With this many interested players, I should perhaps have two parties concurrently running different missions. Regardless, the rules for starting gold are on page 38. Everyone gets at least 500 gold, but instead of "1d10x25 gp", I'm going to say that it should be based on your character's Background, as follows:
25 - Urchin
50 - Hermit
75 - Outlander
100 - Folk Hero or Acolyte
125 - Soldier
150 - Criminal or Sage
175 - Entertainer
200 - Charlatan or Sailor
225 - Guild Artisan
250 - Noble
These rulings are a bit of a guess, since the difference between Backgrounds that start with 10 gp in the book and those with 15 seems to be pretty random. It's also subject to negotiation, if you think your character started as an Urchin but has been ruthlessly mercenary all throughout her adventuring career so as never to be poor again, or if your backstory suggests that your Noble has lost all his lands and holdings to the schemes of a rival whom you have yet to defeat. Regardless, the 500 gives us all a good baseline for the amount of gear you should have by level 6.
For abilities, please use an online dice roller of your choice to do the standard method (4d6-drop-the-lowest and all the rest). For example, I go to
d20 Dice Bag :: 5e.d20srd.org, although this is a bit less than ideal since it doesn't archive the rolls; instead all you can do is copy/paste them from the Roll History window (and they go from bottom to top, which is counterintuitive if you're rolling to hit and then for damage). More ideal would be a site that links directly to the roll results; I used to use Invisible Castle, but that has been dead for some time, so if anyone has an alternative to suggest, I can check it out.
Feel free to either take the average or to actually roll your HD, subject to the same stipulation as the ability rolls. I know it's statistically possible that your Barbarian gets 12 HP every single time he levels up, but I expect to see proof.
(I'm really tempted to steal the town of Dullsville. It would make a great starting point for a visit to my world-famous Dungeon of Suck....)
On the subject of posting frequency, my current situation is pretty weird. I have a seasonal job where I only work Thursdays, Saturdays, and Sundays, and the latter two are half-days, where I can get online for an hour or three if I don't want to go straight home. I can't commit to being online every weekend, but it's basically guaranteed I'll be on the Net for most of a day on Mondays, Wednesdays, and possibly Tuesdays and/or Fridays. This will last for a month, and then I'll be looking for a new job which will likely change my availability. So what I'm going to try and do, for this first month at least, is put up a big post on Monday, get the characters' reactions to that, and post a big response on Wednesday. After that, you'll probably have half a week to think about how to proceed; you might get an update over the weekend, but I'll try to avoid major plot advancements during that time, since I can't commit to it. When I am here online for the whole day, players who respond promptly might get an immediate response, though I won't actually advance the plot until I'm sure everyone's on board. So ideally, the first three or so major pushes can happen during this period, and after that we'll see if I'm able to keep it up. But of course, it's debatable whether this will be long enough to complete even a single combat encounter. Rise of Tiamat is already at least six full chapters, including two dungeons and several scenes of negotiation; even if I resist my temptation to pad that out further, this is still likely to take a lot of time, and my future is always in question, so we'll mostly have to play it by ear. I hope this doesn't turn into one of the many games that falls apart eventually due to RL time constraints, but then, most of those who suffered this fate were trying their best not to.
shrug
@All - Question for the group in terms of setting. By default the module is written for Forgotten Realms, as is standard for 5E, but I've never been a big fan of FR's approach to the clichés of sword and sorcery. I don't really want to have to decide whether every human I introduce to you is a Chondathan or a Tethyrian, and I'd really prefer not to have to use the incredibly bland and one-dimensional NPCs that the book comes with. If you guys are super-fond of the setting, I can make an effort, but I'm not doing hours of research for every little point, so it'll be a rather continuity-light version of FR run without a great deal of enthusiasm. I offer two alternatives to this. I can my own homebrew campaign setting, which is a bit like FR in a few ways but very different in others, a slightly postmodernist approach which is more American than European and more Renaissance than Medieval (at least in a few ways). Or I can run a sarcastic mockery of FR which will be a lot funnier and a lot less epic than this module really tries to be, but will let me use several scathing puns that I've been sitting on since I first saw how stereotypical this module was going to be.
So, everyone who's interested, please vote for "straight FR", "sarcastic FR", or "Will's setting".
@jmucchiello Define "eclectic". If you need more money than suggested above to accomplish something neat, I'll hear out your proposal.
@tglassy - I sympathize with the shortage of fluff in certain archetypes, but I'm going to insist that only PHB content is allowed, particularly with regard to spells, as these are the hardest for me to understand from a balance perspective. Tell you what, if Erupting earth is literally just Fireball with the damage as Bludgeoning instead of Fire, and everything else is the same, but with an added limitation that there has to be Earth nearby which can Erupt, then I'm totally okay with you having that. But if it has some obscure other details that are potentially subject to abuse, then I'd rather not have to think about that, and will request that you stick with the spells as written. Refluffing is always fine; giving players tools they can use to McGuyver their way past the Challenge Rating system is something that makes me nervous.