The games I run for my home Dungeons & Dragons games vary wildly in quality. There are times when I’m just not inspired to create something exceptional.

Well, okay, that’s most of the time. Getting it to “good” is a goal.

However, even when I come up with very boring scenarios, we’re likely to still have a good time. And that’s the magic of Dungeons & Dragons and other TTRPGs. You’re playing it with friends, and it’s the interaction with your friends that provides the magic.

Which is one reason why playing at a public adventure with strangers can be so fraught. Do you get a good group or bad one? I think, more often than not, things will work. But I’ve seen horrendous people playing at the table, bringing down the experience for everyone.

But when I play with my friends, then watching and participating in all the interactions, all the in-jokes we’ve developed over the years, helps elevate even quite weak material.

(At this point, there’s a few people in my home Greyhawk group I’ve been playing with for over two decades.)

I’m playing Shadow of the Dragon Queen with players I met through the D&D Adventurers League in Ballarat. They’re awesome, and we’re very aware of the adventure’s shortcomings. In general, I think it’s a good adventure, a middling representation of the Dragonlance setting, but it also has some awful bits. We have also been speeding through it. I always run combat fast, and with this smaller group, we get through things very quickly.

It’s also an adventure that I’m using story-based levelling with. I love my XP. I prefer them in most circumstances, but for Shadow of the Dragon Queen, as a linear adventure, they’re a bad fit. Not using XP allows me to skip encounters that are just there for XP farming. It’s been an ongoing complaint of mine about a lot of Paizo Adventure Paths is that they have more encounters than the story can handle, so you lose the momentum of the story because you’re just trapped in one fight after another to gain the XP. As I go forward, I’m becoming more aware of different story-telling techniques in TTRPGs. Sometimes, it is about the exploration and fights. Other times, it’s about hitting story beats in a timely manner.

One of my players said to me that the random encounters in the wilderness felt pointless. I had to agree: no XP and no threat. They provided a small amount of flavour, but they weren’t compelling. And that’s a problem.

Considering the matter further, I believe that one reason they weren’t interesting is that you’d get at most one per day, and so they’d never deplete any meaningful resource. Due to hit points and spell slots replenishing overnight, you really need more than one encounter in a day for them to feel meaningful. This is as opposed to AD&D, where hit points did not replenish. You needed to spend days recuperating or – more likely – get access to healing magic. And AD&D healing magic? Unbelievably limited. If you had a party of six with one level 5 cleric in AD&D, that gave you the total of 5d8 healing a day. It’s a long, long way from the plentiful healing available these days.

There are many areas where you can run a 5E scenario in a similar manner to an AD&D scenario, but there are differences.

I picked up a copy of Uncharted Journeys from Cubicle 7 to use in my games – it’s a set of wilderness travel rules based on those in The One Ring. I’ve been playing the (first) 5E version of The One Ring recently, and I’m really looking forward to seeing how they work in practice. Wilderness travel is hard to do well. Even with the more attritional nature of AD&D, it’s very easy to have meaningless encounters that don’t add that much to the game. Of course, we’re currently exploring a major dungeon, but there will be wilderness travel again!

Having a set of rules that aid making travel into a meaningful part of the process is really exciting!

One other bit of Shadow of the Dragon Queen that utterly frustrated me was the following text:

Make it clear the characters don’t need to rush their exploration of the city to return to their allies.

The situation is that the characters’ allies are being chased by Lord Soth and a Dragon Army, and they’re totally outmatched.

Here’s a tip: Don’t put in a situation that puts the characters under time pressure and then tell them that they’re not under time pressure.

It’s amazing how badly most games handle time pressure scenarios. You can see it in Cyberpunk 2077, where you’re told you have only a limited time to live, then the game doesn’t care if you spend weeks wandering around Night City. It’s not the only example; it’s common for these problems to crop up. And in a TTRPG, actually implementing a limited time window then sees the party fail because they rolled really badly in one combat and need to rest.

Yeah, a ticking clock is hard to pull off.

The intentions are good of the Shadow of the Dragon Queen designers. And yes, you want the big cinematic moments to progress the story, but with that needs to be an appreciation of how it then affects the gameplay.

I’ve still been having fun with the adventure, despite my issues with it. (It’d sit on “Recommend” on my review scale at present.) I hope my players are also enjoying it. I think they are, but perhaps they’re just enjoying the group interactions.

I think we’re about one or two sessions away from concluding the adventure. Probably two, but we’ll see. After that, Phandelver and Below is the next adventure for the group, though we might need a one-shot or two while we wait for its release!