So My group is running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist right now & when they are finished I wanted to run Tomb of Annihilation. How easy is it to scale up from the beginning if your starting with lvl 5 characters? If anyone also has any suggestion on how to make it a better experience for my friends I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.
My group started TOA at level 5, and it’s worked fairly well. A few suggestions based on our experience:
-Make sure the guide they pick isn’t too underleveled for them. My crew hired Musharib, and he proved to be completely useless—indeed a liability—in combat and similar situations. I finally figured out a way to provide a new guide for them, but by then they were so convinced any ally NPC was useless, they didn’t really use him. The homebrew tools here means it wouldn’t be that hard to scale up a guide NPC if need be.
-Be prepared to get creative about hex crawling through the jungle; it can get to be a slog, and a bit boring when the party cake walks through most encounters. If you are subscriber, the new encounter builder currently in alpha can help you sort out how to upscale encounters. (Once it’s in beta, it will be available to non-subscribers, too). After too long slogging through, I started handling jungle travel in 5 day chunks: narrating/hand waving most of the encounters but playing out one or two of the most interesting from each chunk.
-There are some good additional encounters available on DMS Guild, some of which are suited to higher level parties. If you consider this, pay particular attention to Guild Adept offerings.
-This isn’t a level thing, but there aren’t really enough clues to the source of the problem. If the party doesn’t end up at just the right places in Port N or in the jungle, they can end up with no clues about where they should be headed. So be prepared to provide more, or at least more ways to obtain those clues. Some devices I used to do that included: the diary of a dead adventurer (whose NPC party visited some of the clue spots in Port N and he recorded those events); visions given to an NPC they encountered; messages from their quest giver (If you go with the quest giver provided in TOA, have them give the party a Sending Stone, or set up some other way for periodic communication).
So My group is running Waterdeep: Dragon Heist right now & when they are finished I wanted to run Tomb of Annihilation. How easy is it to scale up from the beginning if your starting with lvl 5 characters? If anyone also has any suggestion on how to make it a better experience for my friends I'd really appreciate it. Thank you.
Sir Raffen
Tomb of annihilation isn't hard to scale up as it has a lot of tough stuff in it.
You need to be at least level 5 to start the main dungeon/quest anyways. You can steer them there quicker if you like.
My group started TOA at level 5, and it’s worked fairly well. A few suggestions based on our experience:
-Make sure the guide they pick isn’t too underleveled for them. My crew hired Musharib, and he proved to be completely useless—indeed a liability—in combat and similar situations. I finally figured out a way to provide a new guide for them, but by then they were so convinced any ally NPC was useless, they didn’t really use him. The homebrew tools here means it wouldn’t be that hard to scale up a guide NPC if need be.
-Be prepared to get creative about hex crawling through the jungle; it can get to be a slog, and a bit boring when the party cake walks through most encounters. If you are subscriber, the new encounter builder currently in alpha can help you sort out how to upscale encounters. (Once it’s in beta, it will be available to non-subscribers, too). After too long slogging through, I started handling jungle travel in 5 day chunks: narrating/hand waving most of the encounters but playing out one or two of the most interesting from each chunk.
-There are some good additional encounters available on DMS Guild, some of which are suited to higher level parties. If you consider this, pay particular attention to Guild Adept offerings.
-This isn’t a level thing, but there aren’t really enough clues to the source of the problem. If the party doesn’t end up at just the right places in Port N or in the jungle, they can end up with no clues about where they should be headed. So be prepared to provide more, or at least more ways to obtain those clues. Some devices I used to do that included: the diary of a dead adventurer (whose NPC party visited some of the clue spots in Port N and he recorded those events); visions given to an NPC they encountered; messages from their quest giver (If you go with the quest giver provided in TOA, have them give the party a Sending Stone, or set up some other way for periodic communication).
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
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