"Storm King's Thunder" in Actual Play

It's hard to gauge where we really are in terms of our progress through "Storm King's Thunder" - the campaign starts quite tightly, sprawls out into a very loose "exploration" phase, and then comes back together for a tightly-plotted finale. We're some way into that middle section, and I have no really clear idea how much is still to go.

However, we've done enough for me to have some thoughts about how it works in actual play. Some of these observations apply to D&D 5e in general, and some apply to "Storm King's Thunder" in particular.

Firstly, "milestone advancement" sucks. And the decision to use this in "Storm King's Thunder" also sucks - there just isn't enough material to really justify the rate of advancement of the PCs. This is probably a fundamental problem in WotC's big "storyline" books in general, since the page count almost certainly doesn't allow for enough adventure for the supposed level range of the campaign. Especially if the book must also contain bootstrap material to get the PCs from 1st level up to some nominal starting point.

That said, the bootstrap material in "Storm King's Thunder" proved to be surprisingly useful - my PCs started the adventure midway through 4th level, so having a few more bits and pieces to drop in to bring them up to 5th was quite useful. I still think those pages could probably have been better used (since I could have gotten another adventure from somewhere else), but I should note that I did use much of that material.

The second big observation I have is that D&D 5e, like every prior edition, really falls down on its exploration, and especially overland travel, rules. I've mentioned this before, and it's an area that I've been able to 'borrow' some material from elsewhere to plug some of the gaps (have I mentioned that I'm a big fan of the Angry GM's work?), but it's really something that I shouldn't have to significantly rewrite to get a good experience. That's pretty poor. "Storm King's Thunder", of course, isn't to blame for this weakness in 5e, but it does serve to highlight it really well (or badly).

Thirdly, I've been rather frustrated by the interconnections in the adventure, or rather the lack thereof. The PCs start in one of three places, where there is some sort of inciting event. That's fine. Then the PCs get some number of quests (zero to five) from the surviving NPCs from that event, which lead them to start travelling. And at some point, they'll run out of quests.

And then?

Well, the next thing is an encounter with a particular NPC. Which is fine and all, except that that encounter needs to happen on the road, while the PCs' final quest will leave them in one of the many settlements in the region.

So there are two problems there:

• It's entirely possible that the PCs may come out of the inciting event with no quests to pursue. It's fair to say that that's rather problematic!
  
• The DM needs to plan to insert that key encounter some time before the final quest runs out. But that might not be convenient, and it might not be at a point where the PCs are actually ready for the next part of their quest. Not to mention, of course, that that encounter could always go really badly...

Speaking of those "zero to five quests", I had initially thought that this would lead to a bunch of interesting choices - do we go West for quest one, East for quest two, or whatever? It turned out, in fact, that the answer was to go East for quest one, then further East for quest two, and so on. That's a shame. All that said, we've had a fair amount of fun out of the campaign so far. And what it has allowed me to do, which is quite good, is to use it to plug some of my own material into the campaign to keep the group engaged. Which has been fun, even if it's not what I'm looking for in a published adventure. Anyway, my conclusions from this are several:

• My initial assessment of this adventure was right - as a setting guide it's actually pretty sound, but as an adventure it's poor. And since I paid for an adventure, I can't recommend it.
  
• D&D needs at least one more edition. There probably shouldn't be many changes to PC powers, spells, monsters, or magic items, but it could really use a significant revision of the exploration and social interaction pillars, because those are still sorely lacking.
  
• I'm rather looking forward to our next campaign. And, actually, I'm quite glad that we did this one first, as there are quite a few "lessons learned" that I wouldn't have understood without the experience granted by SKT. So that's good.

And that's it.