D&D 5E Waterdeep: Dragon Heist Post-Mortem (Spoilers)

[Retreater]

There is another point to remember. People get very, very bent out of shape about how AP's are railroading.

I've had players though, that are perfectly happy, I daresay happiest, when the DM is leading them by the nose. They are simply not interested in being the slightest bit proactive in how the campaign runs. The DM wheels up the plot wagon, spoon feeds the players, and then players then run through that.

Unrelated to WotC's adventures or 5e, I'm currently running "The Enemy Within" for the group featured in my Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frostmaiden Post-Mortems. They have certainly been feeling railroaded and have openly complained to me that "nothing they do matters." At least the first part of "The Enemy Within" ("The Enemy in Shadows" is the first book) is probably the most railroaded campaign adventure I've seen - though Masks of Nyarlahotep is close.
So this begs the question, is it possible to have an epic, pre-planned adventure that isn't railroaded? You can have certain story beats, but when that story requires certain things to happen in a certain order, that's when it becomes a railroad.

 

[Burnside]

Unrelated to WotC's adventures or 5e, I'm currently running "The Enemy Within" for the group featured in my Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frostmaiden Post-Mortems. They have certainly been feeling railroaded and have openly complained to me that "nothing they do matters." At least the first part of "The Enemy Within" ("The Enemy in Shadows" is the first book) is probably the most railroaded campaign adventure I've seen - though Masks of Nyarlahotep is close.
So this begs the question, is it possible to have an epic, pre-planned adventure that isn't railroaded? You can have certain story beats, but when that story requires certain things to happen in a certain order, that's when it becomes a railroad.

I find Curse of Strahd to be quite free. Literally the only thing that is set in stone is “If you ever want to leave Barovia, Strahd must die.” Everything else that happens between the players arriving in Barovia and that moment is determined by player choice (especially if you don’t use Death House, which is pretty railroady but fun).

 

[Hussar]

There is another aspect to pay attention to as well.

What do people actually mean when they call something a railroad?

Take our Dragon Heist adventure. Sure, the opening adventure is pretty linear - but, it's the introduction adventure, so that usually gets a pass. It's pretty hard to plop down in a wide open sandbox right out of the chute. You need to ground the players a little bit into the setting.

Then there's clearing out and setting up the Trollskull Manor. Now, this isn't a railroad. This is very open. There's no fixed schedule for what needs to be done, no particular order or in fact no particular reason to do any specific task. Add to that the tasks from the various factions, which are all a la carte, and this is a very wide open section of the adventure that can last quite a while.

Then once that's settled, we have the meat of the season's adventure starting with the explosion outside the Trollskull Manor. Yup, pretty linear, although, it's possible to shortcut (my group certainly did) various tasks and each task has multiple potential resolutions. It's linear, but, not particularly railroady.

Then you have the finale with the dragon. Bog standard dungeon crawl, more or less.

Is this a railroad? Not really, IMO. Parts of it are linear, and parts are very wide open. For my group, the wide open parts were the ones that failed and failed rather hard. They absolutely wanted rails.

At the end of the day, it really, really depends on the group. I think Dragon Heist's biggest problem is it really, really needs buy in from the players. If the players don't care about the setting this adventure will fail hard.

 

[pukunui]

@Hussar: The most egregiously railroady part of Dragon Heist is the chase section because the authors went out of their way to make it so the PCs could not affect the outcome. There's a whole sidebar dedicated to "If the PCs get the macguffin early, it makes them get rid of it and then makes them forget they even had it". If that's not railroading, then I don't know what is.

 

[TheSword]

Unrelated to WotC's adventures or 5e, I'm currently running "The Enemy Within" for the group featured in my Curse of Strahd and Rime of the Frostmaiden Post-Mortems. They have certainly been feeling railroaded and have openly complained to me that "nothing they do matters." At least the first part of "The Enemy Within" ("The Enemy in Shadows" is the first book) is probably the most railroaded campaign adventure I've seen - though Masks of Nyarlahotep is close.

So as you know I’m also running it. How is it a railroad if you don’t mind me asking?

I mean the prologue gets the PCs to Bogenhafen in a pretty hamfisted way but really that’s just the set up of the campaign.

As for Bogenhafen the adventure fully predicts that the adventure could go pear shaped and details potential consequences of getting it wrong. Bogenhafen is one of those rare adventures where PCs failing is possible and described - also acknowledged in later sessions.

The adventure in the city is also pretty free-form. There are leads and clues but they don’t have to be followed and events transpire if the PCs don’t intervene.

Are you sure the PCs aren’t frustrated because there aren’t dungeons to ‘clear’ for the most part in this campaign? It is very different in adventure tone to D&d.

 

[Older Beholder]

Each time a campaign ends, I try to learn from it. This will be about my Waterdeep: Dragon Heist campaign.

Thanks for this, always interesting to hear how other groups go with an adventure. Out of interest, what was the party in terms of race/class.

My DM ran us through Waterdeep : DH when we were about level 14, a year into the campaign. (The over arching plot was Hoard of the Dragon Queen, after strarting with a mix of the starter and essentials set.)

So he definitely adjusted the monsters for our level, but other than that it still played pretty much to script as far as I know.

It worked for us. We‘d wanted to go to Waterdeep for a long time in the game. Which meant we were pretty invested when we got there. Also the general investigative based nature of the adventure was a nice change of pace from what we’d been doing previously.

Even though we had fun, I’d agree it was anti-climatic and there were elements that we weren’t interested in, but neither of those points mattered so much for us given it was a 6 or 7 session chapter of an ongoing campaign.

 

[THEMNGMNT]

Wish I would have thought of using the Deck of Many Things. Much more fun than the Stone.

I was inspired by the 4E adventure "Madness at Gardmore Abbey", which features the Deck of Many Things. In order to unlock the vault, each character will need to draw a card from the assembled deck. Can't wait to see what happens!

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There is another point to remember. People get very, very bent out of shape about how AP's are railroading.

I've had players though, that are perfectly happy, I daresay happiest, when the DM is leading them by the nose. They are simply not interested in being the slightest bit proactive in how the campaign runs. The DM wheels up the plot wagon, spoon feeds the players, and then players then run through that.

Sure, players often like to be given direction "This way to the epic story ->" but they don't like to feel that there decisions don't matter. And eventually even the most biddable players are going to make a decision that the AP writer didn't anticipate. The longer the path, the more likely that becomes. An experienced DM will deal with that and create new content that reacts to the new timeline, but some DMs will try to force the party to follow WHAT IS WRITTEN DOWN.

 

[Lyxen]

I was inspired by the 4E adventure "Madness at Gardmore Abbey", which features the Deck of Many Things. In order to unlock the vault, each character will need to draw a card from the assembled deck. Can't wait to see what happens!

For me, honestly, that's the worst design ever. The Deck of Many Things is a relic of a past where basically this forces you to play russian roulette with your character to advance in the adventure. Absolutely hateful, I would stop playing the adventure at that point.

 

[Lyxen]

So this begs the question, is it possible to have an epic, pre-planned adventure that isn't railroaded? You can have certain story beats, but when that story requires certain things to happen in a certain order, that's when it becomes a railroad.

I believe that, to be epic, a pre-planned adventure needs some level of railroading. But it's not a binary thing, it's a scale, and this allows adaptation to what the adventurers are doing. The real fault of WD-DH is not actually in the railroad, it's in the fact that it expressly tells the DM to ignore the results of what the PCs are doing. This is near the extreme end of railroading and what killed it for us.

But give us a bit more freedom and we will play along, as we like epic stories and, as long as there is no blatant disregard for our actions, we are perfectly happy to collaborate with the DM to live an epic adventure.