Hey everyone,

I am going to run a short adventure, likely just 2 sessions.  I found an adventure that seems to suit our group, but the adventure is a level 5.  All the characters are new, level 1.  Does this mean I need to ask the players to level up to level 5 characters?

I know I can always scale down the attacks/monsters, but I was wondering what is usually done by experienced DM's.

Thanks for your help!

If it’s a mini adventure I’d consider leveling up to 5. Otherwise, yeah you’d probably need to scale down the monsters. Th thing is the puzzles/challenges may also need adjusting, DC may be too high, traps designed to hurt wound be lethal and the adventure may assume the players have access to higher level resources to solve problems.  As such you may end up changing a lot, especially if it’s level 5, that’s when martial classes get 2x attack and full casters get lv3 spells, so the party on average will do less than half the expected damage in an encounter 

It's a lot easier to have the PCs level up than for a new DM to scale the adventure down. Unless you're familiar with how tiers of play and power scaling works in practice, you're likely to overestimate what a level 1 party can handle. In addition, there's a huge difference between levels 1 and 5, and you'll pretty much have to overhaul the adventure to make it suitable for a level 1 party. 

Awesome!  Thank you for the advice.  I'll have the characters level up to 5.

Was going to repeat what others have said about leveling the party up to meet the suggested level.  To me, especially those "big step" levels, (at 5 most martials get their 2nd attack, so DPR from the party goes UP a lot) it's important to be in the proper range.  Adjusting from a level 4 down to a 2 or 3 isn't too bad, but the jump from 4 to 5 in party power makes it really tough to scale back effectively.

Happy DM-ing, hope you have a blast!

If both the players and DM are new to the game then I'd suggest finding an alternative adventure or scaling it down to level 3. For new players I would suggest starting with level 2 or 3 characters. Level 1 works too but they have so few hit points that some bad luck in combat can result in characters being unable to participate or dying. Level 5 introduces multiple attacks, 3rd level spells and lots more abilities that can be a lot for new players to take in.

So for absolutely new players, I might go for level 2 before most classes pick up their archetype abilities. For new players that seem very interested, I might go with level 3 since the characters are more differentiated.

I'll just add in to echo that if the players and DM are relatively new, there is a LOT of stuff happening at level 5.

I ran a convention adventure early in the life cycle of 5th edition with pregens and I got RAKED across the coals for not having done a better job building the characters.  I thought I did okay but one of the players had LOTS of comments on things I just plain missed that would have upped the abilities of the characters.  Of course, I've mostly forgotten those notes so... take that for what it's worth.

That said, new players usually sit best in the levels 1-3 so they  don't spend a ton of time going through ALL the options infront of them.