Age of Worms: Scaling the Adventure Advice Needed

[Xaene the Accursed]

Adventures for the Dungeons & Dragons are written so that they are a challenge a party consisting of four players. The 'Scaling the Adventure' section at the end of all adventures in Dungeon Magazine deals with making the adventure more difficult or less challenging based upon the party level. This is nice, I like it, it makes it easy.

Unless.

You are not dealing in terms of party level, but in the number of members in a party.

So, how would one go about scaling the adventures in the Age or Worms for a party of 6 (sometimes 7) players? The group is 50% or more bigger than the party the adventures were written for.

What should I do?

Go with the 'Scaling the Adventure' advice given for higher level parties information given at the back of the adventure?

I'm a veteren DM, but I'm finding myself a little unsure of this situation as I don't want to 'upgrade' the adventure difficulty only to find the party over their head most of the time.

[James Jacobs]

The best bet is to go with the "Scaling the Adventure" advice... sort of. For a group of 6 players, scale the adventure for 1 level higher. For 8, scale 2. This isn't an exact science, of course; in lots of situations you'll want to simply add more creatures to an encounter rather than simply increasing a creature's strength on an individual level.

The main thing to be careful of is scaling classed creatures, since they gain more abilities as they gain levels, some of which can really wreak havoc on characters that are too-low-level. In encounters with classed creatures, it's probably better to go the "more henchmen" route.

[Dryder]

James (or anyone else):

Any ideas how to scale it for just two players???
I happen to have to great players and presently use adventures which are two levels lower than their level. This works most of the time, but some creatures and encounters just don't be a challenge anymore...
Do you think AoW is playable with only two players?

[James Jacobs]

Some Ideas:

1: Run a pair of NPC henchmen to go along with the two players.
2: Use the gestalt class rules from Unearthed Arcana.
3: Start them at 2nd or 3rd level, so they're always 2-3 levels above the recomended level.

With only 2 players, special attacks that take characters out of combat (stunning, paralysis, petrification, etc.) become much more dangerous, so use these monsters carefully.

[Dryder]

Yeah, I have only one NPC because I figured that in 3.5 I have a lot to do as a DM and playing one NPC is quite a challenge sometimes, not to speak of two.

So I go with one and thank you so much for your sound advice! As usual, Dungeon stuff is fast at hand with an answer on these boards ;)