Like many of you I have been participating in the Adventurer’s League and in particular playing or dungeon mastering the Hoard of the Dragon Queen module. This was my first venture into the Encounters program, and to say it was not a smooth start on the journey would be an understatement. Administrative problems aside it took very little time to discover that the Hoard of the Dragon Queen as presented to us was not a good introduction to 5E at all.
My Problems with Greenest
So I downloaded the free content from the Adventurer’s League site and skimmed over the module to get a sense of what was going to happen and what was involved in the first few adventures. On this read over I didn’t see any real problems, I just thought this wouldn’t take that long to get through based on my experiences with play testing Next and playing with the starter box. Then we did the first session and I quickly realised 3 major problems:
- Group Experience was Critical.
- Everything in 1 Night.
- We are supposed to do what?
Group Experience was Critical
That first night we had enough players for 2 groups of 6, most of whom I had not seen previously when we had been running the starter set on Sundays. This meant we had a lot of people who were looking in the PHB for the first time, ever, on that first night. Some of these players had limited experience with any prior edition of DnD (and often just with 4E) and I was the only person present who had participated in the play test. Come the next session and the first fights the problems with this quickly manifested as character’s started dropping like flies. This first session then meant there was a flurry of rebuilding characters so that they could actually survive for at least a few encounters.
Everything in 1 Night
The whole first episode happens in only a few hours of in game time, its a fast raid of a town by a group of unknown enemies who are presumably working for the dragon that is also attacking. For level 4 to 6 characters this wouldn’t be much of a problem, they have plenty of resources for dealing with the levels of enemies involved in the conflict, but for level 1 characters where 3 hits from a kobold is likely to drop a character unconscious this is a big problem. The whole of the raid is equivalent to a dungeon that characters might be expected to be raiding by making sorties into the dungeon before retreating and resting to heal, recover and level up.
We are Supposed to do What?
The first scene starts this problem. Level 1 characters are supposed to stop a raid on a town and castle led by a dragon. Not a little wyrmling, an adult dragon. This just doesn’t seem remotely plausible. In fact the fact that the PCs start out of town and have no real reason to go into the town while a dragon is attacking it (as against hiding behind the hill they just crested) just makes it worse. Sure good PCs should want to help, but with Evil and Neutral PCs common (if not dominant) that is a far cry from being the most likely outcome.
Fixing The Problems
So with those problems in mind its time to propose some solutions to make the first part of the module work better to make a more compelling story. Obviously only the latter two can be addressed by making changes to the module itself (what WotC/Adventurer’s League call DM Empowerment), the problem of experience needs to be addressed differently. Fortunately how we address what is transpiring in the module lets us help the players gain experience and thus cope with the events that are transpiring without falling prey to events of the module. So here are my fixes:
- Start in Town
- Choose Encounters Carefully.
Start in Town
The most important thing to fix (I think) is the initial motivation of the PCs in the game. If they start out of town you are asking them to come into a dangerous situation that is necessarily counter to their purpose in being in the vicinity of the town in the first place. The module’s default is they are travelling with a caravan as guards, if you are guarding a caravan why would you lead it into an attack on a town by a dragon?
Instead have the PCs reach the town, introduce them to some NPCs and let them make some skill checks and just do some RP. PCs can go to the temple, the inn, meet the baker and or butcher or perhaps for noble background characters go and introduce themselves to the Governor. The most important person to introduce them to before the action starts is Nesim and his master Leosin, introducing them beforehand helps then tie into the start of the second chapter where they are more important.
This allows a few things to happen, firstly new player’s can have an opportunity to learn how skills work before you start asking them to sneak through a town or use intimidate or deception to deal with raiders etc, which might make it easier for players to do those things in the first place (rather than just fight). The second thing that it allows is the ability to role play and earn inspiration, which is an important thing for player’s to learn about, and having inspiration for the first event in the module will make it easier for the players to reach the keep. Further the PCs have met some NPCs so when you are having them move around through the rest of the encounters those people can turn up and be ones that need rescuing or provide aid when they need it.
Choose Encounters Carefully
There are 8 scripted missions/scenes in the episode, from which the PCs need to earn 300xp each. I would argue there there are 4 things that are necessary to tell the story of the siege; Seek the Keep, Sally Port, Dragon Attack, and Half-Dragon Champion. The other 4 are optional according the the apparent interests of your players and careful or smart play will let you combine things to reduce the load anyway.
- Seek the Keep offers a reward of 50xp per human rescued which starts at 250xp, there are 8 kobolds in the first fight (200xp) and on average 3 kobolds and 2 cultists in the other 3 fights (125×3 = 375xp). So if they rescue just the initial 5 and do the basic fights they earn 165xp each as a 5 PC party, that’s over halfway to level 2 already. I very much recommend not adding any encounters to this event (despite the text suggesting that happen) and also planing the fights out a little more to pace the PC’s fights rather than depending on the random roll method outlined in the adventure.
- Sally Port offers 2 fights giving 175xp and 200xp, granting another 75xp for a 5 player party. So with just Seek the Keep and Sally Port a 5 player party needs 60xp to reach level 2. It is highly likely that at this stage the PCs are very much drained of resources and so it offers a good opportunity with the securing of the keep by the players in this fight to supply them with healing and maybe a potion or two in reward for their efforts in securing the keep.
- Dragon Attack offers a single difficult encounter for the party. This fight however is particularly problematic, the dragon is obviously an overwhelming foe and its frightful presence power can completely decimate a party making the encounter even less appealing.
- My first suggestion is to have the dragon fly over every previous fight and activate frightful presence. This does nothing to the relevant encounter as the dragon quickly moves away negating the fear, but each PC that saves is one more that is immune to the fear effect for this encounter which allows the party to engage with the dragon more meaningfully in this encounter (and is the expected situation from the NPC defenders as well).
- While the adventure doesn’t suggest it be prepared for PCs to want to turn siege weapons on the dragon, you can either reward that thinking and allow them to make an attack then have the dragon swoop in and destroy the weapon (Attack is unproficient with no stat but does 1d10+10 damage) or just describe the siege weapons as already destroyed by the dragon.
- Be wary of crazy adventurer antics with this scene, my players tied themselves to a javelin which when it hit triggered the dragon leaving, the melee characters had planned to scale the rope to get to the dragon… it knocked them off in the trees as it fled because they wouldn’t let go…
- Half-Dragon Champion this encounter is pretty much purely for narrative purposes and to set up the big confrontation with him in episode 3. It also ensures that they reach level 2.
As you can see it is very easy for the party to reach level 2 with only a modicum of effort and no need to leave the relative safety of the keep once attained. You can of course have your players stay outside and do more running around and never confront the dragon directly, leaving it more of a mystery and so on. The important aspect is that at most you need to run half the missions/scenes in this Episode to meet the xp expectations, and trying to do more than that is very likely to result in characters dying very prematurely, or reaching level 3 much sooner than the module assumes (and many classes take a big step up at level 3).
Aside from the fairly natural progression of these missions (being focused on the keep as they are), I like these missions/scenes because if you have 6 players it is easy to add a 25xp enemy to each fight to keep things the same and make sure there is 1 more human to rescue at the start and the party will progress at the same rate (or drop an enemy and so on). Also the keep provides a natural place for the PCs to rest and get supplies like potions or healing from those able to provide it, so after each mission/scene the players can have a short rest which will help many of the classes keep performing at a higher level through subsequent fights and reduce the chance of party deaths.
There is one addition I would make to the above, and that is the prisoners mission. If you place the RP for that mission before the Sally Port mission then the PCs can capture prisoners during Sally Port and complete both those missions at once, especially if you do a little RP to make it look like the guard enemy is one of the lower ranked officers that the Governor wishes to speak to in the prisoners mission.