Starting Way of the Wicked any tips?

[BiggDawg]

I picked up the Way of the Wicked adventure path (looks awesome) and we sat down last night to make characters. I have 6 players that are all pretty good at optimization and gave them 30 stat points to make their characters and added 2 skill points per level as the AP suggests. The party is as follows

Catfolk Anti-Paladin
Hobgoblin Ranger
Elf Wizard (Necromancer)
Elf Wizard (Diviner)
Human Witch
Gnome Summoner (Synthesist)

My initial thoughts are free advanced template for all monsters and to double the amount of all monsters in the encounters. Does anyone have any advice or suggestions about the above party doing the Way of the Wicked AP? Any feedback is welcome.

[Fire Mountain Games]

Greetings BiggDawg,

First thanks for the kind words and your interest in "Way of the Wicked".

I have several pieces of advice:

1) These are powerful characters (30 pt. build) and you have six of them. Yes advanced templates and more monsters are your friend. A flat doubling? That might be a little much at times. My advice, slowly ramp up your enemies and see how the PCs handle more adversity.

2) A hobgoblin and a catfolk! Interesting racial choices. You should decide how common these races are in Talingarde. As written, they are basically unknown, but this is your Talingarde. Perhaps hobgoblins are very common in the Savage North. Perhaps catfolk live amongst the other races. Again, your choice, but you should make the decision early and keep it consistent throughout the game.

3) Two wizards, a witch and a summoner -- this is one spellcaster heavy party. I would increase the number of spellcaster foes. Parties hurling this many spells are going to need to face foes backed with magic to be challenged.

Anyways, that's all for now.

Hope this helped,
Gary McBride
Fire Mountain Games

[Endzeitgeist]

I'd also suggest that you think about adding moderately challenging encounters with rank-and-file soldiers here and there to deplete the resources of the spellcasters so they don't blast any resistance to shreds. Attrition techniques are your friend and in Book II, I'd suggest to make the enemy parties employ a lot of summoning/hit-and-run tactics.

Just my 2 cents. ^^

[Spyderz]

There's a 3rd party supplement called Trailblazer for 3.5 that has 2 things I use with regularity...though they only had 2 things in it I really liked...and you might find at least 1 of them (maybe both) helpful. I especially find them helpful in large or strong groups or with very skilled players.

They had rules for Elite and Solo monsters. They were intended to be added and subtracted on the fly so that you could make fights more challenging/less anticlimactic.

The Elite template is pretty straight forward. Double it's listed hit points and give it a hero point. I don't always use the hero point for it. If the PCs are having too easy of a time with a fight that you'd intended to be challenging...ta da...they have twice the HP and a hero point to spend. If the fight goes south...you take it back off and the monster is back to the normal HP...and dies..or from the next hit...whichever works for you.

The Solo is same idea...more dangerous. I've only used it 4 times...all as BBEG for a campaign where the party didn't need to kill a bunch of stuff to get to him so they were fresh for the fight. In this case, you multiply it's HP by the number of PCs (dangerous no?) facing it. Give it 1 hero point per PC. Also for the Solo...if a PC goes down...drop it's hp by that fraction (or not...depends on how evil you are)

The other thing that was part of these rules were extra hero points. If you think an extra hero point for the monster might make the fight more memorable for the players, give it one...plus give one of the PCs a hero point (I usually give to either whoever has the least or whoever is the most heroic...depending.)

The purpose is to add dramatic tension...not to make the players crazy at every turn. I find these couple things work really well to make certain fights more fun.