D&D 5E Why is Hoard of the Dragon Queen such a bad adventure?

[Zaran]

I couldn't imagine a more uninteresting cast of self doubting and loathing characters ever. The amount of teenage angst in the novel was beyond nauseating and I could barely read 3 pages at a time.

I prefer my protagonists to be a bit more heroic and a lot less whiny and self absorbed. Almost every character in that book was tightly wrapped around their own axle to the point that they could barely interact with each other without their personal mental anxieties shouting for attention. Each character was a bloated caricature of what the author was trying to convey for them and there was hardly any adventure in the story at all. Just personal misery and consternation. It was hard to find any D&D in the story at all aside from a few (city/organization) names and a few spells.


But, to each their own. Game on!

I totally agree with you. I couldn't finish the book.

On the subject of the ready made backgrounds. I didn't make my players get them. What is the point of making your own character if you have to fit into one of those backgrounds? But it does create the issue, where a Player makes a character that has their own personal objectives and there is no room in the story to deal with them. Maybe Rise of Tiamat will have more room for PCs to deal with their own subplots but Hoard of the Dairy Queen doesn't.

 

[exile]

I'm playing and enjoying it. I can't say the same for my character, a cleric of Helm. She has been cut down by the half-dragon (after landing a symbolic blow against him) and lost an arm to a kobold (thanks to the DM's homegrown critical hit table).

 

[Flexor the Mighty!]

Aside from it being an AP, which I should avoid but I sometimes foolishly think I can make work for my style of game, its got elements where I pretty much had to overtly imply to the players they were OK charging into a town being attacked by an army with a large dragon. It has parts where if you kill X bad guy so he's not ready for his starring moment in a later chapter you just put an identical copy in there. It has moments that are obviously going to overwhelm the party if they aren't the levels the designers assume they are at that point, if you don't level them at DM whim you may run into issues. You need to make sure they don't get off track of the story...which just isn't my bag. AP's don't work well for me in general.

A lot of editing issues.

Chapter 4 is just boring and I think will need to be totally replaced.

Overall plot is convoluted and kind of stupid.

I"m kind of hoping for a TPK next session and we can go back to the other game with 5th level PC's converted from a retro clone.

 

[Blackwarder]

I totally agree with you. I couldn't finish the book.

On the subject of the ready made backgrounds. I didn't make my players get them. What is the point of making your own character if you have to fit into one of those backgrounds? But it does create the issue, where a Player makes a character that has their own personal objectives and there is no room in the story to deal with them. Maybe Rise of Tiamat will have more room for PCs to deal with their own subplots but Hoard of the Dairy Queen doesn't.

IMHO, that's a problem of players expectation verses adventure expectations, if your players don't know what they are going to be playing while building thier characters, or have no wish to buy into the adventure premise (i.e thwarting the cult plans) than you have a problem on your hands.

The way I see it (and do it) before any campaign the DM should destribut a players guide, with home rules, backgrounds and everything related to thier game, if a player wants to have a different character goal than they should discuss it with the DM before hand.

In the end, the writers can't know who is going to play or how they will play it, it's the DM's job to incorporate thier players goals and expectations into the adventure.

Btw, in my upcoming campaign I took a leaf from LMoP and gave a goal for each available background, for example the noble is a son of a Waterdeep noble who own half of Greenest.

Warder

 

[GameOgre]

Adventure Paths are always a railroad story that everyone kinda has to agree to follow. They are NOT good for a typical D&D experience that allows for character wants and goals and growth, unless the players male a metagame commitment to have that growth ect follow the right path.

 

[Riley37]

It sounds like many of the thumbs-down opinions involve incompatible goals. "Does this publication accomplish its goal" and "Was this publication useful for my goals" can be two different questions.

If HotDQ was written primarily to work for AL play, then how well does it serve that goal? Can drop-in players and PCs join a story in progress? I think it's reasonable to presume that drop-in players are fine with "there's something important going on, get involved", and that they write their PCs as being at loose ends.

Does that differ from how useful it was to your particular table?

Straw golem example: If each of five players brings a PC to the table, whose central and immediate goal is to return to their long-lost homeland, then it can take railroading to make them the defenders of Greenest. If that's five *different* homelands in five different directions, then it's time for an out-of-character conversation about reconciling individual motives with party motives.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I bought it because my choices were limited. I'm an avid module user. Railroading isn't a bad thing. But when it consumes the entire life of a PC, holding them hostage throughout the campaign. That's when it gets to be an issue. It would have been much better if the two parts were broken up into 5 pieces each with their own plot. And let the GM and the PCs decide when to stop. Tyranny of Dragons has the issue from day 1 where if the PCs don't buy in, then the world dies.

My biggest problem with Tyranny of Dragons/Rise of Tiamat is the puniness of the threat and the threat response. It's basically Informed Deadliness. You are told that Tiamat is a threat to the whole world, and there are even factions of good dragons and Red Wizards and such who make noises about getting involved, and there's even a big battle at the end where dozens to hundreds good dragons are supposedly fighting the forces of the dragon cult... but if any of those forces were actually onscreen for the climactic battle, they would trivialize the encounter. In all seriousness, the ideal strategic response would be, "Instead of dividing your forces, take all the anti-Tiamat forces to the Well of Dragons, and when Tiamat comes through the portal, kill her." It turns out that nothing much that the other anti-Tiamat forces do matters anyway, at most they will reduce 75 HP from her total and weaken her legendary features some, which they could do just as well by actually showing up at the battle and simply hitting her for 75 HP of damage. Tiamat does deserve her CR 30 rating (unlike the Tarrasque), but she is still very killable, and if the 15th level PCs have even a couple of adult dragons on their side to act as meat shields/grapplers while they fill her full of arrows, even her full CR 30 form goes from "deadly threat" to "straightforward fight." To say nothing of what would happen if they have actual high-level NPCs on their side as well (Szass Tam's wizards, Harper agents).

So, from a simulationist perspective, I find the adventure path lacking mostly because I can't take the plot seriously. A world-shaking threat which is fought primarily by only four heroes is only credible if either 1.) it comes as a surprise, so that other heroes cannot join the fight in time, or 2.) there are no other heroes. Meaning that you're in a sword-and-sorcery world where all the powerful guys are bad guys (who don't care about opposing the new threat because it only threatens the good guys), or you're in a monster-dominated world where all the powerful guys are not (demi)human at all.

I could rewrite it to take place in a world where there are no friendly NPCs over 5th level, and it would probably work, but that would require such extensive rewriting that I might as well throw it all out and start over. For one thing, you'd either have to set it somewhere besides Faerun or else scrap most of Faerun's history. I think you could make it work in Ravenloft though: a band of dragon-cultists are trying to summon Tiamat into their domain, which would turn it from a relatively-benign-if-creepy place into a blasted wasteland terrorized by Tiamat.

 

[jayoungr]

So a subpar initial premise is ok, as long as the adventure designers give the PCs background hooks that the players might not be interested in at all (or alternatively, the PCs might already have backgrounds)?

No, you're putting words in my mouth. I said nothing at all about the quality or lack thereof of the initial premise. I said that some people's complaints (yes, I stand by that word) are not taking into account what is provided.

Scenario 1: If the group is fine with using the given backgrounds, the PCs will have sufficient motivation to try to take on the raiders. Thus, the module provides tools to solve the potential problem.

Scenario 2: If the group chooses not to use the backgrounds provided, then it is up to the DM to get the PCs involved in saving the town. If the DM does not do this, then the problem arises. However, in that situation, it is not the fault of the authors of the module.

(Scenario 3, of course, is where the group chooses to use their own backgrounds and the DM finds a way to get them involved. In that case, the problem does not arise.)

And frankly, I don't think "save the town from attackers" is a weak initial premise in and of itself. You just have to get the PCs involved in it, and that is where it can get tricky.

 

[Derren]

Scenario 1: If the group is fine with using the given backgrounds, the PCs will have sufficient motivation to try to take on the raiders. Thus, the module provides tools to solve the potential problem.

I disagree. Even with the provided backgrounds it takes a heavy dose of metagaming to charge into a town under dragpn attack or even attacking said dragon which is clearly a much too powerful foe to take down werent it for scripting and plot immunity.

 

[Hussar]

Yeah, because expecting heroes to act heroic is such a huge stretch. Sheesh, doesn't WOTC know that we all want to play completely selfish mercenaries who do only do things if we're getting paid? It would almost be like expecting the players to buy into the campaign before the campaign started was such a major stretch.

Good grief, it's a Forgotten Realms adventure - high heroism and badassery is to be expected isn't it? If you have a group of players that are going to completely ignore the adventure in front of them, why on earth are you playing an adventure path?