I am a new DM currently taking my newbie players through Lost Mines of Phandelver. I want to start planning my next adventure, but I have questions about the adventure levels. Are they recommendations only? If my players are level 5 after LMoP, can we still start Dragon Heist (which is a level 1-5) arventure? What is the level rating based on? If it's just monster levels, wouldn't scaling the monsters appropriately eliminate the need for recommended levels?
You can do that although as a new DM, it may be hard to know how to properly scale up encounters.
The unfortunate thing about the way they do most of the published adventures these days is that the majority are tuned to start at level 1 and go through to some higher level (11, 12, etc.). Not many are tuned to start at 4 or 5 and go upwards. Mad Mage is... and probably some from Yawning Portal. Not many others.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I am a new DM currently taking my newbie players through Lost Mines of Phandelver. I want to start planning my next adventure, but I have questions about the adventure levels. Are they recommendations only? If my players are level 5 after LMoP, can we still start Dragon Heist (which is a level 1-5) arventure? What is the level rating based on? If it's just monster levels, wouldn't scaling the monsters appropriately eliminate the need for recommended levels?
I think scaling up the combat will help one aspect, but also note that level 5+ players will have a lot of things in their 'toolkit' that level 1-3 players just don't have access to. In my experience a level 5 group basically doesn't need to worry about any difficulty from food, shelter, water, crossing rivers and ravines, translating languages, and things like that, so some parts of the adventure may be rendered trivial by your characters having access to things like hold person, detect magic, identify and so on.
Yeah, I'd read the adventure thoroughly before diving in too deep. I'm actually playing in a Waterdeep Dragonheist game right now, and so far, there have been very few actual challenges - a couple fights, but nothing overly threatening. You could probably get away with a little extra scaling up, but WD seems to be more RP-heavy anyway. I agree with Itnige, though, be careful about the non-battle scaling. There are things (like money) that seem like impossible mountains to scale for 1st-level players that 5th-level players won't bat an eyelash at. Make sure you are scaling up costs and rewards accordingly.
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I am a new DM currently taking my newbie players through Lost Mines of Phandelver. I want to start planning my next adventure, but I have questions about the adventure levels. Are they recommendations only? If my players are level 5 after LMoP, can we still start Dragon Heist (which is a level 1-5) arventure? What is the level rating based on? If it's just monster levels, wouldn't scaling the monsters appropriately eliminate the need for recommended levels?
Yes, for the most part. You can always scale encounters up or down to suit your party either by number of bad guys or toughness.
"Sooner or later, your Players are going to smash your railroad into a sandbox."
-Vedexent
"real life is a super high CR."
-OboeLauren
"............anybody got any potatoes? We could drop a potato in each hole an' see which ones get viciously mauled by horrible monsters?"
-Ilyara Thundertale
You can do that although as a new DM, it may be hard to know how to properly scale up encounters.
The unfortunate thing about the way they do most of the published adventures these days is that the majority are tuned to start at level 1 and go through to some higher level (11, 12, etc.). Not many are tuned to start at 4 or 5 and go upwards. Mad Mage is... and probably some from Yawning Portal. Not many others.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
As a new DM you may find the encounter builder on this site helpful for doing this since it automatically calculates estimated encounter difficulty.
I think scaling up the combat will help one aspect, but also note that level 5+ players will have a lot of things in their 'toolkit' that level 1-3 players just don't have access to. In my experience a level 5 group basically doesn't need to worry about any difficulty from food, shelter, water, crossing rivers and ravines, translating languages, and things like that, so some parts of the adventure may be rendered trivial by your characters having access to things like hold person, detect magic, identify and so on.
Yeah, I'd read the adventure thoroughly before diving in too deep. I'm actually playing in a Waterdeep Dragonheist game right now, and so far, there have been very few actual challenges - a couple fights, but nothing overly threatening. You could probably get away with a little extra scaling up, but WD seems to be more RP-heavy anyway. I agree with Itnige, though, be careful about the non-battle scaling. There are things (like money) that seem like impossible mountains to scale for 1st-level players that 5th-level players won't bat an eyelash at. Make sure you are scaling up costs and rewards accordingly.