How Deadly was/is Your Frostmaiden Experience

[kbob]

I don’t know how many responses I will garner on this, but I would like to know what people’s experience with Rime of the Frostmaiden (RoF) has been. I have been running it for over a year our group has made it about halfway through chapter 6 (Caves of Hunger) out of 7 chapters. I have to say, this is personally the deadliest 5e module I have ever encountered. Notes: 5e is the operable phrase. The Tomb of Horrors 5e conversion in TtYP is not this deadly (though the original with all of its instant deaths, obviously, is still king with no close second but that’s not the 5e version). I have not played/ran CoS and I have heard it was the deadliest. Though several told me it was all in the front half of the campaign and that the latter parts are much easier with a few telling me Strahd was too easy (though many still say he’s hard). Either way, I speak from him ignorance in CoS. However, for RoF, I can speak first hand.
For starters, I should say, I heard it was challenging for players (and for DMs but that’s another matter) before I began to run it. I also took note of some helpful advise from others on how to adjust certain encounters. I ran all this (without spoilers) to my players and they insisted that we play it as close as possible to the way it’s written. Obviously, some things would have to change due to the nature of player agency and running a module (if you’ve run modules you know what I mean) and I had to adjust fire after making a few mistakes/misreading/overlooking things throughout the module. I prep and take notes, but I still make mistakes. That all said, I reiterated that there are portions that don’t seem balanced/fair (though, if the players are cautious and think things through I still believe they can survive). They still insisted on running as is. They insisted I didn’t pull punches either and play the monsters as they would be. Smart monsters are smart and dumb monsters are dumb. I wouldn’t go out of my way to make cheap deaths. I wouldn’t have a monster just hit downed PCs as default. If the enemy was particularly insidious or some other reason that made more sense to do then I would try to foreshadow that before or during the fight. “The villain looks particularly insidious and seems to looks fwd to killing as many of you as he can” or “the villain seems to know he’s been bested but has a determination in his eye to take one of you with him”. My players know by now that’s code for, cover your downed buddy cuz if he/she drops, then they might die before they get their next turn. They wanted the challenge and so I obliged.
Oh boy has it been challenging! I have 5-8 players (play as they can) that have been playing. NONE of the OG PCs are with the current party! Death, happens all the time in this module. To be fair, some of it is poor decisions. [Example: 2 sessions ago, one of my veteran players screwed up pretty bad, but he got bored with what the other players were doing and made a bad call. They were talking to the head of an iron golem and were asking yes or no Qs to him. He was getting antsy and bored with it, so instead of talking with them about moving on, he decided to run ahead into the next room. To scout. Without sneaking. Alone. In a module that has killed couple of his own PCs already. Again, veteran and he knew better. His gloom stalker-ranger/BM-fighter was ambushed by 12 shadows (yes 12!). He failed to see them with his perception roll. Dead. (Don’t split the party)]. But there has been a lot of deaths that weren’t necessarily their fault. Could plans have been made better? Sure. To be fair, if the strategize, I tend to just make monsters (usually) play into their plans. Cause they took the time to do it (whether I thinks it’s a great plan or not). That said, still, sometimes the challenges are just too high with this module for slugging it out. If you run as is, in my experience, the players really need to learn how to fall back/retreat and regroup. Once a PC drops, and it can happen fast, the balance of power swiftly shifts. They need to see potential problems and react accordingly. There are places in this module that need to be treated like you’re playing Dark Souls. Run and gun is not gonna do it. And then, that’s still not a guarantee. We ended our session last night with the players about to go down a hole instead of heading down another passage. I hope they choose the other direction cuz that hole leads them straight down into a pool with 2 remorhaz’s. The party is level 8 and we had 5 players last night. If the same show up next time and continue that same direction? That’s 5 PCs entrapping themselves with a fight against 2 beefy monsters. They are young R’s but still deadly. And if they went down the first of these tunnels they came across it would’ve been an adult and a young. I mean the module has been deadly the whole time. Not just the beginning (squishy level 1-3). In all of this, my players are still having fun though. Which makes me feel good.
So what has everyone else’s experience been with it? Have you found a lot of PC deaths? Do you find it one of the more challenging 5e modules? Do your players still enjoy it.

[ShadowSandbag]

I was a player in a game with two other PCs and yeah, i found it pretty difficult. No one has actually died yet, but we are only only at the beginning of part 3 i think? We've had a lot of really, really close calls. I actually made a thread a while ago about a particularly difficult fight with a frost giant skeleton and some other things; I don't know if that one came up in your game. That would have been a TPK for sure if one enemy attack had hit at a key point.

To answer your question, I go back and forth on enjoying it. In the fight i just mentioned for example, i pretty much totally clocked out near the end. At that point it was just a game of "am i going to get hit and go down again between the cleric's turn and mine". There's been other occasions like that where the GM just kind of put a hard wall up of "this is the one thing you need to do to proceed". I guess I would say that while I enjoy Frostmaiden, I think I would enjoy other modules more.

[Raphite1]

I’ve been DMing it for over a year and we’re one or two sessions from finishing; the party just killed Auril in Ythryn. To my amazement, we’ve had zero PC deaths, though we lost a couple NPCs (one of whom was Vellynne). I played it mostly as written. I strengthened Auril and Tekeli-li substantially, changed the Tests of the Frostmaiden and made them harder, very slightly nerfed couple insta-kill scenarios, and left the rest the same.

They’re mostly veteran players.

[Luccan]

We haven't finished and it's our DMs first experience. That said, we would have almost certainly had a death or two at this point if said DM hadn't allowed a very powerful bit of homebrew for one of the PCs. This is with two healers in the party as well

[5eNeedsDarksun]

I'm a player in a current game with a small group of veteran players and we're nearing the end. No deaths yet, but I could definitely see where there could have been if we didn't hit the right lever at the right time. Reminds me a bit of the first few levels of Descent into Avernus (which I DMed) where if you don't manage to work out where the danger is in advance or get the drop on some of the enemies you'll have a big problem. The OP made a point of saying this was tough 'for 5e' and I think the example that was provided of a single character running off to check a room is telling. In most areas of earlier 5e mods you might have gotten away with that, so newer players who have learned only 5e may have learned some bad habits.

That said, I can't remember what level we were when we first ran into a frost giant skeleton, but the battle was uncomfortably close. And my character didn't have a lot of ranged options to deal with a certain dragon, so that was a wake up call. By tier 2 I'm finding it's a lot like other mods in the sense that characters have a lot of tools to turn the tide if they manage resources well. We ran into some flameskulls recently, and the DM misread the encounter as 2 groups of 4 rather than 2 groups of 2. No worries; the wizard just put up a wall of force, so we were down to 4 anyway. I do think the newer mods (including DiA) have bumped the difficulty somewhat. Whether that's just a trend or an attempt to compensate for the power creep in Xanathars and Tashas who knows.

Overall, I think it's up there with the best 5e mods in the sense it has a nice balance among the 3 pillars, and I know our DM isn't having to do massive amounts of work to flesh things out as I did with DiA.

[Melphizard]

I’ve been DMing it for over a year and we’re one or two sessions from finishing; the party just killed Auril in Ythryn. To my amazement, we’ve had zero PC deaths, though we lost a couple NPCs (one of whom was Vellynne). I played it mostly as written. I strengthened Auril and Tekeli-li substantially, changed the Tests of the Frostmaiden and made them harder, very slightly nerfed couple insta-kill scenarios, and left the rest the same.

They’re mostly veteran players.

I finished my campaign a while back after running it for a year and had a similar experience. My party avoided PC deaths but lost many NPC friends who they knew or brought with them to Ythryn (notably the two Arcane Brotherhood folk whom they had join along). They experienced two main fights in Ythryn with the first being against a revived lich who was able to obtain a soul to revive himself with and then again Auril herself who proved a challenge but they were capable of overcoming it.

[Spo]

Our game was challenging but the charters we lost were from the players losing interest in finishing the campaign. I felt the setting was great but after fighting the dragon and storming the fortress, the tonal shift was dramatic and playing McGuffin hunt in the magic city
where every step practically required a saving throw got old fast

[kbob]

That said, I can't remember what level we were when we first ran into a frost giant skeleton, but the battle was uncomfortably close. And my character didn't have a lot of ranged options to deal with a certain dragon, so that was a wake up call. By tier 2 I'm finding it's a lot like other mods in the sense that characters have a lot of tools to turn the tide if they manage resources well. We ran into some flameskulls recently, and the DM misread the encounter as 2 groups of 4 rather than 2 groups of 2. No worries; the wizard just put up a wall of force, so we were down to 4 anyway. I do think the newer mods (including DiA) have bumped the difficulty somewhat. Whether that's just a trend or an attempt to compensate for the power creep in Xanathars and Tashas who knows.

My players never really encountered said dragon. They heard tails and saw her fly overhead but the choices they made never took them directly across her path. They made a lot of unexpected choices that took them in directions I didn’t anticipate. Thus there are things they never experienced. They never even encountered a chardalain berserker, which is kind of a head scratcher.
The flame skulls (FS) you mentioned were experienced quite differently in our group. The PCs digging around for loot in some ruins in the cavern between the two caverns with the FS. They rolled crap on initiative (I think one player got to go first and I forget what he did). The FS, being FS, all fireballed them. 4 fireballs. Downed 2 out of 6 PCs (had 6 players that session) with one of them taking a failed death save from the last FB. Another was almost downed. They were level 8 so no wall of force option. They finally destroyed them. I gave them a religion check to see if they knew anything about FS (none of their characters had come across FS before). They passed an knew that FS come back in a couple of hours (possibly one, as in short rest over,? “Welcome back!”) They had previously crossed an underground river soon after entering the cave of hungers (drawn on map). They had explored where that went earlier. The module doesn’t say so I told them it just went about 100’ East and plunged into a seemingly endless void via a crevasse (tried to make it obvious, without saying so, that’s not the way to go). Anyway, one of the players was like, I throw the remains of the FS in the river. I thought that was a great idea! I gave him bonus xp for solving a problem.

The frost giants (both? times, I think it’s only been twice) they encountered were challenging too but not the hardest. The hardest encounters so far have been the duergar fortress, this cave, and Sephek (if they chose to encounter him earlier, he could’ve prob wiped them). Some of the side quests were challenging and close too. I think we lost one or 2 PCs there too but I don’t remember them. Their first encounter with Auril was almost a wipe. They were already down on resources and hurt (the ice piercers didn’t help either). They encountered her in the top chamber of her lair and it didn’t go well. She downed 2 players (they were almost down already) and then the PCs tried to diplomacize (I know 3.5 term) her. So I reworked her MO. She agreed to spare them and restore them if they find the lost city of Ythrn for her and make it in and give all of it to her. This along with their allegiance to be her faithful servants for the rest of their mortal lives was their price for living. They agreed. And of course they have no intentions of giving her Ythrn but I thought that made for a good story. The players have no idea that it wasn’t a given option in the module. It works better, in my mind, than how it’s written. (Paraphrasing: “If players kill Auril then winter is over and they can choose to carry on and get the secrets of Ythrn. If not then game over you win. If they don’t kill her she decides to just show up at the very end”). This way it ties the rest of the adventure to her and they expect to see her again. How did y’all work out the ending? I ask cuz it did seem a bit disconnected to me as written. Like, the adventure is over (killed Auril) but we need to get at least 2 more chapters in so we can justify selling this module for $40.
Critique aside, it has been one of the more enjoyable mods I’ve ever ran/played in spite of alleged flaws.

[5eNeedsDarksun]

My players never really encountered said dragon. They heard tails and saw her fly overhead but the choices they made never took them directly across her path. They made a lot of unexpected choices that took them in directions I didnÂ’t anticipate. Thus there are things they never experienced. They never even encountered a chardalain berserker, which is kind of a head scratcher.
The flame skulls (FS) you mentioned were experienced quite differently in our group. The PCs digging around for loot in some ruins in the cavern between the two caverns with the FS. They rolled crap on initiative (I think one player got to go first and I forget what he did). The FS, being FS, all fireballed them. 4 fireballs. Downed 2 out of 6 PCs (had 6 players that session) with one of them taking a failed death save from the last FB. Another was almost downed. They were level 8 so no wall of force option. They finally destroyed them. I gave them a religion check to see if they knew anything about FS (none of their characters had come across FS before). They passed an knew that FS come back in a couple of hours (possibly one, as in short rest over,? “Welcome back!”) They had previously crossed an underground river soon after entering the cave of hungers (drawn on map). They had explored where that went earlier. The module doesn’t say so I told them it just went about 100’ East and plunged into a seemingly endless void via a crevasse (tried to make it obvious, without saying so, that’s not the way to go). Anyway, one of the players was like, I throw the remains of the FS in the river. I thought that was a great idea! I gave him bonus xp for solving a problem.

The frost giants (both? times, I think it’s only been twice) they encountered were challenging too but not the hardest. The hardest encounters so far have been the duergar fortress, this cave, and Sephek (if they chose to encounter him earlier, he could’ve prob wiped them). Some of the side quests were challenging and close too. I think we lost one or 2 PCs there too but I don’t remember them. Their first encounter with Auril was almost a wipe. They were already down on resources and hurt (the ice piercers didn’t help either). They encountered her in the top chamber of her lair and it didn’t go well. She downed 2 players (they were almost down already) and then the PCs tried to diplomacize (I know 3.5 term) her. So I reworked her MO. She agreed to spare them and restore them if they find the lost city of Ythrn for her and make it in and give all of it to her. This along with their allegiance to be her faithful servants for the rest of their mortal lives was their price for living. They agreed. And of course they have no intentions of giving her Ythrn but I thought that made for a good story. The players have no idea that it wasn’t a given option in the module. It works better, in my mind, than how it’s written. (Paraphrasing: “If players kill Auril then winter is over and they can choose to carry on and get the secrets of Ythrn. If not then game over you win. If they don’t kill her she decides to just show up at the very end”). This way it ties the rest of the adventure to her and they expect to see her again. How did y’all work out the ending? I ask cuz it did seem a bit disconnected to me as written. Like, the adventure is over (killed Auril) but we need to get at least 2 more chapters in so we can justify selling this module for $40.
Critique aside, it has been one of the more enjoyable mods IÂ’ve ever ran/played in spite of alleged flaws.

I think the way the flameskull encounter goes is a particularly good example of the difference between success and failure in 5e in tougher encounters. Flameskulls are an expression of the glass cannon on the monster side. They have 40 hp and a very hittable AC... and Fireball. They have some resistances and immunities, but they're undead. Our group didn't have a Cleric, so we couldn't turn them, but the 4 remaining got killed in a hurry. Just a 1st level smite from my Palard does 3d8 of damage, so he can reliably take out at least 1 per round (PAM + 2 attacks per round from Swords Bard).
You mentioned initiative, and our group rolled well. But even before that, the effectiveness of perception, scouting and preparation are huge in how this battle is going to go. FS shed light, so there's no way they should get surprise on a group that's paying attention, but could the party get surprise? An experienced party is going to do things that increase the chances they kill/ neutralize some of these things before they fireball, while an inexperienced or careless group is going to leave it to chance... or worse. You mentioned one player did win initiative; we only have a group of 3 with a couple of NPCs, but even if only one of us won initiative the player would have had the sense and ability to A) remove at least one of the FS from play and B) if possible get away from the rest of the group so that everyone couldn't get roasted.

You mentioned Sephek, and I believe after the session our DM mentioned he had Misty Step. Well, after we managed to capture him for questioning the next player up (I think it was me) blindfolded him. I didn't know he had MS, but it's just habit to blindfold and gag all prisoners ASAP, then deal with them later. Him and his goon beat us up pretty good, so if he'd got loose we would have had a real problem.

There are things that experienced (not those who have only played 5e on easy) players do to maximize success while they're playing.

[Azuresun]

(Paraphrasing: “If players kill Auril then winter is over and they can choose to carry on and get the secrets of Ythrn. If not then game over you win. If they don’t kill her she decides to just show up at the very end”). This way it ties the rest of the adventure to her and they expect to see her again. How did y’all work out the ending? I ask cuz it did seem a bit disconnected to me as written. Like, the adventure is over (killed Auril) but we need to get at least 2 more chapters in so we can justify selling this module for $40.
Critique aside, it has been one of the more enjoyable mods I’ve ever ran/played in spite of alleged flaws.

It's a really bizarre choice. I think the assumption is that if she's losing, she teleports somewhere else on the island as a lair action, and escapes on her bird....but really, defeating the final boss two chapters early is a really weird possibility to add to a module.

The way I'll handle it is to not have Auril be there in person, but rather a high-ranking frost druid or buer hag, who's enacting the spell on her behalf. They get beaten, and Auril appears personally.