Hi all; new DM here running Hoard of the Dragon Queen, with the intent on running the second book, and looking for a litle advice from people who have run the campaign. Minor spoilers for lvl progrssion
There seems to be a huge disparity between the experiance available in Episodes 6-8 and the milestones. I have 5 players so I knew I'd be making some adjustments so I've been adding monsters left and right; luckilly they skip nothing. The below is not fixed by consolidating the exp pool to 4.
My group ended episode 6 at lvl 5 at 7600exp. They are supposed to be lvl 6. The next episode should make them lvl 7; but has no where near enough experiance to do this. Is this a persistant problem in the campaign? Should I be making experiance drops to adjust for this? I droped 6400xp on them to make then lvl 6 before they entered ep7 but I don't want to have to do that again.
Other thoughts
I'm seriously thinking of building a small campaign between the two books - they are technically like 3 days late for Episode 8; I'm thinking they missed it and chasing it down could be an involved event. There seems to be a serious disjoint between them anyways. (avoiding spoilers here)
This is not a rant on the books. Yes I would never run it as written; blogs have fixed it a dozen times over. We're having fun and see no reason not to continue.
HotDQ uses a Milestone Level-up method, rather than accumulated XP. That is why the numbers don't come out.
My group had an awful time getting from the hunting lodge to the flying fortress. We have variable attendance and a "New Players Welcome" sign up front. The core group found a way to get ourselves into the air for a chase, then stopped for the IRL night. Next week, we had twice as many people to move, and no additional way to move them. 
Don't have the flying fortress leave unless the group just stalls and dawdles in town.
Well that bites. The book specifically says it's optional at the start and all the chapter ends say "if you are using the milestone system". We took a vote at the start, before I had read all of it. Live and learn. Guess they'll be getting "event exp"
Thanks for the reply. Obviously the solution to the problem you ran into is to build/find a 120ft tall giant catapult - that was originally meant for killing dragons and turning them into dracolichs - and goblin made parachutes to land safely (jet packs which can't be turned off, which explode after 5 turns). Not sure why that isn't in the book honestly.
I haven't looked at the total XP, but I'm not surprised if it comes out low becasue while there are a lot of monsters, they're mostly under CR 1. 3 lizardfolk per PC might be a proper challenge but it's still only 150 XP while a single CR 5 will be 450 XP per PC, or 1 CR 3 per 2 PCs is 350 XP. If you want to up the XP then swap out the swarms of low XP monsters for a few higher level ones and you can easily end up doubling or tripling the XP.
Nah, we just had to invent a way to clone our Wyvern (which I tamed on my own, I'm quite proud of myself - given I have only a +1 at Handle Animal - by feeding it a Heal potion) into 2 or 3 Wyverns.
Here is the problem, WotC wanted
1) An adventure from 1st to 8th level
2) An adventure with lots of backstory, creature stats, 'fluffy' information, etc
3) An adventure that fit within 96 pages.
You may be able to get 2 out of 3, but no way to get all three.
So what happened is they skimped on content. There is not enough 'adventure' to get from 1 to 8, it would have been a fine 1-6 adventure if they just scaled back some of Ep 8. But instead of adding content or reducing scope.... they elected to tack on this 'milestone' system to try and hide the fact the adventure was not "1-8".
To me, the epitome of this was Ep 7, where we walked in, had one fight, killed 2000XP, 1400XP surrendered, but somehow we 'earned' 45,000XP if following the Milestone system. Even if you create some objective-based XP.... there is no way you are getting anywhere near close enough.
A Milestone system makes sense if the content is 'about' the right amount. But in this case it is just a crutch to allow them to use much too little content, but still claim it is a '1-8' adventure. Heck, they could have just said you jump 2 levels after every episode and called it a 1-16 adventure.
For all its foibles, I liked the adventure, and I am liking PotA. But they just do not have enough content to warrent their claimed levels.
Hmm cloning wyvern's. Were the, now three, wyverns called Heuy, Dewey, and Louie and colored red, blue, and green? Did you need to force feed them all the sheet in the village to make them grow faster?
They started "strong". My group of 5 players, now half way through lvl 3, got a big kick when I said "and according to the milestone system you should all be lvl 2". Exp just flat lines for 2-3 episodes; and the last two episodes are skippable... make 2-3 levels by walking down a hill anyone? ugh yah no. Glad there was no way in heck my group was going to skip stuff. After all there are kobolds and my Ranger literally will not pass up a chance to kill those things. I think I'm going to reskin all the ogres as kobold abominations - due to wizard experiments.
Everyone in my group is enjoying it and I'm learning a lot about how to write campaigns and spice up my own work by reading it and reading blog reviews - which was actually my argument to running it in the first place with my group. I'd say I'm a better dm now then before I started it.
Not sure I have any interest in PotA though; haven't read any reviews. Is it just "angles vs demons" or something a little more original? I'm planning on informing the group that I'm not holding back on the final encounter although I doubt I'll change anything form the book to make it super hard. The idea of a homebrew failed state actually delights me - either with new characters or as those characters recovering. But if they win I will probably do a home brew on a clean slate outside the forgotten realms.
Thanks for the feedback everyone.
Not THAT 'apocalypse' !
PotA is a re-imagining of the classic adventure Temple of Elemental Evil. I have only put in 20-30 minutes looking at it, because I'm absorbed in DM'ing Rise of Tiamat and expect my group to take until about Christmas to get near 'done' with that.