Hoard of the dragon queen or Princes of the Apocalyps?

[Waazraath]

Hi,

I'm DM'íng for a group of relative new players. Three of 'em, 1 with some experience in 3.5, 2 without any D&D experience. So far, I've played 5 sessions with them, to get them to know the game rules, show different aspects of the game (combat, exploration, social), have 'em role play a bit, and have 'em get to know the region (sword coast). But within 1 or 2 sessions, I want to play a purchased adventure with 'em, mostly because I lack the time to prepare an entire adventure, but also because I purchased 2 (elemental evil and tyranny of dragons) and would like to try 'em out. I wasn't planning on buying any of the other campaigns atm.

We're talking rather casual players here: play only once every month, no power gaming, no heavy optimization (though they rolled quite high for ability scores). They are
- dwarf barbarian (think either frenzy or bear totem at lvl 3)
- halfling sorcerer (draconic)
- human cleric (light domain)

My question:

Which campaign would be most appropriate for this group? Princes of the apocalyps, or Hoard of the Dragon Queen / Rise of Tiamat? Based on this group (players / classes), on which of them is most fun, power level, whatever?

Any advice or tips would be welcome, thnx in advance.

[Envyus]

I prefer Princes myself.

[R.Shackleford]

They both are running a race to see which one wins the "meh" award but I would go with Princes of the Apocalypse. You get a bit more bang for your buck, though I don't suggest buying either one at full price

I don't have my list right now (its on my PC) but there are a lot of 3rd party adventures that blow both away anything WotC has made recently.

[NewDM]

Hoard of the Dragon Queen was developed during the development of 5e and is extremely unbalanced. There are encounters in it that will slaughter an unoptimized party of 3.

Therefore sight unseen I'd have to recommend princes of the apocalypse.

[Envyus]

They both are running a race to see which one wins the "meh" award but I would go with Princes of the Apocalypse. You get a bit more bang for your buck, though I don't suggest buying either one at full price

I don't have my list right now (its on my PC) but there are a lot of 3rd party adventures that blow both away anything WotC has made recently.

I don't agree with you but it's your opinion.

Anyway Princes is really fun. It's a sandbox and Dungeon Crawl. So the PC's will have a lot of options on were to go, make sure they know this so they don't just wait on you to tell them were to go and let them try and figure out their own things. (Though you should also tell them that it's ok to Run away if they get in over their heads.)

[Waazraath]

Thanks all! I already purchased ´em (even at full price), so it'll be one or the other. Based what I've read so far, Princes of the Apocalyps seems to be prefered, also more useful, cause it seems I would have to put extra time & effort in rebalancing HoTDQ to prevent regular TPK's.

More opinions / tips are still welcome!

[PoeticDwarf]

Thanks all! I already purchased ´em (even at full price), so it'll be one or the other. Based what I've read so far, Princes of the Apocalyps seems to be prefered, also more useful, cause it seems I would have to put extra time & effort in rebalancing HoTDQ to prevent regular TPK's.

More opinions / tips are still welcome!

I'd go princes

[Addaran]

Princes is awesome, but it's the only one i've read so can't compare. =P

You'll probably have to be careful with the encounters, no matter which adventures you take, since you have less players then a full party and most are not experienced/optimized.

And since it's sand-boxy, they could go from lvl 8 dungeon to lvl 13 by error....

[NewDM]

Princes is awesome, but it's the only one i've read so can't compare. =P

You'll probably have to be careful with the encounters, no matter which adventures you take, since you have less players then a full party and most are not experienced/optimized.

And since it's sand-boxy, they could go from lvl 8 dungeon to lvl 13 by error....

DM "The three trolls rise up before you letting out a battle cry and charging, their claws raised!"
Player "Ok, I think we took a wrong turn here. Parlay! Parlay!"

Gotta love sandbox adventures.

[mgshamster]

They both are running a race to see which one wins the "meh" award but I would go with Princes of the Apocalypse. You get a bit more bang for your buck, though I don't suggest buying either one at full price

I don't have my list right now (its on my PC) but there are a lot of 3rd party adventures that blow both away anything WotC has made recently.

What would you recommend in general? Think you could send me your list?

[Falcon X]

I haven't played PotA yet, but I can speak into my experiences with Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

Hoard has some strong points but fails in others. It introduces a number of classic adventure styles for it's chapters: Tower defense, spy-mission, dungeon crawl, escort mission, Investigation, and Castle Raid. So, it has some nice variety of styles. Also, travelling the Sward Coast gives endless opportunities for side-quests and flavor enhancement.
However, creature encounters are subpar. The majority of fights are against kobolds and cultists, and they don't even get into much strategy. Fighting is pretty stand and deliver, as written. It's also very linear and will be hard to make it not seem railroady.

It helps if you are an experienced and willing to modify the adventure. Send more variety draconic creatures and cultist servants. Also, get ideas for expanding into the realm from sites like Slyflourish (http://slyflourish.com/on_the_road.html).

I would approach Hoard as a mid-level DM and beginner players, and be ready to modify it all over the place. Or forget heavy mods and push them as fast as possible to get to the Rise of Tiamat. My players found this to be a pretty lackluster adventure, but part of that is that my group went at an incredibly slow pace.

[Digr]

Thanks all! I already purchased ´em (even at full price), so it'll be one or the other. Based what I've read so far, Princes of the Apocalyps seems to be prefered, also more useful, cause it seems I would have to put extra time & effort in rebalancing HoTDQ to prevent regular TPK's.

More opinions / tips are still welcome!

So, I was wondering if you wound up running either of these and what your take-aways were?

I have both of these, and need to pick one to run for a newish set of players (kids age 10/11 + dads).
The kids seem more interested in Dragons as opposed to Elemental Evils..
I have one group I'm running in LMoP - so I'm learning 5e as a DM , with a long Hiatus since playing AD&D back in the 80's....

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

[Steampunkette]

So far I've run the Storm King's Thunder (Which turned out amazing) and I'm currently running Hoard of the Dragon Queen.

My players are all dudes who have been playing tabletop RPGs in general and D&D specifically for 20-30 years. So far? It's been pretty great.

Yes. The encounters in HotDQ are tough, numbers-wise. If your characters are unoptimized and jump right into the fray without a plan they're going to get killed at some point. But for a group of new players that's a GOOD thing. It can teach them caution, that not every fight is one they can win. It can teach them to look for ways to even the odds and think outside of the "Stand next to enemy and swing sword" box.

As to enemy tactics, that's really up to the DM to decide on. Because of the overwhelming force style nature of the encounters I have explicitly leaned away from tactics, even though kobolds are really -big- on not fighting straight engagements with no tactical acumen. Why? So my players can use tactics to outmaneuver them and feel smart while I don't have to do a lot of thinking at all.

Yes. Hoard of the Dragon Queen is on the rails. This is also a good thing for new players. It gives them clear goals and directions as to how to advance the story rather than leaving them with choice paralysis. They know they've got to get to (Insert town here) so they get off their butts and go there, instead of meandering about like they're lost in the Evermoors.

But I'll tell you this much: There's an encounter series in Greenest with a large quantity of enemies that you're supposed to finesse your way through rather than brute-forcing. My players, with almost 90 years of combined experience, brute forced. It was almost a massacre with three of them (including the cleric) hitting 2 failed death saves before the other party members could even try to rescue them. The first one to fall was a Swashbuckling follower of Tymora who wound up going 2 and 2 on death saves before the player invoked a prayer...

And then rolled an 11 (total) death save.

My players were totally unused to getting that close to dead. EVERYONE is still talking about the encounter a week later. They're so hyped to play an on-the-rails game with high stakes that I'm honestly kind of surprised. I guess it's because of how long we've done loose-story games that lead from site to site without a hard direction and how the enemies we fought were smaller, more tactically minded, groups of NPCs built to be a challenge but not a massacre, rather than overwhelming force without much consideration given to tactical considerations.

All in all, it's a fun game, so far, for some of the same reasons other people don't enjoy it.


As to Princes of the Apocalypse... I've never played it. I've never run it. I haven't even read it, yet. I did order it, online, recently, and it should come in the next few days. But if it's the one you think will go over best: Play it to the hilt, friend!

[Waazraath]

So, I was wondering if you wound up running either of these and what your take-aways were?

I have both of these, and need to pick one to run for a newish set of players (kids age 10/11 + dads).
The kids seem more interested in Dragons as opposed to Elemental Evils..
I have one group I'm running in LMoP - so I'm learning 5e as a DM , with a long Hiatus since playing AD&D back in the 80's....

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

I went with Princes of the Apocalyps (PotA). Some context: my group is 3 players, 3 of which have never played 5e, and 2 of which never played D&D at all. We play aprox once every 3 or 4 weeks, for about 3 hours. I created a really easy starting adventure-series myself, to introduce them to the game (PotA also has an optional starting adventure, but I didn't find it very suited to teach the game to new players, nor very interesting). At the moment, my party is level 3, and only at the very beginning of the adventure, discovering the surroundings, meating NPC's, getting the first impressions of "something's going on". Some random thoughts:
- for my group (little experience with the game, long time between sessions) it's all too big and complicated. It has a lot of NPC's, adventure hooks, is very much a 'sand box'. My group needs less complexity, and more direction. No problem their, an experienced DM can provide that, but if I would simply follow the book, it would be less fun.
- the maps have a faulty scale. Because of that, a lot of description doesn't make sense. There are also quite a lot of other (smaller) errors. If you google "errors in PotA" or something like that, you'll find guides and documents about it.
- so far I like it. The dungeon maps look interesting, the artwork (especially of all the elemental evil servants) looks really nice, gives it a distinct feel. So far there's a decent balance between exploring, social encounters and combat.

Can't compare it though. I haven't played the dragon campaigns yet. Am playing Out of the Abyss now as a player, and we got tortured the heck out of us in session no.2. Don't know how suitable it is for 10/11 year olds :smalltongue: Then again, it could have just been the DM, or us doing something really stupid.

I can very well imagine the kids are more interested in dragons than in elementals (cause what the hell are those anyway); from what I've heard, that campaign has more direction in it, that might make it easier for new players.

Hope this helps!