Been playing D&D with my family since right as 3.0 first came out. Have since played 3.5, 4th, and NEXT. After hearing little tidbits about it from various acquaintances we have checked out Pathfinder, spent lots of money buying books, and we are loving it! We play more regularly then ever before and my dad is constantly saying he is having the most playing an RPG ever in the 30 or so years he has played.
Important to note, my group is filled with Min-Maxers! Actually I think the more widely-used term is "Power Gamers". Our play style is minimum role-playing and lots of rolling dice to kill stuff! As such they always try to find each little exploit to make their characters extremely powerful and often unbalanced broken!
So been running the Rise of the Runelords adventure path and again it is very well-written. When I DM I prefer to write the entire adventure myself and not rely on pre-written adventures but this one has been good SO FAR.
Burnt Offerings went well with a fair challenge. Plus because we were rushing to finish the chapter during one of the sessions they rushed into the Malfeshnekor fight with no preparation and almost no daily spells/abilities left. Plus I was really lucky with miss chance rolls that battle. Definitely the toughest battle!
Skinsaw Murders the challenge was starting to dwindle as they became increasingly over-powered. The Aldern fight was good because I had them fight the "Hunter" personality until it had 0 HP at which point he became the "Skinsaw Man" personality with fully restored HP and the Paladin used his last Smite Evil on the "Hunter" which 'fell off' when the personality changed. Plus they skipped the Skaveling fight so that appeared from behind during that battle and stunned 2 of the 6 party members. At the Seven's Mill I ensured they fought all 13 Cultists plus Ironbriar all in one battle but that was only a moderate challenge, fireballs cleared the minions really well.Even Xanesha was defeated really easily.
THIS IS WHERE THE PROBLEM STARTS! As We entered the Hook Montain Massacre they warned me that now since they are 8th levels their characters have really come together and will be super-powerful. Indeed true. Last time we played we made through all of the Graul Homestead. I don't think a sinlge battle made it through a full round of initiative. I was disgusted when I saw 5 Dogs with 1 CR each so I replaced them with Dire Wolves but that hardly mattered. The 1/2 CR Zombies were a bigger joke but I just left them in. Probably the biggest offense was Mammy Graul was killed before she even went by 2 or maybe if I remember right just 1 character (though he did have 2 criticals in that one turn). The party all has really high AC that is near impossible for my monsters to hit except with like a natural 18 or higher. Plus the party is capable of massive amounts of damage in a single turn! They all verbally complained that they did not have fun and it was way too easy.
So this is where I am stuck! As said I am more used to writing my own adventures or just doing a one-shot mod not a long adventure path. I feel like if I increase the monsters or just raise their stats too much I am taking away from the spirit of the adventure path. They worked hard on their characters to make them super powerful so if I just scale everything to me it feels like it cheepens all that work. Videogames that scale the enemies to your level do feel like a rip-off at times.
So what do you all of you suggest is the best way to increase the challenge without messing up the adventure path?
---------------------
Here is a slight overview of the party. Played by my brother, his wife, and our father. Everybody is playing 2 characters.
-Archer that has vital strike, manyshot, and a holy bow. So if he hits the same target with all of his attacks he seems to average around 30-50 damage that round.
-Summoner with an Eidolon. Probably the most broken character! 34 AC! 135 HP. Saves are 10/10/14 (only the Paladin is barely higher). 4 claw attacks. Around the same damage per round as the archer which is a lot!
-Blade-Master Rogue which does your typical heavy damage sneak attack.
-Witch that at the lower level would put everything to sleep and end the combat extremely fast! Even as we face more things immune to sleep she can still cast long-term misfortune/disadvantage. Also one of the last times we played casted a new spell (forgot the name, like Horrible Sorrow)that made the big boss spend their entire turn ether attacking themselves or doing absolutely nothing. This was a short small one-shot adventure I wrote to take a break between the adventure path and that spell was used on a CR 14 Ice Yai Oni which was killed super fast by the party of 6 8th level heroes without getting a single action off :(
-Paladin has 30 AC and saves are 14/11/11. With the Holy weapon and Smite Evil the damage VS an evil creature is again in the insanely high range.
-Wizard that has perfect fly, constantly improve invisible, and when he isn't dropping fireballs he built his character to specialize in making the Phantasmal Killer work.
Feel free to ask any more questions about how over-powered they are.
