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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shardstone" data-source="post: 9213245" data-attributes="member: 6807784">First, let me talk about why Lost Laboratory of Kwalish is my favorite 5E adventure.<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It has fun ideas that inspire me to run them. The Bone Devil body-mech, the brain in the jars in the floating laboratory, the undead medusa driven into hysteria because of the wildly evil kenku that trapped her, the baubles that lead to other worlds -- this is stuff that sounds fun and that I might not have come up with on my own. That's key.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It gives advice for running the adventure. Specifically, it talks about different paths, and it shows how I can rearrange the chapters of the adventure in different ways for different results. It also talks about expanding some parts, using some characters, modifying other encounters and the story to taste, and alternate story routes you can take to use the adventure. This is the biggest thing.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It has interesting combats (not all of them, but many of them are) and interesting encounter tables. One of the encounters is, as destroying a messed up monastery, the flayed monks who escape find the PCs and are chasing them -- but they are chasing them because they want the PCs to be their new master. LOVE this.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It has plenty of cool rewards. I absolutely loathe adventures that don't give PCs fun toys, like magic items, to play with. I am uninterested in running D&D for just the classes -- I want specifically magical items that they can get, and magical items that they can interface with if they can't get them.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">It gives me scenarios, not storyline. There are story threads and advice for tying it together, but it doesn't rely on A then B then C. Instead, it gives me several scenarios ripe for my players to get involved with. Scenario design, IMO, is far more interesting and useful then plot design for adventures.</li> </ul>So let's talk about one of the examples in the OP, Rime of the Frostmaiden. There are many things I love about this adventure but I would not run it as is. I think this adventure, and most of WotC's adventure paths, fails to give me options for modifying the adventure, and doesn't give very good advice for moving things around, changing things, and so on. Furthermore, some parts of it rely very strictly on storyline (A -> B -> C), which means if something in the storyline breaks, I need to change what's happening. That's fine, so long as the adventure talks a little about this. Furthermore, many of the smaller parts of the adventure don't inspire me too much. Some things do, like the weirdly evil albino moose, the Frostmaiden warlock you investigate at the beginning, and so on. However, the adventure hooks specifically are so weak. Having to do stuff like "Go check up on this cargo that hasn't come back" feels so lame to me, so stock. If I wanted that idea, I could have easily come up with it myself. I want adventure hooks that I would have had trouble coming up with, and maybe couldn't come up with by myself at all. After all, I pay for adventures because I want to be inspired by them. If it is generic content, then I feel my money was personally wasted. Frostmaiden isn't unrunnable. I've sketched up different changes I'd make to run it. But, unlike the Last Laboratory, Frostmaiden doesn't give me enough advice to easily make these changes. This means I need to spend a lot of energy digesting the content and then puzzling out for myself how to edit it. This will likely happen to some degree anyway, but having to do it a lot with very little to go off of is very disheartening. As someone with ADHD, it's hard for me to motivate myself to put in all this effort to run a book when, in reality, I could have just made it myself a lot simpler etc etc.Another example is Descent Into Avernus. I have ran this adventure, but not to completion. That's because the adventure just got too forced in a single direction for me. I don't mean in regards to being a railroad -- I have a high patience for these -- but much of the adventure felt like the coolest things were only briefly mentioned and I'd have to flesh them out on my own. To put that another way, if it takes me more time to figure out how to run your book then it does for me to read it, then I'm put off on running it. And the best way to get rid of this problem is to give the DM advice for changing things. Lost Laboratory's greatest strength is how its chapters can be rearranged. I can run this adventure several times over and it be a different result everytime. And because it shows you how to rearrange the chapters and talks about it, it's very easy to do so. I don't have to understand the entire product to rearrange it, I can follow the advice and use that to basically "skip ahead" on the thinking normally required. If more WotC adventure paths took this approach, going a little less hard on storylines and focusing more on scenarios, I'd think their books were very high quality. There's a reason Curse of Strahd, IMO, which is just a scenario you get thrown into, is so popular. And there's reasons that Adventure Paths, despite their sells, often face heavy criticism online.</blockquote>

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