D&D 5E Rise of Tiamat review

[sunrisekid]

Has anyone else read reviews of this yet? I just saw this now, dated from a couple days ago.

http://diehardgamefan.com/2014/10/2...tiamat-dungeons-dragons-fifth-editiondd-next/

Very interesting take on content. Personally, I'm still interested despite it sounding like an organizational cluster-f**k, and intend to buy it (and run it) regardless.

Thoughts?

 

[pepticburrito]

Looking at the reviews I've seen of Rise of Tiamat, it's not even finished. The GM has to construct, from multiple sections in the book, a good part of the adventure. No thank you. HoTDQ was poorly written enough as it is. I don't need to run something that requires me to reconstruct the adventure from multiple sections in the book. If I'm going to do that, I might as well just run a campaign I made myself.

Isn't the point of buying things like this so that you don't have to do all the work yourself? Kobold Press and WoC would do themselves a favor by reading the APs that Paizo makes. Granted, their stories vary in quality, but at least the final product can be run as is by a GM.

 

[machineelf]

Kobold Press and WoC would do themselves a favor by reading the APs that Paizo makes. Granted, their stories vary in quality, but at least the final product can be run as is by a GM.

They would also do themselves a favor by looking at some of D&D's own classic adventures that were well regarded, and bring back some of the flavor of those while making sure that they don't have a railroaded story line.

They could also look in the very recent past. I thought Legacy of the Crystal Shard was an excellent adventure, and deserves to be considered among the best adventures.

ASIDE: It does take a lot of upfront work for the DM to understand all the pieces and how they work together in LoTCS, but once that upfront work is done, the adventure is refreshingly sandbox-style. The only downside was the lack of good dungeon areas.

 

[pepticburrito]

The rails in HoTDQ were exceptional. It drove me nuts while I ran it. Despite how linear the story progression was, once you got out of the Greenest area the GM had to put pretty much everything together himself. If you're going to run a choo choo train story line, you might as well draw out exactly where the rails are in the adventure.

I think with sandbox stuff, it's better to just go with compact campaign settings. My two favorite examples of this are by Green Ronin, Freeport and Thieves World. Compact worlds that have well laid out plot lines in them. GM spends a good amount of time piecing it together and he can rerun it as often as he wants, even with the same players. They won't get bored.

I don't think "adventures" should fall in that category. They're a different beast altogether. Sure, they should also look back at the old school stuff. There's a ton of material they can just republish with new stat blocks for 5e and make a killing off it. If they're going to do original published adventures, how HoTDQ and RoT is done is not the answer. The workload on the GM is high enough, he might as well just go ahead and run a campaign setting. He won't have a linear story line and he can reuse it as much as he wants.

 

[sgtscott658]

Howdy-

Well I read the review and I am not going let it stop me from running RoT. I'll just have to work out the details like I am doing with HotDQ thats all.

Here is my version of HotDQ that I am running:

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showth...cott-s-Hoard-of-the-Dragon-Queen-Campaign-AAR

Spoilers for HotDQ:





As you can surmise, alot of work to make this adventure work and not feel that the players were on the choo choo train to railroad hell. At first I had set the adventure in Greyhawk but I just do not have the time to try and convert stuff from one setting to the other and at the same time try to make the adventure work beyond what is written in the book as I thought I did. So I used a Planscape adventure I inserted in mid campaign to get the players to FR.

As for the quality of HotDQ, its not bad, it has some good ideas but it is seriously rough around the edges. Heck I might skip the Hunting Lodge sequence all together and just have the portal take the players straight to the Cloud Giants Skyship armed with the info on how fragile the Dragon Cult alliance is and the players can take it from there. Oh and in the Hunting Lodge chapter, players are not going to chit chat with Talis or form alliances with her, they know that would be suicide and plus with Paladins in the party, that is not going to happen. So the alternative is just port them to the skyship to try and convince the Cloud Giant to break his alliance with the cult or some such trope.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I'm really, really tired of experienced roleplaying game players SEVERELY underestimating the skills of new players to D&D. Every single thing that gets released there's a bunch of people screaming "THIS IS TOO COMPLEX! NEWBS WON'T UNDERSTAND IT!".

Just how *how long* does a new player have to play before we stop thinking of these people as incompetent morons? I mean really? This is an adventure that starts at Level 8! To get to this point, a campaign has been running probably for like what? Six months at least? And the idea of taking the small individual segments of Episode 1 and spreading them throughout the rest of the episodes is too hard for them to now grasp? Just how stupid do we really think these players are?

I'd love it if for once, rather than all us experience players coming down from our ivory towers to complain about how hard things are for the unwashed masses of little people... maybe we ought to ask those people *themselves* just how easy or difficult it is to understand what this adventure is about? Because the arrogance we display when we state that "While *I* can certainly understand what they are going for... a new player is just a stupid little creature and needs to have their hand held much tighter otherwise their tiny little minds will explode and they'll never play D&D again" is just astounding.

If this is the way we really think of new players to the hobby... THAT'S what's really going to drive them away, that arrogant condescension. Not the supposed ease or difficulty of the products themselves.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Funny. I think the structure of Rise of Tiamat is awesome, though potentially challenging to pull off. It has the framework of the adventure, but leaves some of the details to the group, which I think is great.

 

[Wolfskin]

Ditto, I think RoT is much better than HotDQ. Well, different strokes and all that...

 

[TerraDave]

The review seems a little whiny.

And this is the problem with trying to write an adventure for a broad audience. You make something that is too linear, people complain. You do something that is more open, and well, they complain.

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

Now that I've had a chance to read the full review, his major complaint is about the organization. I can see where he's coming from, but I found it pretty sensible. Perhaps calling the chapter episodes is the problem. Reading the first chapter gives a great sense of the structure of the adventure, and every other chapter is merely the description of one of the many adventures that are spawned from chapter one. It's almost as if the Council of Waterdeep is a hub town for adventures across the continent.