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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MerricB" data-source="post: 6727423" data-attributes="member: 3586">Originally posted by BRJN:Hurin, I came into HotDQ at Balder's Gate and managed to skip everything you have played through. But I am DMing Rise of Tiamat for our ex-HotDQ group, so I did get to read the book. - You are not supposed to fight the blue dragon to the death. You are supposed to give it a hard slap, whereupon it loses interest and wanders off. I don't know what your DM did with it but it sounds like he tried to really blow away defenders of the keep.- Cyanwrath - the half-dragon - is supposed to be a grudge match. Yes he clobbers your guy the first night. (I believe this was written to give players experience with the Death Save rules.) When you meet again you are three times tougher than you were before, plus - I HOPE - the group has learned to work as a team. If I was DMing HotDQ from the beginning, I would have built up Cyanwrath as a figure the Cultists obviously respect. Many of the as-written combat encounters in Greenest would have been name-dropping instead. And his Purple would have been a uniform not a big cloak. He is supposed to be approximately a Fighter2 with racial powers.- You were supposed to sneak around in the Cult camp and get information. I agree that this goal is hard to discern, since it takes until almost the last page of that chapter before the authors say the camp has almost 200 fighters (Cultists, mercenaries, kobolds, and Big Tough Nasty Leaders included) in it.- The group I had not joined yet got into so much trouble trying to clear out the cave, that the old DM had to use a visit from Drizzt to fix the plot. Other groups report losing Fighters and Barbarians to the enemies in there. There has to be a way to break it up into manageable chunks, but I can't see how to fit in a Long Rest without making the enemy bosses become INT 3. The fights do get easier from here on out - you are not attacking the enemy in his base - until you meet up with BBEG and her Chief Lieutenants again, about 3 months in-game from where you are now. There is one encounter ahead of you that has 4 x CR8 enemies in it vs your group at L4, and suggestions are given in posts above how to fix the problem. For myself, I found the road trip to be the most fun part of the adventure. Try to get your DM to hire the group all together as a Caravan Security Team and appoint somebody Sergeant; this is easier than the random table given in the book. Originally posted by Hurin88:Thanks for the input BRJN. Cyanwrath did not kill the player he dueled in Greenest, he just defeated him and gave him a shot to drop him down to one death save left; the rest of the party was able to get to him in time. So I have no problem with that. Nor do I have any problem with the whole dragon encounter in Greenest. What I do have a problem with is a module that repeatedly puts the players up against enemies that they simply have no hope of defeating. And it sounds like this module does that constantly. Cyanwrath in the cultists camp killed two of our party members. The fact that you had to introduce Drizz't to rescue the party indicates that you had problems with that as well. I haven't done the xp budget for that encounter because I am just a player, but I can't see how, even without the xp budget guidelines, a module's designer could think this is a fair challenge for a level 3 party. It is not. And it looks like the designers of the module are going to keep doing this, if they are putting 4 CR 8 monsters up against a level 4 party. To be clear: I don't expect the players to be able to destroy every enemy they meet instantaneously. Occasionally challenging the players by putting them in situations where they need to run or negotiate is fine. But this module does it way too often for me, and even some of the regular encounters the module expects the characters to defeat are WAY over the xp budget, and WAY too hard for the level of the PCs, which puts the DM i the awkward position of having to fudge things just to prevent a TPK. I hope future modules don't repeat that mistake.Originally posted by iserith: ...in direct combat. The CR and XP budget guidelines assume the party is fighting the enemy directly and is choosing to defeat those enemies by reducing their hit points to zero in a direct battle. Therefore, when taking on enemies that exceed the XP budget for your level or monsters with higher CR than the party level, that should tell you that reducing their hit points to zero in a direct battle is probably not the best path to defeating them. What's more, the DM should be telegraphing threats so you have an opportunity to prepare and tips the scales in your favor. If the DM isn't doing a good job of that, take it upon yourselves to be a little more cautious, stealthy, and crafty in order to cause the enemy to fight on your terms. Just make sure you're not making the game boring in the doing. (Some people go overboard.) This isn't D&D 4e where there's an expectation of a skirmish with enemies within a standard range of difficulty that you can meet head on. It's a different game altogether.Originally posted by pukunui:The main reason for that is because the modules were written while the rules were still being finalized. Look upthread at Steve Winter's posts (Huscarl). He's one of the authors of the modules and talks about the difficulties they faced writing these adventures with a fluctuating ruleset. He's also suggested some fixes for some of the unintentionally overpowered encounters. You can also find some more of his corrections and fixes here(x). The vast majority of "errors" in the Tyranny of Dragons modules are minor, easy to fix things. I think the modules have gotten a much worse reputation than they deserve.Originally posted by BRJN:I think that WotC ought to make a formal statement that HotDQ will be the "floor" of quality for future products. All future products will be compared to it before release. Nothing will be worse, everything must be that good or better. Acknowledge that special circumstances existed that made it harder-than-usual to create high quality for this one product. That said, I have DM'ed part of Ep8 and had a chance to read through the rest of HotDQ. I could start at the beginning and play through it as a DM this time. Some stuff I would do very differently but most of it seems to me to require more to-the-group explanation rather than replacement. I hope a few years down the road WotC can present an Updated HotDQ that has removed rules that weren't used (readiness levels come to mind), and included rules that did make the final cut, and sets all encounters at acceptable difficulty ranges. I also would like an appendix of references to kewl lewt that can be brought forward into Rise of Tiamat (like the Farseer of Illusk*) for potential use. * Help the Zhents install it in Darkhold so it can spy on the Well of Dragons. After the emergency is over, who's going to take it away from them?</blockquote>

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