ToA encounters! I've been running ToA for a few weeks now, and have played it! Let's chat =)

My concern is that I don't want encounters to be a slog between locations.

@THiebert I'm probably behind on context: are you currently running vs. playing it, is your table AL or not, and how far into it are you?

I'm running it, we're not AL

I haven't started the campaign yet. We've got a few new players that we've been slowly building characters with still

I haven't yet played it but I have read the Chult section and it strikes me as a very old school hexcrawl. At issue is the fact that the players don't know where they need to go (and would die if they got there too quick anyway) and they have to blunder around in the wilderness until they learn where they need to be. The blundering around is the adventure ...

Perhaps I'm underestimating the amout of time the hexcrawl should take

@Dale

I would expect that if you were planning for say 50 sessions (1 year) at least half of them would be in Chapter 3.

I'm generally curious as to where that random encounter frequency note came from. I'd like to find it so that I stick closer to the book

@DaleM I'd have said about a third.

Chapter 2 is the hexcrawl, but I understand.

@nitsua60 I won't quibble over the exact amount

I'm going by XP numbers there; working through a spreadsheet of LA encounters per level and the idea of hitting Omu at 5 or 6.

3 sessions per level puts you at 15 sessions to Omu

I was for some reason estimating it would only be 5 or so.

How many hexes would you expect a group to move, on average, in a session?

@THiebert The encounter frequency is that you make 3 checks a day with a 25% (16+) of an encounter for each - plug that into a binomial distribution calculator (=BINOM.DIST() in Excel) and out they pop.

@THiebert Many of the random encounters are ten-minute deals. And if you think of them as extended exposition rather than stuff standing in the way... well, it works for me.

What page of the adventure is those numbers on?

Think about all the stuff you read in the HC that you can't imagine how the players would ever learn that. The random encounters are a way to get those things into their hands.

this group will probably be 3 hour sessions. I don't think we'll get the full four hours that my normal group does.

what does HC stand for?

@THiebert When I played it I wasn't mapping, so I can't comment intelligently on that. In the group I'm running they've been covering anywhere between, say, 4 and 10 hexes a day.

@THiebert (sorry--hardcover)

@THiebert in the Appendix about random encounters

Really? I double-checked that earlier when i had it on me, and must have totally overlooked it

@nitsua

@nitsua60 how many encounters do you have during that time? Are you capping it at 2-3, or just letting it happen?

@nitsua60 that seems high - the overland pacing in the book is 1 hex per day or 2 in a canoe - unless you rush (which makes the random encounters more dangerous) in which case you get 1 or 2 hexes.

And have you played the whole thing, or just started? finishing it already seems intense

(brb)

@DaleM Have you run the adventure yet?

Also, there's a lot of stuff in there that isn't random encounters - dealing with each fixed location will take most of a session, if not more than one

yeah, I assumed as much. How many fixed locations do you expect a party to encounter in their stumble through the jungle?

No, but I did run Rise of Tiamat in 2 hour sessions - we had over 50 of them over 18 months. You can get 1 big combat encounter done in that time or 2 or 3 smaller ones.

I was thinking it'd only be a few, but perhaps I'm understating that as well

We're actually pretty quick with combat.

Depends on the players: a group of explorers may try to do them all, a group focused on dealing with the thing the name of which I can't remember may only do a few. However, they have to do enough to level up to an appropriate level - either as an XP slog or thru milestones (my preferred method)

You know your players best (assuming you have a history with them)

Combat is pretty quick in 5e but you still don't get much change out of 30 minutes by the time everyone does their bookkeeping and remembers what they were doing before the combat

yeah, focus is my groups big issue

I was planning to simply accelerate their level if the stumble upon Omu early.

Yeah, the central motivator for getting the PCs engaged in solving the problem is a bit meeh. Some will be driven to help all those poor people who are wasting away and some will be more self-centered about it. Its hard to make players care about NPCs.

I'm hoping they'll go towards Firefinger and Kir Sabal first, then West towards the Oracle, then finally south towards Omu, but I could see a lot of different things happening. I'm planning to make some of the guides that want to go in that direction a bit more appealing.

especially ones they just met

Syndra shows up for all of the first 30 minutes of the campaign, and then players lose their biggest motivator to move quickly, unless I occasionally prompt them with her sending messages to them

Really, the "deadline" only affects others. If a player has a PC die then they aren't coming back and the player is rolling up a new PC.

Yeah, unless they get zombified by the hag.

then the deadline hits the players, and hard

Yes, and you really have no control over how much they care about Syndra.

I've gotta drive home now, i'll be back in ~45 minutes, if you're still around

@THiebert no capping on the random encounters. Have generally had three or four a night (3-hr session), but that's been interspersed with fixed locations so far. Next session or two I expect to be pure hexcrawls, as they're going on the 20-day patrol out of Vengeance.

@DaleM They're on rivers right now, and we've been getting through three to five game-days per session.

I think it would be fun to have had one or more of the PCs raised in their past. You would have to weaken the wasting disease - say roll 1d20 each day and they lose a hp maximum on a 1.

@nitsua60 right - confusing days and sessions again