Quote from: Raven;779561Neither situation is one a little DIY can't fix. Or you can spend all your time grog-raging to the internet about how they did it wrong. There's a meaningful choice for you; one involves playing the game, and the other does not.

One can hope that a terrible adventure is not representative of the game as a whole. I still intend to take 5E for a spin when the schedule permits, it just won't be with this turkey.

One of the reasons I was excited about 5E is I would be able to play a game with a system I like that was also supported by adventure content. Maybe WotC will offer some more sandboxy adventure settings going forward. But I had hoped to kick off 5E with the HotDQ , so yeah, it's disappointing that it's a Paizo-style railroad. So now I have to go with plan B.

The great irony is that I'll probably end up converting a 4E adventure like Madness at Gardmore Abbey to 5E rather than use 5E's flagship launch adventure. It seems WotC launched 5E with an adventure better suited to 4E, just as it launched 4E with an adventure better suited to 3E  (or 5E).

This is disappointing.

At this point, I'm leaning more towards using the Phandelver adventure as the kickoff point, then winging it until I see if Part II of ToD gets any better.

If not, I have entire shelves of older resources I can convert.

Both Frog God and Goodman are going to support 5E with adventure material so there is still hope for good stuff.

My take on the Dragon encounter is that it is supposed to show of the bounded accuracy of 5e, then pummels its own intentions about the head by abstracting the process and not explaining.

After all, there's a bunch of guards in that fortress. Are they supposed to just stand there letting themself roasted? I don't have the adventure, but my guess is that they are shooting arrows at the thing.

So, to avoid having the DM roll attacks for all guards the PC's damage becomes representative of the damage the entire keep deals to the dragon. When the PC's deal 25 damage, that means the rest of the keep has propably dealt a multitude of that and the dragon thinks: "Yeah, I'm not getting hurt or even killed about this shitty little keep."

So the encounter is propably build as a showcase that in 5e a single high level charakter can't be assumed to take down a keep full of low level guys without so much as a scratch. But then doesn't use the actual mechanic in the game for that effect.

So, yes, it's still bad design, but I can see where they are coming from.

I'd fix this by having the Dragon take average damage for the guards each round and placing some balistas on the keep as a way to deal serious damage and keep the dragon from taking an interest in the PCs. If it takes a fourth-third of its hp in damage, it buggers of.


Now that duel? That's just crappy.



One question, out of interest. Is the cloud castle part any good?

Sky dwelling giants are kinda big in my setting (pun not intended, but welcome). So, if that is usable, I might pick up the adventure sometime later, just for that.

Quote from: Gold Roger;779595Now that duel? That's just crappy.



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It is.  I'm wondering if it's a forced way to get players familar with how the death saves work.


Either way, I just looked over my Adventurer's League guidelines again and I think it helps put HotDQ into proper context.

That is, they even call these sessions "storyline sessions".  So you're very much playing a storyline.  As EW points out, why would anyone do this?

The answer is because AL uses factions that PCs belong to, and therefore it's important that all PCs who go through the same adventure have the same (or as close as you can get) experience as a PC in another gaming group.  This is important because players can mix match groups later on.  I.e., if you're playing episode 5 with players from three different groups, they all will have had the same storyline progression in order to play the episode.  If one fo those PCs were in a group where they joined the cultists and burned down the town (possible in a true sandbox game), how could they then join another group in a later episode?

Also, as PCs go through adventures, they get reknown and can rise in the ranks of their particular faction (all the other players in the network).  So adhering to a linear storyline is pretty much the nature of the beast.

That all being said, I can totally get people who don't like that style of play.  It certainly gives me pause to play in these events.  But the good news is that we shouldn't expect other adventures to be just like HotDQ since it's specifically designed for this style.

I actually find that a bit upsetting.

The adventure path shouldn't be specifically designed for organized play. It should be specifically designed for unexperienced groups that get their first experience with 5th edition or even Roleplaying from it.

I'd imagine that with an unexperienced DM the dragon and duel encounters will make for a very bad and possibly disencouraging experience.


Maybe wotc imagines that new players will mostly come in through organized play, where their experience will be guided by seasoned DMs.


But,is there even organized play everywhere? Never heard of it happening here in germany and we are one of the bigger non american markets for RPGs.

From what I know (admittedly based on insuficient data) new groups often spring up pretty isolated. Having such groups presented with a organized play adventure as a logical choice for their first campaign feels misguided to me.


Of course, that doesn't hurt me. But wotc presenting only adventures that aren't designed for the hometable leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

In my opinion, comercial adventures and organized play adventures, that are a form of marketing, should be devloped independently.

My two biggest concerns about 5E support are how much it will be influenced by organized play, and how intrusive the presumed Forgotten Realms setting will be. Because those priorities run contrary to what I'm interested in.

Quote from: Haffrung;779647My two biggest concerns about 5E support are how much it will be influenced by organized play, and how intrusive the presumed Forgotten Realms setting will be. Because those priorities run contrary to what I'm interested in.

Personally I don't think either are big concerns.  for the first, we already know 3rd party support is going to be pretty strong for non-organized play.  HotDQ is just there to kick off their Adventurer's League.  For the second, the PHB includes pantheons for all the major settings, which tells me they are supporting everything and not just FR.

Coordinating an ongoing transmedia event through organized gameplay (both main storyline and "side events"), novels, mmo expansions, boardgames, cardgames, and miniature games is a daunting task.

Why would WotC even bother with non-event adventures?  If "The D&D Brand" is the interconnected web of products, then any non-event content is useless to "The D&D Brand".

That's what the 3pp are for I guess, writing modules for the non-transmedia market.

Quote from: Haffrung;779647My two biggest concerns about 5E support are how much it will be influenced by organized play, and how intrusive the presumed Forgotten Realms setting will be. Because those priorities run contrary to what I'm interested in.

Intrusive. FR or any other setting published will be very intrusive because I really doubt they're gonna drop the "Everything is Core" bullshit.  Thus, you're going to have to basically houserule the system as if it were a toolkit like GURPS to have anything approaching a sane setting.  Of course, you've been doing that since WotC took over anyway.

The design team responsible for the core rules of 5E really have done an exceptional job, and the MoP adventure that comes with the basic set is quite good. But the whole concept of story sessions and adventure leagues and so forth sounds like one of the worst directions you could possible go with table top roleplaying. It sounds like an intentional railroad mind fuck; like railroading as a way of life. Who thought this was a good idea?

Quote from: Larsdangly;779662The design team responsible for the core rules of 5E really have done an exceptional job, and the MoP adventure that comes with the basic set is quite good. But the whole concept of story sessions and adventure leagues and so forth sounds like one of the worst directions you could possible go with table top roleplaying. It sounds like an intentional railroad mind fuck; like railroading as a way of life. Who thought this was a good idea?

Probably just trying to get back to D&D's roots.  Most of the modules that came out in the late 70s early 80s were tourney modules and exactly the same sort of "railroad" adventures that is being discussed here.

Quote from: CRKrueger;779658Intrusive. FR or any other setting published will be very intrusive because I really doubt they're gonna drop the "Everything is Core" bullshit.  Thus, you're going to have to basically houserule the system as if it were a toolkit like GURPS to have anything approaching a sane setting.  Of course, you've been doing that since WotC took over anyway.

If an adventure has cool locations, NPCs, and other tidbits I don't mind picking out the implied setting stuff to use in my own game. A series of scripted scenes complete with endings isn't worth picking through regardless of setting.

Quote from: Sacrosanct;779663Probably just trying to get back to D&D's roots.  Most of the modules that came out in the late 70s early 80s were tourney modules and exactly the same sort of "railroad" adventures that is being discussed here.

I disagree that this is the same strategy. The tournament modules were self contained and 'dungeon-y', and therefore pretty linear. But they generally did not force certain behaviors or proscribe the ways in which scenes or interactions would play out, and with rare exceptions (perhaps only the end of A3) did not dictate outcomes of scenes. The broad intent of adventure league modules may be similar, but the reality sounds quite different.