The adventurers use the items to defeat Strahd.The adventurers find the allies and items they need based on the prophecy.The adventurers are given the prophecy that gives them what they need to find to defeat Strahd.The adventurers are introduced to the Land and its problem.The “proper” play of Curse of Strahd goes like this:
Princes of the apocalypse flowchart series#
Having a series of quests gives the adventurers a clear motivation, and gets away from the “You must be this high to face Strahd” problem. “How do we defeat Strahd?” “You need to find these items”. This strongest form of this structure is found in the reading of the Tarokka deck. If you run Curse of Strahd without thinking through the issues, you can get this exchange: “We need to kill Strahd.” “What level are we?” “Ah… need to kill more dire wolves first!” Thankfully, Curse of Strahd has a stronger quest-based structure than Princes of the Apocalypse that allows the players to avoid thinking about the XP requirement. However, if you have an adventure in a sandbox setting, allowing the players to go where they wish, but also have a strong story (goals) for the adventurers, then problems can set in. Both Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat are of this style: although each section of the adventure gives the players a lot of latitude in how it is dealt with, the overall structure is linear. If you have an adventure written in a linear style, then milestones work very well to avoid the XP grind. It’s still important now, but not in the same manner). (Knowing when to retreat was very important back then. If the players realized they’d gone too deep, they could run away and return to an easier level. (The deeper you went, the more difficult it became). They date from the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, where the players could set the difficulty of the adventure by choosing which level of the dungeon they wished to explore. XP and levels are a very gamist mechanism. Ah…Īt any point when the adventurers need to gain levels to face the threats of the story, then something has gone wrong. Where are the prisoners? In a dungeon designed for level 12 adventurers. However, the story is pushing them towards those areas. One of the bigger problems with Princes of the Apocalypse is that it has an adventure structure that allows the players to very quickly end up in areas that are far too dangerous for them.