What would you change about the published D&D 5e adventures to make them better...

What would you change about the published D&D 5e adventures to make them better? Have any of you run them and done any major alterations?

The main thing I don't like about PotA is that all the cults are representative of only the destructive aspects of their element. It would be way cooler if the cultist's lives were improved by their element in exchange for their evil actions. Like, what if air cultists had a wind turbine Nausicaa thing going on, or earth cultists got ridiculously good crop yields.

Hoard of the Dragon Queen was a bit boring, and could've been designed to be much less linear. It was also strangely difficult at the weirdest sections, then stupid easy at others. I would just balance it out better, and implement more diverting paths.

PotA by contrast, had a bit too much going on at once, and none of it was particularly interesting since they kinda throw you into the shit without really developing much personal reason for the PCs to do much.

OotA, Strahd, SKT, and LMoP are all very well written though, dont really have any major problems with them.

I'd make them dedicated source books and not adventures. Wizards doesn't know how to make a good adventure, and what 5e needs is more options for DMs and players, not shitty stories.

Hmn. You know the Cultist (and Sub-cultist?) worship the EVIL Elemental Prince right?

There are also Good Elemental prince (and neutral sorta) that represent the other aspects of the elements.

Presentation. Holy fuck, it's awful. I could fix everything else myself but rewriting these giant-ass modules to be useful at the actual table is painful.

Sorry. I suppose that is under the ASSUMPTION that 5e will be carrying over lore from older editions. There is no guarantee that they will, but I'm will to take that chance!

Not have them all so hardcorely based in FR.

Rather it just be presented as generic, but I don't play in the organized play.

The elemental cults would also seem to have a great issue in that Imix's is far and away the most accessible, while Yan-C-Bin's is nearly impossible for most people to participate in unless they are magicians.

Anyone can uphold Imix's destructive flames by torching something down.
Olhydra and Ogrémoch ask for a bit more, such as tampering with dams, causing avalanches, and poisoning water sources and fields.
Yan-C-Bin's is effectively cut off from anyone who is not already a magician. Normal people simply cannot manipulate wind and rain so easily.

Cryonax would be in the same metaphorical boat as Yan-C-Bin. Normal people would find it immensely difficult to actually destroy anything with cold alone, short of being in an arctic area and bashing someone with ice or causing a snow-avalanche.

>More monster encounters and XP for social encounters or accomplishing certain things. There just isn't enough XP in them to reach their stated 1-10 or 1-15 levels.

>An index of NPCs. Fuck is it ever hard to find all the info about an NPC when it's scattered across 3 sections and 1 stat block at the back.

>Maps that have the top of the page as North. Fuck whathisname the cartographer who can't even into basic map conventions like that.

>Travel times, distances, food consumption and water requirements, all that basic shit for overland travel sections. OOTA did a good job here but the rest suck.

>Better motivation for why the PCs are doing all this other than murderhoboing their way through the world. "Save the world from monsters" isn't a good motivation for most people, btw.

I actually really liked the Storm King campaign. I think it was really nicely done, and it had that old school "fantasy campaign" feeling going for it.

Well, Yan-C-Bin seems to also appreciate making people fall from high places, just plain choking them, or, possibly, playing wind instruments badly.

I have been dming 3 groups the past 2 years. About 2 months ago one of my players purchased this and wanted to run it. It was my first time running a 5e module , only have done 2 for 3.5 in the past and they went fine..

..This book confused the shit out of me , I feel it was very poorly layed out , and the book doesn't make understanding the plot very easy to understand . I had to look up exactly how to run it on a website and it just wasn't clicking as fun to me. Are all modules like this / have other dMS had better luck with this one?

We are about 8 sessions in and at this point I have more or less made my own plot and use the book for reference .

>the book doesn't make understanding the plot very easy to understand
The same could be said of your writing.

DESU the only thing I'd use from PotA is the Air cult and their qt elf leader. I can't see how any party would enjoy playing through, what is it, 12 different elementally themed dungeons?

>What would you change about the published D&D 5e adventures to make them better?
Better organization (all NPC descriptions in an appendix, adventure flowcharts, etc.) and availability to free digital resources like maps and handouts.

Content-wise most of them are fine, even great, but it's usually the layout and difficulty of use that make them bad.

What about farting in enclosed spaces

>tfw party totally avoided Yan-C-Bin by grappling, gagging and trashing the cult leader
The best action surge ever.

The cult leaders are jokes. I'm happy my PotA campaign fell through before the players faced any of them, cause it'd have been quite anti-climatic.

>Yan-C-Bin seems to also appreciate making people fall from high places
Is he a cultist of Yan-C-Bin?

Hoard of the Dragon Queen starts off quite well but gets pretty fucking boring in the middle. I'm DMing a group right now and I decided to throw in 2 mini-dungeons just to add a bit of colour. Right now we're at the swamp where hopefully things get to pick up.

Less FR please. That goes for everything in the 5e lineup.

I've been hearing that a lot. I'm half tempted to pick it up. And only half because I've never personally felt the need to run prewritten adventures; it's simply never been part of the experience for me.

Abyss and Storm King sound pretty fucking rad, though.

I've got an inkling that they'll start branching out after the big sourcebook comes out.

I'd like to think that they'll publish the Mystic in that to pave the way, or they'll put it in a setting sourcebook that more heavily features psionics like Eberron or Dark Sun relatively soon after that.

>The same could be said of your writing.
Yeah, but we didn't pay him $50 for his writing.

So did I, you're absolutely right. I threw in a huge side mission to Skullport (the updated one with the nice map from 4E) and I greatly expanded the cloud giant castle based on an old Dungeon magazine adventure.

Did Storm King fix a lot of the problems with layout and pacing that earlier adventures had? I haven't read that one.

The level based timeline thing is okay for shit that has to happen on a timeline, but I'm ready for an adventure that splits things out between a timeline and a sandbox. Either a wilderness map, a city with detailed factions, or a handful of megadungeons worth leaving and returning to.

>Eberron
If that happens i'll cum in my pants so hard i'll rip a hole through them.

There is no fucking way they can make Eberron in 5e better than 4 or 3.5.

If they manage to though, I'll give it another shot.