Last night was the final "New Player Day" encounters at my FLGS. Next week starts the official Adventurer's League sessions with Horde of the Dragon Queen. I actually had all of my returning players from the past two weeks join this session. Half already got the PHB and were really wanting to create their own characters instead of the pre-gens we had been using, but that has to wait until next time ;)
At this point in the third session, most players were pretty familar with the various rules and the system, so I had virtually no explaining to do on how a particular check or spell works.
Player Tip: The best way to get in a DM's good graces is to read up on your character and his or her abilities/spells/weapons
Lucky for me, I had a pretty good group and they had done just that. It makes the DM's job a lot easier if you know how your spells and abilities work. Just say'n...
One thing I did during this session was beef up the monsters a bit. With a larger party, I needed to increase the monsters to reflect that, or the encounters were too easy*. I would say in the 2 hour session, we had probably 6-7 combat encounters we were able to get through, including the boss fight.
Speaking of, the boss fight was designed using 5e's encounter building guidelines to be tough for a party of 4 level 3 PCs. The party was 6ea PCs at level 2 when they encountered him (they just so happened to make their way down to him and skip about 1/2 of the encounters above. Sandbox though, right? ;) ).
During the fight, the boss (an evil cleric mad-scientist type) tried to hold person on the dwarf but he made his save. The PCs then managed to score 2 critical hits against him, including 19 points from a single arrow. The wizard cast sleep on the mrav warriors with the cleric. The next round the evil cleric hit the fighter who shot that arrow with an inflict wounds spell for 20 points of damage, leaving him with 2. The fighter mused how lucky he was for rolling well on his HP roll when he reached level 2 last session. The PCs then got two more crits on him and he fell in 2 rounds. Story of my life last night. The players were rolling natural 20s left and right. One player rolled two in a row. It was insane. But I wasn't going to "cheat" and buff the monsters even further. Not much you can do when the players get super lucky. Sometimes that happens. And I wasn't going to penalize them for rolling well.
No PC deaths this time, although three PCs did come close at certain points (the aforementioned cleric, an ochre jelly, and giant ants). They learned the hard way that slashing weapons aren't good against an ochre jelly ;)
All in all, it was a good session. the most important thing is that all of them said they had a blast, and all want to continue to play D&D going forward. Three of them I talked to privately later and extended invites to my own private group to replace some players who couldn't play any more due to various life issues (kids, work, etc). Now that I think about it, running these sessions for new players was an excellent interview process for my own group. :)
*One of the things I've noticed with bounded accuracy is that just like a lot of low level monsters are a challenge for higher level PCs, lots of low level PCs will take out a higher level monster as well. This means that a level 2-3 PC in a party of level 5-7 PCs can still contribute and be effective. That's a good thing IMO. Especially for those DMs who don't automatically start new PCs at the same level as the rest of the party