D&D 5E Hoard of the Dragon Queen for 5 Players

[plancktum]

Hi,

At the moment I'm preparing HotDQ for my group, but my group consists usually of 5 players.
As HotDQ is written for a Party of 4PCs I obviously need to adjust the combats.
How would you adjust the encounters? I thought about just maximizing Monster HP, but I'm afraid that this makes the combats to long.

How would you handle this issue?

best regards

 

[zoroaster100]

One of the adventure's authors said they didn't have the encounter builder XP/CR chart when designing the adventure (as it was not created yet and even recently was still in draft mode for the DMG). And several people who have run the first chapter as-is have complained it was too tough for first level characters. So I would run it as is and see how it goes before trying to up the encounter difficulty.

 

[keterys]

One of the adventure's authors said they didn't have the encounter builder XP/CR chart when designing the adventure (as it was not created yet and even recently was still in draft mode for the DMG). And several people who have run the first chapter as-is have complained it was too tough for first level characters. So I would run it as is and see how it goes before trying to up the encounter difficulty.

The biggest pressure early on is how much you can accomplish before you need to rest; it should probably work fine to run as-is until the fights seem too easy or there aren't enough of them.

 

[Rydac]

I'm running it now and you can definitely leave it as is....opening episode has a lot of activities for the adventurers to tackle before they get a long rest.