brand new country but can run into one NPC you met in your home city in adventure 2 when he fell afoul of a gang, another NPC you encountered while you were undercover on a train in adventure 4, a diplomat you protected in adventure 5 can help you get political connections in this new nation, AND a minor VIP who had cameos in adventures 1 and 3 is revealed to be a new villain trying to make a play for power.

Your interactions with them before affect what happens now, and your choices in this adventure might result in the villain being an ally later, and various other little flairs for the different NPCs.

And the adventures do a lot of work to help the GM keep track of all of this. But damn if it was not a fair bit of work for me as the line director. The original idea of having a different author for each adventure became infeasible after adventure 5 because I'd have to write 10,000 words myself just to bring a new guy up to speed, and they'd invariably not grasp all the nuances for what the long-term plan was.

But the groups who have finished the whole adventure path seem to have really appreciated how deep and rich the world ends up being, because we gave the players opportunities to build genuine relationships with recurring characters.

 

[TiQuinn]

Mostly it's up to the individual DM I think and if you finish the adventure. On the plus side not to many of the 5E adventures are outright terrible so it's probably not to hard for an experienced DM to elevate a mediocre adventure to something fun.

I was surprised to find out that people had a negative view of Dungeon of the Mad Mage after our group finished the campaign after about 2 years of real time gaming. Our DM confided that he made several alterations throughout when appropriate, including the entire final battle, but our group had a blast with it. It all comes down to what inspires you.

 

[zakael19]

As above, it's very hard to judge adventures based on playing through them unless you DM is very open about what they did or did not change/add. I'm running Curse of the Netherdeep right now, and I've been changing/adding tons of stuff because the adventure as written is extremely sparse with content (and, IMHO, simply badly written from a narrative perspective). There's points where it assumes you simply walk across a zone facing 1-3 random encounters and a RP stop and level up, or similar. My players are enjoying it, and have loved some of the stuff I've added in, but a core experience would be very different. To @Ancalagon 's point, there's lots of moments where the connective tissue is absurd stuff like "NPC drops a teleport tablet to zoom the players 3k miles away!"

So I'd put COTN in the "meh" for sure, running Curse of Strahd for the second time I also think it's pretty meh actually. The dungeons are a mess and deeply boring mostly, and the general expectation seems to be that you shoehorn in some degree of external content. No desire to ever run it again for sure.

There's some gems in the compilations, but those benefit from a degree of focus mainly missing in the sprawling adventures.

DoD is by far the best written to play at table large scale book published adventure I've seen, not that it's WOTC official, but even it could use some better organization and cross referencing. Plus its premise kinda sucks for heroic players IMO.