Itavarn's page

Thank you all for your answers. I’m working a lot in these days so I don’t have much time to reply.

One big fault from my side is to trust what my players create in terms of characters and review their sheets little by little when I have time, from what I understand from your answers it seems that maybe the Druid player miscalculated the stats (either by using boon companion feat wrong, or by calculating the snow leopard base stats)

In terms of rounds to prepare for fights, sadly, my players are extremely careful and fear/suspect everything I describe and they are very good in many checks between them. Also many encounters in this AP are allowing them to take the initiative (70% of the time). I know I can change everything but my main problem is that I can’t spend more time than I already do just for redesigning every encounter (my fault, I know)

About atavism: I didn’t find any detail on the animal “trick” part: can you point me where can I find more please?

As for the CR calculated in my fights I usually augment the CR by 2 or 3 depending on the situations. Even in +3 CR encounters for my group level, they pretty much kill everything I throw at them in 2-3 rounds, without suffering any damage sometimes. That’s mostly thanks to the Druid and my lack of creativity in challenging him (hence this post for asking you advice)

Just to make it clear: I’m doing all of this because I think that it’s not right to go to a player and say “this is too strong, you can’t play it” or I don’t like to create “ad hoc” counter to everything strong my players come up with (does this sentence make any sense? )

Lastly, consider that this AP (Reigns of Winter) becomes a little crazy the more you progress it (**little spoiler alert** it has many exotic and uncommon places and creatures, especially starting the 4th module) and for me is not easy keeping balance and flavour at the same time (My fault again I know :D)

I'm running the AP Reigns of Winter and we are at the start of the 4th module around level 10. I have a group of 5 players (Monk, Rogue, Alchemist, Druid and a Shifter) and I have a growing problem in handling the Druid and, specifically, his animal companion.

To put it simply the Druid has a snow leopard as animal companion, and uses the combination of two spells (atavism + animal growth) and boon companion feat, to have an overwhelmingly strong creature that can simply tank and finish easily any encounter previously balanced for the rest of the group.

As an example: after 3 rounds of buffs (atavism + animal growth + ironskin) this creature reach 38 strength, huge size, 32 AC, 30+ CMD, and so on. It's not impossible to handle, but i can't think of a way to keep it balanced for the majority of combat encounters without risking to kill other players or not having a challenge at all (until now I changed the AP encounters by adding 10-20% more weak npc or by adding advanced template to monsters)

On top of that: the druid uses animal shape to fly and avoid being targeted while casting buffs or AoE spells far away while his animal destroy everything. He alone can fight every encounter in this AP without problems (except for Bosses maybe)

I'm (a little bit) desperate: do you have any advice for doing something from my side without interfering in the player class choices?

The options I considered:

1) adding a big tanky creature just for this animal companion whenever i need to have a challenging fight (in order to keep it busy)

2) adding a spell caster with dispel or for the purposes of disrupting (I can't use this too much because I think it will be frustrating for the players)

3) adding a lot more of weak npc just to let other players kill something

Thank you in advance and sorry for my English :D (not my native language)