Worst Official Module Finale

Out of all the 5e/5.5e adventure modules, which one do y'all think has the worst finale?

For me I would probably say Vecna Eve of Ruin, given how badly designed Vecna's stat block is.

I haven't played it myself, but I hear that Rime of the Frostmaiden is poorly received by many. 

Frostmaiden’s ending isn’t the worst. That’d probably be Descent Into Avernus, given the confusing steps needed to get to the “good ending”, the sheer difficulty of the “bad ending”, and the fact that the whole thing is insanely anticlimactic.

"Worst" is subjective.

Do you mean "The one you like the least?"

If we're going that route, I'd say I do not like Icewind Dale:Rime of the Frostmaiden, because of what it did to DND liveplay culture.

It gave me my favorite 1st-party spell and one of my favorite underrated high-level Wizard ones, but it also brought on people trying to make fetch happen via cramming phases into every boss, & I do not like phased combat in places it doesn't belong.

Quote from LinkArcher >>

Frostmaiden’s ending isn’t the worst. That’d probably be Descent Into Avernus, given the confusing steps needed to get to the “good ending”, the sheer difficulty of the “bad ending”, and the fact that the whole thing is insanely anticlimactic.

 Of these two, I think Frostmaiden has the worst ending - the campaign is so directionless there is not really a clear “ending,” and the book has the players kill off the big bad… only to have a chapter or two of useless filler that happens after the campaign.  I think Avernus is a boring fetch quest pretending to be a campaign, but it at least has a direction and a clear endpoint, so I would give Frostmaiden the edge in the “worst ending” contest.

But for worst actual adventure?  Strixhaven wins that hands down.  The book suffers greatly from lack of direction - I a way that makes Frostmaiden look coherent.  It is telling that, in multiple surveys, even WotC does not seem to know how to quantify Strixhaven, sometimes labelling it an adventure, other times a sourcebook.

The story is weak.  The setting was clearly premature - we got a lot of core lore in the second MTG Strixhaven set about the rest of the plane that got missed due to publishing a book about a setting not fully fleshed out in its original source. The mechanical options are generally nonexistent - following the Unearthed Arcana, it looks a bit like they were testing subclass options that (for good reason) failed to get support, so just cut options instead of keep the book in the oven longer.  The plot is pretty nonexistent and is told through various vignettes (and can easily allow players to break things with the incredible amount of downtime between adventures).  The bonus systems, like jobs, clubs, and character relations, are just not very well designed.  Silvery Barbs - which is not as bad as I think some make it out to be, but is still not super well designed. And, even as an anthology book, it fails to deliver very many useful quests with general applicability to other campaigns.

By pretty much any subjective standard, nothing about the Strixhaven book really works (except the art. But every book has great art). 

@Caerwyn: I agree, which hurts to say because I really want to like Strixhaven. I love the concept, but the details are where it entirely falls apart. It feels like such a missed opportunity and I feel like it needs an entire second book to fill the gaps. 

Of the ones I’ve run or played in or both for me it’s Curse of Strahd. Don’t get me wrong, the campaign itself is an absolute corker and deserves all the love and respect it gets but by its very nature the campaign is about collecting magic items and lore that essentially turn off 90% of the BBEG’s abilities and so when you finally face him he goes down like a sack of potatoes. I’ve run it once and played it twice and all three times he barely survived to the third round of combat 

Quote from CunningSmile >>

Of the ones I’ve run or played in or both for me it’s Curse of Strahd. Don’t get me wrong, the campaign itself is an absolute corker and deserves all the love and respect it gets but by its very nature the campaign is about collecting magic items and lore that essentially turn off 90% of the BBEG’s abilities and so when you finally face him he goes down like a sack of potatoes. I’ve run it once and played it twice and all three times he barely survived to the third round of combat 

 Actually, if you use Strahd's lair actions correctly, he can be near-unbeatable. I agree that its not that acessable for most DM's though.

Quote from PPSS2022 >>

Quote from CunningSmile >>

Of the ones I’ve run or played in or both for me it’s Curse of Strahd. Don’t get me wrong, the campaign itself is an absolute corker and deserves all the love and respect it gets but by its very nature the campaign is about collecting magic items and lore that essentially turn off 90% of the BBEG’s abilities and so when you finally face him he goes down like a sack of potatoes. I’ve run it once and played it twice and all three times he barely survived to the third round of combat 

 Actually, if you use Strahd's lair actions correctly, he can be near-unbeatable. I agree that its not that acessable for most DM's though.

 I disagree, his lair actions are the ability to move, the ability to make one strike (doing about 22 points of damage) or if you use two of them you can bite which does 17 points of damage and heals him slightly. Even with the bite he will do that maybe twice before dying. If the players completed all the fetch quests they’re casting daylight all around him so he’s taking 20 points of damage each round with no ability to heal and all his attacks are at disadvantage, they’ve also probably destroyed the heart with his extra bag of HP, and he can’t transform because of the light. Add in them actually attacking as 9th or 10th level characters and his 144 hit points is pretty pathetic 

Quote from CunningSmile >>

Of the ones I’ve run or played in or both for me it’s Curse of Strahd. Don’t get me wrong, the campaign itself is an absolute corker and deserves all the love and respect it gets but by its very nature the campaign is about collecting magic items and lore that essentially turn off 90% of the BBEG’s abilities and so when you finally face him he goes down like a sack of potatoes. I’ve run it once and played it twice and all three times he barely survived to the third round of combat 

 I actually have heard about that. He seems like this all-knowing OP BBEG, but played even the slightest bit incorrectly (or, strategically on the part of the players) and he's gone before any of the players are. It takes away a lot of the stakes.

Frost Maiden suffers from wildly inconsistent tone and an utterly random plot that feels mostly like they just took a bunch of mini-adventures and awkwardly stuffed them together to make something feature-length without bothering to make all the individual chapters actually part of the plot.  The adventure can't decide if it's going to be a grim horror or a lighthearted comedy and thus swings wildly between the two, and most of the horror elements are rather weak stereotypes anyway.  The mechanics for many of the elements in the game flat out don't work: avalanches are either 100% going to hit someone or they have a 100% chance of escape, dog sled travel is actually slower than just using snowshoes etc.  And Auril herself is frankly a very unimpressive fight, not difficult if the party doesn't figure out each form's weakness and an absolute joke if they do.  And of course the previously mentioned part where after her defeat there's two more chapters for absolutely no reason.

Quote from CunningSmile >>

 I disagree, his lair actions are the ability to move

You're talking about his legendary actions.. His important lair action is to walk through walls. Which means (at least, in the old version, did they revamp?) he just sneaks up on the party with his double-digit stealth, does some harass damage, then nopes out through a wall, regenerates to full, and repeats the process. Incidentally, he never takes the sunlight damage because he's never in sunlight at the start of his turn. None of the items the PCs can get on their way through the adventure does anything to negate that. All of which is entirely unfun gameplay so it's a fairly bad boss fight, but it's not as trivial as people make it out to be.

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

Quote from CunningSmile >>

 I disagree, his lair actions are the ability to move

You're talking about his legendary actions.. His important lair action is to walk through walls. Which means (at least, in the old version, did they revamp?) he just sneaks up on the party with his double-digit stealth, does some harass damage, then nopes out through a wall, regenerates to full, and repeats the process. Incidentally, he never takes the sunlight damage because he's never in sunlight at the start of his turn. None of the items the PCs can get on their way through the adventure does anything to negate that. All of which is entirely unfun gameplay so it's a fairly bad boss fight, but it's not as trivial as people make it out to be.

 It's easier to get sunlight on him now that Daylight emits sunlight in 5.5

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

(at least, in the old version, did they revamp?) 

The newer versions of his stat block (from Vecna: Eve of Ruin and Ravenloft: The Horrors Within) do not have this. Lair Actions aren't really a thing in 5.5e, but those effects haven't been replaced by anything comparable.

It's true, though, that if a module has all these options to find special tools to beat the boss... the boss should be kind of unbeatable without those options. Not sure which if any adventures actually work that way, I haven't run or played most of them. It looks like if you totally screw up Rise of Tiamat and Descent Into Avernus you can wind up in a legitimately hard fight.