@nitsua60 So, first things first: both HotDQ and RoT suffer from editing problems, and being written before the rules were set in stone.

But that won't affect the players, and based on my experience it's little more than an annoyance for you.

Editing like typos, or continuity problems?

@nitsua60 The latter.

Some Assembly Required ;)

There's also a lot of "your players might do this shenanigan" without any guidance for how to handle that. That was difficult for me as a first-time DM, but I suspect you'll be okay ;)

@Shalvenay I never took an assembly class =(

yeah -- I know there were a few shenanigans moments we pulled back when I was in Wax's HotDQ game

It's a bit railroadish, especially through HotDQ, but for newer players I don't really see that as a bad thing.

and that is kinda true

I like that the council introduces the "actions have consequences" idea.

@Miniman Yeah. There's some merit to a quest-giver, or prophecy, or whatever it takes to effectively give new players a guided tour of what could happen in a game.

@nitsua60 definitely

@Shalvenay Speaking of which, this Saturday's completely free for me, and I'll plan to wrap things up then.

@nitsua60 that sounds like an awesome plan

but yeah -- I think ToD is probably as good a starting point as any

Ravenloft definitely isn't if you ask me -- way too genre-savvy-sensitive

(I'd butcher anything in Ravenloft to the Nth degree whether as a player or a DM)

@Shalvenay I'm running CoS with the teenagers right now--it's going pretty well, actually. (And I just found out I've got insane AL XP for standing up two new AL GMs. I could easily drop 50K XP on a character of mine if I wanted to do some con-play in a different tier. Of course, I don't con, so that's... that.)

@nitsua60 haha. I'm going to be trying my hand at convention play (albeit not AL) not this upcoming Sat/Sun, but the weekend after that

@nitsua60 how are they doing on the genre-savvy front btw?

@Shalvenay Mixed results. It's not so much genre-savvy as play-savvy that gets them in trouble. A hostile encounter starts: one Hides, one runs away as fast as possible, one runs up with their weapon, one alters self to look like a supplicant and grovels, one tries to talk....

Another keeps trying to use his "neurotic" damage-type spells against undead.

@nitsua60 ah, total lack of party cohesion

@nitsua60 Sorry, I had to do some actual work (for a change).

One of the big points in ToD's favour, I think, is the tremendous variety of gameplay.

@Miniman No worries--I need to actually get cranking on an article I should finish tonight. Which means I should start it at some point =)

I don't think any of the other published 5e campaigns I've looked at even come close in that respect.

@Miniman How so?

for me -- Ravenloft would be both thematically awkward and a genre-savvy trip-up (it does have me wonder what'd happen if you stuck my guy Vlad and Count Strahd in the same room tho)

@nitsua60 You've got dungeon crawls, wilderness journeys, a sailing expedition, a war, a splash of political intrigue...

@Miniman That is a nice-looking smorgasbord.

Maybe it's just because I've been working through PotA for (over a year now? really?), but I think that's a nice thing for new players to experience.

yeah -- ToD is a better mix of stuff

I don't think we got to the sailing part, but we did see a fair bit of both trips through the wilds and dungeon-crawling ,as well as aspects of the war and intrigue facets

There's some really fun stuff in there, too. The roadside encounter with mushrooms screaming the group into insanity is still a fond memory for a few of my players, and the jerks who didn't let them stay at the inn annoyed them to the point where I brought them back, since they were far more memorable enemies than most of the actual enemies.

@Shalvenay Yeah - later on, in one of the cult's assassination attempts, I had them hire those guys and mount them on dragons :D

When they swooped in and yelled "I see you haven't found a place to stay yet" the reaction I got was just priceless.

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