I'm running a new CC campaign and am about to head into our fourth session (about 3 hours apiece, playing remotely over Roll20, pace moves fairly slowly). Thus far it's been very little combat and a lot of roleplay between the players/Kendra/handful of the townsfolk I'm featuring.
My group consists of:
Human Paladin (Undead Scourge)
Human Magus (modified staff magus archetype)
Dhampir Inquisitor (Kinslayer)
Aasimar Cleric (Gozreh)
Human Bard/Brawler (playing a Jekyll and Hyde character with two sheets - randomly switches between the LG Bard and CE Brawler based on a die roll once per session or when I say so for plot funsies)
As we get into Harrowstone proper and going forward I'm concerned about how to make combats fun and challenging (I want the very real threat of character death). My group rolled ability scores and one player (the Bard/Brawler) rolled absolute rocks, which is part of why I was OK with the Jekyll/Hyde setup which will nerf the character some. Paladin and Magus rolled around 20-25 point buys so I didn't feel the need to do anything special. The Dhampir and Aasimar rolled 10-15 point buys so I allowed them access to advanced races.
Group has 2 experienced players, one with some reasonable experience, and 2 newbies. All but one player built fairly optimized characters, and the one who didn't is the cleric so they ought to still be pretty effective in this Book.
TLDR - I have a party of 5 pretty optimized characters averaging around a 25-30 point ability score buy. My current plan is to use max hit points for all enemies, and add additional enemies to most multiple baddy encounters. Haunts I think are tricky enough not to need tweaking. Does this sound about right? Asking up front because my brain likes the idea of applying this consistently across the Book rather than, say, yes for the Lopper but no for the Splatter Man.
Thanks by the way to all the other great tips I've gotten from this forum.