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I thought that Tomb of Annihilation is more like a hommage to Tomb of Horrors, and not a literal conversion. Just like Princes of the Apocalypse is a hommage to Temple of Elemental Evil, without being the same story or dungeon.

Thank you. This is probably the best explanation of the problem in the whole thread. The question is not whether the 6-8 medium to hard encounters per adventuring day is a rule or a guideline. It is just a simple fact that the devs designed game balance, both in terms of players vs. monsters...

What do you do if the players foolishly waste their recoveries early in the level with little effect and find themselves having still half a level to go with no more resources, spell slots, or hit points available? I would use your system maybe in addition to the "gritty realism" option, where...

Do you mean "final modules" as in the final chapters of adventure #1 Island at the Axis of the World? That is something I consider likely. If you mean "final modules" as in all adventures #1 to #13, that isn't going to happen because it's over 1,300 pages and the 5E Zeitgeist chapters are mixed...

In the end it all comes down to the question: Who decides when and how often to take a long rest, the DM or the players? In an ideal world that doesn't make a difference, because the goals of the DM and the players are perfectly aligned, and there is a certain optimum that can be found by...

In a different thread two people wanted to "correct" a calculation of awarded xp of mine, by pointing out the xp multiplier from the table in the DMG on page 82. Then others chimed in, pointing out that those multipliers were only for calculating encounter difficulty, not for awarding xp. That...

I would like to hear from somebody who has used milestone xp on Princes of the Apocalypse how in worked in practice, regardless of theoretical preferences. How do you motivate players to do content like the side trecks if there is no milestone connected to that? How do you handle the 4 Temples...

ArwensDaughter : Thank you very much for this useful bit of information! I turned my iPad and the search function appeared!

My two favorite themes are the Gothic Horror team, in 5E represented by Curse of Strahd; and the Steampunk theme, for which EN Publishing just releases the first adventure for the Zeitgeist AP.

The main encounter of this first part appears to have a problem: The Fire Sprites from the 4E version are mentioned in the Tactics section and even shown in an illustration. But there is no mention how they get summoned, nor do they have a stat block, which makes me think that they aren't...

I am currently running a game with 2 monks, 1 ranger, and 1 barbarian. Works just fine. The "tank - healer - dps" setup is more World of Warcraft than Dungeons & Dragons anyway. In 5E there are no real tanks, because there is no taunt mechanic other than a very limited Compelled Duel paladin...

For the Princes of the Apocalypse campaign I am about to start I consider using the following house rule: Every combat encounter that isn't the first after a long rest gives double xp. That way my group should be able to keep up with the level requirements of the adventure. And they are...

Same here. I will buy books and use D&D Beyond regularly, but I haven't found a compelling argument yet why to pay for a subscription. I don't need more than 6 characters or other people's homebrew stuff. Why should I subscribe? Having used D&D Beyond in the beta I also find it fairly...

In Princes of the Apocalypse as written you end up with, to use sub-theme of this thread, a "Fake Sandbox". The adventure suggests you can go where you want, but in the end you have to fight a CR 18 to 20 prince of elemental evil. Which means that if you skipped too many of the dungeons, you get...

Yes, I just wanted to reply the same thing. Although one could argue that awarding the multiplied XP would be fairer, that is not what the rules say.

Interesting! Do you have a source for this information? I know designed party size was 5 in 4E, but haven't really seen anything in the 5E DMG about it, except for a bit on encounter difficulties that suggests that parties smaller than 4 or larger than 5 need adjustments. Anyway, back to the...

XP from random encounters are hard to predict because, well, they are random. :) In the case of PotA, after errata, the 4 starting keeps are actually quite close to each other, so I don't expect all that much xp from random encounters between them. The side trecks would provide more xp, however...

CapnZapp : My main concern is always rules consistency and balance. My home game meets only twice per month, so leving faster is quite all right with me. What I am not all right with is WotC making one set of rules for DMs that play RAW, and another sense of rules for people who spend extra...

Note that class balance significantly changes in an environment that only has one deadly alpha-strike encounter between long rests.

I did this for the 4 first dungeons in Princes of the Apocalypse: Feathergale Spire: Supposed to get you from level 3 to 4, which would require 1800 xp per character. Actually gives 4175 xp for monsters. For a group of 5 players thatis only 46% of the xp needed. Rivergard Keep: Supposed to get...