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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fanboy2000" data-source="post: 6360387" data-attributes="member: 19998">I'm going to go ahead and quote [MENTION=9501]Prism[/MENTION] from the other thread:I strongly suspect that "Lost Mine of Phandelver" and "Horde of the Dragon Queen" were written before the developers understood how deadly multiple NPCs/monsters were in this edition. Especially for low level PCs. If you look at the table in <a href="http://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/building-adventures-0" target="_blank">the L&L article that came out after the Starter Set was first available to WPN stores</a>, there are some interesting differences between that and what's in the DM Basic Rules.First, under the L&L article's guidelines, a 500xp encounter is 'Challenging' for a five level party. Under the just released DM Basic, a 500xp encounter is 'Deadly'. Also, Mearls suggests multiplying the xp of a group of monsters by 1.5 if they outnumber the PCs by 2 to 1. Under the DM Basic Rules, they suggest multiplying the xp for encounter building purposes based on the raw number of monsters, regardless of how many PCs are in the party. That's a significant change. The Kobald encounters in the HotDQ suggest that it was written without a complete understanding of how large numbers of monsters/NPCs work. The very first episode (which is designed for four 1st lvl PCs) has multiple encounters with fairly large groups of Kobalds. The first encounter is 8 Kobalds. Under the new guidelines, that's a 500xp encounter for a group of four PCs, and is deadly under the guidelines.I think part of what happened is that Kobalds have a CR of 1/8, and that was supposed to be 8 Kobalds = 1 CR 1 encounter. But that's clearly not what happened. And, let me tell you, having a horde of Koblands with advantage on all there attacks does in fact suck.</blockquote>

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