That's the issue,. isn't it. You can easily account for things like high Con Saves - just bump the DCs. The problems are more things like flight - that cuts out any obstacles that are 2D in nature. Just fly past that castle wall. Teleportation gets rid of random encounters and anything obstacles that stand in your way in getting from A to B.
Individually, they're not a major issue, but the abilities get piled on and stacked by the endgame, and that greatly constrains what stories you can tell.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
But! There are some things that are likely true for most adventuring parties at levels 17-20. Access to powerful healing, flight, shape-shifting, ability to travel long distances quickly and easily...
Are they, though?
The one 5e campaign I was in that went to level 20, by the time we got there, our party was four people with no primary casters. We had a paladin, a multiclass ranger, my barb/fighter/rogue melee guy, and another barb/fighter built around grappling. I had played a wizard at lower levels, but retired him when the campaign shifted from ToA to Spelljammer. We had a couple clerics and druids come and go along the way
When I say the options increase exponentially, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. High-level campaigns are outliers already, and I don't think you can make any assumptions about party makeup at all, or what abilities and powers they "should" have available to them
Sure, you can always throw in an NPC to cover for things like teleporting to necessary locations, but that's generally less than satisfying
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Which is I'd argue Eve of Ruin is poorly designed.
If just one character in the party has the ability to fly, the Colossus chapter is blown. It's clearly intended for a party to start at the feet, and go through the entire statue, despite there being higher entrances clearly visible from the outside.
A thing this module reminds me of is... I don't like how dragons are designed in 5e.
In general, when you think of a dragon, you think of 'solo boss fight' (there are a lot of bosses that you don't expect to be solo, but dragons are not generally visualized as surrounded by swarms of minions), which means you're talking about an over-CR monster. However, dragons have several problems as bosses (note: I am only bothering with chromatic dragons)
Wyrmling and Young Dragons have One-Hit KO Breath
In general, dropping a PC in one monster action without any opportunity to respond doesn't feel good for the PCs, and if it can hit multiple PCs can turn fights extremely swingy, which typically means you should limit single hits to around party level*6 damage in tier 1-2 (tier 3-4 can have things like death ward, so OHKO-level damage is more acceptable there). Since a solo boss is probably over-CR, we should probably limit breath weapon to about CR*5, and CR*4 is probably a better target. Every wyrmling or young dragon exceeds this benchmark:
A solo boss monster should generally be able to survive two rounds of all-out attack by PCs (this assumes a three round combat where an average of one round is spent doing things other than all out attacking). This generally requires average to high hit points relative to CR (average hit points is CR*15+15). Here, there's a weird glitch: all the CR 2 dragons have low hit points for their CR, as do all adult dragons; CR 3-10 dragons are average to slightly above average.
Wyrmling and Young Dragons Lack Variety
All of them have... a breath weapon and multiattack, nothing more. In addition, they lack any ability to apply distracting effects (given that we want the PCs to only be spending two rounds all-out attacking, we need a distraction... such as dealing with a status effect).
Second, the complete lack of new mechanical content made the book entirely useless outside of the adventures. Just a wall of text failing to do the subject justice.
I've seen this remark, and the "There's no new monsters, they're all from the Monster Manual" comment, all over the place. And I'm confused. These are adventures. We've just gotten 500 monsters in the Monster Manual and hundreds of magic items in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Why are people desperate for more? And if you mean actual mechanics, which other adventure anthology had that?
It is not just the lack of monsters. Historically, adventures come with new monsters, magic items, maybe some relevant feats and backgrounds - they are not usually as much as a full sourcebook, but they still flesh out the adventure and give a secondary reason to purchase the product (important, considering the data shows the majority of players do not use adventures).
This is a departure from the norm set by every other 5e adventure, and a departure that both makes the adventure itself less unique and the book less useful to other purchasers. Whatever way you slice it, Wizards decided to go against the precedent of their entire catalog, and charge full price for the product regardless. The fact another great set of products just came out is irrelevant - it does not change the reality that Wizards delivered less than they ever have in an official 5e book.
They're literally trying to showcase the core rules and how you can write adventures just with them. New monsters are not added because they want to. They're added when nothing in the Monster Manual fits. New magical items are added when nothing fits appropriately. These adventures were written to use the core rules, so everything can be drawn from them.
This is one example of helping the community, because you don't feel the need to buy Dragon Delves to get access to yet another variant of something, if you're not a Dungeon Master.
Second, the complete lack of new mechanical content made the book entirely useless outside of the adventures. Just a wall of text failing to do the subject justice.
I've seen this remark, and the "There's no new monsters, they're all from the Monster Manual" comment, all over the place. And I'm confused. These are adventures. We've just gotten 500 monsters in the Monster Manual and hundreds of magic items in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Why are people desperate for more? And if you mean actual mechanics, which other adventure anthology had that?
It is not just the lack of monsters. Historically, adventures come with new monsters, magic items, maybe some relevant feats and backgrounds - they are not usually as much as a full sourcebook, but they still flesh out the adventure and give a secondary reason to purchase the product (important, considering the data shows the majority of players do not use adventures).
This is a departure from the norm set by every other 5e adventure, and a departure that both makes the adventure itself less unique and the book less useful to other purchasers. Whatever way you slice it, Wizards decided to go against the precedent of their entire catalog, and charge full price for the product regardless. The fact another great set of products just came out is irrelevant - it does not change the reality that Wizards delivered less than they ever have in an official 5e book.
They're literally trying to showcase the core rules and how you can write adventures just with them. New monsters are not added because they want to. They're added when nothing in the Monster Manual fits. New magical items are added when nothing fits appropriately. These adventures were written to use the core rules, so everything can be drawn from them.
This is one example of helping the community, because you don't feel the need to buy Dragon Delves to get access to yet another variant of something, if you're not a Dungeon Master.
So are these new adventures? I thought they were supposed to be an anthology of adventures written for previous editions and just updated for the current ruleset.
I received my copy and was VERY disappointed with it. I knew it was a collection of adventures, but usually these books offer other things as well, such as new magic items, feats, and/or other new rules and mechanics. This book is ONLY a series of adventures. If I'd known it was ONLY going to be that, I wouldn't have bought it.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
C. Foster Payne
"If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around."
One of the reasons I don't pre-order these things anymore. At least you can check what's in the book in terms of additional content like subclasses etc if you wait - and there are a lot of unwritten assumptions about what book contains, and companies are certainly testing which of those assumptions consumers will tolerate not being upheld.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Given that the description of the product is that it's a bunch of lairs, it should not be a surprise that the contents are a bunch of small adventures. The questions are:
Are these good adventures? You can do a lot with encounter design without actually introducing new rules.
Are the adventures in fact suitable as drop-ins for any campaign/setting?
Are the adventures in fact the bite-sized 'lairs' that the item description implies?
As I don't have the product, I can't answer the first two. The third seems unlikely, because 16 pages per adventure isn't a bite-sized lair (for comparison, the 4e product Dungeon Delve used 6 pages per adventure and each one was pretty much "and here's a three encounter dungeon. I hope you weren't expecting a plot, because that's not what this product is for").
Given that the description of the product is that it's a bunch of lairs, it should not be a surprise that the contents are a bunch of small adventures. The questions are:
Are these good adventures? You can do a lot with encounter design without actually introducing new rules.
Are the adventures in fact suitable as drop-ins for any campaign/setting?
Are the adventures in fact the bite-sized 'lairs' that the item description implies?
As I don't have the product, I can't answer the first two. The third seems unlikely, because 16 pages per adventure isn't a bite-sized lair (for comparison, the 4e product Dungeon Delve used 6 pages per adventure and each one was pretty much "and here's a three encounter dungeon. I hope you weren't expecting a plot, because that's not what this product is for").
Regarding point 3; each "delve" provides information on how long it's expected to take. With the exception of one adventure, they are all expected to take "one or two sessions" which to me seems pretty bite sized. They also include information on how to drop them into your game, such as "It can take place in any community near a desert or similar arid region" or "in any canyon with a river flowing through it", so they're both flexible and provide guidance.
Given that the description of the product is that it's a bunch of lairs, it should not be a surprise that the contents are a bunch of small adventures. The questions are:
Are these good adventures? You can do a lot with encounter design without actually introducing new rules.
Are the adventures in fact suitable as drop-ins for any campaign/setting?
Are the adventures in fact the bite-sized 'lairs' that the item description implies?
As I don't have the product, I can't answer the first two. The third seems unlikely, because 16 pages per adventure isn't a bite-sized lair (for comparison, the 4e product Dungeon Delve used 6 pages per adventure and each one was pretty much "and here's a three encounter dungeon. I hope you weren't expecting a plot, because that's not what this product is for").
The first adventure (for level 1) is 13 pages long; 8 if you are only going by text. Flipping through it, I don't see how it's anything other than "bite-sized", though. There's a town (with a single point of interest without a map), a grove (the entrance to the lair for some investigating and encounters, map included), and the lair itself (with a few encounters in addition to the dragon, map included).
I don't really have a point of comparison except the DMG for 5e things, but those were a half-a-page to a page each with no illustrations, no maps, a paragraph of setup and exposition each, and the barest of bare bones for getting it off the ground. The adventures in DD, in contrast, have a whole page of overview (that has things like: key plot points, how to prepare as a DM, and a list of key NPCs), several maps, and multiple paragraphs of background, interaction notes, rumor tables, as well as multi-paragraph area and encounter descriptions (both DM facing and what to tell the players).
It's the kind of thing a first-time DM could easily pick up and just play with an hour or less of prep.
I guess there's a trend in these anthology books. Candlekeep Mysteries had 17 adventures, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel and Keys from the Golden Vault both had 13, and now this book has 10.
I guess there's a trend in these anthology books. Candlekeep Mysteries had 17 adventures, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel and Keys from the Golden Vault both had 13, and now this book has 10.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh had 7. But it did have some ship rules and backgrounds I guess. Tales from the Yawning Portal also had 7.
I almost bought Dragon Delves last night, but decided against it only because I never run the adventures so books like this just end up collecting dust on my shelves. The layout for the adventures is really good though just from my limited read through.
The first adventure (for level 1) is 13 pages long; 8 if you are only going by text. Flipping through it, I don't see how it's anything other than "bite-sized", though. There's a town (with a single point of interest without a map), a grove (the entrance to the lair for some investigating and encounters, map included), and the lair itself (with a few encounters in addition to the dragon, map included).
I would call that "failing to match the blurb".
The adventure description on the market page says "Meet each of the chromatic and metallic dragons as you delve into unique lairs suitable for any campaign setting."
That means... I expect lairs that I can conveniently incorporate into my pre-existing campaign. Not adventures. Answers for "I've already established that the dragon Ashencorax has been raiding towns, but I haven't gotten around to writing up a lair for when the PCs hunt him down, let me see if there's something useful here". There's nothing wrong with mini adventures, but they really are a different type of resource.
The first adventure (for level 1) is 13 pages long; 8 if you are only going by text. Flipping through it, I don't see how it's anything other than "bite-sized", though. There's a town (with a single point of interest without a map), a grove (the entrance to the lair for some investigating and encounters, map included), and the lair itself (with a few encounters in addition to the dragon, map included).
I would call that "failing to match the blurb".
The adventure description on the market page says "Meet each of the chromatic and metallic dragons as you delve into unique lairs suitable for any campaign setting."
That means... I expect lairs that I can conveniently incorporate into my pre-existing campaign. Not adventures. Answers for "I've already established that the dragon Ashencorax has been raiding towns, but I haven't gotten around to writing up a lair for when the PCs hunt him down, let me see if there's something useful here". There's nothing wrong with mini adventures, but they really are a different type of resource.
That kind of sounds like complaining that a baker's dozen is 13 instead of 12 though, doesn't it? The lairs (granted one isn't a "lair" so much as an "encounter space") could pretty easily be lifted straight out of the book and plopped into an existing campaign with your own NPCs and reasons for existing (e.g. the green dragon lair can be used in "any heavily forested area").
And look... I'm not here trying to white knight this book, or anything. I just don't really understand this complaint; especially when the others in this thread were saying that it wasn't enough.
And look... I'm not here trying to white knight this book, or anything. I just don't really understand this complaint; especially when the others in this thread were saying that it wasn't enough.
They're actually related problems. If you were to simply remove all of the stuff that isn't lairs... you'd have enough page count freed to go up to level 20 with the lairs.
I had a sense that this one would disappoint. I don't accept the defense that it is hard to make high level challenges for a reason why they didn't offer some in this book. Third party publishers seem to have the ability to hit the mark. I would expect WotC to be staffed with expert-level campaign designers if a handful of people can do it out of their garage, then throw it up on a KS to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. The demand from players is certainly there and the talent definitely exists to make satisfying high level adventures.
See, the thing is...nowhere was Tier 4, or any direct non-slang synonym, explicitly promised ANYWHERE on this.
I'm even more convinced that the community overhyped this in every way possible. It's called Dragon DELVES, not Bahamut Vs Tiamat Vs Sardior:The Final Fight. The connotation of the word "delves" is of swiftness & shallow depths in a watery environment. A "delve" is a light exploration.
This fits that bill exactly:A surface-level exploration/dive into the kind of stories that can be told via dragons. It never intended to be what community slang has determined "epic" means.
This also adds credence to my hypothesis that somebody higher-up at Hasbro than WotC doesn't like it when game designers use community slang as such, & keeps telling WotC to stick to rigid SEO-friendly phrasing akin to how Disney, Nintendo, & most other big entertainment megacorps insist on such. Because this REEKS of SEO BS in the description.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
That's the issue,. isn't it. You can easily account for things like high Con Saves - just bump the DCs. The problems are more things like flight - that cuts out any obstacles that are 2D in nature. Just fly past that castle wall. Teleportation gets rid of random encounters and anything obstacles that stand in your way in getting from A to B.
Individually, they're not a major issue, but the abilities get piled on and stacked by the endgame, and that greatly constrains what stories you can tell.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Are they, though?
The one 5e campaign I was in that went to level 20, by the time we got there, our party was four people with no primary casters. We had a paladin, a multiclass ranger, my barb/fighter/rogue melee guy, and another barb/fighter built around grappling. I had played a wizard at lower levels, but retired him when the campaign shifted from ToA to Spelljammer. We had a couple clerics and druids come and go along the way
When I say the options increase exponentially, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. High-level campaigns are outliers already, and I don't think you can make any assumptions about party makeup at all, or what abilities and powers they "should" have available to them
Sure, you can always throw in an NPC to cover for things like teleporting to necessary locations, but that's generally less than satisfying
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
That's why you don't design the encounter to require certain capabilities -- you just design it so it's not broken if the PCs have those capabilities.
Which is I'd argue Eve of Ruin is poorly designed.
If just one character in the party has the ability to fly, the Colossus chapter is blown. It's clearly intended for a party to start at the feet, and go through the entire statue, despite there being higher entrances clearly visible from the outside.
A thing this module reminds me of is... I don't like how dragons are designed in 5e.
In general, when you think of a dragon, you think of 'solo boss fight' (there are a lot of bosses that you don't expect to be solo, but dragons are not generally visualized as surrounded by swarms of minions), which means you're talking about an over-CR monster. However, dragons have several problems as bosses (note: I am only bothering with chromatic dragons)
Wyrmling and Young Dragons have One-Hit KO Breath
In general, dropping a PC in one monster action without any opportunity to respond doesn't feel good for the PCs, and if it can hit multiple PCs can turn fights extremely swingy, which typically means you should limit single hits to around party level*6 damage in tier 1-2 (tier 3-4 can have things like death ward, so OHKO-level damage is more acceptable there). Since a solo boss is probably over-CR, we should probably limit breath weapon to about CR*5, and CR*4 is probably a better target. Every wyrmling or young dragon exceeds this benchmark:
CR 2 and Adult Dragons lack Boss-Level Durability
A solo boss monster should generally be able to survive two rounds of all-out attack by PCs (this assumes a three round combat where an average of one round is spent doing things other than all out attacking). This generally requires average to high hit points relative to CR (average hit points is CR*15+15). Here, there's a weird glitch: all the CR 2 dragons have low hit points for their CR, as do all adult dragons; CR 3-10 dragons are average to slightly above average.
Wyrmling and Young Dragons Lack Variety
All of them have... a breath weapon and multiattack, nothing more. In addition, they lack any ability to apply distracting effects (given that we want the PCs to only be spending two rounds all-out attacking, we need a distraction... such as dealing with a status effect).
They're literally trying to showcase the core rules and how you can write adventures just with them. New monsters are not added because they want to. They're added when nothing in the Monster Manual fits. New magical items are added when nothing fits appropriately. These adventures were written to use the core rules, so everything can be drawn from them.
This is one example of helping the community, because you don't feel the need to buy Dragon Delves to get access to yet another variant of something, if you're not a Dungeon Master.
So are these new adventures? I thought they were supposed to be an anthology of adventures written for previous editions and just updated for the current ruleset.
I received my copy and was VERY disappointed with it. I knew it was a collection of adventures, but usually these books offer other things as well, such as new magic items, feats, and/or other new rules and mechanics. This book is ONLY a series of adventures. If I'd known it was ONLY going to be that, I wouldn't have bought it.
C. Foster Payne
"If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around."
One of the reasons I don't pre-order these things anymore. At least you can check what's in the book in terms of additional content like subclasses etc if you wait - and there are a lot of unwritten assumptions about what book contains, and companies are certainly testing which of those assumptions consumers will tolerate not being upheld.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
Given that the description of the product is that it's a bunch of lairs, it should not be a surprise that the contents are a bunch of small adventures. The questions are:
As I don't have the product, I can't answer the first two. The third seems unlikely, because 16 pages per adventure isn't a bite-sized lair (for comparison, the 4e product Dungeon Delve used 6 pages per adventure and each one was pretty much "and here's a three encounter dungeon. I hope you weren't expecting a plot, because that's not what this product is for").
Regarding point 3; each "delve" provides information on how long it's expected to take. With the exception of one adventure, they are all expected to take "one or two sessions" which to me seems pretty bite sized. They also include information on how to drop them into your game, such as "It can take place in any community near a desert or similar arid region" or "in any canyon with a river flowing through it", so they're both flexible and provide guidance.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
The first adventure (for level 1) is 13 pages long; 8 if you are only going by text. Flipping through it, I don't see how it's anything other than "bite-sized", though. There's a town (with a single point of interest without a map), a grove (the entrance to the lair for some investigating and encounters, map included), and the lair itself (with a few encounters in addition to the dragon, map included).
I don't really have a point of comparison except the DMG for 5e things, but those were a half-a-page to a page each with no illustrations, no maps, a paragraph of setup and exposition each, and the barest of bare bones for getting it off the ground. The adventures in DD, in contrast, have a whole page of overview (that has things like: key plot points, how to prepare as a DM, and a list of key NPCs), several maps, and multiple paragraphs of background, interaction notes, rumor tables, as well as multi-paragraph area and encounter descriptions (both DM facing and what to tell the players).
It's the kind of thing a first-time DM could easily pick up and just play with an hour or less of prep.
I guess there's a trend in these anthology books. Candlekeep Mysteries had 17 adventures, Journeys through the Radiant Citadel and Keys from the Golden Vault both had 13, and now this book has 10.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh had 7. But it did have some ship rules and backgrounds I guess. Tales from the Yawning Portal also had 7.
I almost bought Dragon Delves last night, but decided against it only because I never run the adventures so books like this just end up collecting dust on my shelves. The layout for the adventures is really good though just from my limited read through.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I would call that "failing to match the blurb".
The adventure description on the market page says "Meet each of the chromatic and metallic dragons as you delve into unique lairs suitable for any campaign setting."
That means... I expect lairs that I can conveniently incorporate into my pre-existing campaign. Not adventures. Answers for "I've already established that the dragon Ashencorax has been raiding towns, but I haven't gotten around to writing up a lair for when the PCs hunt him down, let me see if there's something useful here". There's nothing wrong with mini adventures, but they really are a different type of resource.
That kind of sounds like complaining that a baker's dozen is 13 instead of 12 though, doesn't it? The lairs (granted one isn't a "lair" so much as an "encounter space") could pretty easily be lifted straight out of the book and plopped into an existing campaign with your own NPCs and reasons for existing (e.g. the green dragon lair can be used in "any heavily forested area").
And look... I'm not here trying to white knight this book, or anything. I just don't really understand this complaint; especially when the others in this thread were saying that it wasn't enough.
They're actually related problems. If you were to simply remove all of the stuff that isn't lairs... you'd have enough page count freed to go up to level 20 with the lairs.
Overhype may have occured.
I got what I personally wanted while keeping my expectations in check.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.
I had a sense that this one would disappoint. I don't accept the defense that it is hard to make high level challenges for a reason why they didn't offer some in this book. Third party publishers seem to have the ability to hit the mark. I would expect WotC to be staffed with expert-level campaign designers if a handful of people can do it out of their garage, then throw it up on a KS to make hundreds of thousands of dollars. The demand from players is certainly there and the talent definitely exists to make satisfying high level adventures.
DM mostly, Player occasionally | Session 0 form | He/Him/They/Them
EXTENDED SIGNATURE!
Doctor/Published Scholar/Science and Healthcare Advocate/Critter/Trekkie/Gandalf with a Glock
Try DDB free: Free Rules (2024), premade PCs, adventures, one shots, encounters, SC, homebrew, more
Answers: physical books, purchases, and subbing.
Check out my life-changing
See, the thing is...nowhere was Tier 4, or any direct non-slang synonym, explicitly promised ANYWHERE on this.
I'm even more convinced that the community overhyped this in every way possible. It's called Dragon DELVES, not Bahamut Vs Tiamat Vs Sardior:The Final Fight. The connotation of the word "delves" is of swiftness & shallow depths in a watery environment. A "delve" is a light exploration.
This fits that bill exactly:A surface-level exploration/dive into the kind of stories that can be told via dragons. It never intended to be what community slang has determined "epic" means.
This also adds credence to my hypothesis that somebody higher-up at Hasbro than WotC doesn't like it when game designers use community slang as such, & keeps telling WotC to stick to rigid SEO-friendly phrasing akin to how Disney, Nintendo, & most other big entertainment megacorps insist on such. Because this REEKS of SEO BS in the description.
DM, player & homebrewer(Current homebrew project is an unofficial conversion of SBURB/SGRUB from Homestuck into DND 5e)
Once made Maxwell's Silver Hammer come down upon Strahd's head to make sure he was dead.
Always study & sharpen philosophical razors. They save a lot of trouble.