This is one of your best episodes, full stop. The commentary on the requirements for good module design and you highlighting how shorter, and one-person made content to be able to stand on their legs alongside the big production products was INCREDIBLE and extremely motivating for a lot of people out there who want to get into this either as a hobby or professional. Great stuff, loved it.
I second this! Yes, it’s very inspiring to think that as a solo designer I could find success bringing something to market and might even have a better chance than an overproduced designed by committee product. As an artist and writer it can be daunting and overwhelming to think of the competition and perceived challenges, and the imagination can be a terrible thing. This really puts things in perspective. Keep it clear, short, leaning towards adventure based vs campaign setting content, and yam shaped. These are helpful and flexible boundaries.
As a patreon of sly flourish, not only do I get a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I hear the thanks in a video, I also think that the money I spend on it is some of the best value I have gotten so far, regarding TTRPGs.
I think Curse of Strahd splits the difference between presenting an amazing reasonably digestible campaign setting and gives a flexible idea for a campaign to run in it. It looks like Monty and Kelly took this approach with Dungeons of Drakkenhiem too!
I've found out if Numenera/Cypher is a gamer's first ttrpg, they take to like a fish to water. Ironically, it's the players who are very set in their expectations of how a ttrpg goes that get tripped up and frustrated. The tighter they hold onto how they *think* an rpg should run, the longer it takes them to wrap their head around a fantastic game.
I played both LMoP and DoIP. The small setting of Phandalin made it really easy for my DMs to instill a sense of place and belonging for me as a player. As a DM, I really loved the small setting of Deep Delver's Enclave, in Ruins of the Grendleroot. When you keep interacting with the same small town NPCs, you build a sense of community. In a big travel adventure, this doesn't happen. As a DM involved in a big travel campaign right now, I am exhausted because of all the NPCs and locations I make up and abandon after 1-2 sessions. Lots of work, low payoff.
This video is tremendously useful for me because I find it very hard to figure out if an adventure works for me until I've read almost the whole thing, and online reviews tend to not be helpful since they usually focus more on their highly specific experiences running the adventure than in the written material
Everything in your S tier are adventures run in regional areas with minimal long distance travelling. Maybe Eberron is an exception but it shifted from Sharn to The Mournland, both feel regionally based to me. Nice focused campaigns without the bloat of going too wide with adventures like the lower ranked ones.
That's because D&D have no system support for long distance travel. You either pack it with smaller adventures or make a montage description that is most likely boring for players. Any long travel falls apart. Tomb of Annihilation tried to introduce hexcrawl but even that had some issues.
Happy to see Shadow of the Demon lord on here. Also your S-tier picks are all phenomenal choices and definitely some of the most fun I've had DM-ing or playing in!! Great commentary on them as well.
I run very differently than Mike but I like this list. My Criteria 1) Battlemaps. I don’t run theater of the mind so I need a battle map for EVERY fight 2) Monsters. My players are power gamers and I need monsters that are challenging and interesting. Bags of HP drive me nuts. 3) To the point. I wanna be able to read it once and get a good idea of the exciting stuff.
Personally, what I want out of an adventure/campaign book is a scaffold of locations, quests, NPCs, and relevant setting details, presented in a way that is sensibly organized. These things don't have to be fleshed out in incredible detail. I can create or expand on individual encounters, give NPCs depth, add flavor to environments, and do some doctoring of story or plot details, but I always want to the adventure to provide something concrete that I can put in front of my players without me having to make it up out of whole cloth. When it comes to locations, maps are important. I want a detailed map of any geography or adventure site the players visit, every town or city the players are like to use as a base or adventure in, and battle maps for any locations of set-piece encounters, or other unique locations that the adventure describes. I know that I can source maps online or create my own rough maps, but that's not fun for me, and it's not what I want to spend my time doing. And if I purchase the adventure on a virtual tabletop site, I want the technical implementation of those maps to be correct and usable (Out of the Abyss on Roll20 is horrible in this regard; the travel map is hard to interpret, and the other maps are incorrectly scaled). It doesn't bother me so much if the published material lacks a strong hook for the PCs, because that's usually fairly easy to remedy, and because I usually want to put some work into personalizing that aspect of the adventure anyway. Pure campaign setting books don't appeal to me. I don't really have the patience anymore to read them cover to cover, and already have plenty of established, high-quality campaign settings to choose from.
Re: Double-near, I immediately thought of how 13th Age does abstracted distances- they use engaged (melee), close (within a move), near (takes two moves) and far (further but in sight). So I wondered why doesn't SD do this since they have double-near? It's been a while since I ran 13A so I went to double-check my memory and WHOOPS! In reality, *13A only has Engaged, Nearby, and Far!* At some point in my memory I made up a fourth distance!
I'd be interested in hearing more about the idea of you being "happier with more focused campaign settings, than big, story-focused campaign adventures." I feel there's a lot to explore with this topic. And, as much as I'm inclined to agree with you, sales seem to reflect the opposite in the community. Thoughts on why?
My best guess is a combination of factors. Many GMs are new or looking to save time. Players know enough from the back of the book to create a fitting backstory. Some of the campaign settings weren't done well. Existing settings have vast quantities of lore online without the need to create something new.
6:00, "wotc making too much adventures and not enough source books", amen brother! My weekly games are Wildemount, Taldorei and this week I start Heckna. I much prefer taking any of the maps that I got from a Patreon subscription and if it inspires me be able to plug it into my game and create a reason of why we're going to that map.
oh seeing someone running heckna out in the wild! Im to afraid of clowns so i cant play or run it but i read it as I really enjoy that book in how it structures the adventure.
Thanks Mike. This is what we need - an updated review of D&D adventures by someone who's actually run them. Many thanks. FYI - Dungeons of Drakkenheim is the best adventure I've run - better than Curse of Strahd.
Great commentary. It helped me realize that personally, I'm more willing to forgive needing to do more work to fix a book if I'm extremely interested in the setting/theme. There's a correlation there for sure.
When I did death house, I had the party appear naked with no gear and they had to scavenge for gear. It really upped the anti and really put the fear into the party. It set the tone for the whole game going forward.
I really like horror, and icy horror especially seems to click with me. So naturally I was pretty excited for Frostmaiden. But it’s just… it just doesn’t make sense. They spend a paragraph on Auril’s motives, but what she’s doing doesn’t follow from her motives. Most of the adventure you’re wandering around doing unrelated stuff. And then for some reason confronting Auril isn’t the end, and instead there’s an extra chapter to explore an old Netherese city. What? Why?
I ran Scarlet Citadel and found it to be really hard to wrangle, your criticism of it is spot on. Now, in the next campaign, I’m simply finding individual shorter modules and linking them to form one overall campaign in my homebrew setting, and my group is having a blast! Lesson for me is, smaller bits of quality, less focus on the overall run from level 1 to 20!
I actually really enjoy this content! Honestly, I just get so much value from listening to your shows while doing my prep, because your investment and joy in the game is infectious.
Love this video concept! Writing this before watching past the third minute... That's a great question. When I think of my favorite pre-published (as opposed to homebrew) campaigns, my criteria would be: 1) DM-friendly presentation- Is the campaign presented in a way that makes sense when preparing for sessions, or am I left wondering what plot points are most important for the PCs? Is it clear how the adventure should "flow" one session to the next, or is it easy to overlook necessary details? 2) Engaging- Does the campaign provide thematic and memorable moments that allow PCs to feel like rock stars and inspire cinematic encounters? 3) Adaptable- Does the campaign allow players to make important decisions about interacting with the setting in a meaningful way? Can the campaign be run multiple times with different groups who have different play styles and still feel satisfying, with meaningful differences upon each re-play? Curse of Strahd has easily been my favorite to run, followed by Wild Beyond the Witchlight and Call of the Netherdeep. The AL season 3 adventures (Rage of Demons) are also an incredibly fun series of adventures to run as a campaign-- I found them even more satisfying than Out of the Abyss (which was also a really fun adventure). My other favorite short-length AL adventures are the Best Friends Forever series and Cloud Giant's Bargain.
The first ever campaign I played and DM'd in any role playing game was Dragon of Icespire Peak. I agree with the lethality. There's a mission where the party encounters a manticore at lvl 1, and the book I feel like really wants you to push for a non-violent resolution, but I think a lot of early players(at least with my group, who were all first time players), can't resist the urge to fight everything remotely looking like a monster before they get bored with combat. I really liked the job board system though, it gave really clear objectives to new players and helped me stay organized as well since I could basically just run them as confined one shots and then just maintain the overarching connected events in the town. Overall I'd say it's a faaaairly good introduction to RPGs. I re-wrote the entire ending, because the stakes were way too low when fighting the dragon. I had the group go up to Ice-Spire Peak, but at the last moment, Cryovain decides to take vengeance on the town below. Our last session was by far the coolest(and not even in the book at all), which was a dragon attack on the town, where also some dragon worshipping cultists also decide to join in to potentially transform Cryovain from a young dragon, to a more ancient and powerful one. Good times.
I’m currently running Out of the Abyss, and am about 1/3 away through the second half. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the number of NPCs, as you mentioned. I actually stole the finale mechanic used in your Light of Xaryxis campaign for my own. For travel encounters when you have the army of NPCs, the Expedition NPCs will handle the fights unless the party specifically intervenes to take them on by themselves. When they do this, there is a chance of injury or death for their followers. I roll an appropriate number of percentile dice for a particular day’s encounter, and higher than 50% indicates there was an injury they must deal with, slowing travel unless they intervene, higher than 85% indicates there was a chance of death. Those randomly determined NPCs get advantage on a single death save if the party equipped a magic item to that character. They’ve enjoyed it so far.
At 25:21 - I love the 3 option job board, reminds me of anime fantasy settings and it's just convenient bc the players all know this. To me, it's fun meta. Another option I thought of is that when they complete the 2 and you change to 3 new ones, maybe the job they decided not to take returns but it's changed or escalated bc no one took the job
Personally afte running a 80 sessions Curse of Strahd campaign, I would rank it D as a resource book. I felt so confused and not helped by the book, I HIGHLY recommend DMs not run it until they are ready spend most of their time on altering / tweaking so many things. If i was in charge of updating the book I would likely remove 50%+ of it. Deathhouse was the best bit I think. I could chat for a few hours about all the things I felt missing in the book.
Is there an adventure in the Blades in the Dark core book? I don't remember one, but it's been a while since I peeked at it. If not, it seems odd to include it here as everything else contains an official adventure that is being ranked. Just wondering if it should be on this list at all.
Blades doesn't and can't really have pre-written adventures, as the events emerge from the player characters and their interactions with the various factions. It does have a different starting scenario depending on the Crew (type of gang) selected, but after that it's very much "play to see what happens". About the only prep I've ever done is to have a handful of job proposals to throw in as complications from a bad roll, or a few NPCs with an interesting agenda seeking help, revenge or somebody to take the fall. (I respectfully disagree with Mike's rating - I think Blades is the best player-centered system I've seen in 40 years of roleplaying - but it's his list!)
The game is meant to be heavily improvised. It's designed for the GM to roll for the core mission details and make it up on the spot. So you can't really do a campaign, and it doesn't really jive with the Sly Flourish prep method.
Remember, the rankings are based on his experience. Mike has a method, and you're absolutely right that I don't know that it really fits with his prep style. I think the only reason I was even able to approach running the game was because I watched Harper's actual play, and even then I don't think I did a great job of it. I'd put the game higher, but it rejects his experience with it.
The point I was trying to make is this...every other book on this list is an adventure or starter rules with adventure(s) included. BiTD is a core rule book without adventures. It doesn't really belong on this list if you're ranking campaigns. All of the other books provide campaign/adventure text. Blades doesn't. I respect Mike's experience with it and share many of the same opinions. It still seems odd to include a core book w/out adventures on a campaign ranking list.
I LOVE both of the adventures on F tier but I think it's cause I use them as a general reference and sourcebook for my campaigns. I haven't run an exact Elturel-Zariel storyline, but my players went to Avernus, and I used like 70-80% of the content in those chapters in some way. Same with Frostmaiden, I used it to build my own Icewind Dale and it was a blast! Used both adventures as I use Rising from the Last War honestly. On comparison, I felt miserable running the portions of Princes of the Apocalypse and Hoard of the Dragon Queen I ran, I wished I just had ran a homebrew adventure. Now I'm just stealing some things from those books but I'm not running them at all. Made Yan-C-Bin a cool villain in my world.
I always consider Storm Kings Thunder as the DMs DM adventure as it's so malleable and really strikes the balance between a liner adventure that provides a DM unlimited sandbox opportunity. It's the most heroic. When I look at what you like and having read your adventures I feel you really love your linear non jay quay Yam adventure which is perfectly fine just the observation I have made. Storms Kings Thunder is pretty much the pinnacle DMs adventure to run. Its not for novices or the DM conditioned to having it all on the page. Took me a while to go ah-ha so this is how its supposed to be run and its been my and my players favourite by a mile ever since - 8 years later. Thanks for sharing
I enjoyed running Storm Kings Thunder. My players spent four game sessions on a blurb about a location that took up half a page. It can also fit great as a tier above Waterdeep adventure. Start in Phandalin or Ice Spire then go to Dragon Heist, next up is storm then finish in Avernus. Four stories each suitable for one tier of play. Adjusting the encounter difficulty takes time but was probably needed based upon party size and mix.
As someone who ran SKT as my first GM experience, I agree. I actually chose it because Mike had some videos and an article of what to modify if you run it. The tips were incredibly useful, but as a brand new GM I found the many open-ended and dead-ended side quests to be a challenge to implement at the table. Still, we had a ton of fun. I might put it in A tier. But it could use a DM’s warning label. And I wish I’d known SCAG could be player-facing, otherwise I would have bought that to help acclimate the players.
I'm glad you champion campaign settings and compare them against adventures. They're really the only product I want. Making up adventures is fun. Making up setting dressing isn't (in my opinion). So setting books are perfect. Shoutout for Ravnica. Probably the most under appreciated WotC book.
Wow. Rime is what brought me into 5e and my players lived it. It gave me loads of room to homebrew and my players felt a lot of freedom of choice. It was lorw campaign setting then adventure, once you accept that you are going to spend a couple of years here, you'll be good. I did drop the last two chapters as they felt like a complely different adventure, but I'll likely do something with it as a epic movie finale.
I really liked Lost Mines of Phandelver as well, I have ran it for various groups maybe 6 times. I like the goblin ambush, because it makes folks take the danger more seriously. Its a very strong start to DnD. I bought the book too, and have also not run it, stopped DMing when Covid happened, had two kids, and have not got back into gaming yet.
I had a fantastic time running Rime of the Frostmaiden. I did have to do some work but no more than the usual for a WotC adventure. Sometimes my players grow tired of their characters and want to change, and the structure allows for that as you move through the major arcs of the campaign.
I use Swordcoast for making tieflings and half-elves cause it gives good options for making them that doesn't exist in the Handbook (like acknowledging tieflings aren't all 'pact babies' as was presented in 4th and shoehorned into 5th). It is a good book that people seem to want to forget (it was banned from Adventurer's League for a time as it was conspicuously absent from the allowed books list).
Amazing episode, very insightful. I really mean it. Here are my criteria (and I run mostly published adventures, with a lot of tweaking and homebrewing added on): 1. The high concept (to borrow film studio language). Does it have a simple but catchy premise to grab my imagination and my players'? 2. How easy it is to run thanks to the layout, advice to DMs, summaries, and cross-referencing of material? 3. Focus on the player characters. Is this campaign focusing more on the NPCs (looking at you Shadow of the Dragonqueen and Turn of Fortune's Wheel) or is it focusing on who the PCs are and what they can do? I want the latter because it always feels more fun and more meaningful. 4. Value outside of the story. Can I strip this for parts? Can I use the maps, locations, adventure seeds, new monsters, etc., in other games? If yes, I will use it. 5. Maps and illustrations. I'm not much of a visual person, so the more and better maps and illustrations there are, the easier I find it in play.
We played over 200 sessions of Rime. This is such an incredible adventure if you use the community stuff like you did for a bunch of others you rated highly. Use it as the bones for your own imagine and it is so very fertile. I loved Witchlight the same way, but it has even less to work with.
After getting my first "real" D&D group together I thought we needed something epic and Rime of the Frostmaiden seemed to fit the bill. But playing only once a month smacked headfirst into a game with two much content and weird flow. It's taught me to be a scrappy, self-reliant GM but that's precisely because of Mike's points. Looking for RotFM on youtube is how I found Sly Flourish and Mike's RPG prep sessions in the first place, so hey, that's a good thing in my book.
Rime of the Frostmaiden broke me in so many ways. I ended up doing so many additions and rewrites that I deserve a writing credit. I lost faith in published adventures as a whole, especially WOTC ones; lost faith in WOTC and got jaded with d&d 5e in general. It looked so cool at first glance but it fought me every single step of the way. Didn't help that this was my first long campaign adventure. The silver lining is that I got a lot more confident as a DM. Turns out I do know better than publishers and the stuff I come up with is better than many published stuff. I'm willing to run published adventures or use them for parts. But I'll never run an adventure before I read the whole thing.
Currently in the midst and have created an entirely different story line and although I have used several of the quests in there, I've brought a few others over such as the Snow Stalkers (Arcane Library). A ton of work.
I am shifting towards OSR material because the layout and presentation of the information for the dm is so much more usable on the table. I have really been itching to run 'The secret of the black crag' as well as 'the dark of hot springs island'
I'm actually trying to create a setting/adventure for the first time, and this was very helpful in pointing out some potential mistakes. Some things I already agree about, such as the yam structure and ensuring motivation to take the hooks for the main conflict, but I worry that I have too many moving parts for DM comfort. The idea is that there is a hidden doomsday clock for the BBEG, and as players choose which routes to take and how to resolve conflicts they encounter, conditions and NPCs in other locations begin to change. This isn't meant to be obvious to the player at first, but at some point they will realize they may have wasted time or missed opportunities by making the choices they did. I hope this allows for unique and even replayable campaigns, even with the same setting and villain. In short, it takes time to travel between locations. As time progresses, triggers will happen in the background, and certain events will progress the subplots even without player interaction, so that when they do reach those locations the options or enemies have changed. There are about half a dozen locations. Does this sound like too much?
I'm still a beginner DM and I'm only running my 2nd campaign but I chose both based on them having "dragon" in their name - Tyranny of Dragons, and Odyssey of the Dragonlords. ToD is how I found Mike in the first place!
I was a fan of Frostmaiden. Yes, it had it issues, like the ten-towns bloat and under/over powered monsters, but a lot of the mini-adventures in it were genuinely fun and it’s designed in a way where you can skip the adventures you don’t want to play. I found the frost island and the underground city to be particularly exciting. It a B tier to me.
I'm so pleased Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands is on your S tier. I ran it in my first 1e PF campaign where I used it to follow up Retribution (also by Raging Swan) and it was amazing. I've recently bought the new OSR version to run with OSE and as you say the new stuff is awesome.
I found Curse of Strahd to be so unwieldy and overcomplicated. I was able to do cool stuff once I gave up and ran it how I wanted, but trying to use it as a reference for anything was a huge struggle. So many important details buried in walls of text.
I run games for duets to 4 players in 2hr sessions. My criteria are that (1) games need to be memorable week to week and not arc to arc, (2) worlds need to feel lived-in with scenery to chew, (3) storylines need flexibility, and (4) books need solid editing . My tiering end up similar to yours. My players seem to respond to having a home base mechanic or a really tight episodic structure. The essentials/starter sets, Eberron, and Strahd fit the bill here. The Magic sets (Ravnica, Strixhaven, and Theros) are great setting books, but I wish Strixhaven had another round of play testing and workshopping. Amen to Sword Coast Adventures Guide for players. With it, I thought WotC was going to start a line of player resources like 2e. Maybe they’ll do that with D&D 2024.
5:52 your statement helped me clear up some stuff I've been thinking about in creating a game. I realized that I tend to like settings over an actual published adventure. Give me the setting and lore and some potential hooks and I can come up with an adventure. And if done a certain way, Lazy DM style for instance, it shouldn't be too difficult to do(?). Since LDM and the like are providing a template for that type of thing.
Hoard of the dragon queen is how I found you and I found it great thanks to your advice - wish you had made the same guide for Shadow of the Dragon Queen!
I would personally rather have an adventure than a campaign setting. I can pretty easily come up with cool worldbuilding, especially if I incorporate ideas from whatever my PCs want to play; I really struggle with writing a compelling adventure outline, and inventing story beats that flow logically into an grand epic campaign.
I was actually thinking about Tomb of Annihilation as my next campaign, I might review some of your S tier again. I 100% agree with your idea that we are paying someone else to do the work for us. This is a major factor in choosing a campaign for me. I am currently loving curse of Strahd. Sometimes I make a lot of changes, but it runs fine without them, which allows me to relax a bit as the DM.
Mike, thanks for making this video. It is top tier for sure. You said, I wish I had listened to my gut, and said you know what I'm going to pass on it. But usually for the sake of popularity, I ran it anyway and then sometimes it was a mistake." What adventures were those? Whose popularity (players or community)? I would love to hear more about this. I would also love more info on how to use campaign settings. I read them and take an idea or two out, but I never put it all together. I just never understood how to use that to create your adventures. I would love to see you do a deep dive and demonstrate how to do this. Lastly, do you run mega dungeons? Which would you recommend? Would love to see you do a video on this. Storm Kings Thunder ~ you said C tier but then placed it in B tier. Never mind, you changed your mind and said B tier. I like what you said at the end (around 51:50) "Production quality doesn't matter near as much to me as product design. I feel that way and have felt that way especially when talking about video games. I loved Asheron's Call because you built the character the way you wanted them to be. You spent points to buy skills that you wanted. Sure, you did not get every single skill that you wanted but that is what made it great, characters were not the same (as much as they could be in a mmorpg. Basically, not cookie cutter unless you wanted to follow a build that someone made popular). Later, my friend would not play WOW because it looked cartoony and childish. I thought the game play was better than the mmorpg they were playing (pretty sure it was guild wars 2). I tried it but all we did was get on a boat, die, and run back to the boat to do it again. I have no idea why, or how anyone would think that would be fun. I have no idea what I like as an adventure. I struggle trying to run premade adventures. Although lost mines of Phandelver was fun for me and my players (the green dragon was difficult for me to run). Basically I just run a made up adventure where they go to a dungeon I created, which I don't feel I am good at making, to find loot there. Or someone hires them to get something/explore something/or rescue someone.
Just like you think of Storm King's Thunder as a campaign setting, you should think of Rime of the Frostmaiden as a campaign setting. Then it works great! The issue with with a lot of the adventures and overarching story, which many DMs make significant changes to.
I guess it depends on what I’m looking for at the time. If I want material to populate a sandbox world, my efforts are focused on creating the world and it’s nice to have little adventures to populate it. However, if I want to run a campaign that has more of a focused story, I think one of the biggest hurdles for me is when there is no larger world or context for this adventure to take place in. I don’t want to make up all of the trivial details, generate a bunch of towns and NPCs, what I want to do is make adventures. You’ll never write an adventure that works for every group of players so I also want there to be flexibility in the narrative and difficulty so that it doesn’t totally derail if I let my players guide the story. Another thing I want is to have my characters backstories rooted in the world and allow them to embark on personal side quests. A lot of adventures don’t have the freedom to do that because there’s no context to the larger world that isn’t directly explored during the adventure, time pressure to keep the narrative moving, or the inability to allow them to level up doing quests that aren’t part of the main story unless you want to rework every encounter. I’m with you on preferring a setting with adventure hook ideas for what characters can get up to in this world. I like being presented with a rich and well fleshed out group of factions with moving pieces so the world changes regardless of the players actions as the campaign continues. I want to know what is the central conflict of the world and what are the different perspectives and information so players can build rich well thought out characters who are well suited for the campaign. I like to have set piece battle maps for the most important locations players will probably visit as well as stat blocks for unique villains. I like to have unique options or restrictions for campaigns so that they feel unique and it brings the setting and campaign themes to life. Part of my fun as a DM is the opportunity to be creative, but the part I enjoy creating is what happens next, not the whole world around the story. If the adventure does all the work for me, that’s just as boring for me to run as it is for my players to play.
Great video. My criteria is pretty flexible. 1) does it have a map or something else I can give the players at the end. I enjoy giving the players souvenirs from the various sites explored and campaigns undertaken. 2) Can I run it with multiple systems? 3) All modules are incomplete and it's important for me to be able to quickly spot gaps so i can figure out if these are the types of gaps I enjoy filling in.
Really interesting that you don't really mention one thing I look for: compelling NPCs. Given how unexpected PC behaviour is going to be, I need to have a good handle on who the NPCs are to be able to improvise their reactions. Similarly, I actually find 'empty' or randomly generated settings like OSR more difficult to run than coherent worlds since the latter have a logic that I can riff off (especially if the setting is pseudo-historical and I can use my knowledge RL history or historical fiction tropes to expand a scene on the fly). I also notice that your D-tier seems to be, "Good, but I found it really hard work", which is fair enough. You were really explicit about the fact that you were talking about your own needs rather than everyone's or even your players', so I don't think you need to feel bad about putting BitD so low down.
I can't understand the hate towards Rime of the frostmaiden. Its my favorite campaign so far as a player. The ten towns open world was really fun ! Especially compared to Rise of Tiamat where you have the most unbalanced encounters.
I’m running Oracle of War, and I’ve noticed my evaluation of how much the players will like the adventure is often off - the ones I think are great, they find ho-hum. The ones I think are too basic, they rave about. It’s having me rethink a lot of things.
Have you run through any of the Adventurers' League campaigns? Dreams of the Red Wizards 9-20 is IMO top tier and I've run it for 3 tables, Oracle of War 1-20 is awesome, took 3 years to play through it at home.
For death house I started at level 1 but at the half way point just before stuff gets dangerous I leveled them to 2 which of course made them paranoid.
I would love to hear from other DMs about the ranking of their campaigns. I know Shea just wants people to list their criteria, but I would find it valuable to learn what other DMs have experienced running full-blown campaigns, even their homebrew campaigns. What worked, what didn't, and why? So much criticism of RPG products happens before the would-be critic has even tried out the product. I'm curious.
I'm a bit past half way through DMing Out of the Abyss. The first half seems interesting and fun to run. The least half feels a bit shoehorned. My players cared about escaping the Underdark. They're not really interested in returning to fight the demons.
To be honest - I've been playing D&D for almost 9 years now and I hate running written adventures. Even reading them often doesn't give me a feeling of "ow, that would be great to DM". If anything, I'd have enjoy more a sort of toolbox to create my own adventure based on some ideas and pieces of design rather than a whole adventure. Looking at adventures that I've played as a player - namely Avernus - I lost at least a few times an interested and idea why we (as players) do what is design for as to do. Some elements of adventures are overdesign - descriptions, high details of every room - and others, like goals, motivations, story beats are underdeveloped. And I would say creating a description is much easier for any DM than figuring our how to roleplay a certain major NPC or how to design storybeats .
I noticed there wasn’t any Paizo products up there, which I find strange since their flag ship product is Adventure Paths. Does the mechanical conversion to 5e take too much work for the stories to be worth stealing?
There are significantly more players than DMs out there, and players generally get excited for new adventures, while DMs look forward to new campaign settings. Consequently, adventures are more popular than campaign settings, regardless of their quality. Another important aspect is that with a good DM, players do not experience something like a 'bad' campaign. They have fun and may not even realize the extent of the DM's efforts. They simply may not recognize if an adventure is bad or poorly designed. It's the DM's responsibility to make it engaging and enjoyable. For example, my players loved Descent into Avernus after I implemented some of Mike's advice and made certain changes to it. It was quite a burden for me to prepare and run. Conversely, they didn't enjoy WBTW as much, even though it was a well-crafted adventure that required minimal tinkering.
I love this video. I noticed that the conclusion is kind of lining up with Matt Colville's conclusion about shorter adventures being better... even though you made a whole video disagreeing with him. Your conclusion in this video was that you tend to value campaign settings and shorter adventures, and that when you run bigger campaigns, you tend to run them more as campaign settings or tool sets. I have run a few of the larger book campaigns now, and when I saw Matt's video, it helped me see what I didn't like about running them. So despite your disagreements with him, I actually get a similar takeaway from both of you.
I'm so curious to know what makes CoS a great "yam" shaped adventure while RotFM is F tier. Is it just because of the odd difficulty issues between level 1 and Aurel being CR10? Too fat a "yam" once the story gets going with not enough guidance on how to run it? I get the impression that you almost didn't want to like it from your initial skim through?
I want to like every adventure I run. I want to like *all* adventures. Here’s more of my thoughts: Rime of the Frostmaiden Campaign Retrospective - Tips, Experiences, Boss Battles, and One Year Later ruclips.net/video/oxcxb07RiU0/видео.html
From the games the campaigns I have run, I like more sandbox campaigns. Curse of Strad, Dragon of Icespirepeak and a mix of Candlekeep Mysteries with homebrew. My players or I did not like the super linear Dragonlance adventure.
I’m curious what other people in the comments think about Stormwreck Isle? I’ve never actually played or ran it myself, and for full disclosure I haven’t run very many pre-written adventures, but I read all the way through that adventure last year and thought it read terribly. I’m planning to run a game soon for my younger siblings. (11 and 12) And wanted a couple to look at and choose between.
As a first time DM running Rime of the Frostmaiden, I enjoy hearing your insight into the module. My players and myself are absolutely loving it so far but like you said, it has taken a lot of work. I am curious though, are there any adventures that are very cleanly and well written that I can look at for contrast? Particularly interested in running an old school module from a previous edition
Dungeons and Dragons works best with a more linear campaign because as was stated the game balance is off. D&D is focused on combat more so than many other games and was built with an idea the player characters get stronger to take on tougher creatures. So a linear campaign works very well for that as opposed to an open ended campaign. Opened campaigns either end up with players either running into combat that is way too difficult or way too easy. I highly recommend GMs understand the ways their game excel. It makes being a GM easier if you play into the strengths of your game.
Based on the ranking here, I am surprised that usability is not only a significant criteria in this ranking, but was also the only criteria that was really well defined. Wotc product design in this respect is so poor, until their design approach fundamentally changes I do not think I could justify placing any of their existing products I have read higher than a C. If they released a product with other criteria (e.g. innovation, creativity, evocative fiction and content etc.) that did an *extreme* amount of heavy lifting, maybe I could warrant a B. Kesley's work was rated very highly here, there's heaps more products in the OSR space out there that are also designed with a strong focus on providing highly gameable and usuable content . I am sure there are other styles of play and products, especially in the indy space, where this is also true.
4:50 , I would say I regret running Strixhaven. Me and players were really interesting it. I had two groups, so 2 weekly games. And the book just falls flat. But it gives me an idea to add things to it and put that on reddit or in RUclips video for others to get more out of it.
@@christopherw1509 amazing you got 2 years with it before that happened. For me it seemed thin right away. Two years and haven't finished the campaign yet?
@@sqoody7invegas625 We play every other week and we've had some major pauses as a player had a baby and so did I! I've basically used it as a setting to run my own homebrew adventure, which I'm also regretting. I wanted something more epic with the Oriq more directly involved, which has lent itself to a longer campaign. Now I wish I had just gone with the relatively short adventure in the book.
So what do the A and S tier adventures have in common? Ease of use? I LOVED running FrostMaiden. I will defend FrostMaiden. I did make a lot of changes though. As a SANDBOX Point Crawl region with 2 major events that you have to lead the people to with breadcrumbs in the rest... Here's what I think. If we re-Formatted this to a Hex Crawl in the style of the Dark of Hot Springs Island, I think that would fix a lot of people's complaints with this module. Also, the personal test (in Auril's Abode) that wasn't done well. I built that up and when we got there, it didn't really deliver.
It’s kind of weird to me that you felt that way about Rime of the Frostmaiden and witch light. I felt the exact opposite. I enjoyed running Rime. I felt I could run rime the way I enjoy, they didn’t struggle to get into the campaign or follow the story. When I ran Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I was lost and confused on where to drive the story. Might just be me, but I personally would have swapped those 2. I’m presently running Descent too 😂
Honestly I couldn't disagree more with you ranking, to the point that Descent into Avernus is my favorite, with Wild beyond the Witchlight being the worst. I LOVED the moral dilemas of Avernus, that was the whole point of the adventure for me. Specially because the characters were evil aligned and their morals improved by their experience, it was a story of redemption. Wild beyond the witchlight throws random things at the wall, including characters out of nothing at the end of the adventure instead of focusing on the hags as the main villain
I want a complete campaign. If I have to write/create a ton of content, it's a flop imo. However, if a complete product is provided, I can edit it however I need. It's incredibly disappointing when the authors sell a bunch of supplemental material on another website because they know their product isn't finished. That's not to be confused with real supplements such as price lists, fair activities, rollable tables, etc. A toc and index are a must. And I want to know the key npc's, plot points, locations, and items upfront. Imo surprises for the DM should come from the players or fluid gameplay, not the content itself.
I am fine with adventure books, but the adventure books should also be a campaign setting too. Cut some of the middle junk adventures, expect gms to fill and provide setting information with those pages.
Love you Mike and everything you do, but this video is so difficult to watch with so many midroll ads. I'm 15 minutes in and already 6 Ads! I probably won't get to finish this video unfortunately. I'm not blaming you, I know it's youtube ridiculous ad policy.
I would love to hear about you playing in a Blades in the Dark campaign. And it's totally fine if you don't like it. That game is dripping in flavor and I love it. But like many odd flavors you shouldn't have to love.
This is one of your best episodes, full stop. The commentary on the requirements for good module design and you highlighting how shorter, and one-person made content to be able to stand on their legs alongside the big production products was INCREDIBLE and extremely motivating for a lot of people out there who want to get into this either as a hobby or professional. Great stuff, loved it.
I second this! Yes, it’s very inspiring to think that as a solo designer I could find success bringing something to market and might even have a better chance than an overproduced designed by committee product. As an artist and writer it can be daunting and overwhelming to think of the competition and perceived challenges, and the imagination can be a terrible thing. This really puts things in perspective. Keep it clear, short, leaning towards adventure based vs campaign setting content, and yam shaped. These are helpful and flexible boundaries.
I want to tell you that you adding chapter links in the dooble dee doo makes it a lot easier to rewatch your videos.
As a patreon of sly flourish, not only do I get a warm and fuzzy feeling whenever I hear the thanks in a video, I also think that the money I spend on it is some of the best value I have gotten so far, regarding TTRPGs.
Bless you!
This blessing grants you a d4 to add to an attack or saving throw.
I think Curse of Strahd splits the difference between presenting an amazing reasonably digestible campaign setting and gives a flexible idea for a campaign to run in it. It looks like Monty and Kelly took this approach with Dungeons of Drakkenhiem too!
"Princes of the Apocalypse - It's not the end of the world" - Mike Shea
😄
I've found out if Numenera/Cypher is a gamer's first ttrpg, they take to like a fish to water.
Ironically, it's the players who are very set in their expectations of how a ttrpg goes that get tripped up and frustrated. The tighter they hold onto how they *think* an rpg should run, the longer it takes them to wrap their head around a fantastic game.
I played both LMoP and DoIP. The small setting of Phandalin made it really easy for my DMs to instill a sense of place and belonging for me as a player. As a DM, I really loved the small setting of Deep Delver's Enclave, in Ruins of the Grendleroot. When you keep interacting with the same small town NPCs, you build a sense of community. In a big travel adventure, this doesn't happen. As a DM involved in a big travel campaign right now, I am exhausted because of all the NPCs and locations I make up and abandon after 1-2 sessions. Lots of work, low payoff.
This video is tremendously useful for me because I find it very hard to figure out if an adventure works for me until I've read almost the whole thing, and online reviews tend to not be helpful since they usually focus more on their highly specific experiences running the adventure than in the written material
As someone who is prepping Rime of the Frostmaiden to be there next campaign your videos still got me excited to try it an helped with my prep!
Everything in your S tier are adventures run in regional areas with minimal long distance travelling. Maybe Eberron is an exception but it shifted from Sharn to The Mournland, both feel regionally based to me. Nice focused campaigns without the bloat of going too wide with adventures like the lower ranked ones.
That's because D&D have no system support for long distance travel. You either pack it with smaller adventures or make a montage description that is most likely boring for players. Any long travel falls apart. Tomb of Annihilation tried to introduce hexcrawl but even that had some issues.
Happy to see Shadow of the Demon lord on here. Also your S-tier picks are all phenomenal choices and definitely some of the most fun I've had DM-ing or playing in!! Great commentary on them as well.
An excellent video - very helpful. Mike is not the only D&D/RPG pundit that I watch, but he sure is the best.
I run very differently than Mike but I like this list.
My Criteria
1) Battlemaps. I don’t run theater of the mind so I need a battle map for EVERY fight
2) Monsters. My players are power gamers and I need monsters that are challenging and interesting. Bags of HP drive me nuts.
3) To the point. I wanna be able to read it once and get a good idea of the exciting stuff.
Personally, what I want out of an adventure/campaign book is a scaffold of locations, quests, NPCs, and relevant setting details, presented in a way that is sensibly organized. These things don't have to be fleshed out in incredible detail. I can create or expand on individual encounters, give NPCs depth, add flavor to environments, and do some doctoring of story or plot details, but I always want to the adventure to provide something concrete that I can put in front of my players without me having to make it up out of whole cloth.
When it comes to locations, maps are important. I want a detailed map of any geography or adventure site the players visit, every town or city the players are like to use as a base or adventure in, and battle maps for any locations of set-piece encounters, or other unique locations that the adventure describes. I know that I can source maps online or create my own rough maps, but that's not fun for me, and it's not what I want to spend my time doing.
And if I purchase the adventure on a virtual tabletop site, I want the technical implementation of those maps to be correct and usable (Out of the Abyss on Roll20 is horrible in this regard; the travel map is hard to interpret, and the other maps are incorrectly scaled).
It doesn't bother me so much if the published material lacks a strong hook for the PCs, because that's usually fairly easy to remedy, and because I usually want to put some work into personalizing that aspect of the adventure anyway.
Pure campaign setting books don't appeal to me. I don't really have the patience anymore to read them cover to cover, and already have plenty of established, high-quality campaign settings to choose from.
Re: Double-near, I immediately thought of how 13th Age does abstracted distances- they use engaged (melee), close (within a move), near (takes two moves) and far (further but in sight). So I wondered why doesn't SD do this since they have double-near?
It's been a while since I ran 13A so I went to double-check my memory and WHOOPS! In reality, *13A only has Engaged, Nearby, and Far!*
At some point in my memory I made up a fourth distance!
Actually, I kind of love your 4 distance breakdown! I think it makes great sense for action economy when not using squares.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the idea of you being "happier with more focused campaign settings, than big, story-focused campaign adventures." I feel there's a lot to explore with this topic. And, as much as I'm inclined to agree with you, sales seem to reflect the opposite in the community. Thoughts on why?
This may help: slyflourish.com/homebrew_adventures_in_published_settings.html
@@SlyFlourish I'll check it out, thanks! :)
My best guess is a combination of factors. Many GMs are new or looking to save time.
Players know enough from the back of the book to create a fitting backstory.
Some of the campaign settings weren't done well.
Existing settings have vast quantities of lore online without the need to create something new.
6:00, "wotc making too much adventures and not enough source books", amen brother! My weekly games are Wildemount, Taldorei and this week I start Heckna. I much prefer taking any of the maps that I got from a Patreon subscription and if it inspires me be able to plug it into my game and create a reason of why we're going to that map.
oh seeing someone running heckna out in the wild! Im to afraid of clowns so i cant play or run it but i read it as I really enjoy that book in how it structures the adventure.
Thanks Mike. This is what we need - an updated review of D&D adventures by someone who's actually run them. Many thanks. FYI - Dungeons of Drakkenheim is the best adventure I've run - better than Curse of Strahd.
It's kind of funny, I just rewatched your hardback adventure ranking just earlier today
Great commentary. It helped me realize that personally, I'm more willing to forgive needing to do more work to fix a book if I'm extremely interested in the setting/theme. There's a correlation there for sure.
When I did death house, I had the party appear naked with no gear and they had to scavenge for gear. It really upped the anti and really put the fear into the party. It set the tone for the whole game going forward.
I really like horror, and icy horror especially seems to click with me. So naturally I was pretty excited for Frostmaiden. But it’s just… it just doesn’t make sense. They spend a paragraph on Auril’s motives, but what she’s doing doesn’t follow from her motives. Most of the adventure you’re wandering around doing unrelated stuff. And then for some reason confronting Auril isn’t the end, and instead there’s an extra chapter to explore an old Netherese city. What? Why?
I ran Scarlet Citadel and found it to be really hard to wrangle, your criticism of it is spot on. Now, in the next campaign, I’m simply finding individual shorter modules and linking them to form one overall campaign in my homebrew setting, and my group is having a blast! Lesson for me is, smaller bits of quality, less focus on the overall run from level 1 to 20!
Amazing video Mike, thanks for sharing your experiences with such valuable commentary!
I actually really enjoy this content! Honestly, I just get so much value from listening to your shows while doing my prep, because your investment and joy in the game is infectious.
Love this video concept! Writing this before watching past the third minute... That's a great question. When I think of my favorite pre-published (as opposed to homebrew) campaigns, my criteria would be:
1) DM-friendly presentation- Is the campaign presented in a way that makes sense when preparing for sessions, or am I left wondering what plot points are most important for the PCs? Is it clear how the adventure should "flow" one session to the next, or is it easy to overlook necessary details?
2) Engaging- Does the campaign provide thematic and memorable moments that allow PCs to feel like rock stars and inspire cinematic encounters?
3) Adaptable- Does the campaign allow players to make important decisions about interacting with the setting in a meaningful way? Can the campaign be run multiple times with different groups who have different play styles and still feel satisfying, with meaningful differences upon each re-play?
Curse of Strahd has easily been my favorite to run, followed by Wild Beyond the Witchlight and Call of the Netherdeep. The AL season 3 adventures (Rage of Demons) are also an incredibly fun series of adventures to run as a campaign-- I found them even more satisfying than Out of the Abyss (which was also a really fun adventure). My other favorite short-length AL adventures are the Best Friends Forever series and Cloud Giant's Bargain.
The first ever campaign I played and DM'd in any role playing game was Dragon of Icespire Peak. I agree with the lethality. There's a mission where the party encounters a manticore at lvl 1, and the book I feel like really wants you to push for a non-violent resolution, but I think a lot of early players(at least with my group, who were all first time players), can't resist the urge to fight everything remotely looking like a monster before they get bored with combat.
I really liked the job board system though, it gave really clear objectives to new players and helped me stay organized as well since I could basically just run them as confined one shots and then just maintain the overarching connected events in the town.
Overall I'd say it's a faaaairly good introduction to RPGs. I re-wrote the entire ending, because the stakes were way too low when fighting the dragon. I had the group go up to Ice-Spire Peak, but at the last moment, Cryovain decides to take vengeance on the town below. Our last session was by far the coolest(and not even in the book at all), which was a dragon attack on the town, where also some dragon worshipping cultists also decide to join in to potentially transform Cryovain from a young dragon, to a more ancient and powerful one. Good times.
I’m currently running Out of the Abyss, and am about 1/3 away through the second half. I’ve heard a lot of complaints about the number of NPCs, as you mentioned. I actually stole the finale mechanic used in your Light of Xaryxis campaign for my own. For travel encounters when you have the army of NPCs, the Expedition NPCs will handle the fights unless the party specifically intervenes to take them on by themselves. When they do this, there is a chance of injury or death for their followers. I roll an appropriate number of percentile dice for a particular day’s encounter, and higher than 50% indicates there was an injury they must deal with, slowing travel unless they intervene, higher than 85% indicates there was a chance of death. Those randomly determined NPCs get advantage on a single death save if the party equipped a magic item to that character. They’ve enjoyed it so far.
At 25:21 - I love the 3 option job board, reminds me of anime fantasy settings and it's just convenient bc the players all know this. To me, it's fun meta. Another option I thought of is that when they complete the 2 and you change to 3 new ones, maybe the job they decided not to take returns but it's changed or escalated bc no one took the job
Personally afte running a 80 sessions Curse of Strahd campaign, I would rank it D as a resource book.
I felt so confused and not helped by the book, I HIGHLY recommend DMs not run it until they are ready spend most of their time on altering / tweaking so many things. If i was in charge of updating the book I would likely remove 50%+ of it. Deathhouse was the best bit I think. I could chat for a few hours about all the things I felt missing in the book.
Love this. Plan to use it as a conversation starter/Nexus of argument with my weekly group 👍
Is there an adventure in the Blades in the Dark core book? I don't remember one, but it's been a while since I peeked at it. If not, it seems odd to include it here as everything else contains an official adventure that is being ranked. Just wondering if it should be on this list at all.
Blades doesn't and can't really have pre-written adventures, as the events emerge from the player characters and their interactions with the various factions. It does have a different starting scenario depending on the Crew (type of gang) selected, but after that it's very much "play to see what happens". About the only prep I've ever done is to have a handful of job proposals to throw in as complications from a bad roll, or a few NPCs with an interesting agenda seeking help, revenge or somebody to take the fall.
(I respectfully disagree with Mike's rating - I think Blades is the best player-centered system I've seen in 40 years of roleplaying - but it's his list!)
The game is meant to be heavily improvised. It's designed for the GM to roll for the core mission details and make it up on the spot. So you can't really do a campaign, and it doesn't really jive with the Sly Flourish prep method.
Remember, the rankings are based on his experience. Mike has a method, and you're absolutely right that I don't know that it really fits with his prep style. I think the only reason I was even able to approach running the game was because I watched Harper's actual play, and even then I don't think I did a great job of it. I'd put the game higher, but it rejects his experience with it.
The point I was trying to make is this...every other book on this list is an adventure or starter rules with adventure(s) included. BiTD is a core rule book without adventures. It doesn't really belong on this list if you're ranking campaigns. All of the other books provide campaign/adventure text. Blades doesn't. I respect Mike's experience with it and share many of the same opinions. It still seems odd to include a core book w/out adventures on a campaign ranking list.
Such a helpful topic, thanks for continual source of GM Tools!
I LOVE both of the adventures on F tier but I think it's cause I use them as a general reference and sourcebook for my campaigns. I haven't run an exact Elturel-Zariel storyline, but my players went to Avernus, and I used like 70-80% of the content in those chapters in some way. Same with Frostmaiden, I used it to build my own Icewind Dale and it was a blast! Used both adventures as I use Rising from the Last War honestly. On comparison, I felt miserable running the portions of Princes of the Apocalypse and Hoard of the Dragon Queen I ran, I wished I just had ran a homebrew adventure. Now I'm just stealing some things from those books but I'm not running them at all. Made Yan-C-Bin a cool villain in my world.
I always consider Storm Kings Thunder as the DMs DM adventure as it's so malleable and really strikes the balance between a liner adventure that provides a DM unlimited sandbox opportunity. It's the most heroic.
When I look at what you like and having read your adventures I feel you really love your linear non jay quay Yam adventure which is perfectly fine just the observation I have made.
Storms Kings Thunder is pretty much the pinnacle DMs adventure to run. Its not for novices or the DM conditioned to having it all on the page. Took me a while to go ah-ha so this is how its supposed to be run and its been my and my players favourite by a mile ever since - 8 years later.
Thanks for sharing
I enjoyed running Storm Kings Thunder. My players spent four game sessions on a blurb about a location that took up half a page. It can also fit great as a tier above Waterdeep adventure.
Start in Phandalin or Ice Spire then go to Dragon Heist, next up is storm then finish in Avernus.
Four stories each suitable for one tier of play. Adjusting the encounter difficulty takes time but was probably needed based upon party size and mix.
@pheralanpathfinder4897 Glad you all enjoyed it. It's chock full of material for a custom journey.
As someone who ran SKT as my first GM experience, I agree. I actually chose it because Mike had some videos and an article of what to modify if you run it. The tips were incredibly useful, but as a brand new GM I found the many open-ended and dead-ended side quests to be a challenge to implement at the table.
Still, we had a ton of fun. I might put it in A tier. But it could use a DM’s warning label. And I wish I’d known SCAG could be player-facing, otherwise I would have bought that to help acclimate the players.
This is great and largely aligns with my thoughts. Thanks!
I'm glad you champion campaign settings and compare them against adventures. They're really the only product I want. Making up adventures is fun. Making up setting dressing isn't (in my opinion). So setting books are perfect. Shoutout for Ravnica. Probably the most under appreciated WotC book.
Wow. Rime is what brought me into 5e and my players lived it. It gave me loads of room to homebrew and my players felt a lot of freedom of choice. It was lorw campaign setting then adventure, once you accept that you are going to spend a couple of years here, you'll be good.
I did drop the last two chapters as they felt like a complely different adventure, but I'll likely do something with it as a epic movie finale.
I really liked Lost Mines of Phandelver as well, I have ran it for various groups maybe 6 times. I like the goblin ambush, because it makes folks take the danger more seriously. Its a very strong start to DnD. I bought the book too, and have also not run it, stopped DMing when Covid happened, had two kids, and have not got back into gaming yet.
I had a fantastic time running Rime of the Frostmaiden. I did have to do some work but no more than the usual for a WotC adventure. Sometimes my players grow tired of their characters and want to change, and the structure allows for that as you move through the major arcs of the campaign.
I use Swordcoast for making tieflings and half-elves cause it gives good options for making them that doesn't exist in the Handbook (like acknowledging tieflings aren't all 'pact babies' as was presented in 4th and shoehorned into 5th). It is a good book that people seem to want to forget (it was banned from Adventurer's League for a time as it was conspicuously absent from the allowed books list).
Amazing episode, very insightful. I really mean it.
Here are my criteria (and I run mostly published adventures, with a lot of tweaking and homebrewing added on):
1. The high concept (to borrow film studio language). Does it have a simple but catchy premise to grab my imagination and my players'?
2. How easy it is to run thanks to the layout, advice to DMs, summaries, and cross-referencing of material?
3. Focus on the player characters. Is this campaign focusing more on the NPCs (looking at you Shadow of the Dragonqueen and Turn of Fortune's Wheel) or is it focusing on who the PCs are and what they can do? I want the latter because it always feels more fun and more meaningful.
4. Value outside of the story. Can I strip this for parts? Can I use the maps, locations, adventure seeds, new monsters, etc., in other games? If yes, I will use it.
5. Maps and illustrations. I'm not much of a visual person, so the more and better maps and illustrations there are, the easier I find it in play.
We played over 200 sessions of Rime. This is such an incredible adventure if you use the community stuff like you did for a bunch of others you rated highly. Use it as the bones for your own imagine and it is so very fertile. I loved Witchlight the same way, but it has even less to work with.
After getting my first "real" D&D group together I thought we needed something epic and Rime of the Frostmaiden seemed to fit the bill. But playing only once a month smacked headfirst into a game with two much content and weird flow. It's taught me to be a scrappy, self-reliant GM but that's precisely because of Mike's points. Looking for RotFM on youtube is how I found Sly Flourish and Mike's RPG prep sessions in the first place, so hey, that's a good thing in my book.
Rime of the Frostmaiden broke me in so many ways. I ended up doing so many additions and rewrites that I deserve a writing credit. I lost faith in published adventures as a whole, especially WOTC ones; lost faith in WOTC and got jaded with d&d 5e in general. It looked so cool at first glance but it fought me every single step of the way. Didn't help that this was my first long campaign adventure.
The silver lining is that I got a lot more confident as a DM. Turns out I do know better than publishers and the stuff I come up with is better than many published stuff. I'm willing to run published adventures or use them for parts. But I'll never run an adventure before I read the whole thing.
Currently in the midst and have created an entirely different story line and although I have used several of the quests in there, I've brought a few others over such as the Snow Stalkers (Arcane Library). A ton of work.
Excellent review! Thanks. I agree i need the campaign setting to not give me too much work - the whole point otherwise i just improv :D
I am shifting towards OSR material because the layout and presentation of the information for the dm is so much more usable on the table. I have really been itching to run 'The secret of the black crag' as well as 'the dark of hot springs island'
I'm actually trying to create a setting/adventure for the first time, and this was very helpful in pointing out some potential mistakes. Some things I already agree about, such as the yam structure and ensuring motivation to take the hooks for the main conflict, but I worry that I have too many moving parts for DM comfort. The idea is that there is a hidden doomsday clock for the BBEG, and as players choose which routes to take and how to resolve conflicts they encounter, conditions and NPCs in other locations begin to change. This isn't meant to be obvious to the player at first, but at some point they will realize they may have wasted time or missed opportunities by making the choices they did. I hope this allows for unique and even replayable campaigns, even with the same setting and villain.
In short, it takes time to travel between locations. As time progresses, triggers will happen in the background, and certain events will progress the subplots even without player interaction, so that when they do reach those locations the options or enemies have changed. There are about half a dozen locations. Does this sound like too much?
I'm still a beginner DM and I'm only running my 2nd campaign but I chose both based on them having "dragon" in their name - Tyranny of Dragons, and Odyssey of the Dragonlords. ToD is how I found Mike in the first place!
I was a fan of Frostmaiden. Yes, it had it issues, like the ten-towns bloat and under/over powered monsters, but a lot of the mini-adventures in it were genuinely fun and it’s designed in a way where you can skip the adventures you don’t want to play. I found the frost island and the underground city to be particularly exciting. It a B tier to me.
I'm so pleased Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands is on your S tier. I ran it in my first 1e PF campaign where I used it to follow up Retribution (also by Raging Swan) and it was amazing. I've recently bought the new OSR version to run with OSE and as you say the new stuff is awesome.
I found Curse of Strahd to be so unwieldy and overcomplicated. I was able to do cool stuff once I gave up and ran it how I wanted, but trying to use it as a reference for anything was a huge struggle. So many important details buried in walls of text.
I run games for duets to 4 players in 2hr sessions. My criteria are that (1) games need to be memorable week to week and not arc to arc, (2) worlds need to feel lived-in with scenery to chew, (3) storylines need flexibility, and (4) books need solid editing . My tiering end up similar to yours. My players seem to respond to having a home base mechanic or a really tight episodic structure. The essentials/starter sets, Eberron, and Strahd fit the bill here. The Magic sets (Ravnica, Strixhaven, and Theros) are great setting books, but I wish Strixhaven had another round of play testing and workshopping. Amen to Sword Coast Adventures Guide for players. With it, I thought WotC was going to start a line of player resources like 2e. Maybe they’ll do that with D&D 2024.
5:52 your statement helped me clear up some stuff I've been thinking about in creating a game. I realized that I tend to like settings over an actual published adventure. Give me the setting and lore and some potential hooks and I can come up with an adventure. And if done a certain way, Lazy DM style for instance, it shouldn't be too difficult to do(?). Since LDM and the like are providing a template for that type of thing.
I’ll point out that Justin Alexander has done redos if both dragon heist and decent into avernus, which makes them a lot better.
Hoard of the dragon queen is how I found you and I found it great thanks to your advice - wish you had made the same guide for Shadow of the Dragon Queen!
I would personally rather have an adventure than a campaign setting. I can pretty easily come up with cool worldbuilding, especially if I incorporate ideas from whatever my PCs want to play; I really struggle with writing a compelling adventure outline, and inventing story beats that flow logically into an grand epic campaign.
I was actually thinking about Tomb of Annihilation as my next campaign, I might review some of your S tier again. I 100% agree with your idea that we are paying someone else to do the work for us. This is a major factor in choosing a campaign for me. I am currently loving curse of Strahd. Sometimes I make a lot of changes, but it runs fine without them, which allows me to relax a bit as the DM.
Mike, thanks for making this video. It is top tier for sure.
You said, I wish I had listened to my gut, and said you know what I'm going to pass on it. But usually for the sake of popularity, I ran it anyway and then sometimes it was a mistake." What adventures were those? Whose popularity (players or community)? I would love to hear more about this.
I would also love more info on how to use campaign settings. I read them and take an idea or two out, but I never put it all together. I just never understood how to use that to create your adventures. I would love to see you do a deep dive and demonstrate how to do this.
Lastly, do you run mega dungeons? Which would you recommend? Would love to see you do a video on this.
Storm Kings Thunder ~ you said C tier but then placed it in B tier. Never mind, you changed your mind and said B tier.
I like what you said at the end (around 51:50) "Production quality doesn't matter near as much to me as product design. I feel that way and have felt that way especially when talking about video games. I loved Asheron's Call because you built the character the way you wanted them to be. You spent points to buy skills that you wanted. Sure, you did not get every single skill that you wanted but that is what made it great, characters were not the same (as much as they could be in a mmorpg. Basically, not cookie cutter unless you wanted to follow a build that someone made popular).
Later, my friend would not play WOW because it looked cartoony and childish. I thought the game play was better than the mmorpg they were playing (pretty sure it was guild wars 2). I tried it but all we did was get on a boat, die, and run back to the boat to do it again. I have no idea why, or how anyone would think that would be fun.
I have no idea what I like as an adventure. I struggle trying to run premade adventures. Although lost mines of Phandelver was fun for me and my players (the green dragon was difficult for me to run). Basically I just run a made up adventure where they go to a dungeon I created, which I don't feel I am good at making, to find loot there. Or someone hires them to get something/explore something/or rescue someone.
Just like you think of Storm King's Thunder as a campaign setting, you should think of Rime of the Frostmaiden as a campaign setting. Then it works great! The issue with with a lot of the adventures and overarching story, which many DMs make significant changes to.
I guess it depends on what I’m looking for at the time. If I want material to populate a sandbox world, my efforts are focused on creating the world and it’s nice to have little adventures to populate it. However, if I want to run a campaign that has more of a focused story, I think one of the biggest hurdles for me is when there is no larger world or context for this adventure to take place in. I don’t want to make up all of the trivial details, generate a bunch of towns and NPCs, what I want to do is make adventures. You’ll never write an adventure that works for every group of players so I also want there to be flexibility in the narrative and difficulty so that it doesn’t totally derail if I let my players guide the story. Another thing I want is to have my characters backstories rooted in the world and allow them to embark on personal side quests. A lot of adventures don’t have the freedom to do that because there’s no context to the larger world that isn’t directly explored during the adventure, time pressure to keep the narrative moving, or the inability to allow them to level up doing quests that aren’t part of the main story unless you want to rework every encounter. I’m with you on preferring a setting with adventure hook ideas for what characters can get up to in this world. I like being presented with a rich and well fleshed out group of factions with moving pieces so the world changes regardless of the players actions as the campaign continues. I want to know what is the central conflict of the world and what are the different perspectives and information so players can build rich well thought out characters who are well suited for the campaign. I like to have set piece battle maps for the most important locations players will probably visit as well as stat blocks for unique villains. I like to have unique options or restrictions for campaigns so that they feel unique and it brings the setting and campaign themes to life. Part of my fun as a DM is the opportunity to be creative, but the part I enjoy creating is what happens next, not the whole world around the story. If the adventure does all the work for me, that’s just as boring for me to run as it is for my players to play.
My party and I had a great time with Rime of the Frostmaiden. Each to their own.
Great video. My criteria is pretty flexible. 1) does it have a map or something else I can give the players at the end. I enjoy giving the players souvenirs from the various sites explored and campaigns undertaken. 2) Can I run it with multiple systems? 3) All modules are incomplete and it's important for me to be able to quickly spot gaps so i can figure out if these are the types of gaps I enjoy filling in.
Really interesting that you don't really mention one thing I look for: compelling NPCs. Given how unexpected PC behaviour is going to be, I need to have a good handle on who the NPCs are to be able to improvise their reactions. Similarly, I actually find 'empty' or randomly generated settings like OSR more difficult to run than coherent worlds since the latter have a logic that I can riff off (especially if the setting is pseudo-historical and I can use my knowledge RL history or historical fiction tropes to expand a scene on the fly).
I also notice that your D-tier seems to be, "Good, but I found it really hard work", which is fair enough. You were really explicit about the fact that you were talking about your own needs rather than everyone's or even your players', so I don't think you need to feel bad about putting BitD so low down.
I can't understand the hate towards Rime of the frostmaiden. Its my favorite campaign so far as a player. The ten towns open world was really fun ! Especially compared to Rise of Tiamat where you have the most unbalanced encounters.
my big takeaway: good adventure means a different thing to a player or a DM
I’m running Oracle of War, and I’ve noticed my evaluation of how much the players will like the adventure is often off - the ones I think are great, they find ho-hum. The ones I think are too basic, they rave about. It’s having me rethink a lot of things.
This was really cool. I'd love to see you do it for campaign settings (though I don't know whether you break up worlds into separate settings or not).
1:38 We value your opinions. That’s why we watch.
Have you run through any of the Adventurers' League campaigns? Dreams of the Red Wizards 9-20 is IMO top tier and I've run it for 3 tables, Oracle of War 1-20 is awesome, took 3 years to play through it at home.
For death house I started at level 1 but at the half way point just before stuff gets dangerous I leveled them to 2 which of course made them paranoid.
I would love to hear from other DMs about the ranking of their campaigns. I know Shea just wants people to list their criteria, but I would find it valuable to learn what other DMs have experienced running full-blown campaigns, even their homebrew campaigns. What worked, what didn't, and why? So much criticism of RPG products happens before the would-be critic has even tried out the product. I'm curious.
I'm a bit past half way through DMing Out of the Abyss. The first half seems interesting and fun to run. The least half feels a bit shoehorned. My players cared about escaping the Underdark. They're not really interested in returning to fight the demons.
To be honest - I've been playing D&D for almost 9 years now and I hate running written adventures. Even reading them often doesn't give me a feeling of "ow, that would be great to DM". If anything, I'd have enjoy more a sort of toolbox to create my own adventure based on some ideas and pieces of design rather than a whole adventure. Looking at adventures that I've played as a player - namely Avernus - I lost at least a few times an interested and idea why we (as players) do what is design for as to do.
Some elements of adventures are overdesign - descriptions, high details of every room - and others, like goals, motivations, story beats are underdeveloped. And I would say creating a description is much easier for any DM than figuring our how to roleplay a certain major NPC or how to design storybeats .
I noticed there wasn’t any Paizo products up there, which I find strange since their flag ship product is Adventure Paths. Does the mechanical conversion to 5e take too much work for the stories to be worth stealing?
Thanks
There are significantly more players than DMs out there, and players generally get excited for new adventures, while DMs look forward to new campaign settings. Consequently, adventures are more popular than campaign settings, regardless of their quality. Another important aspect is that with a good DM, players do not experience something like a 'bad' campaign. They have fun and may not even realize the extent of the DM's efforts. They simply may not recognize if an adventure is bad or poorly designed. It's the DM's responsibility to make it engaging and enjoyable.
For example, my players loved Descent into Avernus after I implemented some of Mike's advice and made certain changes to it. It was quite a burden for me to prepare and run. Conversely, they didn't enjoy WBTW as much, even though it was a well-crafted adventure that required minimal tinkering.
I love this video. I noticed that the conclusion is kind of lining up with Matt Colville's conclusion about shorter adventures being better... even though you made a whole video disagreeing with him. Your conclusion in this video was that you tend to value campaign settings and shorter adventures, and that when you run bigger campaigns, you tend to run them more as campaign settings or tool sets.
I have run a few of the larger book campaigns now, and when I saw Matt's video, it helped me see what I didn't like about running them. So despite your disagreements with him, I actually get a similar takeaway from both of you.
The difference is I don’t assume my view is everyone’s view.
@SlyFlourish Ah that's fair.
Can you poll your players of these games and we get their rankings from a player perspective?
There are some games that you like more as a player than you like as a GM
And vice versa
I'm so curious to know what makes CoS a great "yam" shaped adventure while RotFM is F tier. Is it just because of the odd difficulty issues between level 1 and Aurel being CR10? Too fat a "yam" once the story gets going with not enough guidance on how to run it? I get the impression that you almost didn't want to like it from your initial skim through?
I want to like every adventure I run. I want to like *all* adventures.
Here’s more of my thoughts: Rime of the Frostmaiden Campaign Retrospective - Tips, Experiences, Boss Battles, and One Year Later
ruclips.net/video/oxcxb07RiU0/видео.html
From the games the campaigns I have run, I like more sandbox campaigns. Curse of Strad, Dragon of Icespirepeak and a mix of Candlekeep Mysteries with homebrew.
My players or I did not like the super linear Dragonlance adventure.
I’m curious what other people in the comments think about Stormwreck Isle? I’ve never actually played or ran it myself, and for full disclosure I haven’t run very many pre-written adventures, but I read all the way through that adventure last year and thought it read terribly. I’m planning to run a game soon for my younger siblings. (11 and 12) And wanted a couple to look at and choose between.
As a first time DM running Rime of the Frostmaiden, I enjoy hearing your insight into the module. My players and myself are absolutely loving it so far but like you said, it has taken a lot of work. I am curious though, are there any adventures that are very cleanly and well written that I can look at for contrast? Particularly interested in running an old school module from a previous edition
Check out Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands
Dungeons and Dragons works best with a more linear campaign because as was stated the game balance is off. D&D is focused on combat more so than many other games and was built with an idea the player characters get stronger to take on tougher creatures. So a linear campaign works very well for that as opposed to an open ended campaign. Opened campaigns either end up with players either running into combat that is way too difficult or way too easy. I highly recommend GMs understand the ways their game excel. It makes being a GM easier if you play into the strengths of your game.
Based on the ranking here, I am surprised that usability is not only a significant criteria in this ranking, but was also the only criteria that was really well defined.
Wotc product design in this respect is so poor, until their design approach fundamentally changes I do not think I could justify placing any of their existing products I have read higher than a C. If they released a product with other criteria (e.g. innovation, creativity, evocative fiction and content etc.) that did an *extreme* amount of heavy lifting, maybe I could warrant a B.
Kesley's work was rated very highly here, there's heaps more products in the OSR space out there that are also designed with a strong focus on providing highly gameable and usuable content . I am sure there are other styles of play and products, especially in the indy space, where this is also true.
You’re really underrating Dragon Heist in this lineup
4:50 , I would say I regret running Strixhaven. Me and players were really interesting it. I had two groups, so 2 weekly games. And the book just falls flat. But it gives me an idea to add things to it and put that on reddit or in RUclips video for others to get more out of it.
We're on year 2 of Strixhaven, and I am very ready for it to be over! I enjoyed the college aspect of it, but now it feels worn thin.
@@christopherw1509 amazing you got 2 years with it before that happened. For me it seemed thin right away. Two years and haven't finished the campaign yet?
@@sqoody7invegas625 We play every other week and we've had some major pauses as a player had a baby and so did I! I've basically used it as a setting to run my own homebrew adventure, which I'm also regretting. I wanted something more epic with the Oriq more directly involved, which has lent itself to a longer campaign. Now I wish I had just gone with the relatively short adventure in the book.
So what do the A and S tier adventures have in common? Ease of use?
I LOVED running FrostMaiden. I will defend FrostMaiden.
I did make a lot of changes though. As a SANDBOX Point Crawl region with 2 major events that you have to lead the people to with breadcrumbs in the rest... Here's what I think. If we re-Formatted this to a Hex Crawl in the style of the Dark of Hot Springs Island, I think that would fix a lot of people's complaints with this module.
Also, the personal test (in Auril's Abode) that wasn't done well. I built that up and when we got there, it didn't really deliver.
It’s kind of weird to me that you felt that way about Rime of the Frostmaiden and witch light. I felt the exact opposite. I enjoyed running Rime. I felt I could run rime the way I enjoy, they didn’t struggle to get into the campaign or follow the story. When I ran Wild Beyond the Witchlight, I was lost and confused on where to drive the story. Might just be me, but I personally would have swapped those 2. I’m presently running Descent too 😂
Wild Beyond the Witchlight is horrible. I can't figure out what Mike sees in it to warrant S-tier rating
Honestly I couldn't disagree more with you ranking, to the point that Descent into Avernus is my favorite, with Wild beyond the Witchlight being the worst.
I LOVED the moral dilemas of Avernus, that was the whole point of the adventure for me. Specially because the characters were evil aligned and their morals improved by their experience, it was a story of redemption.
Wild beyond the witchlight throws random things at the wall, including characters out of nothing at the end of the adventure instead of focusing on the hags as the main villain
I want a complete campaign. If I have to write/create a ton of content, it's a flop imo. However, if a complete product is provided, I can edit it however I need. It's incredibly disappointing when the authors sell a bunch of supplemental material on another website because they know their product isn't finished. That's not to be confused with real supplements such as price lists, fair activities, rollable tables, etc. A toc and index are a must. And I want to know the key npc's, plot points, locations, and items upfront. Imo surprises for the DM should come from the players or fluid gameplay, not the content itself.
I am fine with adventure books, but the adventure books should also be a campaign setting too. Cut some of the middle junk adventures, expect gms to fill and provide setting information with those pages.
can someone spoil me which 3 adventures have npc quest giver betrayal?
Spelljammer, Planescape, Vecna
@@SlyFlourish Thank you, good sir
Love you Mike and everything you do, but this video is so difficult to watch with so many midroll ads. I'm 15 minutes in and already 6 Ads! I probably won't get to finish this video unfortunately. I'm not blaming you, I know it's youtube ridiculous ad policy.
Every campaign is only as good as it gives you enough freedom to let you go totally off the rails
44:34 😮
I would love to hear about you playing in a Blades in the Dark campaign.
And it's totally fine if you don't like it.
That game is dripping in flavor and I love it. But like many odd flavors you shouldn't have to love.
13:34 Blades is VERY improvisational in its requirements pushes back against your prep style a lot
Avernus is a better source book than anything.
The first half of Rime is S-tier, the second half needs work to make it more coherent and fun.
Hot mess so confused that I don’t know how to fix it offhand. Which is why while I own it I have never run it.