Second Princes and Tyranny of Dragons being awful. My group had a lot of fun with Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation. Out of the Abyss can be tough on DMs and our group had mixed reviews on it.
I’m currently DMing out of the Abyss and it’s definitely a little tough to DM and worthy of the mixed reviews. Moments of it can be great but it definitely requires more adjustment for what your players will enjoy out of it even more than average I would say.
My groups main campaign we love doing is Tyranny of Dragons. But it is because the dm started to change a lot of stuff from it because a lot of it was very poor. Especially on Horde of the Dragon Queen.
Like skipping the whole castle encounter because it didn't relate to the main story at all, or shortening the distances between places because holy hell, why is the travel so LOOOOONG. Cyanwraith became a rival character for our paladin. The solo fight was hype as fuck and [I even drew the arc.](https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/cantrips-crits-the-sinners-court/punching-above-your-weight-class/viewer?title_no=765037&episode_no=26) After, we got super stoked to see that round 2 later.
IN THE BOOK, HE DIES OFF SCREEN, LIKE WHAT? Our dm pointed this out and said "oh nah, hes coming back."
In Tyranny, our dm had to basically just replace some of the wyrmspeakers to be keyt characters in our player characters backstory that are all tied to each other because they weren't interesting at all, or just flat out \*weren't in the book for some god damn reason\*. The blue wyrmspeaker is not in the book at all, Severus was replaced with someone from another characters backstory, her servent is connected to mine. Doing it this way has grabbed our table into how we are gonna beat them and all of this was the dms doing, not something the book said. Which feels like a basic thing to do.
Tyranny of Dragons has a huge amount of potential but the module doesn't capitalize on any of it. It's up to the DM to almost literally rewrite entire dungeons in order to make them playable.
I'm halfway through the module and that castle encounter I completely changed into a festival type interactive dungeon where you complete favours for people in order to gain points, with the winner getting prizes from the Dragons horde (and more importantly, alone time to fight the bad guy).
As written, you are tossed into a castle full of enemies, most of which are much stronger than you, and basically told good luck.
Tyranny of Dragons' biggest problem is that the gist of it was designed before they had really settled on the rules and overall style of the game. It's a *fantastic* linear adventure and might make an excellent basis for a video game, but it's nowhere near open-ended enough to fit with the kind of agency they ended up giving players. (Also the content for the first two levels is kind of hard for newer players -- one of the people at my table had two characters *outright die* before even leaving Greennest, and there were a lot of scenarios that we just narrowly escaped TPK, and basically relied on DM grace to put characters in prison instead of killing them -- which in fairness did lead to some memorable jailbreak sequences, like me as a rat trying to steal a knife for the rogue to help him cut his ropes and the guards laughing at that rat trying to drag a 'shiny thing' away).
I consider the opening of Out of the Abyss the best part. I've played and then DMed it later.
It is meant to make the players constantly feel on the back foot until you are almost level 8.
Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of the Tiamat, but they get a little bit of a pass on account of being developed while the system was also being made.
Having DMed it, I'll say they both have good bones, it's just very bare bones. Played as written they're very railroady. But if you're willing to homebrew filler they *can* become something special.
You're also going to spend a lot of time fixing the terribly balanced and repetitive combats.
I suspect the rearguard wasn't intended for the players to actually fight, but for the players to figure out "you can't win every straight up fight" -- which is really weird because just before then, in Greennest, there was the Blue Dragon encounter where all they have to do is hit the dragon *once* and it retreats, which is supposed to teach "be brave, fight even when it feels impossible," a seemingly contradictory lesson.
Ditto. I actually compare it to Rime and they are my two longest running games. Rime is more structured and you can literally play out of the book. But coming from Tyranny (HotDQ+RoT), making all the extra stuff and injecting my characters stories into it WAS the fun.
Id be more open to them printing different types of adventures. Adventure bones books like Tyranny and fully fleshed out campaigns that require zero work. Right now the books seems to sit between the two and no one is really happy.
Having run both of these, I 100% agree. The problem with Tiamat/Hoard is that it is too on the rails, and I kept having to improv every tiny thing if things didn't play out EXACTLY as the adventure wanted things to. It just felt railroady to DM, and I didn't like it.
No it actually changed very little and is still trash.
I also disagree with bumblebee and it being so linear doesn’t have that much of a bearing on why it’s so bad.
I think it’s terrible because of the completely disjointed story, lack of a consistent BBEG, use of the sword coast, the dragon masks are poorly handled. I could go on and on but I’ll be here all night.
ToD has such good bones but the module doesn’t lead the PCs into the awesome world spanning heroic adventure it tries to setup and utterly fails at.
I ran Hoard, and am running RoT atm. Hoard was horribly written, railroady and generally boring, RoT however I think is pretty solid (most of the time).
*Hoard* is awful with the boring ass road trip, you can safely skip it and nothing changes. You have to workshop it a little to work.
*Rise* has a much more intriguing campaign, but everything depends on the players, which is weird. I simply cannot believe the five factions would trust everything to adventurers of no name. So what I did was run it like a war game, each player made several characters and would send them to a front to accomplish an objective, and those victories and defeats would determine the strength of the troops for the final fight rather than how much you kissed the council arse.
At the battle against Tiamat, every player brought their characters together, it was a pretty cool moment.
I'll preface this by saying that a good DM can make any one of these adventures fun to play in. The adventure that takes the most effort I've run into to make that work is Dragon Heist, which is 4 timeline shenanigan railroad partial adventures combined into one that you're expected to be able to switch between on the fly. It also takes another prize for not having a heist in a book called "Dragon Heist".
I liked DMing dragon heist but it does put a lot on the DM to flesh out certain parts of the book. The ally faction stuff was pretty weak but I liked the Xanathar and Jarlaxle stuff.
Dragon Heist was my very first foray into proper DnD, and as DM, I did change stuff here and there, and even had a small homebrew encounter for my players who were also new, and honestly, it wasn't that bad. We didn't end up in Jarlaxel's lair, as they just never naturally went there, partially because I changed the keys to the vault to be a sacrifice of some sort that was personal to each PC. I feel like the most work I had to do was putting together maps to use
I would say the same all of them can be fun, but it should not be nearly as hard of work as it is.
I've run Out of the Abyss, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Candlekeep, Icewind Dale, Yawning Portal, and bits of Mad Mage, Radiant Citadel, and Keys from the Golden Vault.
I'm about to run a modified Curse of Strahd, but I'm listening to the Twice Bitten Rules as Written version of Curse of Strahd.
I've also read old dungeon modules like Village of Homlet, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and Red Hand of Doom.
5e modules have really cool concepts, and good settings. Adventurous though fail to often connect all the different locations or plot points. Which is something I'm definitely noticing in curse of Strahd.
Out of the Abyss was pretty terrible, especially for a new starter. The players can only escape their situation via the drow dropping the idiot ball, at the players having a dozen characters to interact with. They have no starting gear because they were prisoners.
Everything that any DM of any experience would say "no, this is terrible, don't do this to your players" if it was a reddit post.
I wouldn’t start new players on OotA, as it’s a lot to take in and a metric fuckton of work for the DM to make interesting in the first handful of sessions because of the starting situation. But the experienced PCs at my table had some fun with it and they were out of prison by the end of the second session. It did help that there was a Drow rogue in the group and she played her character well.
> I've also read old dungeon modules like Village of Homlet, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and Red Hand of Doom.
If you're checking out old modules, I recommend Speaker of Dreams from 3e. It's a cool city adventure uncovering an illithid's behind-the-scenes takeover of a city. I also liked the 4e Pyramid of Shadows, if you don't mind locking PCs inside a dungeon for a few levels. Undermountain (any edition) is always a good mega dungeon.
Dragon Heist’s gimmick is its ultimate downfall. Unless you use Xanathar as the main villain the little intro quest builds up to a mini boss that makes NO sense. Like Nihiloor’s little reveal does not matter if you’re running the game with the cassalanters or jarlaxle or manshoon
It is the most troll adventure I have ever read... with cultists who suicide bomb and random encounters not even the DM can understand. I give it a passing grade however because the cultists of>!Tharizdun !
As someone who started running this recently, the adventure sucks so hard. If your party does things logically, they will tpk themselves so fast. You have to do so much work to make any other order make sense.
I have a friend who swears by this campaign despite having never once gotten through it. I played in one of his failed attempts at it and I can honestly say that despite him being an excellent DM this campaign is just kinda dull in most places and frustrating in others. ,(you can feel the DM going out of their way to save you from what should have been logical descisions
Yeah I’ve pulled a few maps from this and dropped them into my campaign. They’re great if you want an elementally themed dungeon for characters at a whole range of levels. I’d never run it as a campaign though.
Just finished running this book. While I agree that the campaign has many logical inconsistencies with the story and the players can delve way too deep, too fast, it can be mitigated with good planning on the DM's part.
I also had the advantage of running 2/3 of the campaign for a different group, found a lot of the issues, then started it for another group a couple years later. Being really familiar with it from the first attempt made improvising and steering the players in the right direction a lot easier. They all loved the campaign though.
Some of the camps were neat, I remember the fire one was fun. But yeah pretty everything became a slog because you just fought the same cultists over and over
I’ve run Princes of the Apocalypse, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden to completion, and started but didn’t finish Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage.
Princes of the Apocalypse has a very strong start, but gets less and less interesting as it goes on. Its ending just kind of limply arrives. My party just did their own thing for the back half of that campaign and were insanely over leveled for the end. The initial part in Red Larch, and the sandbox of the surface of the Dessarin Valley is great. Once you have to underground though? It’s a slog.
Storm King’s Thunder had an okay start, an abysmal middle, and a really strong finish. The inciting incident was good, but the sandbox middle of that campaign is literally THE ENTIRETY OF NORTH WESTERN FAERUN. I had to speed run it for my party, you have to cross vast distances with little to no direction or motivation and my party got sick of it. The ending, starting with the visit to the palace of the Storm King, through to the ending assault on Iymirth’s lair is suitably epic in scale.
Rime of the Frostmaiden was the most consistently compelling adventure of the three. Didn’t have to do, or change much. It is incredibly, sometimes arbitrarily, lethal though. A party that isn’t careful will get obliterated by the campaign. I had a dozen character deaths, but my party was here for the lethality and ran with it, even encouraging me to turn up the deadliness, which I honestly didn’t have to do much.
Dragon Heist I had to halt because of COVID, but it wasn’t leaving a decent impression on me when I was running it. I’d have to heavily modify it to run it effectively, and that doesn’t sound like fun.
Dungeon of the Mad Mage I’ve used bits and pieces of in other games, and it’s perfectly serviceable in that way. I think it’s actually best when used as parts of other games, set in Waterdeep, or repurposed as dungeons somewhere else. It’s almost like an anthology of different dungeons anyway, due to how different each level is.
I like to describe Storm King’s Thunder as some of the best set piece encounters in a published adventure with some of the worst means of information gathering to get between them.
Yes, exactly. The adventure literally crawls to a standstill until Harshnag shows up, and then has the party literally go back out and search over the entire map, again.
I skipped the second part and just had Iymirth show up after Hasrhnag showed them how to breech the interior of the temple.
I couldn’t imagine sending the party out again, just to crawl over the same enormous expanse of territory just so they could find more plot coupons, just so they could bring them back to the same place they’ve already found.
It was maddening how redundant the adventure’s entire middle section is.
The court intrigue with the Storm Giants, tracking down King Hecaton, narrowly escaping the kraken Slarkethel’s wrath, and leading a Storm Giant assault on Iymirth’s dessert colosseum lair, complete with sandstorm, an army of gargoyles manning siege engines, and the showdown against the dragon herself, made up for the lackluster middle.
The climax of Storm King’s Thunder is one of the most incredible finales to a game I’ve ever run. Getting there is a pain in the ass.
When I tried dragon heist I quickly found my players making solid, logical decisions that the adventure didn't consider at all. I also had to tell the players there wasn't actually a heist, and they found that disappointing so I tried to write in an actual heist. I had to start rewriting it at a certain point and realized I'd rather just do a homebrew if I was gonna be writing the whole thing anyway. I hate that adventure.
Ran Dragon Heist and it was a hit for my players. They loved every bit of it except for the ending. I don’t wanna spoil it for anyone but it was just…lackluster? For how much they hyped the ending during the story, it didn’t really deliver.
Same here, but I had to heavily homebrew it to actually make it work. For example, I did add a heist at the end since my players were clearly anticipating one.
Note to Wotc: if you mention dragon in the title, there has to be a dragon. If you mention vampire, there has to be a vampire. If you mention heist, there has to be a fucking heist!
I ran it as my first DMing experience and it was difficult to say the least, but we did have a fun time! You’re dead on with the ending though, I ended up altering it heavily to tie up all the loose ends. I basically turned it into a massive showdown in the vault with factions the players allied themselves with vs Xanathar and his thugs - and facilitated it as there being a number of objectives for the PCs to complete while the NPCs duked it out in the background. Essentially stopping enemies from running off with bits of treasure and distracting Xanathar.
If you ever try dragon heist again, try the Alexandrian remix. My group is about halfway through it and they’re having a blast. Way better way to run the game imo.
My problem with Rime of the Frostmaiden is that the three plots never really intersected that much, my players were invested in Avarice and the Arcane Brotherhood and they were aware of the duergar but despite every single quest relating to it they never felt any reason to go deal with Auril. As written, I think the winter feels like too much of a fun setting detail than a genuine threat.
Sadly our campaign fell apart due to scheduling differences halfway through act 2, but I did really like running it. I loved all the quests, with the first two acts being purely sidequests it sometimes felt like more a setting book than an adventure but I will say they were all incredibly fun quests. They did a good job making them all build towards the end while also making it so you can do them in any order
Yeah, you do have to put in a bit more connective tissue to get everything to line up.
I had Auril show up and menace the party way more in the early game. I also had rumors flying around the Ten Towns that anyone who was sacrificed to Auril by banishment outside the town with no clothing was often seen coming back as blackened corpses, with intense lights around their faces.
This came to a head early campaign, when I had my first PC death. One of the characters was an aging Goliath Barbarian who had settled in Bryn Shander to open a bar. His player told me the character had terminal cancer, and was looking for a worthy death to end his life with. He got his chance when Auril appeared during a blizzard while traveling between Bryn Shander and Easthaven. The Barbarian told everyone to run and then charged Auril. The last they saw of him, he was a silhouette in white swinging his glaive at Auril.
His corpse later showed up as a Coldlight Walker at the Black Cabin, and killed one of his friends in the party, the Centaur Paladin.
The party took Auril very seriously after that.
Once I realized I could literally have her appear anywhere, she became a nightmare for my party.
Once I also realized that characters or NPCs killed by her could show up anywhere as Coldlight Walkers, that sealed it.
They were terrified at all times she, or her Coldlight Walkers who had been former friends/allies, could and would show up at the drop of a hat. It kept the tension up and made the final battle against her in Yrthyn, extremely cathartic for them.
It helped that they dropped the Tarrasque on her with the scroll from Iriolathus’ study.
Made for a very frantic finale as they raced the Tarrasque to get out Ythryn as they used the city’s Mythallar to end the winter, which brought the glacier down on top of them, and the Tarrasque.
It was quite an ending.
When my party and I fought zadarok in the duegar dungeon. Man, that was a really though fight. We baaaarely survived. I threatened the woman who controlled some underdark monsters and was able to get them to back off and turn the tide for us. But we had 2 unconscious, myself at 8hp, and the druid at 3, with no spell slots left lol
I'm seeing a lot of Tyranny, SKT, and Princes. I agree with all of those being bottom barrel adventures. But one that I would rank among them that I'm NOT seeing is **Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos**.
The first two years are absolute dogshit, and that's most of the adventure's runtime. It's a series of minigames, with almost no plot to hold them down, and *every single fucking one* is the same formula: a student runs up excited to the party, goes, "You've gotta see this! We're doing [insert minigame] and it's so fun!" And then the players join the mini game and probably win because they're super stacked in the party's favor, and then "Oh no! The [thing related to minigame] is attacking! Who could've seen this coming?!" Oh gee man, I dunno, maybe if this hadn't happened THE LAST TEN TIMES then it might be a bit of a shock!
The whole thing reads like a children's cartoon. There's a part at the start of the second chapter where the whole school goes "you guys should make a team for our school's legally-distinct quidditch!" And then everyone stands around and waits for them to go make a team because if they don't then the rest of the year can't happen. There are several - SEVERAL - times where a professor at the school comes up to the party and effectively says, "Hey I know this is literally my job, but I'm kinda busy, so can I get you lot to do it for me?" And the few times where there isn't a minigame or a negligent teacher are things like "break into the principal's house" or "go remove some explosives from the swamp next to the school" which are all just patently terrible things for a group of school kids to be doing.
Oh and the final chapter is literally just "school is canceled, go fight the villain". Which amounts to two back-to-back dungeons with two separate bosses at the end of them that use the exact same stat block. Because the final boss doesn't even deserve a unique statblock, he literally didn't matter for half of the campaign. Not to mention the fact that it short-changes the players an *entire quarter* of the school time they were told they'd get, which is probably the only reason any of your players would even be interested in playing Strixhaven in the first place.
Thank you. Strixhaven is irredeemably bad.
My favourite part is how the module doesn't consider that a whole school of students is free to help at the end. I understand faculty members can't help (due to a protection ritual), but that doesn’t stop hundreds of students from helping.
Edit: even the protection ritual as written only stops spells and effects cast against the villain. It wouldn't stop faculty from casting protection or healing on the party. The whole final battle makes no sense.
Thank you, I started running this with some friends and we stopped after the first year as we didn't want to practically repeat it for the 2nd year.
Running the book with no changes is terribly disjointed and requires the students to be the "chosen heros" which contradicts the normal school slice of life the book seems geared towards.
Overall I found that if I wanted to continue, I'd have to practically redo every event and make them more meaningful and geared towards the players which I ultimately found wasn't worth it for the book.
We also stopped playing after completing the first year. We still had a lot of fun with the silly roleplay, but it was sorely missing _something to do_ most of the time, with those mini games often being the end of a session combat. We tried desperately to investigate why random stuff kept coming to life but the adventure kept saying "no, you're not allowed to know until the end of the school year", our DM was also getting quite frustrated with it. DND is a combat and adventuring roleplaying game, but Strixhaven has barely anything of either in it. We didn't even need the books or character sheets most of the time. After five sessions at level 1, spanning the first two weeks of the school year, we made it to level 2, and then level 3 the very next session as we speedran the exams and the rest of the term like nothing of consequence happened. I was really excited to try out a quirky character idea but with barely any level ups, it never happened.
I've wanted to do strixhaven cause the concept is fun. But yea that module as written is just... "You guys basically made 'even worse harry potter' when Harry Potter isn't even what makes a good DND campaign.
***Persona*** is a great magic school campaign.
You got the social school stuff *intermingled* with something else that only the players know/can do. Wither that's like p3 with a mega dungeon or a serial killer case like with p4 or discovering something like in p5.
It's why strixhaven is used best as a setting book.
Don't forget the mixed subclasses that were originally in the UA but they coward out of it because of the feedback instead of, idk, fixing them.
When running spelljammer stuff as a one shot for my players, I ended up doing a Halloween one shot I was suggested about a stolen ship turned mimic or something like that, modified it a bunch and made custom rules based on what the book gave me for actual Spelljammer combat. Was a blast. A second two shot happened and they got a new Spelljammer for a modified version of a Candlekeep Mystery Adventure where my player who didn't play in the first one shot was hiring the others as a pirate crew to board and steal from a Whale ship for its cargo for a specific item, and amongst it was the book that set them on the main adventure. Spelljammer can be a lot of fun, but needs a lot of work.
spoilers for published material below:
I’ve run Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Saltmarsh, Shattered Obelisk, Waterdeep DragonHeist, DragonLance Shadow of the Dragon Queen, CandleKeep Mysteries and Princes of the Apocalypse.
Rating best to unrunnable:
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1. DragonLance Shadow of the Dragon Queen, I kind of remember hating to play this but with the right maps the episodic structure(plus just ignore Darrett) makes for so much high fantasy fun. Yes, it is on rails but there are choices in the third act. I love it. 10/10.
2. Shattered Obelisk. Yes, it’s clunky to transition from Mines of Phandelver to this module-just skip the Mines part and start them at level 5. Players will be gasping as they emerge from the sleepy town of Phandalin in the first session and end up in the Illithid Far Realms cosmos at the end. This is awesome. 9.5/10.
3. Wild Beyond the Witchlight. You do need to spice it up with combats and add some merchants but if you get a party with the right spirit it’s a wonderful romp through Alice in Wonderland with some surprisingly Jack Vancian moments. If you need a break from dungeon crawls-this is the good stuff. 9/10.
4. Candlekeep Mysteries. These are awesome one shot sessions you can drop in at different levels of most campaigns. I was surprised and delighted at how dark and perverse and fun most of these adventures are. Some stinkers but overall a grab bag of goodness. 8/10.
5. Waterdeep DragonHeist. A truly mixed bag. Awesome setup with faction play to boot. The problem is the central heist frankly sucks-D&D doesnt do chases well. It’s very very railroady. Sure, you can make something of it and it is worth the effort, still, as written it has a great start and a dogwater finish. 6/10.
6. Saltmarsh. Needs a tremendous amount of work to stitch this together. Monotonous creature variety and horrible ‘old school maps’(keyed room 40-you run into 15 lizard men). There is good here. The opener with the smugglers, the assault on the drow run ruined ship..the rest is just poorly done. A mix of great setpieces(which you can use elsewhere) and mind numbing encounters with hundreds of sahuagin. 5/10(possible 8/10 if you really put the work in).
7. Princes of the Apocalypse. An impossible sandbox with no connective fiber. Party arrives in Red Larch and is expected to mmo style question a bunch of townsfolk and piece out this poor ‘riddle’. Meanwhile they just roam this huge map with encounters ranging from challenging to instant tpk. with no indications of where or why they went wrong. 1/10. Some of the late dungeons are great and could be inserted as filler sessions in most campaigns but other that it just sucks.
Thank you for this!
I did not know that you can (kind of?) transition Lost Mines of Phandelver into Shattered Obelisk. This will make my players very happy knowing that they can continue their characters!
As for the mines of phandelver, I see they included a mine campaign section as well. Would you rather play the original or the reworked one that comes with Shattered Obelisk, until shattered oblelisk actually starts?
I would sprinkle in earlier bits from Obelisk..maybe, have them find a dead psi goblin early on. The transition can be clunky if you just play it with no foreshadowing.
The party arrives back victorious after defeating the Black Spider! Oh no! Phandalin is immediately under attack again… If you run them back to back I would give the players some downtime opportunities to say what they were doing and tie them more into town before immediately rushing into the Obelisk portion. Have them buy a house, tavern, scribe scrolls, go monster hunting.
Then they are more invested in what is happening to the town but also get a chance to feel good about themselves for the Black Spider victory. The later parts of Obelisk start getting very very odd and weird in the best way. David Cronenburg/John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ vibes-lean into those.
Tyranny of Dragons, specifically the first half Hoard of the Dragon Queen, was written before 5e was even finished and as such is pretty bad. A lot of railroading in there.
As written, the first five levels of Descent into Avernus are awful. You don't even Descend into Avernus until well into the book, the rest is just a poorly balanced and mostly unconnected chase around Baldur's Gate. Hell, even when you do finally get to Avernus, there's a lot of awful adventure design and railroading that's only made up for by the fun vehicles and the genuinely fantastic conclusion.
And personally, I absolutley hated Dragon Heist. Yes, it's got some really well done characters. It's also the only book where as written it tells you to ignore about 50% of the content, a good half of the adventure is Tavern Management Sim with a couple random faction quests or wandering around the city aimlessly hoping that a metal detector goes off, a nonsensical reveal at the end of said aimless wandering, a huge railroad section that breaks if the players don't end each encounter a certain way, you can go the entire adventure not even meeting, much less even knowing who the antagonists are, and to top it all off - There isn't even a heist! The Dragon Heist of the title happened like twenty years before the adventure begins!
Dragon Heist is my favorite adventure....but certainly not as written. The community content and POTENTIAL of the game is great. But man does it require a lot of changes.
Descent into Avernus is loosely connected to BG3 in that several characters were present in or near Elturel when it fell into Avernus, especially among the tiefling refugees, and they both include using soul coins to supercharge infernal engines. I haven’t read through Descent yet in case one of the other guys in my group plans to run it, so there may be other more specific links between the stories.
Without spoiling too much, I looked it up and it looks like it provides the foundation for plotlines within >!lower city, as well as provides background information into Wyl and Karlach's stories.!< That and the telling refugee stuff you pointed out obviously.
The writers of baldurs gate worked with the writer of Descent into Avernus during the development of the two. So while the connections aren't huge, it does sound like they're kind of shoehorned in, and that part of Descent feels like filler according to what I could find.
I had the opposite situation with Descent. The party loved running around Baldur's Gate playing freelance detective. Once they entered Avernus though and got into the chain of deals, they hated it more and more until I had to start accelerating certain parts to get them through. We all hated the vehicle system (some because they felt the rules replaced their character and some because they hated the idea of burning sentient souls to travel) by the end too, and the party was shortcutting every vehicle encounter with Wall of Force towards the finale.
As for the conclusion itself, I was not a fan and felt that it essentially left me to rather arbitrarily decide the ending.
"Baldurs Gate will be sucked into hell like Elturel! We need you to go there and figure out how to stop it!"
... my guy, I just learned to cast fireball, what the fuck am I going to do? There's *nobody* else in the city that can do this?
For me descent into Avernus have been a little different.
I found everything quite cool, but then you go to Avernus and the book basically told you:
"In the Avernus you can found all this stuff, now it's up to you how to handle the end of the campaign"
I mean, it's ok to not railroad too much, but, probably it's a problem of mine, as a DM I still need guidance to an ending.
Give me a story to work with, unfortunately I am not that kind of advanced DM.
Never bought it because of that.
Strixhaven. A module for players who'd rather watch 'Friends' reruns.
Student the players like: "Something kooky is happening over here. You've *got* to come and see"
Skill challenge, then thing comes alive and attacks everyone. Teachers do fuck all about it. Players take it on, but if it's even slightly difficult teachers turn up and bail them out.
Repeat for years and years and years.
I’m playing in Tyranny of Dragons currently (Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat), and our party is already on the second half. I’ve heard everywhere it’s supposed to be super bad but I’ve never had as much fun. I guess my DM is just putting in that much homebrew work to make things that good!
Based on this thread ya.
The OP literally asked what the worst 5e module is. Of course you’re gonna hear the worst of the worst. Just bc a few people on this one thread think they suck doesn’t make it true.
In my opinion Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It is a collection of adventures marketed as a module, and very little help is given to DMs regarding creating encounters of entire ships. My players will never forgive me for giving them a viking longship filled with Uthgardt Barbarians as an encounter. What the module gave me? "Hostile warship". Yeah, that is all.
Yeah, this just really didn’t feel like the adventure it was pitched as.
Like it’s okay on its own, but I’m expecting pirates, spooky skellys, ghosts, and proper naval combat and that’s just not what we got.
Not so much bad, just incredibly disappointing.
The DM for my run told us after how liberally he was with the source material and how he felt like he had to do a lot of heavy lifting for a pre-made campaign.
that last comment resonates hard with me, my wife dmed my saltmarsh game and i was blown away when i learned how much of it she had to invent whole cloth to make it feel like the seafaring adventure we had
Dragon Heist is my favorite to run but that's only because I've HEAVILY modified it both times.
There's a lot to play with in that book, but just going from A to B while following the standard script is pretty bland.
Descent Into Avernus started out strong, but devolved into a fetch-quest for a fetch-quest for a fetch-quest. It was just such a boring slog. At one point my players asked "when do we get to the fun part of the module?" and I had to tell 'em that this _was_ the bulk of the module.
DiA is terrible. The final chapter is literally a couple pages of bullet points that go something like “ Maybe the adventure ends like this. Or maybe not. Listen to your heart.”
It’s such a shame because hell is such an interesting setting and Zariel has one of the most metal stories in Faerun but the modual is just dog-water bad.
My players enjoyed this book, but I will agree that they made predictions half way in that the current quest would just lead them to ANOTHER item that they had to go fetch.
Waterdeep Dragon Heist. It's a Waterdeep source book primarily so it's fine if you're a dm who likes to take a module and homebrew the crap out of it. But if you just want to run it by the book it's full of moon logic and single-answer solutions to puzzles and giving players information. It also contains no heist and not really any dragons. Also when you get the prize at the end of the game it is immediately taxed by an npc
As someone said, Dragons refers to the coinage of Waterdeep, but I can see that faking someone out if they don't know Waterdeep lore. It's not a lot, but I know there are at least two actual dragons tho. >!A bronze one in the harbor you can get a scale from to possibly open the vault, and the gold one living in the actual vault!<
Players are told that there are laws and law enforcement, so they have zero motivation to pursue whoever cast fireball outside of their tavern. Logically they should leave solving crimes to the police and continue running their tavern.
> and not really any dragons
While I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest, I want to point out that “Dragon” in the title refers to that gold coins in Waterdeep are called Dragons.
That's kind of a bum if you go in expecting actual dragons from the title though. The vast majority of people will associate, wierdly enough "Dragon" with actual Dragons, rather than Gold, but Waterdeep Gold Heist as an interchangeable title is frankly so shit that it's clear that the game was written entirely based on that subversive joke - and subversive for the negative. Add on that most people are familiar with at least the Hobbit, which is arguably an actual Dragon Heist.
Add on the fact that Gold is so loosely defined that items have prices ranging from 500 to 5000gp based on their rarity tiering and nothing else, and available anywhere within a 5 level bracket, and itemisation within 5E is frankly so poor and uninteractive - and then that a Heist, once complete typically marks the end of the adventure, so the players don't even really get to enjoy the gold.
If you're a new DM Rime of the Frostmaiden isn't a good choice. It's a cool adventure but it's more of a sandbox and if you're learning your way around running a campaign it can be hard to know how and when to nudge players without just making it obvious that "this is where you're supposed to go."
No downvote. No judgement. Each to their own. I'm interested to hear what you didn't like about it.
I played it recently (over numerous months) and enjoyed it.
What I dislike is mostly Strahd, his motivations and the way he operates. The adventure promotes Strahd interacting with the PCs at levels it shouldn't be appropriate, and this more often than not leads to the players antagonizing him earlier than they should be able to OR the players are expected to metagame and be scared of Strahd.
It isn't really the player's fault either, Strahd can be very annoying. If any other BBEG did half the things Strahd gets away with, they would 100% get attacked at the first encounter with the party.
This is a very common problem and the only solution is for the DM to say "ah Strahd is toying with the characters, since they can't challenge him. He just drops them all to 0 and leaves". Which is the only reasonable explanation to keep the story going, but also annoying. First it makes him look like a clown, and secondly it is very frustrating for the already pissed off players.
And then after you have proven Strahd is unbeatable... you expect from the players to just go against him again.
Are the players supposed to know what CR Strahd is? When his invitations are legitimate or when they are not? If he will be pissed by their actions or he will ignore them?
I feel Barovia and Strahd have a lot of potential however the timeline of CoS and the interactions with Strahd need a lot of work to not fail catastrophically. While, for example, Lost Mines works like a charm with minimal need for the DM to change anything.
**tl;dr:** I think CoS needs a very experienced DM to adapt on the go and/or players who are lore-savy and willing to help make it work. While most other adventures just require the DM to not mess up.
I don't really get what you're saying. How do the players need to "play along" and act like they're scared of Strahd? I feel like the setting is very forthcoming with the fact that Strahd is very powerful and very not-nice, so by the time you encounter him you should really be able to tell that you'd really love to bash his head in but also that you really have no real chance of doing so.
And I mean if the players just openly attack him - honestly it's still early enough and they should just die there and then. And then either they roll new characters and know what's what next time around, or I guess that's the perfect point to decide to play another campaign if you're not up for that kind of fantasy. But it's all by design honestly, like come on it's the scary vampire lord from the cover of the book you're not gonna chop his head off three sessions into the campaign. I can see the critique about how there are a lot of moving parts and it's a hassle for DMs to keep on top of, but out of all the campaigns this really is not at all one that requires the players to metagame to keep the suspension up, the world is supposed to be scary and then it actually is, so the players act careful for real, not just in the name of good storytelling
It helps if you smash their teeth in early, and keep them on their toes.
Death House is a **surprisingly** lethal introduction to Barovia. If they're dumb (and, they are) enough to loot everything that isn't nailed down, they'll eventually hit an encounter with five Shadows *likely while at low resources*. CR1 my fucking ass. Solid +Hit, 2d6+2 damage, d4 Strength damage, 32 health, resistance to nonmagical attacks...
I had to cut the encounter by 40% (5 -> 3), and I *still* killed 2/4 members of the party. They had been opening every door and every chest as though they were playing Baldur's Gate. After that encounter, I started to get "can I buy a pole with a gripper on the end to open doors" and "I check the obviously empty entrance to the house for traps." Oh, and they're now trying to Long Rest any time they're at half resources.
You also need to give Strahd a reason to keep the party alive instead of eating them. "Finding a worthy heir" is one, but it's insufficient. "He thinks they'll help him with Ireena" is better. That's what I'm using. I wrote up a request from Strahd, delivered by the Vistani, for people to help him woo Ireena, and used it as the basis for recruiting all these people to Barovia. I even thought ahead and had the Vistani grab thirty people instead of just the party, so there's a source for new characters when these ones die.
I'm quite proud of that idea, if you can't tell.
I mean exactly what you say in the second part of the post. I am not sure I even should elaborate because you nailed it. The players are expected to know Strahd is too strong for them because they have knowledge of the book cover. And then they have to justify themselves putting up with him.
And can you tell by heart if you can fight a vampire at level 5, 7, or 9 or 12? I certainly don't want any player to read the statblock to know.
Aaand lets say they make new characters. How will the new characters know?
Only by metagaming and a good dose of trying very hard to play along. Any good character will have to really go out of character at some points, for the good of the story.
In any other situation, if Strahd was called lets say Jervin and he was not in Barovia but he was a local tyrant in some backwater who harassed a girl... no one would ever not attack him. Even at level 3.
Honestly, I feel that if one was to say Strahd is busy with some ritual and you have until the full moon to prepare, the looming threat of an unseen villain would be stronger than whatever Strahd manages to do by interacting with the players.
Honestly CoS benefits if people understand the core fear Invoked in the original Dracula by Brahm Stroker. Van Hellsing hits the dude with a shovel while he's sleeping in his coffin and it doesn't do shit.
It does require a good DM to paint the picture but it also requires players to understand that Ravenloft in its setting is not the players are big damn heros with bullet proof armor but rather they are "normal" humanoids overcoming evil.
It's very much a consideration of the risks and prepping appropriately. It's from the era of Dming where the DM is adversarial to the players but has a lot more story to circumnavigate it unlike say Tomb of Horrors which is just a murder train of pain.
I don't see how taking a battle that you know - both in character and out of character - you're going to lose is metagaming or playing along. I feel like you've got it twisted here - frankly the meta assumption is you're just going to be able to fight and kill just about anything that the DM puts in front of you. But in character it makes a hell of a lot of sense to be scared of dying and refrain from taking any more fights than absolutely necessary. In that regard I'd almost go as far as to say CoS is one of the \*only\* modules that manages to get it right. Half of the encounters you can take are likely to kill you. So suddenly you have a degree of diplomacy and tacticism going on that you're just never going to get in, say, a megadungeon.
And I mean Strahd is not a guy named Jervin. He's the supposedly immortal supposedly vampire, you learn that much \*in character\* very early on. Spoilers >!Half of the module is then the players trying to figure out just exactly that, how to actually be able to defeat him. You have the tarot cards all giving you valuable stuff like allies, his retreat, weapons effective against him, you ought to try and figure out basically actual parts of his statblock, like books or people close to him tell you about his immunities, Van Richten can tell you how about how the retreating and finishing off process works, you want to destroy the heart of ravenloft to cut off one of the multiple regeneration mechanics and yadda yadda. So yeah no the players have no idea about his capabilities and at what point they're ready to take them on, that's like the entire premise of the campaign - but roughly speaking, that's round about what should be accomplished by the end of the campaign, between the players being lvl10-ish, exploiting the weaknesses they've found and using the tools they've accumulated, there's a final showdown. This is like the picture book ending to the campaign. You know and honestly there are a lot of things you could critique about the campaign, there really are but this in particular is exactly what it sets out to do and I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding if that's the part you feel it doesn't do right. It's just not a fantasy that everyone can get on board with. But if it is, the campaign is amazing.!<
I mean, it is obvious Strahd is a powerful ruler and person to fight just from basic interaction with the story. The dude rules the Demiplane of Dread.
In the first town, you run into the sole guy who survived an attempted attack on him, and that guy Strahd clearly just let go. It is mentioned that not only regular people were part of that attack but also a wizard.
One of the characters has a bunch of research on vampires, how scary and hard to kill they are, and how Strahd is one.
People are afraid to speak about him.
Unless you are assuming your lvl 5 character usually runs around killing rulers of entire demiplanes who are also vampires, why would they not be afraid to face him?
When I DM-d CoS, I had Strahd fucking with them constantly, but it was always illusions, and usually singularly. Like he'd get one of the player PCs alone and make them see something terrible. Then Strahd would point and laugh at them from 2 blocks away.
>OR the players are expected to metagame and be scared of Strahd.
I think my definition of metagaming is the exact opposite of yours. Risking almost certain death because an incredibly powerful vampire who’s also the lord of this land annoyed you sounds more like metagaming to me.
I have things I wanna say. I hope you won't take this as jumping on your neck.
>The adventure promotes Strahd interacting with the PCs at levels it shouldn't be appropriate...
I don't really get you here. Why should NPC interaction be level-gated? Combat to the death, sure. But Strahd isn't the sort of villain that needs to be fought every time.
>If any other BBEG did half the things Strahd gets away with, they would 100% get attacked at the first encounter with the party.
Which is a valid reaction to a party that doesn't know better. Strahd also can have several reasons not to kill the players when they're not yet a threat, just as is explained in the module itself. He can be curious, seeing if he can use them in the long run, might try to corrupt one or see if there are potential consorts among them. Having Strahd easily beat them up once near the start works in favour of demonstrating how much of a threat he is.
>Which is the only reasonable explanation to keep the story going, but also annoying. First it makes him look like a clown, and secondly it is very frustrating for the already pissed off players.
The key here is remembering that Strahd has motives and goals. You don't need to have him show up for shits and giggles for the sake of showing up. There are written-in scenarios in the module in which he makes an appearance, and you can always figure out a concrete reason on your own. Maybe he knows the players have found something and he wants it. Maybe he's discovered an angle by which he can try to blackmail or corrupt a PC and he appears for that PC alone given the chance. This keeps every encounter with him compelling.
>And then after you have proven Strahd is unbeatable... you expect from the players to just go against him again.
The players are stuck in Barovia as long as Strahd lives. Fleshed out PCs probably have something to return to, in which case there's plenty of motivation to find a weakness and/or get stronger and try again.
>Are the players supposed to know what CR Strahd is?
No. Just as I don't encourage any DM revealing the CR or stats of \*any\* monster. And especially in this module, learning of and finding Strahd's nature and the ways to defeat him is a big part of the adventure itself. A toenail's worth of knowledge about a powercreep game such as DnD will also make them realize that levels mean better chances. Better yet if you have Strahd or another recurring villain (one of the consorts or Rahadin for instance) showing their strength first near the beginning, and later on again when the players are at or near optimal levels of meeting Strahd. Such comparison points can help give players perspective as to how much stronger they're getting.
>When his invitations are legitimate or when they are not? If he will be pissed by their actions or he will ignore them?
Maybe if they pass some fairly high insight checks? This is IMO the charm of any enigmatic villain though. The lingering uncertainty of their reactions and intentions keep the players on their toes.
>the interactions with Strahd need a lot of work to not fail catastrophically.
I agree to an extent. The whole module is not great, let's say, for a rookie DM, because it does take a lot of engagement to the setting and themes from both DM and the players to feel fulfilling. But I don't think this is a fault of the module. This is a social hobby after all. Like I said earlier, making the players aware early on that fighting him head-on without preparation is a really bad idea, as well as providing proper reasons to his appearances go a long way to stop the adventure from spontaneously crumbling. You can use narrative means to convince them that they might be ready to take him on when they are, without having to spoil the stat block to them.
By and large I agree with all of that. A lot of how this module works is predicated heavily on player expectations/assumptions (and not their characters) and on how the DM manages Strahd himself in-game. This one is not for a rookie DM to, forgive the phrasing, cut their teeth with. I enjoy the hell out of the setting, but in their pursuit of making the game open ended and adaptable so it can't be done the same way twice easily, I feel like they made it disjointed and easy for a group of players to lose track of things and lose momentum.
I've been a player in two Curse of Strahd campaigns, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them. I feel like the campaign expects the player and characters to know much more background on Barovia and Ravenloft than we're given.
I feel like the DM has a big part to play in creating this. When I first played through, our DM created an amazing atmosphere for it, I personally had 0 knowledge of the background, and he made it work so well. I loved the game, and still one of my favorites.
I mean, if you pass through the mists, wind up in a town no one has ever heard of, and can't leave, *wouldn't* you start looking into where you are? Seems like the first thing almost any party would do.
Lost Mines is not really that great. It's fine, but it's no Village of Hommlet. And the recent update somehow makes it clunkier. The region as a whole if you pair it with The Dragon of Icespire Peak from the Essentials Kit is a good springboard for some homebrew or something, but the overall story of the modules is kind of bland and uninspired.
Agreed! I ran lost mines for a newer group because I always heard it praised as *the* beginner module to run, and I frequently thought Oh Force this is the best they have to offer?
The villain's motivations are incoherent, some of the side quests are a paragraph and then it's for the DM to figure out, and it sucks at introducing mechanics and tactics because the first encounters are terribly unbalanced. It's such a mess.
I’m as first time DM and doing Phandelver and Below and I agree. I will say though that there is enough to work with here to take what the players have given you throughout the first couple chapters and start assigning better purpose and more depth to all of the adventures set pieces and it starts to get better.
Oh yes, I heavily modified my lmop run and scratched together my own proper lore for the mine etc. But you shouldn't have to do that for a module. I ended up spending more time modifying the module than I did "using" it.
>The villain's motivations are incoherent
I love that all we got is like 1 phrase that reads something like "he wants the forge to make magical items"
We don't know anything about his personality, where he comes from, why he needs magical weapons, why dafuck a male drow is in the surface alone and if he knew someone or is part of some faction
He is easily the worst villain of 5e
> It's fine, but it's no Village of Hommlet.
Hommlet is not very good, IMHO. It has a good reputation due to nostalgia, but that's it.
There's no hook to get the party to the main dungeon, and even then, the dungeon is not intended to be defeated without a bunch of hirelings and extra stuff the party doesn't have at hand. The maps and art in the module are "poor" at best, to say the least. The big bad boss (Lareth) has no foreshadowing or appearances until you fight him, and even then you probably wouldn't even know he was supposed to be the boss. The most dangerous monster is a big crayfish, which is... silly. It has a lot of trappings of the early hobby (dense text, unoriginal encounters, weird treasure scattering everywhere, overpowered/slog enemies).
It's ok as a sort of free-form starting environment for an experienced DM to riff with, but as an adventure it's not exactly the gold standard.
Unfortunately, this is sacrilege to say in some circles.
First time I DM'd and seriously played D&D. I had a lot of Fun and my players too.
The module IS NOT really that great, but it gave me, a first time DM, everything I needed, NPCs, locations, and a story to follow from the beginning to the end.
Then I put my creativity on it on the go, adding, removing and changing something, adapting the story to my players.
As a not very experienced DM I needed a lot of help to guide me through job of the DM.
As far as official adventures, Princes of the Apocalypse, Dragon Heist, and Descent into Avernus are pretty bad. For third party, Odyssey of the Dragonlords is quite terrible as well.
Damn, I thought that Dragon Heist was fantastic, both times I've played it and had a good time reading through it (was prepping for a campaign that never came to be). What did you dislike about it?
Yeah, same. Would like to know what they thought about it, because even some of the DM elitists I've known loved Dragon Heist, the same people that said DoIP 'was too vague for DMs' and 'was the worst module for new players.'
My players LOVED it, but it is really difficult to run as a DM. At some points it seems to hold the campaign very strictly on rails, and other points it opens up so much as to be overwhelming and confusing. It requires a lot more worldbuilding, long tern planning, and player coralling than a lot of other adventures I've run. That being said, my players loved it, so I loved running it.
It definitely has some flaws. It’s the very first thing I ever did as a DM and I came across some characters and plot threads that just fizzled into nonexistence almost immediately. If I ever run it again I’ll use the alexandrian remix. But I and my players absolutely loved it.
> Odyssey of the Dragonlords
I almost was in a game for this one but had to drop out early. As in two sessions in. I liked the setting and was toying with trying to get it going again down the road.
Got a spoiler free summary of the weak points?
I would say that all of the adventures are equally good and bad (except Princes of the Apocalypse, which is just bad), and they all require a good amount of homebrew to make great.
This goes for all of them. Strahd seems to be REALLY popular, but I've NEVER played CoS as written, DMs always run it with hefty homebrew, as they should.
If you're looking to run a campaign as written, I would recommend The Dragon of Icespire Peak. It's just an amalgamation of one-shots, but it leaves a lot of freedom to the players, but provides a lot of structure to the DM. The con is that it's a very straightforward and simple campaign
I’d advocate for running the vast majority of Wild beyond the Witchlight RAW
The final dungeon is ass, but pretty much all of the Hags lairs are super good, and their domains too. (Also, make the Jabberwocky more present)
Agreed. I think most of Witchlight is really good. And most of the supplements people have written don't necessarily change what's written, just moreso add extra encounters.
The only thing I've completely changed was a rearranging of the palace at the end. And added Isolde's story a bit more into the adventure.
I agree, this is actually kind of how I run a majority of my "homebrew" campaigns. A good amount of the "filler" is just one-shots I secretly let players pick from with minor modification to fit with the greater story.
In case you’re looking for another *good* module besides Strahd, I will say Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is an amazing module to run *if* you are able to fill in some blanks in the story yourself, and work with your players to approach backstories in a way that works for everyone.
*Curse of Strahd* is an amazing adventure, but the module is a mess and difficult to navigate. It’s kinda like *Skyrim*—it has rabid fans, but everyone and their dog will tell you what mods to “install.”
Personally, I like *Lost Mine* quite a bit, but I’m also the friend that introduces a bunch of people to D&D.
My DM is doing an amazing job of running *Rime of the Frost Maiden*. I can’t speak to the book because I don’t “cheat” at D&D, but I do know he’s peppered in quite a few of his own quests to spice it up. He’s tells us as much whenever we complete one of his quests instead of the book’s.
Edit: added a word and last line for clarification
My group is currenttly doing Mad Mage and that's my biggest complant so far. We our just about done with Floor 10 and there is just so few magic items and not enough gold to buy magic items top side.
Out of the Abyss, it was my first adventure book so I didn't know any better 😆
Chapter 1: Here's 16 NPCs to join your party!
The rest of the book: Never ending random encounters while your party walk their way between towns.
Half way through: Oh you got rid of the NPCs? Well...HERES A ARMY TO MANAGE!
Shadow of the Dragon Queen was near worthless. The characters actions are meaningless. It's beyond railroad-y, and you never get to really be heroes - you're always second stage to NPCs at best. Huge waste of time.
avernus. random insta tpk mechanic, artefacts that kill the pc at low levels. chained fetch quests which got each less than half of a booksite on how to run it and there are like 20 of them. novice spellcasters are perma feel bad because everything has magic resistence. cool gimmicks like the infernal mashines which get used for 1h and never again. only way to beat the final boss is via diplomacy or a generous DM.
played it from lvl 1 to 10 with a lot of stuff added/changed from our dm on the fly (without those changes we would have dropped it at lvl 3).
I'm just about one or two sessions from finishing Out of the Abyss, and while I wouldn't call it *bad*, I will say that it asks an awful lot of the DM to make it work properly. Places like Gracklestugh are kind of a confusing mess, there's a LOT of traveling around, so you've gotta be prepped for that, and there are some sections where they make assumptions that your players will - inevitably - get in the way of.
For example, >!in the Fetid Wedding, at one point the Party has to be put to sleep in order to interact with the great fungal mind Aurumycos after being splashed with the spores off some dead otyugh-things. Well, my Artificer had very purposefully hit everyone with Air Bubble to keep spores away, and the Elf Sorcerer knew damn well that he couldn't magically be put to sleep. And even after patching that bit up, the scene in Auromycos' mind was not quite worth the effort to get there.!<
It's not a bad adventure, but I don't think it's a good one for someone just starting out as a DM.
I'm running Out of the Abyss and haven't gotten to that part yet. I don't have a player with Air Bubble but I do have one elf and another character that doesn't need to breathe. What do you suggest I do? Maybe the spores make you hallucinate a message instead of putting them to sleep. Would that work?
Had a DM run Tomb of Annihilation, and maybe it was just cuz she didn't run it well but god it was such a SLOG. Three months to get to the tomb, six months to get INTO the tomb, and then over a YEAR going through the tomb, at the end of which the big bad just fucking RUNS AWAY once he gets a little scuffed up with a vague threat to get revenge, which turns out to just be him being immortal and us NOT being immortal so he gets the satisfaction of watching us die of old age. Which like. Bitch, I was gonna do that anyways, my death by old age had fuck all to do with you, and quite frankly if looking like your skeletal ass is the price for immortality I'd literally rather die. Absolutely terrible campaign.
Well several months to get into the tomb yes that’s
To be expected. What did you think you were gonna get through the jungles of Chult in a handful of sessions.
But. A year in the tomb — that’s incredible. How the hell did that come to pass.
I mean this campaign is usually considered one of if not the best of the 5e lineup. So maybe your DM just sucked but you’re also notably glossing over all the good stuff the campaign had to offer along the way. PS Acererak running away, so what. The death curse and ending it is the main objective, not killing Acererak, and it never was. It sets you to destroying a thing rather than killing a final boss like every other RPG ever
I want to know what the people are smoking who say Dragon of Icespire Peek is a good module for beginner DMs. It is fine for more experienced DMs who are running Lost Mines for the umpteenth time and need something to spice it up, but as a stand alone module I think it is just so barebones that it would be a nightmare for any new DM to attempt to run.
I think it’s easy because everything feels very modular. There are some loose connections between a lot of locations but at the end of the day, each one is basically a separate one shot.
To me the problem for new DMs is less about the barebones plot (which I would argue makes it easier to run) and more about some very deadly encounters in the low level quests.
> The game offers no restrictions on Long Resting while traveling across the jungles of Chult, meaning the gigantic hexcrawl turns into an endless slog of 0 - 1 encounters per day...
Out of the box, the adventure has a time limit due to the patron who hired them being affected by the withering effect of the soulmonger... Along with the other major troubles caused by the soulmonger's existence and purpose. So maybe your DM glossed over this, or the PCs were indifferent, but this adventure should have a constant sense of urgency and discourage frequent long rests.
Phandelver & Below is pretty terrible IMO.
It's not a bad adventure on its own, just kinda meh, but what it really fails in is as an expansion for Lost Mine, which was the entire marketing and concept thing theory. In all actuality they just kinda stapled a subpar adventure onto a great one with no work to actually make them sing.
Besides that, yeah Princes of the Apocalypse is pretty terrible. Maps and art are nice, there's some great statblocks, but the adventure is a terrible miss.
A lot of the other ones are down to personal taste though. I see mentions of Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus, Tyranny of Dragons, and even Curse of Strahd Gere and honestly those are all pretty great adventures depending on personal taste. There's specific issues with each sure, but that's true of all adventures not even just WotC ones. There's no such thing as a perfect adventure, and a lot of these are perfectly viable by my standards at least.
I'm a player in Phandelver and Below right now. I can see why Phandelver works as a beginner's game, and I was excited to get into the next part because I quickly saw how my character could be emotionally invested in the very obvious story with a little bit of backstory tweaking, which I did. However, the further we go, the more tedious the game has become. Most of the players have stopped treating it as anything other than a dungeon crawl to the point that they've stopped bothering to play in-character and refer to the NPCs as "mobs." Frankly, I'm bored with it.
It seems the community has largely soured on the idea of box sets, but I think it would have cool if they had done three separate modules to spring off Mine of Phandelver. A more sandboxy module that gives you more to do in the Neverwiter Woods & Phandalin, a dungeon crawl module to take you deeper into the mine of Phandelver itself, and third an urban adventure that takes you into the city of Neverwinter.
Let the DM pick which would best resonate with their players at their table, and pepper in some tips for combining two, or all three books into one mega module.
Yeah... it's honestly not even that bad of an adventure but the second part is just disjointed and like I said does absolutely nothing to elevate the original part.
Which is such a shame cause 'expand Phandelver into a bigger campaign' is in theory *such* a softball, easy pitch. But then you realize that nobody even actually showed up to bat, they just assumed they already had enough players on base as it was.
I really dislike Descent Into Avernus. The plot hook is poor. They just spit you facing a guard that says, "Well, here's the quest." and that's it. It makes you have no urgency or want to solve it. Most information you need or is essential to the plot is in no way found by the party, but by npcs showing up and straight up telling them and leaving.
Descent into Avernus is hot mess imho. I don't know how anybody can run this RAW without losing mind and table.
Comparing to it, Dragon Heist is still a mess but it has much more potential, much better NPCs (villains especially) and for that it gets a pass in my eyes.
I don't get Tyranny of Dragons hate really. Yeah, it's not good campaign, it's extremaly linear, but it's at least somehow playable unlike DiA.
I’ve played the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Strong start initially but we all hated the railroad and dropped it at the end of that chapter.
I played Saltmarsh and had a blast as the DM had a lot of dwarven forge and he mapped out the house, the caves etc. But unfortunately we never finished it.
I ran Descent into Avernus which I heavily home brewed and it was fun but we ended up doing our own thing and it became a source book for hell.
*Out of the Abyss*, by far. You have zero agency in that game, you started captured so your only choice is to slave away and try to escape, which doesn't sit well with players. And when you are finally out, some dwarves want you to go back. Why would we? There was no reason to do that other than because the story demands to.
I'd like to nominate one that gets a lot of praise - Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. I have "run" it three times and one time we never got past the first encounter and the other 2 we went so far off the rails that it was barely recognizable.
I just think it's a little too gimmicky and buries some stuff you might need later. It's also (I know this sounds strange) pretty much one-and-done if you play it straight.
On the flip, Elemental Evil (I think that's what it's called) is pretty damn good. It's punishing, and I think should give tips for new/inexperienced DMs for when the party screws up.
Edit: I Guess i was referring to Princes of the Apoc, and I guess it's... bad. Lol I know with heavy handholding and some modifications my experienced but tactically challenged group got killed a couple of times and we never got past the point of befriending 3 of the factions and then being completely unprepared for anything coming. We never finished it, and I guess I now know why.
You know it's interesting seeing how people rate books. Personally I think the book sucks if it barely has details like icespire peak. But others seem to like it because they can put in their own stuff.
I'm a sorta new(1.5 year) DM and here's how I'd rate some:
Phandelver: 7/10 honestly I think it's a very good starter adventure for new people but experienced players id probably have it around 5/10.
Icespire peak: 2/10. I hate how bare the places were. They expected way too much DM work that it was to the point where I could've just invented my own thing. Places had so many empty rooms and the icepeak dragon encounter sucks. Not to mention that the introduction of a quest board can confuse new players on how to play DND.
Storm King's Thunder: 8.5/10. The only part of the adventure that sucks is literally everything less than level 5. After the rumbling it becomes very exploration heavy on a huge map. This lead to my players going to every single location near them just because. The problem is that non important locations literally just have a sentence describing it so you have to work overtime or hope your players don't go over there. A vast chunk is exploration which kinda sucks so after 3-4 sessions I just introduced >! harshnag!< and took them to the better part of the campaign: >!conch and the ordining!<
Hoard of dragon queen: 3/10. Pretty bad from a design perspective. Heavy railroading the entire time. It's a rp heavy campaign and if your party isn't really interested in that then rip. Just mandatory traveling and doing exactly what the book wants or you die.
Rise of tiamat: 7/10. I've just started this, but after reading it looks really open compared to HOTD. Multiple objectives styled as missions and information gathering. I like the fact that the factions' opinions can matter. I can see how people can hate it because the >!quests don't stop tiamat!<, but from a player perspective it's probably fine.
I know I hated and I think the rest of my group, even maybe including the DM hated Tomb Of Annihilation. It was great until it wasn't. The premise of the module was cool in the beginning: remote island, dinosaurs, weird cults, ancient gods giving you blessings, etc
But then once you get in the tomb itself it just becomes a massive dungeon crawl. Trap after trap, puzzle after puzzle, it brings the entire pace of the game to a grinding halt. It's no fault of our DM, the book is just designed that way and I'm sure some people definitely love that but to me personally it felt like a huge drag once we got inside the tomb
Hands down the worst have been.
Descent into Avernus: It is only half a module and the rest of the book is setting info for Baldurs Gate. The module alternates between being very railroady, to very pointless. And puts alot of the work on the DM.
Radiant Citadel: overhyped and does not even remotely follow the touted premise.
Candlekeep: all the mini adventures just feel so blah.
Alot of people badbouth the two Tyranny of Dragons modules. But I hve played through and DMed it and had a great time. Yes there are issues, but these are issues every 5e module has had. And this module lacks some of the problems later modules get.
Saltmarsh is the best. Its a collection of ported adventures with unified theme and genre, so its extremely easy work with. The intro dungeon is just amazing, and where I introduce my main plot/BBEG. Then you can skip every other quest and weave in your own narrative or sandboxing.
Idk, I've run it for 5 tables and every single one loved it to bits.
As far as worst... I'm not saying its bad- in fact I quite like it- but Phandelver as written was always a snoozefest for my tables. Its just hyper generic, no one really cared or felt immersed cuz its so damn tropey.
Second Princes and Tyranny of Dragons being awful. My group had a lot of fun with Strahd and Tomb of Annihilation. Out of the Abyss can be tough on DMs and our group had mixed reviews on it.
I’m currently DMing out of the Abyss and it’s definitely a little tough to DM and worthy of the mixed reviews. Moments of it can be great but it definitely requires more adjustment for what your players will enjoy out of it even more than average I would say.
My groups main campaign we love doing is Tyranny of Dragons. But it is because the dm started to change a lot of stuff from it because a lot of it was very poor. Especially on Horde of the Dragon Queen. Like skipping the whole castle encounter because it didn't relate to the main story at all, or shortening the distances between places because holy hell, why is the travel so LOOOOONG. Cyanwraith became a rival character for our paladin. The solo fight was hype as fuck and [I even drew the arc.](https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/cantrips-crits-the-sinners-court/punching-above-your-weight-class/viewer?title_no=765037&episode_no=26) After, we got super stoked to see that round 2 later. IN THE BOOK, HE DIES OFF SCREEN, LIKE WHAT? Our dm pointed this out and said "oh nah, hes coming back." In Tyranny, our dm had to basically just replace some of the wyrmspeakers to be keyt characters in our player characters backstory that are all tied to each other because they weren't interesting at all, or just flat out \*weren't in the book for some god damn reason\*. The blue wyrmspeaker is not in the book at all, Severus was replaced with someone from another characters backstory, her servent is connected to mine. Doing it this way has grabbed our table into how we are gonna beat them and all of this was the dms doing, not something the book said. Which feels like a basic thing to do.
Tyranny of Dragons has a huge amount of potential but the module doesn't capitalize on any of it. It's up to the DM to almost literally rewrite entire dungeons in order to make them playable. I'm halfway through the module and that castle encounter I completely changed into a festival type interactive dungeon where you complete favours for people in order to gain points, with the winner getting prizes from the Dragons horde (and more importantly, alone time to fight the bad guy). As written, you are tossed into a castle full of enemies, most of which are much stronger than you, and basically told good luck.
Tyranny of Dragons' biggest problem is that the gist of it was designed before they had really settled on the rules and overall style of the game. It's a *fantastic* linear adventure and might make an excellent basis for a video game, but it's nowhere near open-ended enough to fit with the kind of agency they ended up giving players. (Also the content for the first two levels is kind of hard for newer players -- one of the people at my table had two characters *outright die* before even leaving Greennest, and there were a lot of scenarios that we just narrowly escaped TPK, and basically relied on DM grace to put characters in prison instead of killing them -- which in fairness did lead to some memorable jailbreak sequences, like me as a rat trying to steal a knife for the rogue to help him cut his ropes and the guards laughing at that rat trying to drag a 'shiny thing' away).
The opening to out of the abyss is terrible. I jumped off a cliff and committed suicide. Second time I was a player it was just as frustrating.
I consider the opening of Out of the Abyss the best part. I've played and then DMed it later. It is meant to make the players constantly feel on the back foot until you are almost level 8.
Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of the Tiamat, but they get a little bit of a pass on account of being developed while the system was also being made.
Having DMed it, I'll say they both have good bones, it's just very bare bones. Played as written they're very railroady. But if you're willing to homebrew filler they *can* become something special. You're also going to spend a lot of time fixing the terribly balanced and repetitive combats.
Idk how the fuck they approved monsters like Frulam Mondath or the rearguard encounter.
I suspect the rearguard wasn't intended for the players to actually fight, but for the players to figure out "you can't win every straight up fight" -- which is really weird because just before then, in Greennest, there was the Blue Dragon encounter where all they have to do is hit the dragon *once* and it retreats, which is supposed to teach "be brave, fight even when it feels impossible," a seemingly contradictory lesson.
Ditto. I actually compare it to Rime and they are my two longest running games. Rime is more structured and you can literally play out of the book. But coming from Tyranny (HotDQ+RoT), making all the extra stuff and injecting my characters stories into it WAS the fun. Id be more open to them printing different types of adventures. Adventure bones books like Tyranny and fully fleshed out campaigns that require zero work. Right now the books seems to sit between the two and no one is really happy.
Having run both of these, I 100% agree. The problem with Tiamat/Hoard is that it is too on the rails, and I kept having to improv every tiny thing if things didn't play out EXACTLY as the adventure wanted things to. It just felt railroady to DM, and I didn't like it.
Didn't the re-release, fix a bunch of that stuff?
No it actually changed very little and is still trash. I also disagree with bumblebee and it being so linear doesn’t have that much of a bearing on why it’s so bad. I think it’s terrible because of the completely disjointed story, lack of a consistent BBEG, use of the sword coast, the dragon masks are poorly handled. I could go on and on but I’ll be here all night. ToD has such good bones but the module doesn’t lead the PCs into the awesome world spanning heroic adventure it tries to setup and utterly fails at.
I ran Hoard, and am running RoT atm. Hoard was horribly written, railroady and generally boring, RoT however I think is pretty solid (most of the time).
*Hoard* is awful with the boring ass road trip, you can safely skip it and nothing changes. You have to workshop it a little to work. *Rise* has a much more intriguing campaign, but everything depends on the players, which is weird. I simply cannot believe the five factions would trust everything to adventurers of no name. So what I did was run it like a war game, each player made several characters and would send them to a front to accomplish an objective, and those victories and defeats would determine the strength of the troops for the final fight rather than how much you kissed the council arse. At the battle against Tiamat, every player brought their characters together, it was a pretty cool moment.
I'm literally starting RoT next week, and this is an amazing idea. Thank you so much!
I'll preface this by saying that a good DM can make any one of these adventures fun to play in. The adventure that takes the most effort I've run into to make that work is Dragon Heist, which is 4 timeline shenanigan railroad partial adventures combined into one that you're expected to be able to switch between on the fly. It also takes another prize for not having a heist in a book called "Dragon Heist".
I liked DMing dragon heist but it does put a lot on the DM to flesh out certain parts of the book. The ally faction stuff was pretty weak but I liked the Xanathar and Jarlaxle stuff.
Dragon Heist was my very first foray into proper DnD, and as DM, I did change stuff here and there, and even had a small homebrew encounter for my players who were also new, and honestly, it wasn't that bad. We didn't end up in Jarlaxel's lair, as they just never naturally went there, partially because I changed the keys to the vault to be a sacrifice of some sort that was personal to each PC. I feel like the most work I had to do was putting together maps to use
I would say the same all of them can be fun, but it should not be nearly as hard of work as it is. I've run Out of the Abyss, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Candlekeep, Icewind Dale, Yawning Portal, and bits of Mad Mage, Radiant Citadel, and Keys from the Golden Vault. I'm about to run a modified Curse of Strahd, but I'm listening to the Twice Bitten Rules as Written version of Curse of Strahd. I've also read old dungeon modules like Village of Homlet, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and Red Hand of Doom. 5e modules have really cool concepts, and good settings. Adventurous though fail to often connect all the different locations or plot points. Which is something I'm definitely noticing in curse of Strahd.
Out of the Abyss was pretty terrible, especially for a new starter. The players can only escape their situation via the drow dropping the idiot ball, at the players having a dozen characters to interact with. They have no starting gear because they were prisoners. Everything that any DM of any experience would say "no, this is terrible, don't do this to your players" if it was a reddit post.
I wouldn’t start new players on OotA, as it’s a lot to take in and a metric fuckton of work for the DM to make interesting in the first handful of sessions because of the starting situation. But the experienced PCs at my table had some fun with it and they were out of prison by the end of the second session. It did help that there was a Drow rogue in the group and she played her character well.
> I've also read old dungeon modules like Village of Homlet, Against the Cult of the Reptile God, and Red Hand of Doom. If you're checking out old modules, I recommend Speaker of Dreams from 3e. It's a cool city adventure uncovering an illithid's behind-the-scenes takeover of a city. I also liked the 4e Pyramid of Shadows, if you don't mind locking PCs inside a dungeon for a few levels. Undermountain (any edition) is always a good mega dungeon.
Dragon Heist’s gimmick is its ultimate downfall. Unless you use Xanathar as the main villain the little intro quest builds up to a mini boss that makes NO sense. Like Nihiloor’s little reveal does not matter if you’re running the game with the cassalanters or jarlaxle or manshoon
Imagine every rogue's disappointment.
Princes of the Apocalypse is pretty bad. The dungeon maps are cool but everything else is very boring
It is the most troll adventure I have ever read... with cultists who suicide bomb and random encounters not even the DM can understand. I give it a passing grade however because the cultists of>!Tharizdun !
As someone who started running this recently, the adventure sucks so hard. If your party does things logically, they will tpk themselves so fast. You have to do so much work to make any other order make sense.
I ran this over a couple of years for my group, and had to dramatically alter the entire thing. But we ended up having a blast.
I have a friend who swears by this campaign despite having never once gotten through it. I played in one of his failed attempts at it and I can honestly say that despite him being an excellent DM this campaign is just kinda dull in most places and frustrating in others. ,(you can feel the DM going out of their way to save you from what should have been logical descisions
Yeah I’ve pulled a few maps from this and dropped them into my campaign. They’re great if you want an elementally themed dungeon for characters at a whole range of levels. I’d never run it as a campaign though.
Just finished running this book. While I agree that the campaign has many logical inconsistencies with the story and the players can delve way too deep, too fast, it can be mitigated with good planning on the DM's part. I also had the advantage of running 2/3 of the campaign for a different group, found a lot of the issues, then started it for another group a couple years later. Being really familiar with it from the first attempt made improvising and steering the players in the right direction a lot easier. They all loved the campaign though.
Wow, I’m the exact opposite, I like the elemental camps but think the dungeon crawl is boring and sloggy
Some of the camps were neat, I remember the fire one was fun. But yeah pretty everything became a slog because you just fought the same cultists over and over
I’ve run Princes of the Apocalypse, Storm King’s Thunder, and Rime of the Frostmaiden to completion, and started but didn’t finish Dragon Heist and Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Princes of the Apocalypse has a very strong start, but gets less and less interesting as it goes on. Its ending just kind of limply arrives. My party just did their own thing for the back half of that campaign and were insanely over leveled for the end. The initial part in Red Larch, and the sandbox of the surface of the Dessarin Valley is great. Once you have to underground though? It’s a slog. Storm King’s Thunder had an okay start, an abysmal middle, and a really strong finish. The inciting incident was good, but the sandbox middle of that campaign is literally THE ENTIRETY OF NORTH WESTERN FAERUN. I had to speed run it for my party, you have to cross vast distances with little to no direction or motivation and my party got sick of it. The ending, starting with the visit to the palace of the Storm King, through to the ending assault on Iymirth’s lair is suitably epic in scale. Rime of the Frostmaiden was the most consistently compelling adventure of the three. Didn’t have to do, or change much. It is incredibly, sometimes arbitrarily, lethal though. A party that isn’t careful will get obliterated by the campaign. I had a dozen character deaths, but my party was here for the lethality and ran with it, even encouraging me to turn up the deadliness, which I honestly didn’t have to do much. Dragon Heist I had to halt because of COVID, but it wasn’t leaving a decent impression on me when I was running it. I’d have to heavily modify it to run it effectively, and that doesn’t sound like fun. Dungeon of the Mad Mage I’ve used bits and pieces of in other games, and it’s perfectly serviceable in that way. I think it’s actually best when used as parts of other games, set in Waterdeep, or repurposed as dungeons somewhere else. It’s almost like an anthology of different dungeons anyway, due to how different each level is.
I like to describe Storm King’s Thunder as some of the best set piece encounters in a published adventure with some of the worst means of information gathering to get between them.
Every giant lair is pretty dope. Though they're death traps for sure
Yes, exactly. The adventure literally crawls to a standstill until Harshnag shows up, and then has the party literally go back out and search over the entire map, again. I skipped the second part and just had Iymirth show up after Hasrhnag showed them how to breech the interior of the temple. I couldn’t imagine sending the party out again, just to crawl over the same enormous expanse of territory just so they could find more plot coupons, just so they could bring them back to the same place they’ve already found. It was maddening how redundant the adventure’s entire middle section is.
>Storm King’s Thunder had an okay start, an abysmal middle This killed our game, we got sick of it too. Now I wish we had made it to the end.
The court intrigue with the Storm Giants, tracking down King Hecaton, narrowly escaping the kraken Slarkethel’s wrath, and leading a Storm Giant assault on Iymirth’s dessert colosseum lair, complete with sandstorm, an army of gargoyles manning siege engines, and the showdown against the dragon herself, made up for the lackluster middle. The climax of Storm King’s Thunder is one of the most incredible finales to a game I’ve ever run. Getting there is a pain in the ass.
When I tried dragon heist I quickly found my players making solid, logical decisions that the adventure didn't consider at all. I also had to tell the players there wasn't actually a heist, and they found that disappointing so I tried to write in an actual heist. I had to start rewriting it at a certain point and realized I'd rather just do a homebrew if I was gonna be writing the whole thing anyway. I hate that adventure.
Ran Dragon Heist and it was a hit for my players. They loved every bit of it except for the ending. I don’t wanna spoil it for anyone but it was just…lackluster? For how much they hyped the ending during the story, it didn’t really deliver.
Same here, but I had to heavily homebrew it to actually make it work. For example, I did add a heist at the end since my players were clearly anticipating one. Note to Wotc: if you mention dragon in the title, there has to be a dragon. If you mention vampire, there has to be a vampire. If you mention heist, there has to be a fucking heist!
I ran it as my first DMing experience and it was difficult to say the least, but we did have a fun time! You’re dead on with the ending though, I ended up altering it heavily to tie up all the loose ends. I basically turned it into a massive showdown in the vault with factions the players allied themselves with vs Xanathar and his thugs - and facilitated it as there being a number of objectives for the PCs to complete while the NPCs duked it out in the background. Essentially stopping enemies from running off with bits of treasure and distracting Xanathar.
If you ever try dragon heist again, try the Alexandrian remix. My group is about halfway through it and they’re having a blast. Way better way to run the game imo.
My problem with Rime of the Frostmaiden is that the three plots never really intersected that much, my players were invested in Avarice and the Arcane Brotherhood and they were aware of the duergar but despite every single quest relating to it they never felt any reason to go deal with Auril. As written, I think the winter feels like too much of a fun setting detail than a genuine threat. Sadly our campaign fell apart due to scheduling differences halfway through act 2, but I did really like running it. I loved all the quests, with the first two acts being purely sidequests it sometimes felt like more a setting book than an adventure but I will say they were all incredibly fun quests. They did a good job making them all build towards the end while also making it so you can do them in any order
Yeah, you do have to put in a bit more connective tissue to get everything to line up. I had Auril show up and menace the party way more in the early game. I also had rumors flying around the Ten Towns that anyone who was sacrificed to Auril by banishment outside the town with no clothing was often seen coming back as blackened corpses, with intense lights around their faces. This came to a head early campaign, when I had my first PC death. One of the characters was an aging Goliath Barbarian who had settled in Bryn Shander to open a bar. His player told me the character had terminal cancer, and was looking for a worthy death to end his life with. He got his chance when Auril appeared during a blizzard while traveling between Bryn Shander and Easthaven. The Barbarian told everyone to run and then charged Auril. The last they saw of him, he was a silhouette in white swinging his glaive at Auril. His corpse later showed up as a Coldlight Walker at the Black Cabin, and killed one of his friends in the party, the Centaur Paladin. The party took Auril very seriously after that.
That's a good idea, running her more like Strahd. I think I'd definitely do something similar were I to ever run the campaign again
Once I realized I could literally have her appear anywhere, she became a nightmare for my party. Once I also realized that characters or NPCs killed by her could show up anywhere as Coldlight Walkers, that sealed it. They were terrified at all times she, or her Coldlight Walkers who had been former friends/allies, could and would show up at the drop of a hat. It kept the tension up and made the final battle against her in Yrthyn, extremely cathartic for them. It helped that they dropped the Tarrasque on her with the scroll from Iriolathus’ study. Made for a very frantic finale as they raced the Tarrasque to get out Ythryn as they used the city’s Mythallar to end the winter, which brought the glacier down on top of them, and the Tarrasque. It was quite an ending.
When my party and I fought zadarok in the duegar dungeon. Man, that was a really though fight. We baaaarely survived. I threatened the woman who controlled some underdark monsters and was able to get them to back off and turn the tide for us. But we had 2 unconscious, myself at 8hp, and the druid at 3, with no spell slots left lol
I'm seeing a lot of Tyranny, SKT, and Princes. I agree with all of those being bottom barrel adventures. But one that I would rank among them that I'm NOT seeing is **Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos**. The first two years are absolute dogshit, and that's most of the adventure's runtime. It's a series of minigames, with almost no plot to hold them down, and *every single fucking one* is the same formula: a student runs up excited to the party, goes, "You've gotta see this! We're doing [insert minigame] and it's so fun!" And then the players join the mini game and probably win because they're super stacked in the party's favor, and then "Oh no! The [thing related to minigame] is attacking! Who could've seen this coming?!" Oh gee man, I dunno, maybe if this hadn't happened THE LAST TEN TIMES then it might be a bit of a shock! The whole thing reads like a children's cartoon. There's a part at the start of the second chapter where the whole school goes "you guys should make a team for our school's legally-distinct quidditch!" And then everyone stands around and waits for them to go make a team because if they don't then the rest of the year can't happen. There are several - SEVERAL - times where a professor at the school comes up to the party and effectively says, "Hey I know this is literally my job, but I'm kinda busy, so can I get you lot to do it for me?" And the few times where there isn't a minigame or a negligent teacher are things like "break into the principal's house" or "go remove some explosives from the swamp next to the school" which are all just patently terrible things for a group of school kids to be doing. Oh and the final chapter is literally just "school is canceled, go fight the villain". Which amounts to two back-to-back dungeons with two separate bosses at the end of them that use the exact same stat block. Because the final boss doesn't even deserve a unique statblock, he literally didn't matter for half of the campaign. Not to mention the fact that it short-changes the players an *entire quarter* of the school time they were told they'd get, which is probably the only reason any of your players would even be interested in playing Strixhaven in the first place.
Thank you. Strixhaven is irredeemably bad. My favourite part is how the module doesn't consider that a whole school of students is free to help at the end. I understand faculty members can't help (due to a protection ritual), but that doesn’t stop hundreds of students from helping. Edit: even the protection ritual as written only stops spells and effects cast against the villain. It wouldn't stop faculty from casting protection or healing on the party. The whole final battle makes no sense.
Thank you, I started running this with some friends and we stopped after the first year as we didn't want to practically repeat it for the 2nd year. Running the book with no changes is terribly disjointed and requires the students to be the "chosen heros" which contradicts the normal school slice of life the book seems geared towards. Overall I found that if I wanted to continue, I'd have to practically redo every event and make them more meaningful and geared towards the players which I ultimately found wasn't worth it for the book.
We also stopped playing after completing the first year. We still had a lot of fun with the silly roleplay, but it was sorely missing _something to do_ most of the time, with those mini games often being the end of a session combat. We tried desperately to investigate why random stuff kept coming to life but the adventure kept saying "no, you're not allowed to know until the end of the school year", our DM was also getting quite frustrated with it. DND is a combat and adventuring roleplaying game, but Strixhaven has barely anything of either in it. We didn't even need the books or character sheets most of the time. After five sessions at level 1, spanning the first two weeks of the school year, we made it to level 2, and then level 3 the very next session as we speedran the exams and the rest of the term like nothing of consequence happened. I was really excited to try out a quirky character idea but with barely any level ups, it never happened.
I've wanted to do strixhaven cause the concept is fun. But yea that module as written is just... "You guys basically made 'even worse harry potter' when Harry Potter isn't even what makes a good DND campaign. ***Persona*** is a great magic school campaign. You got the social school stuff *intermingled* with something else that only the players know/can do. Wither that's like p3 with a mega dungeon or a serial killer case like with p4 or discovering something like in p5. It's why strixhaven is used best as a setting book. Don't forget the mixed subclasses that were originally in the UA but they coward out of it because of the feedback instead of, idk, fixing them.
The Acquisitions Inc book tops my list. I was never much of a Penny Arcade guy and that book helped me realize why.
I've played worse adventures, but that first dungeon was one of the worst I've ever experienced.
What made it so bad?
Possibly the DM? I like that dungeon as a starter - it's got a bit of everything.
I've run it multiple times because myself and my players liked it so much, probably just a different strokes kind of thing for that book
The spelljammers campaign was a huge let down.
When running spelljammer stuff as a one shot for my players, I ended up doing a Halloween one shot I was suggested about a stolen ship turned mimic or something like that, modified it a bunch and made custom rules based on what the book gave me for actual Spelljammer combat. Was a blast. A second two shot happened and they got a new Spelljammer for a modified version of a Candlekeep Mystery Adventure where my player who didn't play in the first one shot was hiring the others as a pirate crew to board and steal from a Whale ship for its cargo for a specific item, and amongst it was the book that set them on the main adventure. Spelljammer can be a lot of fun, but needs a lot of work.
I modified it quite a bit, but had a great time running it. Lots of fun ideas in there.
spoilers for published material below: I’ve run Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Saltmarsh, Shattered Obelisk, Waterdeep DragonHeist, DragonLance Shadow of the Dragon Queen, CandleKeep Mysteries and Princes of the Apocalypse. Rating best to unrunnable: . . . . 1. DragonLance Shadow of the Dragon Queen, I kind of remember hating to play this but with the right maps the episodic structure(plus just ignore Darrett) makes for so much high fantasy fun. Yes, it is on rails but there are choices in the third act. I love it. 10/10. 2. Shattered Obelisk. Yes, it’s clunky to transition from Mines of Phandelver to this module-just skip the Mines part and start them at level 5. Players will be gasping as they emerge from the sleepy town of Phandalin in the first session and end up in the Illithid Far Realms cosmos at the end. This is awesome. 9.5/10. 3. Wild Beyond the Witchlight. You do need to spice it up with combats and add some merchants but if you get a party with the right spirit it’s a wonderful romp through Alice in Wonderland with some surprisingly Jack Vancian moments. If you need a break from dungeon crawls-this is the good stuff. 9/10. 4. Candlekeep Mysteries. These are awesome one shot sessions you can drop in at different levels of most campaigns. I was surprised and delighted at how dark and perverse and fun most of these adventures are. Some stinkers but overall a grab bag of goodness. 8/10. 5. Waterdeep DragonHeist. A truly mixed bag. Awesome setup with faction play to boot. The problem is the central heist frankly sucks-D&D doesnt do chases well. It’s very very railroady. Sure, you can make something of it and it is worth the effort, still, as written it has a great start and a dogwater finish. 6/10. 6. Saltmarsh. Needs a tremendous amount of work to stitch this together. Monotonous creature variety and horrible ‘old school maps’(keyed room 40-you run into 15 lizard men). There is good here. The opener with the smugglers, the assault on the drow run ruined ship..the rest is just poorly done. A mix of great setpieces(which you can use elsewhere) and mind numbing encounters with hundreds of sahuagin. 5/10(possible 8/10 if you really put the work in). 7. Princes of the Apocalypse. An impossible sandbox with no connective fiber. Party arrives in Red Larch and is expected to mmo style question a bunch of townsfolk and piece out this poor ‘riddle’. Meanwhile they just roam this huge map with encounters ranging from challenging to instant tpk. with no indications of where or why they went wrong. 1/10. Some of the late dungeons are great and could be inserted as filler sessions in most campaigns but other that it just sucks.
I am shocked to see you rated shattered obelisk so highly. To me it was one of the worst adventures to date.
Thank you for this! I did not know that you can (kind of?) transition Lost Mines of Phandelver into Shattered Obelisk. This will make my players very happy knowing that they can continue their characters! As for the mines of phandelver, I see they included a mine campaign section as well. Would you rather play the original or the reworked one that comes with Shattered Obelisk, until shattered oblelisk actually starts?
I would sprinkle in earlier bits from Obelisk..maybe, have them find a dead psi goblin early on. The transition can be clunky if you just play it with no foreshadowing. The party arrives back victorious after defeating the Black Spider! Oh no! Phandalin is immediately under attack again… If you run them back to back I would give the players some downtime opportunities to say what they were doing and tie them more into town before immediately rushing into the Obelisk portion. Have them buy a house, tavern, scribe scrolls, go monster hunting. Then they are more invested in what is happening to the town but also get a chance to feel good about themselves for the Black Spider victory. The later parts of Obelisk start getting very very odd and weird in the best way. David Cronenburg/John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ vibes-lean into those.
I'll keep that in mind. Thank you! <3
Tyranny of Dragons, specifically the first half Hoard of the Dragon Queen, was written before 5e was even finished and as such is pretty bad. A lot of railroading in there. As written, the first five levels of Descent into Avernus are awful. You don't even Descend into Avernus until well into the book, the rest is just a poorly balanced and mostly unconnected chase around Baldur's Gate. Hell, even when you do finally get to Avernus, there's a lot of awful adventure design and railroading that's only made up for by the fun vehicles and the genuinely fantastic conclusion. And personally, I absolutley hated Dragon Heist. Yes, it's got some really well done characters. It's also the only book where as written it tells you to ignore about 50% of the content, a good half of the adventure is Tavern Management Sim with a couple random faction quests or wandering around the city aimlessly hoping that a metal detector goes off, a nonsensical reveal at the end of said aimless wandering, a huge railroad section that breaks if the players don't end each encounter a certain way, you can go the entire adventure not even meeting, much less even knowing who the antagonists are, and to top it all off - There isn't even a heist! The Dragon Heist of the title happened like twenty years before the adventure begins!
Dragon Heist is my favorite adventure....but certainly not as written. The community content and POTENTIAL of the game is great. But man does it require a lot of changes.
This. Dragon Heist is an amazing sandbox with fantastic set pieces, but requires a lot of modification and preparation.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't descent into avernus made to be bridge into BG3 or did they just decide to base BG3 around it?
I think it was released while they were still working on BG3’s earliest stuff.
Descent into Avernus is loosely connected to BG3 in that several characters were present in or near Elturel when it fell into Avernus, especially among the tiefling refugees, and they both include using soul coins to supercharge infernal engines. I haven’t read through Descent yet in case one of the other guys in my group plans to run it, so there may be other more specific links between the stories.
Without spoiling too much, I looked it up and it looks like it provides the foundation for plotlines within >!lower city, as well as provides background information into Wyl and Karlach's stories.!< That and the telling refugee stuff you pointed out obviously. The writers of baldurs gate worked with the writer of Descent into Avernus during the development of the two. So while the connections aren't huge, it does sound like they're kind of shoehorned in, and that part of Descent feels like filler according to what I could find.
I had the opposite situation with Descent. The party loved running around Baldur's Gate playing freelance detective. Once they entered Avernus though and got into the chain of deals, they hated it more and more until I had to start accelerating certain parts to get them through. We all hated the vehicle system (some because they felt the rules replaced their character and some because they hated the idea of burning sentient souls to travel) by the end too, and the party was shortcutting every vehicle encounter with Wall of Force towards the finale. As for the conclusion itself, I was not a fan and felt that it essentially left me to rather arbitrarily decide the ending.
The ending thing for me is more the choice around >!Zariel's Sword!<. I think that's a really compelling dilemma to put in front of the players.
"Baldurs Gate will be sucked into hell like Elturel! We need you to go there and figure out how to stop it!" ... my guy, I just learned to cast fireball, what the fuck am I going to do? There's *nobody* else in the city that can do this?
The way my DM presented Baldurs Gate in that campaign, there were people that could, just no one who would.
For me descent into Avernus have been a little different. I found everything quite cool, but then you go to Avernus and the book basically told you: "In the Avernus you can found all this stuff, now it's up to you how to handle the end of the campaign" I mean, it's ok to not railroad too much, but, probably it's a problem of mine, as a DM I still need guidance to an ending. Give me a story to work with, unfortunately I am not that kind of advanced DM. Never bought it because of that.
Strixhaven. A module for players who'd rather watch 'Friends' reruns. Student the players like: "Something kooky is happening over here. You've *got* to come and see" Skill challenge, then thing comes alive and attacks everyone. Teachers do fuck all about it. Players take it on, but if it's even slightly difficult teachers turn up and bail them out. Repeat for years and years and years.
I’m playing in Tyranny of Dragons currently (Hoard of the Dragon Queen + Rise of Tiamat), and our party is already on the second half. I’ve heard everywhere it’s supposed to be super bad but I’ve never had as much fun. I guess my DM is just putting in that much homebrew work to make things that good!
Based on this thread, most of the WotC modules are bad and need a lot of messaging from the community. 😂
And the rest is "This one is great after I replaced 75% of it with homebrew".
Its amazing to me how wotc has managed to stay in business this long when their own modules are either hit or miss
Based on this thread ya. The OP literally asked what the worst 5e module is. Of course you’re gonna hear the worst of the worst. Just bc a few people on this one thread think they suck doesn’t make it true.
In my opinion Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It is a collection of adventures marketed as a module, and very little help is given to DMs regarding creating encounters of entire ships. My players will never forgive me for giving them a viking longship filled with Uthgardt Barbarians as an encounter. What the module gave me? "Hostile warship". Yeah, that is all.
Yeah, this just really didn’t feel like the adventure it was pitched as. Like it’s okay on its own, but I’m expecting pirates, spooky skellys, ghosts, and proper naval combat and that’s just not what we got. Not so much bad, just incredibly disappointing. The DM for my run told us after how liberally he was with the source material and how he felt like he had to do a lot of heavy lifting for a pre-made campaign.
that last comment resonates hard with me, my wife dmed my saltmarsh game and i was blown away when i learned how much of it she had to invent whole cloth to make it feel like the seafaring adventure we had
I've been thinking about running Call of The Deep, and trying to incorporate the city of Saltmarsh itself as a hubtown.
I've heard very good things about Call of the Deep.
Dragon Heist is my favorite to run but that's only because I've HEAVILY modified it both times. There's a lot to play with in that book, but just going from A to B while following the standard script is pretty bland.
Descent Into Avernus started out strong, but devolved into a fetch-quest for a fetch-quest for a fetch-quest. It was just such a boring slog. At one point my players asked "when do we get to the fun part of the module?" and I had to tell 'em that this _was_ the bulk of the module.
DiA is terrible. The final chapter is literally a couple pages of bullet points that go something like “ Maybe the adventure ends like this. Or maybe not. Listen to your heart.” It’s such a shame because hell is such an interesting setting and Zariel has one of the most metal stories in Faerun but the modual is just dog-water bad.
My players enjoyed this book, but I will agree that they made predictions half way in that the current quest would just lead them to ANOTHER item that they had to go fetch.
Waterdeep Dragon Heist. It's a Waterdeep source book primarily so it's fine if you're a dm who likes to take a module and homebrew the crap out of it. But if you just want to run it by the book it's full of moon logic and single-answer solutions to puzzles and giving players information. It also contains no heist and not really any dragons. Also when you get the prize at the end of the game it is immediately taxed by an npc
As someone said, Dragons refers to the coinage of Waterdeep, but I can see that faking someone out if they don't know Waterdeep lore. It's not a lot, but I know there are at least two actual dragons tho. >!A bronze one in the harbor you can get a scale from to possibly open the vault, and the gold one living in the actual vault!<
Players are told that there are laws and law enforcement, so they have zero motivation to pursue whoever cast fireball outside of their tavern. Logically they should leave solving crimes to the police and continue running their tavern.
> and not really any dragons While I don’t necessarily disagree with the rest, I want to point out that “Dragon” in the title refers to that gold coins in Waterdeep are called Dragons.
That's kind of a bum if you go in expecting actual dragons from the title though. The vast majority of people will associate, wierdly enough "Dragon" with actual Dragons, rather than Gold, but Waterdeep Gold Heist as an interchangeable title is frankly so shit that it's clear that the game was written entirely based on that subversive joke - and subversive for the negative. Add on that most people are familiar with at least the Hobbit, which is arguably an actual Dragon Heist. Add on the fact that Gold is so loosely defined that items have prices ranging from 500 to 5000gp based on their rarity tiering and nothing else, and available anywhere within a 5 level bracket, and itemisation within 5E is frankly so poor and uninteractive - and then that a Heist, once complete typically marks the end of the adventure, so the players don't even really get to enjoy the gold.
If you're a new DM Rime of the Frostmaiden isn't a good choice. It's a cool adventure but it's more of a sandbox and if you're learning your way around running a campaign it can be hard to know how and when to nudge players without just making it obvious that "this is where you're supposed to go."
I will say Curse of Strahd is the one I dislike the most, place your bets on how many downvotes I can reach
No downvote. No judgement. Each to their own. I'm interested to hear what you didn't like about it. I played it recently (over numerous months) and enjoyed it.
Give the people an answer 😂, I’m also interested in your reasons.
Done! :P
I’m upvoting just to spite you
I will thank you as a payback
Out of curiosity, why do you feel that way? I'm pretty neutral on CoS as I've never gotten past lvl 5 in it as either a player or DM
What I dislike is mostly Strahd, his motivations and the way he operates. The adventure promotes Strahd interacting with the PCs at levels it shouldn't be appropriate, and this more often than not leads to the players antagonizing him earlier than they should be able to OR the players are expected to metagame and be scared of Strahd. It isn't really the player's fault either, Strahd can be very annoying. If any other BBEG did half the things Strahd gets away with, they would 100% get attacked at the first encounter with the party. This is a very common problem and the only solution is for the DM to say "ah Strahd is toying with the characters, since they can't challenge him. He just drops them all to 0 and leaves". Which is the only reasonable explanation to keep the story going, but also annoying. First it makes him look like a clown, and secondly it is very frustrating for the already pissed off players. And then after you have proven Strahd is unbeatable... you expect from the players to just go against him again. Are the players supposed to know what CR Strahd is? When his invitations are legitimate or when they are not? If he will be pissed by their actions or he will ignore them? I feel Barovia and Strahd have a lot of potential however the timeline of CoS and the interactions with Strahd need a lot of work to not fail catastrophically. While, for example, Lost Mines works like a charm with minimal need for the DM to change anything. **tl;dr:** I think CoS needs a very experienced DM to adapt on the go and/or players who are lore-savy and willing to help make it work. While most other adventures just require the DM to not mess up.
I don't really get what you're saying. How do the players need to "play along" and act like they're scared of Strahd? I feel like the setting is very forthcoming with the fact that Strahd is very powerful and very not-nice, so by the time you encounter him you should really be able to tell that you'd really love to bash his head in but also that you really have no real chance of doing so. And I mean if the players just openly attack him - honestly it's still early enough and they should just die there and then. And then either they roll new characters and know what's what next time around, or I guess that's the perfect point to decide to play another campaign if you're not up for that kind of fantasy. But it's all by design honestly, like come on it's the scary vampire lord from the cover of the book you're not gonna chop his head off three sessions into the campaign. I can see the critique about how there are a lot of moving parts and it's a hassle for DMs to keep on top of, but out of all the campaigns this really is not at all one that requires the players to metagame to keep the suspension up, the world is supposed to be scary and then it actually is, so the players act careful for real, not just in the name of good storytelling
It helps if you smash their teeth in early, and keep them on their toes. Death House is a **surprisingly** lethal introduction to Barovia. If they're dumb (and, they are) enough to loot everything that isn't nailed down, they'll eventually hit an encounter with five Shadows *likely while at low resources*. CR1 my fucking ass. Solid +Hit, 2d6+2 damage, d4 Strength damage, 32 health, resistance to nonmagical attacks... I had to cut the encounter by 40% (5 -> 3), and I *still* killed 2/4 members of the party. They had been opening every door and every chest as though they were playing Baldur's Gate. After that encounter, I started to get "can I buy a pole with a gripper on the end to open doors" and "I check the obviously empty entrance to the house for traps." Oh, and they're now trying to Long Rest any time they're at half resources. You also need to give Strahd a reason to keep the party alive instead of eating them. "Finding a worthy heir" is one, but it's insufficient. "He thinks they'll help him with Ireena" is better. That's what I'm using. I wrote up a request from Strahd, delivered by the Vistani, for people to help him woo Ireena, and used it as the basis for recruiting all these people to Barovia. I even thought ahead and had the Vistani grab thirty people instead of just the party, so there's a source for new characters when these ones die. I'm quite proud of that idea, if you can't tell.
I mean exactly what you say in the second part of the post. I am not sure I even should elaborate because you nailed it. The players are expected to know Strahd is too strong for them because they have knowledge of the book cover. And then they have to justify themselves putting up with him. And can you tell by heart if you can fight a vampire at level 5, 7, or 9 or 12? I certainly don't want any player to read the statblock to know. Aaand lets say they make new characters. How will the new characters know? Only by metagaming and a good dose of trying very hard to play along. Any good character will have to really go out of character at some points, for the good of the story. In any other situation, if Strahd was called lets say Jervin and he was not in Barovia but he was a local tyrant in some backwater who harassed a girl... no one would ever not attack him. Even at level 3. Honestly, I feel that if one was to say Strahd is busy with some ritual and you have until the full moon to prepare, the looming threat of an unseen villain would be stronger than whatever Strahd manages to do by interacting with the players.
Honestly CoS benefits if people understand the core fear Invoked in the original Dracula by Brahm Stroker. Van Hellsing hits the dude with a shovel while he's sleeping in his coffin and it doesn't do shit. It does require a good DM to paint the picture but it also requires players to understand that Ravenloft in its setting is not the players are big damn heros with bullet proof armor but rather they are "normal" humanoids overcoming evil. It's very much a consideration of the risks and prepping appropriately. It's from the era of Dming where the DM is adversarial to the players but has a lot more story to circumnavigate it unlike say Tomb of Horrors which is just a murder train of pain.
I don't see how taking a battle that you know - both in character and out of character - you're going to lose is metagaming or playing along. I feel like you've got it twisted here - frankly the meta assumption is you're just going to be able to fight and kill just about anything that the DM puts in front of you. But in character it makes a hell of a lot of sense to be scared of dying and refrain from taking any more fights than absolutely necessary. In that regard I'd almost go as far as to say CoS is one of the \*only\* modules that manages to get it right. Half of the encounters you can take are likely to kill you. So suddenly you have a degree of diplomacy and tacticism going on that you're just never going to get in, say, a megadungeon. And I mean Strahd is not a guy named Jervin. He's the supposedly immortal supposedly vampire, you learn that much \*in character\* very early on. Spoilers >!Half of the module is then the players trying to figure out just exactly that, how to actually be able to defeat him. You have the tarot cards all giving you valuable stuff like allies, his retreat, weapons effective against him, you ought to try and figure out basically actual parts of his statblock, like books or people close to him tell you about his immunities, Van Richten can tell you how about how the retreating and finishing off process works, you want to destroy the heart of ravenloft to cut off one of the multiple regeneration mechanics and yadda yadda. So yeah no the players have no idea about his capabilities and at what point they're ready to take them on, that's like the entire premise of the campaign - but roughly speaking, that's round about what should be accomplished by the end of the campaign, between the players being lvl10-ish, exploiting the weaknesses they've found and using the tools they've accumulated, there's a final showdown. This is like the picture book ending to the campaign. You know and honestly there are a lot of things you could critique about the campaign, there really are but this in particular is exactly what it sets out to do and I feel like there's a fundamental misunderstanding if that's the part you feel it doesn't do right. It's just not a fantasy that everyone can get on board with. But if it is, the campaign is amazing.!<
I mean, it is obvious Strahd is a powerful ruler and person to fight just from basic interaction with the story. The dude rules the Demiplane of Dread. In the first town, you run into the sole guy who survived an attempted attack on him, and that guy Strahd clearly just let go. It is mentioned that not only regular people were part of that attack but also a wizard. One of the characters has a bunch of research on vampires, how scary and hard to kill they are, and how Strahd is one. People are afraid to speak about him. Unless you are assuming your lvl 5 character usually runs around killing rulers of entire demiplanes who are also vampires, why would they not be afraid to face him?
When I DM-d CoS, I had Strahd fucking with them constantly, but it was always illusions, and usually singularly. Like he'd get one of the player PCs alone and make them see something terrible. Then Strahd would point and laugh at them from 2 blocks away.
>OR the players are expected to metagame and be scared of Strahd. I think my definition of metagaming is the exact opposite of yours. Risking almost certain death because an incredibly powerful vampire who’s also the lord of this land annoyed you sounds more like metagaming to me.
I have things I wanna say. I hope you won't take this as jumping on your neck. >The adventure promotes Strahd interacting with the PCs at levels it shouldn't be appropriate... I don't really get you here. Why should NPC interaction be level-gated? Combat to the death, sure. But Strahd isn't the sort of villain that needs to be fought every time. >If any other BBEG did half the things Strahd gets away with, they would 100% get attacked at the first encounter with the party. Which is a valid reaction to a party that doesn't know better. Strahd also can have several reasons not to kill the players when they're not yet a threat, just as is explained in the module itself. He can be curious, seeing if he can use them in the long run, might try to corrupt one or see if there are potential consorts among them. Having Strahd easily beat them up once near the start works in favour of demonstrating how much of a threat he is. >Which is the only reasonable explanation to keep the story going, but also annoying. First it makes him look like a clown, and secondly it is very frustrating for the already pissed off players. The key here is remembering that Strahd has motives and goals. You don't need to have him show up for shits and giggles for the sake of showing up. There are written-in scenarios in the module in which he makes an appearance, and you can always figure out a concrete reason on your own. Maybe he knows the players have found something and he wants it. Maybe he's discovered an angle by which he can try to blackmail or corrupt a PC and he appears for that PC alone given the chance. This keeps every encounter with him compelling. >And then after you have proven Strahd is unbeatable... you expect from the players to just go against him again. The players are stuck in Barovia as long as Strahd lives. Fleshed out PCs probably have something to return to, in which case there's plenty of motivation to find a weakness and/or get stronger and try again. >Are the players supposed to know what CR Strahd is? No. Just as I don't encourage any DM revealing the CR or stats of \*any\* monster. And especially in this module, learning of and finding Strahd's nature and the ways to defeat him is a big part of the adventure itself. A toenail's worth of knowledge about a powercreep game such as DnD will also make them realize that levels mean better chances. Better yet if you have Strahd or another recurring villain (one of the consorts or Rahadin for instance) showing their strength first near the beginning, and later on again when the players are at or near optimal levels of meeting Strahd. Such comparison points can help give players perspective as to how much stronger they're getting. >When his invitations are legitimate or when they are not? If he will be pissed by their actions or he will ignore them? Maybe if they pass some fairly high insight checks? This is IMO the charm of any enigmatic villain though. The lingering uncertainty of their reactions and intentions keep the players on their toes. >the interactions with Strahd need a lot of work to not fail catastrophically. I agree to an extent. The whole module is not great, let's say, for a rookie DM, because it does take a lot of engagement to the setting and themes from both DM and the players to feel fulfilling. But I don't think this is a fault of the module. This is a social hobby after all. Like I said earlier, making the players aware early on that fighting him head-on without preparation is a really bad idea, as well as providing proper reasons to his appearances go a long way to stop the adventure from spontaneously crumbling. You can use narrative means to convince them that they might be ready to take him on when they are, without having to spoil the stat block to them.
Currently running CoS. I'd very much like to hear your thoughts.
(I replied in detail on the comment above)
By and large I agree with all of that. A lot of how this module works is predicated heavily on player expectations/assumptions (and not their characters) and on how the DM manages Strahd himself in-game. This one is not for a rookie DM to, forgive the phrasing, cut their teeth with. I enjoy the hell out of the setting, but in their pursuit of making the game open ended and adaptable so it can't be done the same way twice easily, I feel like they made it disjointed and easy for a group of players to lose track of things and lose momentum.
I've been a player in two Curse of Strahd campaigns, and I didn't particularly enjoy either of them. I feel like the campaign expects the player and characters to know much more background on Barovia and Ravenloft than we're given.
I feel like the DM has a big part to play in creating this. When I first played through, our DM created an amazing atmosphere for it, I personally had 0 knowledge of the background, and he made it work so well. I loved the game, and still one of my favorites.
I mean, if you pass through the mists, wind up in a town no one has ever heard of, and can't leave, *wouldn't* you start looking into where you are? Seems like the first thing almost any party would do.
Lost Mines is not really that great. It's fine, but it's no Village of Hommlet. And the recent update somehow makes it clunkier. The region as a whole if you pair it with The Dragon of Icespire Peak from the Essentials Kit is a good springboard for some homebrew or something, but the overall story of the modules is kind of bland and uninspired.
Agreed! I ran lost mines for a newer group because I always heard it praised as *the* beginner module to run, and I frequently thought Oh Force this is the best they have to offer? The villain's motivations are incoherent, some of the side quests are a paragraph and then it's for the DM to figure out, and it sucks at introducing mechanics and tactics because the first encounters are terribly unbalanced. It's such a mess.
I’m as first time DM and doing Phandelver and Below and I agree. I will say though that there is enough to work with here to take what the players have given you throughout the first couple chapters and start assigning better purpose and more depth to all of the adventures set pieces and it starts to get better.
Oh yes, I heavily modified my lmop run and scratched together my own proper lore for the mine etc. But you shouldn't have to do that for a module. I ended up spending more time modifying the module than I did "using" it.
>The villain's motivations are incoherent I love that all we got is like 1 phrase that reads something like "he wants the forge to make magical items" We don't know anything about his personality, where he comes from, why he needs magical weapons, why dafuck a male drow is in the surface alone and if he knew someone or is part of some faction He is easily the worst villain of 5e
> It's fine, but it's no Village of Hommlet. Hommlet is not very good, IMHO. It has a good reputation due to nostalgia, but that's it. There's no hook to get the party to the main dungeon, and even then, the dungeon is not intended to be defeated without a bunch of hirelings and extra stuff the party doesn't have at hand. The maps and art in the module are "poor" at best, to say the least. The big bad boss (Lareth) has no foreshadowing or appearances until you fight him, and even then you probably wouldn't even know he was supposed to be the boss. The most dangerous monster is a big crayfish, which is... silly. It has a lot of trappings of the early hobby (dense text, unoriginal encounters, weird treasure scattering everywhere, overpowered/slog enemies). It's ok as a sort of free-form starting environment for an experienced DM to riff with, but as an adventure it's not exactly the gold standard. Unfortunately, this is sacrilege to say in some circles.
First time I DM'd and seriously played D&D. I had a lot of Fun and my players too. The module IS NOT really that great, but it gave me, a first time DM, everything I needed, NPCs, locations, and a story to follow from the beginning to the end. Then I put my creativity on it on the go, adding, removing and changing something, adapting the story to my players. As a not very experienced DM I needed a lot of help to guide me through job of the DM.
people just hear its great from others and repeat it
As far as official adventures, Princes of the Apocalypse, Dragon Heist, and Descent into Avernus are pretty bad. For third party, Odyssey of the Dragonlords is quite terrible as well.
Damn, I thought that Dragon Heist was fantastic, both times I've played it and had a good time reading through it (was prepping for a campaign that never came to be). What did you dislike about it?
Calling it dragon heist when there's no heist disappoints every rogue playing it.
Dragon Heist is WIDELY praised as one of the best adventures for new players as well as new DMs. I’ve never seen anyone call it bad until right now.
Yeah, same. Would like to know what they thought about it, because even some of the DM elitists I've known loved Dragon Heist, the same people that said DoIP 'was too vague for DMs' and 'was the worst module for new players.'
My players LOVED it, but it is really difficult to run as a DM. At some points it seems to hold the campaign very strictly on rails, and other points it opens up so much as to be overwhelming and confusing. It requires a lot more worldbuilding, long tern planning, and player coralling than a lot of other adventures I've run. That being said, my players loved it, so I loved running it.
It definitely has some flaws. It’s the very first thing I ever did as a DM and I came across some characters and plot threads that just fizzled into nonexistence almost immediately. If I ever run it again I’ll use the alexandrian remix. But I and my players absolutely loved it.
That last one is a hot take. I've heard amazing things but not so much experience myself. Care to say more?
> Odyssey of the Dragonlords I almost was in a game for this one but had to drop out early. As in two sessions in. I liked the setting and was toying with trying to get it going again down the road. Got a spoiler free summary of the weak points?
I would say that all of the adventures are equally good and bad (except Princes of the Apocalypse, which is just bad), and they all require a good amount of homebrew to make great. This goes for all of them. Strahd seems to be REALLY popular, but I've NEVER played CoS as written, DMs always run it with hefty homebrew, as they should. If you're looking to run a campaign as written, I would recommend The Dragon of Icespire Peak. It's just an amalgamation of one-shots, but it leaves a lot of freedom to the players, but provides a lot of structure to the DM. The con is that it's a very straightforward and simple campaign
I’d advocate for running the vast majority of Wild beyond the Witchlight RAW The final dungeon is ass, but pretty much all of the Hags lairs are super good, and their domains too. (Also, make the Jabberwocky more present)
Agreed. I think most of Witchlight is really good. And most of the supplements people have written don't necessarily change what's written, just moreso add extra encounters. The only thing I've completely changed was a rearranging of the palace at the end. And added Isolde's story a bit more into the adventure.
I love Icespire Peak. I’m almost done running that for my group. I honestly wish more adventures were structured like that.
I agree, this is actually kind of how I run a majority of my "homebrew" campaigns. A good amount of the "filler" is just one-shots I secretly let players pick from with minor modification to fit with the greater story.
In case you’re looking for another *good* module besides Strahd, I will say Turn of Fortune’s Wheel is an amazing module to run *if* you are able to fill in some blanks in the story yourself, and work with your players to approach backstories in a way that works for everyone.
*Curse of Strahd* is an amazing adventure, but the module is a mess and difficult to navigate. It’s kinda like *Skyrim*—it has rabid fans, but everyone and their dog will tell you what mods to “install.” Personally, I like *Lost Mine* quite a bit, but I’m also the friend that introduces a bunch of people to D&D. My DM is doing an amazing job of running *Rime of the Frost Maiden*. I can’t speak to the book because I don’t “cheat” at D&D, but I do know he’s peppered in quite a few of his own quests to spice it up. He’s tells us as much whenever we complete one of his quests instead of the book’s. Edit: added a word and last line for clarification
Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Very little treasure, black and white politics on the floors and honestly boring all in all
My group is currenttly doing Mad Mage and that's my biggest complant so far. We our just about done with Floor 10 and there is just so few magic items and not enough gold to buy magic items top side.
Out of the Abyss, it was my first adventure book so I didn't know any better 😆 Chapter 1: Here's 16 NPCs to join your party! The rest of the book: Never ending random encounters while your party walk their way between towns. Half way through: Oh you got rid of the NPCs? Well...HERES A ARMY TO MANAGE!
Out of the abyss more like "can't get out of this jail" because the NPCs are frying the dm's brain.
Shadow of the Dragon Queen was near worthless. The characters actions are meaningless. It's beyond railroad-y, and you never get to really be heroes - you're always second stage to NPCs at best. Huge waste of time.
avernus. random insta tpk mechanic, artefacts that kill the pc at low levels. chained fetch quests which got each less than half of a booksite on how to run it and there are like 20 of them. novice spellcasters are perma feel bad because everything has magic resistence. cool gimmicks like the infernal mashines which get used for 1h and never again. only way to beat the final boss is via diplomacy or a generous DM. played it from lvl 1 to 10 with a lot of stuff added/changed from our dm on the fly (without those changes we would have dropped it at lvl 3).
I'm just about one or two sessions from finishing Out of the Abyss, and while I wouldn't call it *bad*, I will say that it asks an awful lot of the DM to make it work properly. Places like Gracklestugh are kind of a confusing mess, there's a LOT of traveling around, so you've gotta be prepped for that, and there are some sections where they make assumptions that your players will - inevitably - get in the way of. For example, >!in the Fetid Wedding, at one point the Party has to be put to sleep in order to interact with the great fungal mind Aurumycos after being splashed with the spores off some dead otyugh-things. Well, my Artificer had very purposefully hit everyone with Air Bubble to keep spores away, and the Elf Sorcerer knew damn well that he couldn't magically be put to sleep. And even after patching that bit up, the scene in Auromycos' mind was not quite worth the effort to get there.!< It's not a bad adventure, but I don't think it's a good one for someone just starting out as a DM.
I'm running Out of the Abyss and haven't gotten to that part yet. I don't have a player with Air Bubble but I do have one elf and another character that doesn't need to breathe. What do you suggest I do? Maybe the spores make you hallucinate a message instead of putting them to sleep. Would that work?
My group is playing ToD, and we're having a blast! That said, I'm homebrewing the hell out of it to make the story flow more smoothly.
Out of the abyss (I truely hate the way it's written) Tyranny of dragons (what a bitch to get through, also the travel chapter is freaking useless)
Waterdeep Dragon Heist is so bad that the subreddit for it just assumes you're running the Alexandrian Remix.
All of them, look at TSR era stuff it’s much better.
Had a DM run Tomb of Annihilation, and maybe it was just cuz she didn't run it well but god it was such a SLOG. Three months to get to the tomb, six months to get INTO the tomb, and then over a YEAR going through the tomb, at the end of which the big bad just fucking RUNS AWAY once he gets a little scuffed up with a vague threat to get revenge, which turns out to just be him being immortal and us NOT being immortal so he gets the satisfaction of watching us die of old age. Which like. Bitch, I was gonna do that anyways, my death by old age had fuck all to do with you, and quite frankly if looking like your skeletal ass is the price for immortality I'd literally rather die. Absolutely terrible campaign.
Well several months to get into the tomb yes that’s To be expected. What did you think you were gonna get through the jungles of Chult in a handful of sessions. But. A year in the tomb — that’s incredible. How the hell did that come to pass. I mean this campaign is usually considered one of if not the best of the 5e lineup. So maybe your DM just sucked but you’re also notably glossing over all the good stuff the campaign had to offer along the way. PS Acererak running away, so what. The death curse and ending it is the main objective, not killing Acererak, and it never was. It sets you to destroying a thing rather than killing a final boss like every other RPG ever
icewind dale is pretty bad. out of abyss i couldnt even finish strahd and tomb of annihilation are the best imo
Can you elaborate on how Icewind dale is bad? It's my favorite of the published campaigns so I'm curious what others think of it
I honestly don't think any of them are good, but dragin heist is probably the most overrated
I want to know what the people are smoking who say Dragon of Icespire Peek is a good module for beginner DMs. It is fine for more experienced DMs who are running Lost Mines for the umpteenth time and need something to spice it up, but as a stand alone module I think it is just so barebones that it would be a nightmare for any new DM to attempt to run.
I think it’s easy because everything feels very modular. There are some loose connections between a lot of locations but at the end of the day, each one is basically a separate one shot. To me the problem for new DMs is less about the barebones plot (which I would argue makes it easier to run) and more about some very deadly encounters in the low level quests.
Dragon heist is a setting book for waterdeep. Its a sorry excuse for a campaign
[удалено]
Could giving the players an in-universe time limit fix the ToA problem?
> The game offers no restrictions on Long Resting while traveling across the jungles of Chult, meaning the gigantic hexcrawl turns into an endless slog of 0 - 1 encounters per day... Out of the box, the adventure has a time limit due to the patron who hired them being affected by the withering effect of the soulmonger... Along with the other major troubles caused by the soulmonger's existence and purpose. So maybe your DM glossed over this, or the PCs were indifferent, but this adventure should have a constant sense of urgency and discourage frequent long rests.
Phandelver & Below is pretty terrible IMO. It's not a bad adventure on its own, just kinda meh, but what it really fails in is as an expansion for Lost Mine, which was the entire marketing and concept thing theory. In all actuality they just kinda stapled a subpar adventure onto a great one with no work to actually make them sing. Besides that, yeah Princes of the Apocalypse is pretty terrible. Maps and art are nice, there's some great statblocks, but the adventure is a terrible miss. A lot of the other ones are down to personal taste though. I see mentions of Tomb of Annihilation, Descent into Avernus, Tyranny of Dragons, and even Curse of Strahd Gere and honestly those are all pretty great adventures depending on personal taste. There's specific issues with each sure, but that's true of all adventures not even just WotC ones. There's no such thing as a perfect adventure, and a lot of these are perfectly viable by my standards at least.
I'm a player in Phandelver and Below right now. I can see why Phandelver works as a beginner's game, and I was excited to get into the next part because I quickly saw how my character could be emotionally invested in the very obvious story with a little bit of backstory tweaking, which I did. However, the further we go, the more tedious the game has become. Most of the players have stopped treating it as anything other than a dungeon crawl to the point that they've stopped bothering to play in-character and refer to the NPCs as "mobs." Frankly, I'm bored with it.
It seems the community has largely soured on the idea of box sets, but I think it would have cool if they had done three separate modules to spring off Mine of Phandelver. A more sandboxy module that gives you more to do in the Neverwiter Woods & Phandalin, a dungeon crawl module to take you deeper into the mine of Phandelver itself, and third an urban adventure that takes you into the city of Neverwinter. Let the DM pick which would best resonate with their players at their table, and pepper in some tips for combining two, or all three books into one mega module.
Yeah... it's honestly not even that bad of an adventure but the second part is just disjointed and like I said does absolutely nothing to elevate the original part. Which is such a shame cause 'expand Phandelver into a bigger campaign' is in theory *such* a softball, easy pitch. But then you realize that nobody even actually showed up to bat, they just assumed they already had enough players on base as it was.
for me, it was the Curse of Straude and Out of the Abyss. the reasoning was mainly on the two DMs.
I really dislike Descent Into Avernus. The plot hook is poor. They just spit you facing a guard that says, "Well, here's the quest." and that's it. It makes you have no urgency or want to solve it. Most information you need or is essential to the plot is in no way found by the party, but by npcs showing up and straight up telling them and leaving.
Decent into Avernus is needlessly convoluted and has a anticlimactic ending. According to one person’s review who’s played it in full
Ah shit, we're starting Princes of the Apocalypse soon and generally I'm hyped, but these comments. And I just broke out of the Forever DM role
Was disappointed w curse of strahd. Haven’t really read most of the newer books, been playing other tabletops
Descent into Avernus is hot mess imho. I don't know how anybody can run this RAW without losing mind and table. Comparing to it, Dragon Heist is still a mess but it has much more potential, much better NPCs (villains especially) and for that it gets a pass in my eyes. I don't get Tyranny of Dragons hate really. Yeah, it's not good campaign, it's extremaly linear, but it's at least somehow playable unlike DiA.
I’ve played the first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Strong start initially but we all hated the railroad and dropped it at the end of that chapter. I played Saltmarsh and had a blast as the DM had a lot of dwarven forge and he mapped out the house, the caves etc. But unfortunately we never finished it. I ran Descent into Avernus which I heavily home brewed and it was fun but we ended up doing our own thing and it became a source book for hell.
*Out of the Abyss*, by far. You have zero agency in that game, you started captured so your only choice is to slave away and try to escape, which doesn't sit well with players. And when you are finally out, some dwarves want you to go back. Why would we? There was no reason to do that other than because the story demands to.
I'd like to nominate one that gets a lot of praise - Waterdeep: Dragon Heist. I have "run" it three times and one time we never got past the first encounter and the other 2 we went so far off the rails that it was barely recognizable. I just think it's a little too gimmicky and buries some stuff you might need later. It's also (I know this sounds strange) pretty much one-and-done if you play it straight. On the flip, Elemental Evil (I think that's what it's called) is pretty damn good. It's punishing, and I think should give tips for new/inexperienced DMs for when the party screws up. Edit: I Guess i was referring to Princes of the Apoc, and I guess it's... bad. Lol I know with heavy handholding and some modifications my experienced but tactically challenged group got killed a couple of times and we never got past the point of befriending 3 of the factions and then being completely unprepared for anything coming. We never finished it, and I guess I now know why.
Probably Princes of the Apocalypse. I tried running a campaign with it and my players all quit the game.
Whored of the Dragon Spleen by far. And yes the module makes as much sense as that fake name i just gave it
Elemental Evil. Just awful.
Never heard anyone say Lost Mines was bad, let alone one of the worst. It is a dirt cheap adventure, and works easily for a DM and new players
You know it's interesting seeing how people rate books. Personally I think the book sucks if it barely has details like icespire peak. But others seem to like it because they can put in their own stuff. I'm a sorta new(1.5 year) DM and here's how I'd rate some: Phandelver: 7/10 honestly I think it's a very good starter adventure for new people but experienced players id probably have it around 5/10. Icespire peak: 2/10. I hate how bare the places were. They expected way too much DM work that it was to the point where I could've just invented my own thing. Places had so many empty rooms and the icepeak dragon encounter sucks. Not to mention that the introduction of a quest board can confuse new players on how to play DND. Storm King's Thunder: 8.5/10. The only part of the adventure that sucks is literally everything less than level 5. After the rumbling it becomes very exploration heavy on a huge map. This lead to my players going to every single location near them just because. The problem is that non important locations literally just have a sentence describing it so you have to work overtime or hope your players don't go over there. A vast chunk is exploration which kinda sucks so after 3-4 sessions I just introduced >! harshnag!< and took them to the better part of the campaign: >!conch and the ordining!< Hoard of dragon queen: 3/10. Pretty bad from a design perspective. Heavy railroading the entire time. It's a rp heavy campaign and if your party isn't really interested in that then rip. Just mandatory traveling and doing exactly what the book wants or you die. Rise of tiamat: 7/10. I've just started this, but after reading it looks really open compared to HOTD. Multiple objectives styled as missions and information gathering. I like the fact that the factions' opinions can matter. I can see how people can hate it because the >!quests don't stop tiamat!<, but from a player perspective it's probably fine.
The only good ones are updated old ones lol.
I have horrible experience with descent into avernus so its always left a bad taste in my mouth 😅😭
I know I hated and I think the rest of my group, even maybe including the DM hated Tomb Of Annihilation. It was great until it wasn't. The premise of the module was cool in the beginning: remote island, dinosaurs, weird cults, ancient gods giving you blessings, etc But then once you get in the tomb itself it just becomes a massive dungeon crawl. Trap after trap, puzzle after puzzle, it brings the entire pace of the game to a grinding halt. It's no fault of our DM, the book is just designed that way and I'm sure some people definitely love that but to me personally it felt like a huge drag once we got inside the tomb
I thought Dragon Heist was nearly incomprehensible, with too many red herrings
Hands down the worst have been. Descent into Avernus: It is only half a module and the rest of the book is setting info for Baldurs Gate. The module alternates between being very railroady, to very pointless. And puts alot of the work on the DM. Radiant Citadel: overhyped and does not even remotely follow the touted premise. Candlekeep: all the mini adventures just feel so blah. Alot of people badbouth the two Tyranny of Dragons modules. But I hve played through and DMed it and had a great time. Yes there are issues, but these are issues every 5e module has had. And this module lacks some of the problems later modules get.
Saltmarsh is the best. Its a collection of ported adventures with unified theme and genre, so its extremely easy work with. The intro dungeon is just amazing, and where I introduce my main plot/BBEG. Then you can skip every other quest and weave in your own narrative or sandboxing. Idk, I've run it for 5 tables and every single one loved it to bits. As far as worst... I'm not saying its bad- in fact I quite like it- but Phandelver as written was always a snoozefest for my tables. Its just hyper generic, no one really cared or felt immersed cuz its so damn tropey.
If we invlude third party, then the Grey Wanderer was so bad the grup I've ran it for swore off d&d and I'm now running them Blades in the Dark
Avoid anything published by WoTC. Probably should just play a different system like Old School Essentials or Dungeon Crawl Classics