My group has just come out of their first attempt at Jade Regent with a TPK, and rather than roll new characters and continue where they left off, they all want to restart at 1st level with Brinewall Legacy. Do things from scratch.
The new party was a surprise to me however. They built a Barbarian, Cleric, Summoner, and Summoner (Master Summoner).
From the looks of things, the Gnome master summoner hangs back, either using her weak eidolon as a mount or not at all, while her summoned monsters fight on the front lines (and they'll all be augmented by 2nd level of course) and she either casts spells or uses her heavy crossbow.
The other summoner is using the new Suli race from bestiary 3, and has built his character and eidolon to be a team of melee fighters, wading into battle together.
The Aasimar cleric looks like primarily a healing specialist, and then a spellcaster second and a melee fighter third, but even he has a greatsword due to being a cleric of Gorum. And of course with a barbarian, summoner, eidolon, and summoned monsters on the front lines, and both arcane/crossbow and healing support behind them, this doesn't feel so much like a party of 4. It almost feels more like a party of 5 or 6 that has access to lots of minions/henchmen/whatever you want to call them.
I'm wondering how Jade Regent will hold up against what is essentially a larger party. Do you think I might need to make some of the encounters more difficult?
I think it will depend on how good your players are at combat. If the TPK came from bad tactics or just not being strong enough, playing a powerful group like this might bring them up to the level to survive the AP. If they are hardcore optimizers that only died by a fluke, you might be in trouble. If the Master Summoner realizes what you can do with long lasting summons... run.
If you do decide things are a bit easy and want to toss in a few more monsters, this is probably the easiest AP ever to do it in. The books mostly skew towards encounters with large numbers of weak foes, rather than a few big baddies. Add an extra ninja here and there, and everything should be fine.
While I've never played with a summoner in any campaign, it seems to me that if the classes are balanced -and they mostly are- the advantages of having summoned creatures should be compensated by the lack of other abilities for the class, and therefore no adjust should be needed.
It seems to me that one of the worst thing a DM can do is adjust the adventure to play against the PCs. I've played a gnome sorcerer specialized in compulsion spells only to find that most of the bad guys suddenly and mysteriously developed immunity to mind-affecting effects and really, it's disappointing. If your PCs notice that now that they have the extra field support suddenly there are more foes, they would have the right to complain, at least from my point of view.
@Mort: They're not really optimizers. The TPK came from them being fairly unprepared to overcome a certain enemy's SLAs, but the dice were rather against them as well in that situation.
@Fox: I meant more like the type of adjustment Mort suggested. An extra ninja or two if they're crushing encounters without effort. Not making the enemies immune to the tactics the PCs use, or ridiculously outnumbering them.
@Mort: They're not really optimizers. The TPK came from them being fairly unprepared to overcome a certain enemy's SLAs, but the dice were rather against them as well in that situation.
@Fox: I meant more like the type of adjustment Mort suggested. An extra ninja or two if they're crushing encounters without effort. Not making the enemies immune to the tactics the PCs use, or ridiculously outnumbering them.
If they are crushing encounters it probably means there will be other encounters where they will not fare so well (places where they cannot summon creatures, for example, or places with traps none of them can detect). Unless you plan on making those places easier, I don't think you should make the rest of them harder. But then, that's just my way of directing the game, and not necessarily the correct way for your party.
|
I play in a group of 6 players, and I don't think the GM adjusts the AP. I could be wrong, though.
Still, I think it will remain balanced. Most summons are good for distractions and some damage, but are very squishy, even with Augmented Summoning. Enemies can crush them in 1-3 hits, but that's essentially the summons job, to be ablative armour of sorts.
If you don't have a min-maxing group, then I really wouldn't make any changes. Encounters will be challenging enough as is.
Cheers
Hmm, well we've started playing now, and the Master Summoner isn't really playing with great strategy. Her summons were very useful dealing with Tsutamu (she pretty much flooded the cave with fire beetles), but aside from that she's not been much help.
The regular Summoner's eidolon is a terror on the battlefield, and doing even better than the Barbarian, but he's sacrificed quite a bit of his own PC's power to boost her up. So overall the party's not too overpowered.
They did fight through Brinestump with a lot more ease than their previous group of characters was able to though.
I am playing in a 7 people Kingmaker game, we are usualy 6 people there every game. The DM double every ennemies in the encounters, the named NPCs and boss are either Advanced or Advanced twice. We do have above average stat so each encouter are still challenging but not overpowering. We didn't encounter many dungeons so this kind of increase is good for open spaced battle. If you plan on increasing the number of ennemies, I recommend increasing the size of some room in the dungeons (I didn't play Jade Regent so I doesn't know if there is). On a side note, never increase the number of shocking lizard if you ever randomly roll somes... near TPKed us
Definitely agreed. I increased the size of a lot of the locations in Brinewall Legacy, which I often found were cramped even for a party of four.
Just to name a few, I found Walthus' house and the Brinewall Vault in the first part of the AP, as well as Tunuak's Bore in the third to all be perfect examples of far-too-cramped places for big battles. Especially when Summoners, or a larger than average party is involved. Fortunately the AP seems to move further and further away from overly cramped spaces as things progress.