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Hello and Good day to you all,
Since the Worldwound Incursion arrived in the mail, my players have been lining up to play it. At the end of the day I allowed a total of 7 players to play though the first book.
As far as I can recall, these adventures assume the Medium Exp track format, and are ruled for 4 players at most. So an extra 3 players means I must either re-check my encounters in order to keep the game balanced and all players at the desired level for each part of the adventure.
First question: 3 Extra players means 69,000 extra exp (23,000 per player) that can be either used for encounters of scenes, am I correct?
Second Question: For all other DMs in these forums, how would you spend the extra exp, what encounters would you change?
My thoughts so far are making some encounters, like a certain undead dwarf, more powerful by increasing his CR, discovering secret passages beneath Kerabes that could lead them to more encounters and increase a bit the amount of EXP that already existing scenes give the players.
Thoughts?
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Honestly, the only thing I keep thinking is that you are screwed :)
I mean, 7 players is a TON in a regular campaign, but here Mythic could really push things over the edge... you sure you want to do this? I know it's not what you're looking for, but I feel the best advice I can give you is to find a way to not have 7 players playing this campaign all at the same time.
You'd likely be safe to double the number of foes in an encounter if you don't bother to upgrade them in any other way. With boss fights and the like you might want to have guard dogs or the like with the boss to eat up some of your players' actions.
It would certainly save you a ton of work if you would run two groups. After all it is much easier to tone down the AP for a second group that is missing a player than it is to increase the challenge level for one group with three extra ones.
Besides having seven PC's will have them stepping all over each others chances to shine.
Additionally, it would allow them to build hyper-effective specialists because they have near double coverage on all their bases.
Running a 7 person group is just asking for it. Especially considering this is almost certainly your first shot at a mythic game. Personally, when testing new rules, I prefer to have a group that is going to perform as closely to baseline expectations as possible. Otherwise any data you glean from this mythic experiment will be skewed by both the presence of so many PC's as well as by the massive adjustments you will have to make to challenge them. By running two groups you would provide yourself with a "control" group to base your observations against.
Best of luck,
Weslocke
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Wow, that was quick ;3
Thanks Snow and Weslocke. This ain't my first mythic game. We have been ruining with the free trial since it first came out and then changed to using Mythic Adventures when it first came out, ain't the first time I had to fight a party of mythics. It's tough, but I can handle the lot of them. (Been honest I would be much happier with 5 rather than 7, but we already have a nice group dynamic going, and I wouldn't like to have that gone.)
Also, my overall group has always been 5-6. 7 players doesn't scare me in the least, but I appreciate the concern.
Having said that, you two make an excellent point. I'm likely going to follow it, and kick some of them out. And they can always join another campaign. :D
On to Tangent; How didn't I think of that? Thanks for the quick advice y'all.
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7 players can be tough , but it is entirely possible. Of course that means more work for the GM, and the players have to be very well prepaired and should use every trick in the arsenal (like deciding what they want to do before it is their turn, rolling and adding the damage for the fireball they indend to throw ahead of time ...).
I would not worry overly much about the XP budged (but I dont use XP in my group at all), the CR system tends to break down a bit.
Doubling the number of creatures is a nice start, but I would add:
- give the creatures more buffs, potions of blur and mage armor are very usefull in that regard. and with so many players they should have enough access to magic to "dispel" the worst buffs
-throwing the "advanced" and other templates on your monsters. Once the PCs are mythic, the mythic templates (especially agile) are a very good option.
-do not scale the loot all that much, that way they have to rely on their synergies
And that's overdoing it really. If we assume the players have 15 or 20 point builds, then doubling the number of critters will often double the XPs (and thus CR) of the encounter. More importantly, it's doubling the action economy of the encounter. Now, there are exceptions to this, true. But this is the situation where rather than doubling the foe, you just add allies.
For instance, let's say you're underground and you run into that old classic encounter, the mad evil wizard. Now, adding a second evil wizard is doable. But the problem is trying to come up with a thematic explanation why two mad evil wizards are working together and not killing each other. So let's find an out: allies. The evil wizard has three dire rats he's trained. Before it was one on four. Now it's four on seven.
There's also terrain. If there is a lot of rubble on the ground, there's no charging, and people have a lot of their movement eaten by terrain. So if you have a couple archers, they get an extra round of fighting without needing to give them potions to increase AC.
I was recently introduced to this document which goes into depth about this. It will help, and it also explains how just using Advanced Creatures and the like doesn't really improve things, except to ultimately make the critter almost impossible to hit which makes it frustrating to players.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nx-o8VAjhUwh3nnfzDQT-JA5eFLnN_BZJiBitGj BMDg/edit#