|
I ran my first session of "The Haunting of Harrowstone" last night and had a great time of it. My perception was that the first three encounters we ran through last night did not present much of a challenge. Combat ended by no later than round 3 with the "villains" thoroughly trounced. I'm wondering if I need to beef up the encounters with more combatants or some other method to present more of a challenge.
Any advice is welcome and appreciated!
Not a spoiler, but background:
I'll also cop to the fact that this is the first time I've tried to GM an AP, and have only GM'd one PFS module before. So, consider me a newbie GM.
Well, the APs are designed for 4 PCs so you're gonna need to make some adjustments.
A technique that i've used is to give big bads max hp and to increase the number of creatures in normal fights. This isn't going to work in every situation and for every group though. Get the hang of your pc's and experiment a bit.
|
Yeah APs are built around 4 PCs with a 15 point buy, so you're running stronger characters than assumed and with more people. It's gonna take some work for you to actually make the AP challenging. Try just adding 1/3 extra monsters (so if they're fighting 6 creatures add two more), and give each solo boss two henchmen (some creature already established earlier in the AP).
The first several encounters of any AP tend to play 'softball' in that they don't hit very hard, use less then optimized tactics, and/or have secondary objectives which keep them for being organized. This is done partially to ease the way to level 2 which is a huge increase in survivability.
That said: If you feel things are just too easy and feel its a bad thing, add a couple more monsters to a given encounter to make up for group size or drop the advanced simple template on one or two critters to toughen them up.