Lucanus Starforge Divine Battle
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My group of players are simply unable or unwilling to show up at designated times and places consistently. I have one dedicated player who always plays each session (usually 3-4 times a month) and thus the game revolves around that player, which is fine.
We have 2 other players who play once a month if we are lucky, and 3 others who play once every 3 months.
For instance, I'm running Rise of the Runelords- since the summer of 2012. We've tried desperately to only play this campaign when at least 3 players are available, but this just hasn't happened.
Hence, I've decided to create "hirelings," custom-made characters the full-time PC can use along with his main character. I've created one of each class which the player can pick 3 from in order to form a party of 4. That player than controls the 3 "hirelings." Other issues notwithstanding like XP and treasure divisions, this really slows the game to a crawl.
The player is naturally ungodly slow anyways, so most of the time I'm sitting twiddling my thumbs while he figures out something to do. One combat encounter at level 10 often takes at least 3 hours.
This just won't do any longer. I understand the burden the player has- it would indeed be hard to keep track of the main character and the hirelings. So for our next campaign I have decided something needs to change.
My thoughts:
1. Don't go the Hireling route any more. Instead, have the player be by himself using only his main character (unless he takes other feats, spells, etc. in game). This character will use the 25 point buy (I currently use 20 pt) and I will scale back encounters based on a single player rather than the typical design of a party of 4-6.
a. I'm leaning this way, buy am afraid I don't know I how scale back an encounter. For instance, if I were doing RotRL for one player character, how would I go about this? Also, if the scaling is in effect, then the 25 point buy might be too high, eh?
2. Continue the Hireling route, but use only combat/melee Hirelings.
b. This player favors melee characters, so he would need that additional support of control/rogue/divine...
3. Allow the player to actually create and use 4 characters...i.e. instead of one main guy, the player will have 4 and control their advancement, etc.
c. This may speed up things a tad, but strikes at the heart of DnD, which is one player one character, and would be more of the same, really.
The key issue here is time and removing the burden the player has, realizing the fact that we just won't have the people dedicated to playing all the time.
I'm really leaning towards #1, scaling the encounters/campaigns/modules down for one player.
:(