GM'ing an AP with over-powered PCs


Shattered Star

The Exchange

I inherited the Shattered Star AP as our DM had to go out of town for a few months. He was 'very' generous with stat rolls and the PC have on average about a 60 point-buy. They have no dump stats and too many skill ranks.

The Plan

I'm thinking to run the AP almost 'as is' but to increase everything as follows: enemy AC's all +2, enemy to hit +2, enemy damage +2, all save DC's for PC's +3 harder, all PC skill checks +3 harder. Is that too much of an adjustment? too little?

This approach seems like the simplest way for me to deal with the PC stat imbalance vs. the AP... I don't want to have to customize a perfectly well-designed AP. Does anyone have any alternate suggestions?

The Party

The party is 4-5 players: two rangers level 2, a ranger-1/cleric-1, a cavalier-2, and a sorcerer-2 (npc). The sorc is my character from before; I tend to keep him out of the combat, but have him help move the plot along with suggestions and knowledge checks.

Fortunately, the party is all new to pathfinder. So, they are not too min/max at this point.


You could just ask them to rebuild their characters with the same equipment and standard 15 point buy.


that's a beefy setup.

If you are looking to minimize bookwork, consider the Augmented Simple Template on anything critter wise you feel is supposed to be dangerous.


So wait, they have good stats but don't know how to optimize and are newbies to boot?

If that's true, why would you even modify the monsters unless you wanna kill them really badly?


add more monsters, if there are 4 grey maidens, make it 6, and lower treasure, especially anything that would boost stats, make the vendors in town stingy, things they sell they get less for, things they want to buy, they just can't find... if they want to craft, sure but that'll burn up feats, which will offset the uber stats a bit.


My gaming group has traditionally (since well before PF, back in 3.0 days) generated stats using 4d6, discard lowest, re-roll if more than one 1 rolled, and as a consequence are quite over the top for AP's as well. Average stats tend to the 13-14 mark, and the players consider a 9 or 10 a very low stat. The party hits harder, and is harder to lay a hand on due to better saves and AC. In addition, I have a couple of decent optimisers playing.

For ease, I just apply the Advanced simple template to pretty much every beastie on the fly, which turns out to be very similar to your proposed mods. It ends up not being overpowered, although I find I need to juice up solo bosses a little more, particularly their defences.

The players end up feeling like they earn their victories (their relief after a hard-fought victory over Vordekai in Kingmaker recently was very rewarding), and I minimise the amount of extra work I have to do. It sounds like you are close enough to spot on. Just keep an eye on the players' anxiety during encounters - they should know they have to pull out all the stops every so often just to survive.

Shadow Lodge

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60 point buy. So we are looking at 18/18/18/14/12/12 before racial mods. Yeesh.

If you want to do as little bookwork and math as possible, then scale WAY back on the items. Way back. If a character has a strength of 18, and he would normally have a strength of 14, that's equivalent to a +2 weapon. Don't give them magic items until, say level 6, and then very, very slowly.


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Icyshadow wrote:

So wait, they have good stats but don't know how to optimize and are newbies to boot?

If that's true, why would you even modify the monsters unless you wanna kill them really badly?

This. Run it unmodified until your GM-senses tell you that things are getting too easy, then tweak things.

The Exchange

I think I'll try the advanced simple template. That's pretty helpful. Thanks.

The encounters were a little too easy without the tweaks.

As for magic/gold... I suppose I could cut back on the treasure by say 25%? Perhaps that would do it. I don't want to have to re-price everything in the book.

I'm not sure how they would take the re-rolling stats. I had suggested point-buy originally with the group (before I took over GM'ing, at the start of the campaign) but a couple of people balked at the idea. Perhaps if I explain the consequences (beefed up opponents, less gold rewards) they will be more receptive to re-setting stats.

Thanks for all the input.

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