1st Lvl Module and Party of Three (( Help ))

[Bastion Girl]

Ok so we started the quest of the everflame and one of my party members made a mistake and got eveyrone electrocuted to death...
There was little i could do about it and told them from the start i will not be using plot armor if you die then you die...

However! they didnt just understandably move on and make new charecters or even argue with the eachother over whos fault it was, They turned on me yelling at me and saying this was my fault for not properly balencing the dungeon!

They said That since nobody made a healer and they were a party of three not four that they were saverly handicapped and that this mission was intended for a full party with one of each class type (( Fighter rogue wizerd and healer ))

They said I should had thrown them more health potions every time they were hurt or changed the encounters to be easier on them for there handicap.. (( By the way i already doubled the amount of health potions the module told me to give them ))

Every encounter somone would almost die or become saverly wounded but to me i just felt like it was chalenging nobody had died untill the wizerd ran into a AOE trap that shocked everyone with 3D6 every 1d8 turns... the only one that was standing afer the inital shock was the fighter who thought it only went off cause the wizerd was running so he waited in place for 10 whole turns untill it was ready to fire again and shocked him again.
(( they were wounded from fighting skelitons just before ))

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Also later today I was yelled at again when I said that you wont die as much when you get to higher levels (( around level 5 )) I said then your heros will be less novice and able to servive longer and threw more encounters before falling over.
and the response was "No you f!$#ing idiot... do I have to explain to you thaaat the mooonsters get strooonger as the plaaayers do... dont be so stupid of course it will be just as hard as it is now! the creators of pathfinder arent that incompetent that they would make the game easier as you level"

[Bastion Girl]

Any ideas?

[ParagonDireRaccoon]

You could give them an npc cleric with a vow of nonviolence. The cleric would accompany them and heal them, but not fight any opponents. The party has part of the responsibility to be able to defeat encounters and progress through an adventure, it is not only the GM's responsiblity. A party without a healer has to meet the GM halfway.

[Elven_Blades]

It sounds like your players are completely new to the game. I recommend starting them with Beginner Box, or giving them an NPC cleric they can direct.

Iirc, that's one of the modules with Pre-Gen Iconic PCs in the back of the book. Against iirc, my group beat that module with said Pre-Gens, but we did have 4 and are very veteran gamers.

Pre written modules and the Adventure Paths generally assume that you have the 4 "classes" covered (fighter, caster, healer, thief). If you only have 3 players, the thief is the safe on to drop. Dumping the other 3 will almost always make a campaign exponentially difficult. That, and inexperience, seem to have been the downfall of your group.

Edit:
I don't necessarily consider it the GMs responsibility to balance a dungeon for new players. They have always felt like (to me anyway) to be tuned to new players, and need to be adjusted up to more experienced players. My groups have, on occasion, just strong-armed their way through published stuff with little challenge.

[Ninja in the Rye]

The game really is designed on the assumption that you'll have healing available to the party and it really becomes a grind at low levels if you do not ("The Fighter took 10 damage this fight, he gets back 1 HP a night, guess we need to rest for a week and a half if we don't want him dying the next time he gets hit.")

In the past I would usually toss a party without a healer type a 10 charge wand of CLW (assuming they have someone who can use it) or a few potions, or run a healbot NPC cleric (in this module you could have made the crazy guy who is locked in the supply room a cleric, for example).

More recently I've been using Evil Lincoln's Strain-Injury houserules.

[Dazz]

I would say you were being fairly reasonable. You did give them extra healing potions, though I don't know how many the module starts off giving them--doubling 1 potion given is much different than doubling 6 given. With three people, especially missing a cleric, it can be hard. You told them ahead of time you weren't going to make things super easy on them, and at the time they accepted it. Now they know you were being serious.

As Ninja suggested, you could give them a wand of CLW with low charfes as random treasure so they can tactically use healing, but what they are saying you should have done--give them boatloads of healing every time they get scratched--is also bad. They're asking for more healing than a first level cleric could feasibly give.

For their remark that "it doesn't get easier to survive because encounters get tougher", they're very much wrong. It's not just hit points and damage rolls that matter--higher level you have a lot more resources to fall back on in tough spots, especially with spellcasters around. Although the higher hit points does usually mean a character won't go down in one shot from an unlucky roll--even a fighter will usually drop if a goblin rolls max damage on his critical at first level.

My suggestion: highly suggest to them to change one of their characters change to something with healing capabilities. I hate to sound like a power gamer, but it wasn't the greatest idea to start a party with no healer in the first place, unless they decided before play that they wanted a challenge.

Once they're through Crypt of the Everflame, I'd suggest keeping the party one level above the assumption of the module you send them through. That usually works well for me for smaller parties.

[Ximmrik]

To me they should learn from their mistakes. One of all if there was a rogue in the party, why wasn't that person up front checking for traps! The wizard most likely should be in the middle or at the end of the group. Next did they read about all the classes or are they the type that thinks clerics are useful for only healing. With the channelling energy abilities,clerics (thanks Pathfinder)are more useful now. They can be a backup fighter type and can use other spells to help the party. At higher levels they get some AOE spells. Playing a cleric isn't easy, but the long run (with patient) they useful in any party.

Lately in our group we usually have 2 types of healers, with only 3 or 4 players, and we usually can out last most encounters the GM has us come up against.

Back in 3.5 editions most people did not want to play cleric, for most of the time their character would just be healing and nothing else.
If other players are demanding the cleric player for healing, he should role play as if the others worship his or her deity, have the them pay for healing if demanding,etc. We had a few players that demand the healer to heal them and were rude, once the healers demand payments and respect most other players thought twice about the hate on healers.

You warn them it was not going to be easy, and in real life if you do not have a medic skills in adventuring the unknown, war, etc. You are SOL. If they are new to the system, I would think they are use to computer game type adventures.

[Ninja in the Rye]

3.5 Clerics were one of the most powerful classes in the game, they're actually nerfed a bit in PF. Channel Energy is no where near the power of options 3.5 clerics had for their Turn Undead uses like Divine Metamagic and powering Devotion feats. Spells like Divine Power were stronger in 3.5 as well.

As to a Rogue I believe that the "trap" in question was not an actual trap

CotE:

It's a room with Azure Fungus on the walls reaching down into the flooded floor. It requires a decent knowledge Nature check to identify. A rogue would have been little use.

IMO nobody should be "forced" to play a Cleric if that's not what they're interested in. It's not about thinking a class is strong or weak, it's just that sometimes people are just more interested in playing other classes that do different things.