Doing a Adventure Path or Module for optimized characters?
Also would y'all please tell me what Adventure Paths, Modules, and Society Scenarios y'all consider to have a high challenge rating?
I've heard some say your age of worms was particularly difficult!Thanks!
Age of Worms. considered the 'hardest' to date i believe.
Savage Tide i would put at 2nd place.
I would not consider Maure castle especially difficult for power gamers. I'm about 1/2 way through running it, and am having trouble making it a challenge. I've got one player (of 2) who's into optimizing, and his character basically can't be hit by anything the adventure has to throw at him.
Rise of the Runelords is quite brutal, especially towards the end.
....of the second adventure.
....of the second adventure.
Ha!
Doing a Adventure Path or Module for optimized characters?
Hum. What would this entail for you? I mean, we certainly could increased all the challenge ratings of a whole AP's encounters by say 2 or 3. But that takes us away from the core rules' assumptions about how experience is gained, level progression, and encounter design, which leads to a whole host of behind the scenes problems.
I'm also wary of making anything harder just for difficulty's sake. A more killer AP means - well - more kills, and TPKs just aren't very fun (not to mention that from our perspective, if you have a TPK in adventure four you probably don't play adventure five, which means no one reads our incredible prose :P ).
Fortunately, though, you don't have to wait on us or get stuck amid our hang ups to do this. The Core Rulebook presents all the rules you need for adjusting encounters (not to mention more traps, poisons, class levels to add, yada yada), and even if you don't want to just add more of the same enemies an adventure presents to increase difficulty, you've going a shiny new Bestiary headed your way in just a few short weeks.
So yeah! No one messes with a killer GM. Go claim that title!
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I don't know about APs, but you could certainly throw in a few room-based traps and puzzle traps that require critical thinking skills.
Instead of boosting an encounter of 5 orcs in a room, equip them with crossbows and have them on a (difficult to reach) balcony.
When you increase the difficulty of an encounter though, it's kinda hard to strike a balance between challenging the party and "OMG the DM is out to kill us on purpose!".
Of course, you could always lie and say "That's how the adventure was written!".
Out of curiousity, how high is your party's level?
I don't know about APs, but you could certainly throw in a few room-based traps and puzzle traps that require critical thinking skills.
Instead of boosting an encounter of 5 orcs in a room, equip them with crossbows and have them on a (difficult to reach) balcony.
When you increase the difficulty of an encounter though, it's kinda hard to strike a balance between challenging the party and "OMG the DM is out to kill us on purpose!".
Of course, you could always lie and say "That's how the adventure was written!".
Out of curiousity, how high is your party's level?
This reminds me of a really fun encounter I threw at my players once. A room divided by a, I believe, 15' wide chasm, falling at least 40' down. Enemy crossbowmen on a battlement with cover on the opposite side. One 5' wide bridge spanning the chasm, with a dwarf fighter blocking it. The party suffered serious damage until the barbarian ran and jumped clear over the chasm (these were low level characters, like 3rd level, so clearing that jump wasn't guaranteed by any means) and flanked the dwarf, beating him down pretty quickly. It was very much fun for a while, until the party started thinking a bit more tactically.
....of the second adventure.Ha!
Come on, we all know it's true.
I don't say you were doing it on purpose, but it was done.
To be fair, I do think it gets easier. Probably because once you survive Xan, you can survive everything ;-)
I'm also wary of making anything harder just for difficulty's sake.
Well, I'd be wary, too.
Plus, just take that "advanced" template and slap it onto every single enemy, that makes it more killer.
Or give the players more sucky character creation options.
...Or give the players more sucky character creation options.
Yeah. Just have 'em all play one of the NPC classes. For example, surviving The Skinsaw Murders as a Commoner is SO much more rewarding. ;-D
...Or give the players more sucky character creation options.Yeah. Just have 'em all play one of the NPC classes. For example, surviving The Skinsaw Murders as a Commoner is SO much more rewarding. ;-D
It starts with not going with 30 point purchase for a change. Go and tell them they have 15 points to spend this time around.
Or, if you're one of those dice rollers, tell them it's 3d6, six times, no re-rolls.
...Or give the players more sucky character creation options.Yeah. Just have 'em all play one of the NPC classes. For example, surviving The Skinsaw Murders as a Commoner is SO much more rewarding. ;-DIt starts with not going with 30 point purchase for a change. Go and tell them they have 15 points to spend this time around.
Or, if you're one of those dice rollers, tell them it's 3d6, six times, no re-rolls.
Went with 15 point buy style for RotRL and the first three adventures were tough on them. Number 2 espically the final fight was a serious edge of the cliff fight that could have been a TPK but ended up with only one player dead and another in negatives. Three was a little easier but not a cakewalk by any stretch.
Creative Director
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For all our adventure paths, we assume something between average and somewhat optimized, so that the AP can work for a wider range of play styles. We generally try to skew key encounters to be tough but not impossible.
Of course... if by "optimized" you mean "a group of PCs built using EVERY WotC book as a resource" then we can't help you—we can't directly reference anything beyond the 3.5 SRD from WotC, and so building an AP that's tailored for hexblades and Book of Nine Swords and the Spell Compendium and all that is pretty much not possible.
So yeah! No one messes with a killer GM. Go claim that title!
And most (with any sense) wouldn't continue to play in his campaigns after the 2nd or 3rd TPK.
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If you want to a tougher AP for your optimized party, you can always look at some of the fan created material on the AP specific boards. I know at least for Rise of the Runelords, one GM posted all the mods he made for the entire AP to make it more challenging because he had a party of 6 players running through it instead of 4. I would assume there is a similar thread or two for each of the other APs, though to be honest I haven't looked because I am not there yet progression wise :)
If that isn't hard enough, you can always tweak it even more, though honestly IMO at a certain point, you have to make the adventure harder specific to the power and abilities of your group, meaning countering some of their strengths. Since your optimized group could look like just about anything in this regard, I think it would be difficult for Paizo or anyone to deliver what you are asking as far as an AP meant for an optimized party.
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As mentioned by others, probably the easiest way to really challenge optimization enthusiasts is to limit their characters.
15 point buy or 3d6 in order would probably do it. Don't give out as many magical items, and limit their ability to purchase or craft magical items.
Or just run modules meant for characters 1-3 levels higher than they are, and shift the amount of experience required to level up as if they were 1-3 levels higher than they are.
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I understand the many reasons you wouldn't do this, but it's not as though someone can't write a hellish adventure meant to challenge cleric/cleric/wizard/artificer using entirely OGL-compliant material. It's a niche for someone who isn't spending Paizo's money on production values or, well, paying people at all.
Well, that one time when Paizo adventure had an overkill boss the reaction was pretty much negative.
You know, as much as it is hard for some of the optimizer crowd folks to understand, the vast majority of the Pathfinder audience doesn't optimize nor spend time on CO/BG/Den forums looking forward to the Next Great Combo. And they don't give a flying damn about the relative power level of classes or whether feat A in combination with item B makes class C look silly. Such audience has no use for an adventure meant to be ran for optimized CoDzillas. And it's the gaming industry, so you either make stuff that sells or you can't afford the breakfast ;-)
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Of course, from a certain perspective, from lvl 11 it's the "world-breaking casters vs. bar-brawling fighters" issue. Except this issue was present in the game from the very first Gygax days. Casters get to cast wish, fighters get to smack stuff. One can argue that the 3ed took it even more to the extreme, but reality is, does the majority care ?
It seems that the majority of D&D gamers are fine with the discrepancy in power levels. They're OK with playing a, of all things, a Hexblade right next to scry-teleport-disintegrate Wizard. If they weren't, Paizo and WotC would be long time out of the business.
scry-teleport-disintegrate Wizard.
Those are pure nuclear power!!!
In that if one side uses them, the other side will use them as well.
Other than that, Pathfinder will never have fighters-that-aren't-really-fighters. If you don't want fighters-that-are-actually-fighters, don't play them. Or get 3rd-party stuff that panders to your preferences.
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I always held that a good adventure has a story, setup, locales and ideas that can be tailored to whatever play style you prefer.
It's rather easy to scale Paizo adventures to target audience - heck, my RotRL group is made up of two "optimizers" and two "casuals", and I do my best to keep them all happy. It usually works. I'm not sure if I could achieve that in an adventure written in a delve format.
The earlier APs assumed the 3.5 experience progression, right?
If you're playing them in Pathfinder, perhaps you could try playing them on the medium or slow experience progression rather than the fast one. Since the party is levelling slower than expected, it seems like the first APs would be fairly easy, but then get progressively more challenging and meatgrindery.
I've only played/run in fast progression games in Pathfinder, to maintain compatibility with 3e modules and products. Having done that, I think the medium progression is the way to go. Since you gain powers at every level, it gives you more time to explore each level of power, and it gives the DM more room to improvise and add homebrew encounters without levelling the party too quickly.
Our group, for the most part, has maintained the early assumption that the focus of the game should change significantly around "name level" at 10th, and most of the game should be played at low to mid-levels. We've very rarely played above 10th level.
I think "Legacy of Fire" had a bunch of that high-magic stuff, with wish spells flying everywhere in the later adventures, if you want that.
Were going with a 20 point buy, nothing but pathfinder core. I'd be willing to try 15. The rest agree with Jared Ouimette's statement though!
Well, If you're a bunch of bad-asses, adventures will be easy.
Or, if you don't want them to be easy, make everyone a bad-ass.
But if everyone's a bad-ass, no one really is.
So you want challenging encounters, and don't want to do it via killer tactics (that's always a choice - though it only goes so far). There are two ways: Make enemies stronger (which means the GM will have to adjust every single enemy) or make protagonists weaker (which carries no extra work load).
The way I see it: If you want challenging encounters with powerful characters, you need to bribe the GM. :P
Higher ability scores increase in GM paperwork. That leads to less gaming.
My players have come to appreciate the default array. I can always just pick up the encounters out of the book and there's a good challenge.
Super high ability scores can only result in two outcomes: a boring, easy game; or a GM who has to constantly buff monsters and throw CR to the wind. None for me, thanks.
With a published adventure it would be a little harder because I'm sure their npc's already have the elite array (or I could just do so anyway *evilgrin*) but when you set an array like that, all you have to do is just apply the modifier over 10 to the score.
NPCs are created using 25 point buy (and later 20 point purchase, I think), with some exceptional individuals (like end bosses) getting the "PC treatment", i.e. better stats and PC wealth.
Example if something primarily needs strength, their strength goes up by 8, their strength bonus goes up by 4. Bam, that stat's done.
The new "easy templates" (or what they're called) work that way: They have detailed/from-scratch adjustments and also quick-and-dirty changes.
It might say: "Detailed: improve all ability scores by 4; fast: increase all numerical values by 2"
Coming up with challenge ratings isn't an exact science. I even believe it cannot become an exact science unless you cripple the game and take away a lot of the players' freedom.
That, I do not want.
So I'll live with an imperfect system. I'll leave plain and perfect to checkers.
Oh, one thing I guess can help is reduce all CRs by 1 (or even more), and to compensate for the treasure inflation, use more monsters that don't have treasure, or tie up more treasure in perishables and let the enemy use those up. Or give them a lot of items you know they'll destroy (let everyone fighting the honourable party have unholy weapons so the group paladin will have his hands full destroying them }>)