So a friend of mine got a new job and no longer has time to build/run the game anymore and I've been elected new DM. I'm actually looking forward to it though it's been almost 12 years since I was behind the screen.
I realize that I've jumped in the deep end of the pool here as I'm trying to convert the original 1985 Temple of Elemental Evil for the Pathfinder system and I have a question about the CR builds as something seems a bit off to me.
The first encounter at the moathouse calls for 6 giant frogs. If I'm reading the verbage correctly that would be a CR6 encounter granting each player 600xp ( assuming they survived ). Six of them seemed a little excessive so I thought I would take the core of the encounter, here being "the PC's are attacked by Giant Frogs" and build the encounter from scratch based around that idea.
So the APL for my group of four, first level players is 1. A standard encounter level for them would be a CR1 encounter giving me 400xp for which to "buy" monsters/traps for the encounter (again, assuming I'm reading this correctly). So with my 400xp bucks I run down to the monster store and start checking out Giant Frogs. Giant Frogs are CR1 and "cost" 400xp...
Suddenly I feel like I'm going from a slightly overpowering 6 frog encounter to a by the book cake walk. AC 12 and 15 hit point, that one frog is gonna get stomped quick and everyone will walk away with a hundred xp. Is the math in the calculation right? Am I reading this wrong?
While I don't want this to be a character grinder ( I know I know, its classic Gygax, all the peasants are rich and the monster uber deadly ) I don't want it to be this easy either. The math just seems a bit off to me and while I could wing it I was curious if this is going to be how the whole conversion goes. Thanks guys!