D&D 5E Starting Tyranny at 3rd Level?

[pukunui]

For what it's worth, I really do believe the first half of HotDQ is the roughest part of the whole campaign. Given you're starting at higher level anyway, it would be easier to skip it than to polish it.

Perhaps. Nevertheless, I am not going to skip anything. I like the early parts as much as the later parts.

Chapters 1-5 are (to quote your other thread) "error-ridden railroads" where the players have to do what the DM tells them to, but then the rest of the campaign is well-designed dungeon crawls (if you can grok them despite the layout, which was difficult for me).

They are not as railroady as some people claim they are. Linear, yes, but not necessarily railroady. There are a few bits here and there (like where it says that if, by some miracle, Cyanwrath is defeated, some other half-dragon takes his place in the hatchery) but they are easily avoided.

I am not a new DM, but my players are mostly newish (either to 5e or D&D in general). I think the way the campaign goes from being fairly linear to being more open-ended is a good thing for them. I'm pretty sure they will appreciate the direction that the early parts of Hoard give. My wife, for instance, is always worried that she didn't have her character do what she was supposed to do. Having some rails to ride on early on will help her, I think.

As for the errors ... meh. As I said, most of them are pretty minor things. It's easy enough to see what was intended. I'd actually say that, at least as far as the maps are concerned, Princes has some more serious map errors than Tyranny does. Tyranny's map errors are mostly just to do with labelling, while Princes has locations that don't line up between maps.