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At level 2 in the campaign the Cleric ran into a huge horde of zombies and proceeded to get torn limb from limb. I guess he was expecting more from his burst but there were just too damd many zombies. The whole encounter was supposed to overwhealm the party and force them to retreat back to the safety of a building (such as the temple where most of the townsfolk were holed up). At this point they were to fight off the horde until daylight when they would go shambling back to their graves. Unfortunately it took a party member getting killed in order for them to pull back.

Generally I don't like to kill PC's if it's just due to bad luck. If a player does something exceedingly stupid and has a dose of bad luck then I may have him or her die.

But I do feel that the players need a sense of "if we don't pay attention and respect the encounters then we can die for real here".

Is there something in Kingmaker that tells you to run sub-standard numbers of encounters per day?

Exploring the wilderness establishing a Kingdom doesn´t sound like a prescription for that, if anything the whole premise of the AP is that the wilderness is full of unknown dangers and other power groups hostile to the PCs. With a 5 person party, I think 5 encounters per day should definitely be your standard, and going to 6 occasionally (to balance out some days with 4) is more than reasonable.

Ug, 5 or 6 encounters per day would grind the monentum of the campaign down to a halt. That would consume an entire rpg session. As I said before it takes days and weeks to explore and travel from place to place. There is also kingdom management aspect to the game. Sometimes the players stay in their home city and deal with the affairs of their kingdom for a month or more.

When the characters are exploring a more elaborate specific encounter site (such as a cave network or an abandoned keep) then the campaign takes on a more traditional tone and 5-6 encounters wouldn't be unreasonable.

Update: In our last session the Barbarian squared off against a really tough monster. The monster scored some devestating critical hits and the cleric was a bit too slow with the heals and the Barbarian actually died (to be revived later by a powerful NPC). This was not planned at all (I don't take character death lightly in my games) but perhaps it will teach the party to work together in the future.

I'm finding that the party has been getting lazy when it comes to planning and teamwork. When a fight ensues no one really tries to devise tactics or plan a strategy. Everyone kind of does their own thing with the Barbarian typically raging and charging the biggest threat. I've even had other characters ignoring the fight to tend to other things (such as identifying magic items they've just found) because they know that the Barbarian has it covered.

Hopefully this unexspected brush with death and the introduction of more complex and challenging encounters with force the party to evolve and have everyone engaged.

Just so everyone is clear the campaign is still going good and everyone is mostly having fun (no big complaints from the players yet). Its just I can see that things are starting to become mundane and some of the PC's are not feeling that can contribute in the fights very much. Also, the dwarf is not really being challenged much. My goal is to head trouble off before it really develops. We've got the structure of a good campaign here but I want to make it great.

Many thanks for all the idea's folks. I've got plenty of new things to think about and introduce to the game. By all means keep em coming.

Ok, first off...animal fury does not put out significant damage. It's d4 + 1/2 strength + 1/2 power attack. it's significantly weaker than a normal attack. And hits at -5.

It still adds to the damage output.

So, 5th level dwarf barbarian...

+5 bab, +7 (assuming 20 strength and rage) gets him to +12 to hit. Magic weapon makes that +13. What else is he using, since you stated bull's strength wasn't part of the equation normally?

Bonus for charging and bonus for flanking play into this often.

Grapple monsters were probably hilarious against the angriest dwarf.

Actually this was one of the most effective tactics to use against the dwarf. Some monsters have obscene grappling mods. What tends to happen is that the big monster grapples the dwarf and then next turn the dwarf escapes only to get grappled again next turn. They basically nullify one another (and allow an interesting fight to delevop with the rest of the party).

The biggest problem is that the barbarian can easily slaughter most enemies that will challenge the rest of the party. Any monster that can inflict significant damage on the Barbarian will murder any of the other PC's. After a while it's difficult to reason to the party why the big angry monster is only attacking the Barbarian.

What I need is tougher situations, not tougher monsters. Don't get me wrong the campaign is moving along fine. I have used most if not all of the ideas presented here to make the encounters interesting and challenging. I'm just running out of tricks. What I need is more ideas. Keep em coming.

PS-Directed at no one in particular. Please refrain from analyzing the stats too much or claiming in some sort of semi-derisive tone that I'm doing it wrong. This is not very helpful in the end.

Why are they only getting one or two encounters a day? And why do the players know this?

The nature of the Kingmaker is campaign is exploring wilderness areas and forging a new kingdom. It takes weeks and months to explore. Sometimes the party will not encounter anything for a few days. I have used staged multiple encounters one after another but you just can't do this often as it looses credibility.

So I’m running my friends through the Kingmaker campaign and we’ve advanced into the second book. The characters have all reached 5th level and things are going reasonably well. We have a Ranger, Druid, Sorcerer, Cleric/Monk and a Barbarian. Recently however, the Dwarf Barbarian is starting to cause problems.

This character is so tough and puts out so much damage that it’s difficult to stage meaningful combat encounters. He’s swiping at enemies with over a +15 to hit and inflicting 10-30 damage with each hit (or more if he's got Bull Strength on him). In addition he gets an Animal Fury bite attack that can deal out significant damage also. Thanks to his damage reduction and pool of 70+ hit points he can absorb damage all day. Worst of all is that he has the Diehard feat so that he stays in the fight until he dies. Before he could be knocked out of the fight and revived later so it wasn’t so bad. But now in order to stop him I have to kill him.

The nature of the Kingmaker campaign is that the PC’s may experience only one or two encounters on any given day. This means that the characters are less concerned with carefully managing their resources (such as rounds of rage per day) and are mostly “all in” with their best spells and abilities in every encounter.

Some of the things I’ve tried in the past to curtail this characters effectiveness: swarm attackers, attacking with mostly ranged enemies, grappling monsters and of course magic. I’m running out of tricks though.

Does anyone have any advice for dealing with this character?