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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6384678" data-attributes="member: 996">With good reason.  Between sneaking into town and Seek the Keep the party could face anything from 4 to 8 encounters (8 being pretty unlikely, they'd have to not sneak at all, and you'd have to roll a lot of 50/50 random encounters, even everyone in a 4-PC party failing stealth would only get you two random encounters for a total of 6).  That's about a day's worth of encounters without even a short rest among them.  And, if you get out your DM basic pdf, and run the numbers on those encounters, a lot of them are hard, and the 8 kobolds chasing the family are technically 'deadly' to a party of 4 first-level characters.  So, you could go through and try to get the total exp for that first 'mission' down to 100 per PC, which is what the guidelines suggest the party be able to do before needing their first short rest of the day.  If you skip the random encounters and just run the family chased by kobolds and the 3 patrols to get to the keep, each of those 4 encounters would need to be with only about 4 kobolds (which, BTW, is still a 'medium' encounter for 4 first-level PCs, thanks to the multiplier for a 'group' of 4 monsters).  You could make it, say, 6 kobolds chasing the family (exactly 'hard'), and 2 kobolds & a cultist (easy-med) for each patrol.That might not seem very challenging, but there's very little margin for error (and bad dice rolls) with 1st level characters, /especially/ if you lack the ability to get fallen allies back up after being dropped to 0 (stabilizing them is fine, but they take 1d4 hours to wake up!).The other thing you can do - if you're not running an official AL game - is just start them at 2nd or 3rd level.  The extra hps & HD will see the party through the occasional bad die roll, and there are some nice class features that kick in, as well.</blockquote>

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