Complaining about 5e Adventure Paths

[Krusk]

How much are you supposed to level up during your random hexcrawl?

Its possible (2% chance) that your first encounter in the jungle is a CR 8 tyrannosaurus. You will very likely be level 1. So your TOA game could be "dicked over by NPC, town seems cool, TPK". It recommends that you are 1st-6th level for the hexcrawl portion of the game, and that you start at 1 leveling up 5 times as you crawl about.

They don't do anything like say "Not to imply the jungles near town are safe, but the further from town the characters get, the darker and more powerful the foes become. Use this second chart of hard encounters for this region". And then include the CR 8 stuff there. They also don't conveniently populate the low level hexes near town and the high levels ones far from it. I assume they assume your DM will cheat and not just TPK you with a T-rex during session 1, but you never know. If your players explore the bay right outside town, the module directly tells you that the dragon turtle shows up and wrecks their day unless they give him 50gp (a lot in level 1 5e terms).

When you end the game in the Tomb of the Nine Gods, you are expected to be level 9 or higher. If you kill the Atropal at the end, CR 13, Acerack himself shows up all pissed off, CR 23. Its not clear why you wouldn't kill the Atropal, it being a giant evil god fetus feeding off the souls of the thing you came here to break, that attacks you if you try to break the thing. you do get some buffs if you did some of the bullshit annoying puzzles earlier, but it turns it into an annoying grind. You get +50 temp HP every round, and +3d6 damage. you might be level 9 or 10, and he is CR 23, and you might not even have those buffs (the puzzles sucked a lot, so I wouldn't hold it against groups who said fuck it and ignored them). So you might just get fucked. It really comes off like a lot of the challenge from the module is just that sometimes stuff is way over CRed.

It really plays like they didn't actually run the game themselves. Just wrote the adventure, and assumed it was all good.

[Thaluikhain]

It really plays like they didn't actually run the game themselves. Just wrote the adventure, and assumed it was all good.

For some reason (possibly time and effort involved), they don't seem to be the only people to have done that sort of thing.

[Krusk]

Sure, I imagine its very common for AP writers. To play through a 40 hour adventure module, you need to actually sit down and play 40 hours of DND with 3-5 players. I can forgive that in a small press, or indie shop. In Washington state, assuming they pay minimum wage, and have 4 people (DM and 3 players), that's a little over 2 grand. An indies whole budget might be like 10 grand and hope to take in like 12 in revenue. The big names, who charge $50 list price for the book? No fuck off.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

It's very hard to justify paying a bunch of people actual currency to play pretend elf games regularly.
Probably because everybody and their mother would apply for it. Plus, how do you select for the necessary skills? I imagine in the same way you get video game testers - paying broke college kids pennies on the dollar until you find one that's passionate enough to do the job without any real training or pay.

[Krusk]

I'm working on a 5e AP that I intend to sell for like $5 a pop. I am 95% done writing it, and plan to run it once myself with my regular play group. I may be able to convince some friend-DMs to do the same and give me feedback. I assume I'll then have to rewrite at least 75% because of unintended gaps like the ones in ToA.

WoTC is a million dollar company charging $50 a book. They famously have in office D&D games as part of job duties for a variety of folks. If they can't do better than some random jackass on his own, then they shouldn't be a company.

If I were King of WoTC and got to set official policy, before publishing an AP, I would mandate that a different author run it for some of the other staff. I would build the assumed length into those folks job duties. In outlook, some random in house artist would have a 4 hour recurring meeting on Tuesday and Thursday to go play whatever module and provide feedback until the expected duration of the module is complete with a survey after each session for feedback (and be expected to do 30 hours of art or whatever). I would dictate ahead of time to the author "we expect it to take 80 hours of play" or whatever. Mearls would literally go "OK Perkins, I wrote this, it's supposed to be 80 hours. Can you run it and collect feedback". Then perkins would have Tue/Thur blocked out to run the module, chat with Mearls, and prep, with M/W/F to work on his own AP/other job stuff.

Even better, if they want to be the multi-million dollar company they pretend to be, they should actually hire playtesters. That should be a real job, or maybe internship or something. Have in house DMs who actually specialize in running things as though they were first time DMs who are actually good at interpreting rules. Your playtesters are people who are good at playing games from a minmax perspective, and a noob perspective, and can give feedback on "Fun". Shit, MTG has timmies and spikes. Go talk to the MTG team.

[ColorBlindNinja61]

When you end the game in the Tomb of the Nine Gods, you are expected to be level 9 or higher. If you kill the Atropal at the end, CR 13, Acerack himself shows up all pissed off, CR 23. Its not clear why you wouldn't kill the Atropal, it being a giant evil god fetus feeding off the souls of the thing you came here to break, that attacks you if you try to break the thing. you do get some buffs if you did some of the bullshit annoying puzzles earlier, but it turns it into an annoying grind. You get +50 temp HP every round, and +3d6 damage. you might be level 9 or 10, and he is CR 23, and you might not even have those buffs (the puzzles sucked a lot, so I wouldn't hold it against groups who said fuck it and ignored them). So you might just get fucked. It really comes off like a lot of the challenge from the module is just that sometimes stuff is way over CRed.

This is one of the worst parts of the entire module, IMO. You can bet that when my group finally gets to this point, that section is getting an extensive rewrite.

It really plays like they didn't actually run the game themselves. Just wrote the adventure, and assumed it was all good.

While I'm certainly inclined to say you're 100% correct, I have to wonder if they didn't want groups to TPK.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

If I were King of WoTC and got to set official policy, before publishing an AP, I would mandate that a different author run it for some of the other staff. I would build the assumed length into those folks job duties. In outlook, some random in house artist would have a 4 hour recurring meeting on Tuesday and Thursday to go play whatever module and provide feedback until the expected duration of the module is complete with a survey after each session for feedback (and be expected to do 30 hours of art or whatever). I would dictate ahead of time to the author "we expect it to take 80 hours of play" or whatever. Mearls would literally go "OK Perkins, I wrote this, it's supposed to be 80 hours. Can you run it and collect feedback". Then perkins would have Tue/Thur blocked out to run the module, chat with Mearls, and prep, with M/W/F to work on his own AP/other job stuff.

Even better, if they want to be the multi-million dollar company they pretend to be, they should actually hire playtesters. That should be a real job, or maybe internship or something. Have in house DMs who actually specialize in running things as though they were first time DMs who are actually good at interpreting rules. Your playtesters are people who are good at playing games from a minmax perspective, and a noob perspective, and can give feedback on "Fun". Shit, MTG has timmies and spikes. Go talk to the MTG team.

This is all a great idea except for the part where you actually pay people to do any of it. Good luck convincing your boss or a board of directors that it's a good idea to pay a team of staff thousands of dollars a week to play elf games. Where's the ROI, man? They can just look at nerds raging on the internet for feedback, and that's free. At most, you pay one guy to collect the screaming retard noise on Twitter and bring it to the designers... who then proceeds to ignore it because you probably hired a primadonna.
I would do a great job, though. Not like those chucklefucks they have over there now. I'd be a great chucklefuck. The best chucklefuck in the office.

[Dogbert]

If you kill the Atropal at the end, CR 13, Acerack himself shows up all pissed off, CR 23...

Alternatively, you can just finish the adventure the same way you finished the original, except this time instead of 70 goats, it's 70 hireling archers, which can probably kill him just like they can kill anything else in game, because 5E. Granted, you'll need to clear a path through the hex crawl from town to the evil lair first because you'll want to minimize money spent per day.

...and yes, it's going to be a revolver door massacre in the meantime, so cue Spongebob's screen: "94 redshirts later."

[amethal]

Its possible (2% chance) that your first encounter in the jungle is a CR 8 tyrannosaurus. You will very likely be level 1. So your TOA game could be "dicked over by NPC, town seems cool, TPK". It recommends that you are 1st-6th level for the hexcrawl portion of the game, and that you start at 1 leveling up 5 times as you crawl about.

They don't do anything like say "Not to imply the jungles near town are safe, but the further from town the characters get, the darker and more powerful the foes become. Use this second chart of hard encounters for this region". And then include the CR 8 stuff there.

Good point.

And that's not even a playtest issue. They just needed to spend some time thinking about it, yet you've clearly spent more time thinking about it than they ever did.

Maybe their thought was for the encounter with the T-Rex to play out more like "Something very large is crashing through the jungle ahead of you. Suddenly, a host of terrified animals rushes past. What do you do?" and the PCs should take the hint and run away. Even if we allow them that - and repeat the point that none of this is in the actual adventure that they actually wrote and charged money for - then once the T-Rex has gone the PCs are going to head back to town and stay there. So the adventure ends anyway.

And from what I remember of the town description, dangerous dinosaurs do sometimes come right up to the town, as the townsfolk have procedures in place for what to do when that happens. So the one thing they have done is ruled out the nearby jungle being any safer.

Hell, if they were so attached to their "it's not unusual for impoverished black townspeople to get eaten by dinosaurs" theme that they couldn't possibly leave it out, then at least they could have made it a seasonal thing, tied to dinosaur migration patterns or some such bullshit, so that the local jungle is relatively safe at the moment but will get more dangerous in a few months (i.e. when the PCs are high enough level to cope with it).

[Krusk]

If I were King of WoTC and got to set official policy

Good luck convincing your boss or a board of directors that it's a good idea to pay a team of staff thousands of dollars a week to play elf games. Where's the ROI, man?

What are you, some sort of Jackass?

the King of WoTC clearly owns the entire company and doesn't answer to anyone. Hes the king.

[Krusk]

If you kill the Atropal at the end, CR 13, Acerack himself shows up all pissed off, CR 23...

Alternatively, you can just finish the adventure the same way you finished the original, except this time instead of 70 goats, it's 70 hireling archers, which can probably kill him just like they can kill anything else in game, because 5E. Granted, you'll need to clear a path through the hex crawl from town to the evil lair first because you'll want to minimize money spent per day.

...and yes, it's going to be a revolver door massacre in the meantime, so cue Spongebob's screen: "94 redshirts later."

There is enough random bullshit in the jungle and the temple that its reasonable to assume the standard of "hand bows to 10 people and tell them to spread out and eventually win" won't work. Or rather, you'll empty the town of whateverthefuck of willing and unwilling participants well before you get there. You could probably do it with skeletons, but you'll have to go with them.

Acerack is also a lich. This means hes randomly immune to nonmagic weapons. so the normal hail of arrows attack won't really bother him. You could have the entire town read actions to jump him and hold him down while PCs stab him to death, but hes going to spam his aoe kill anyone in an aura powers. If you kill him, he comes back in a week to repeat. He will probably eventually win.

[Kaelik]

If I were King of WoTC and got to set official policy

Good luck convincing your boss or a board of directors that it's a good idea to pay a team of staff thousands of dollars a week to play elf games. Where's the ROI, man?

What are you, some sort of Jackass?

the King of WoTC clearly owns the entire company and doesn't answer to anyone. Hes the king.

Court Jester Almanac is employed for the sole purpose of trolling the King.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

If I were King of WoTC and got to set official policy

Good luck convincing your boss or a board of directors that it's a good idea to pay a team of staff thousands of dollars a week to play elf games. Where's the ROI, man?

What are you, some sort of Jackass?

the King of WoTC clearly owns the entire company and doesn't answer to anyone. Hes the king.

Court Jester Almanac is employed for the sole purpose of trolling the King.

I try my damn best, too.