I am a new GM running a home brew pathfinder game. I have a module from an old magazine I want to run in our world, but I need to scale up the difficulty. I also need to add a bandit encounter within the next day or two if I can. So far I have run only modules within their level range.
currently the party is a party of 4 all lvl 3, and have been stomping over everything the modules have thrown at them with ease.
I want a bandit party of 6 bandits to encounter them soon if possible. I want the fight to be as hard as I can make it, with out hitting PC deaths. and with out wonky reasons, just good ol fashioned melee superiority.
Can anyone help me figure out what lvls I should make the bandits to fit a 4 man party of lvl 3?. from there hopefully I will have a better understanding to try to tackle the module upscale.
Thanks in advance for your wisdom.
You can think of using terrain in you advantage. Or an ambush or even both. You can seriously damage a party with an ambush of equal CR if you give the bad guys some serious terrain advantage or/and a good strategy. The bestiaries have lists of monsters by CR.
And you can use a leader who is a ranger with favorite enemy being human or any other race in the front line and try getting them to a flanking position. A second bandit may have a level in rogue, so he will add 1d6 to damage in a flank or a surprise.
If you make them level 3 the party might have serious trouble depending a little on the front line armor class and damage potential.
I would make each individual bandit a CR 1 for what you want. That's my opinion.
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First, a couple of questions:
Were your players built with high stats (higher than a 15 pt buy)?
Do they have wealth higher than the expected wealth?
Assuming the answers to both questions is 'no' and that you want an epic encounter (APL+3=6) then you've got 600 xp per PC = 2400 xp to spend on the encounter. So that could be six 2nd level rogues (assuming NPC levels of wealth and 'heroic NPC' stats - see for example the Skulking Brute 2nd level rogue in the NPC index).
Use the appropriate NPC Codex entries as a baseline and tweak from there. Here's how I might set up the encounter.
800 xp ranger 4
400 xp rogue 2
400 xp rogue 2
400 xp rogue 2
200 xp fighter 1
200 xp fighter 1
party is level 3, just finished doing crown of the kobold king. I even added kobolds, and beefed up the king. The party used a total of 2 heals through the whole module. and was knocking over kobolds left and right like no resistance.
as for point buy, I let them roll their stats and this resulted in some high base stats. I do believe the barbarian is +3 to all stats O.O (my mistake didn't know about point buy at the time).
How do you add up the CR of multiple monsters to decide the overall CR for the encounter? If I can figure how to count it up, Like above was suggested lvl 1-4 bandits. (how would I add that group up to get a CR number).
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From what I understand from this site ( http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering#TOC-Table-CR-Equivalencies )you basically take the highest CR, then add +1 for every aditionnal unit (whatever the level). Although this can highly variable, depending on party build. As far as you seem to say, your party is VERY powerful. I wouldnt be surprised to hear of people who where crushed by the Kobold king, so the system is unfortunately imperfect.
I'm playing a game where we stomp the ground in maybe 2 out of every 3 encounters. How does the GM mess us up? By putting us up against unconventionnal tactics. We had defeated drow, cyclopses, gargoyles. But we had quite a lot of trouble against bears since they constanly grappled us.
So give your bandits tripping weapons. Nets, whips, etc. Give the bandits teamwork feats (always fun). (The former comments are from player experience) (What follows is pure speculation:
If you want to gage player strength, up the level of the enemy, and make it non-lethal. Let's say the bandits are there to capture (not murder) them. Then go wild. Keep sending bandits parties against them until they get captured. Up the level each time. Then voila, you have an idea of what level the enemies should have. Although this is far from foolproof, it can give you an idea. Maybe. Like I said, this is pure speculation.
But, as a player, I would rather you do this, rather than murder us or let us get away with murder.
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I like what Humphrey Boggard said, but I would recommend tossing in a wizard and cleric (replacing some of the other bandits). A well-rounded party is stronger than it's component parts, and this applies to NPCs as well as PCs.
I agree, but OP specifically asked for all bandits and melee focus.
How do you add up the CR of multiple monsters to decide the overall CR for the encounter? If I can figure how to count it up, Like above was suggested lvl 1-4 bandits. (how would I add that group up to get a CR number).
Have a look at the Core rulebook section on gamemastering. Average party level is 3 so an epic encounter is APL+3 = 3+3 = 6 for you. The individual experience point award is 600 for a CR 6 encounter and a party of 4-5 so that gives you (XP award) x (# players) = 600 XP x 4 = 2400 XP, your "budget" for the encounter.
There's a nice guide that goes into more detail as well here.
thanks :) much better grasp now.
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Here's the thing.
Pathfinder (and 3.5 before them) was built on the idea that you would get a party of 4 adventurers and run them through about 13 encounters before they leveled. This included 10 or so "level appropriate" encounters and one or two "high level" encounters that are 1-2 CR's higher than the party. Traps and role-playing counts as encounters too.
If you use the formula in the book, this is about what you end up with.
This works pretty well in a module environment. But in "homebrew" play, mostly it's pretty darn boring. Heck it's not that great in modules either - my DM has to tweak the module to make it harder all the time.
In homebrew play I find that if I just populate a dungeon with level appropriate encounters, it usually works best to simply apply basic logic to the game and let bad things happen.
For example, I just got done running a group of 6 level 6-7 characters through level two of a keep. They snuck in the secret door in the basement, and have been climbing UP to the BBEG at the top of the thing. The basement was full of an alchemist lab and the experiments that they use to make their super-solders. But because it's a taboo place to the hobgoblin guards above, (and guarded by some bound hellhounds) the guards tend to want to stay away. Therefore the party was able to have a SERIOUS slug-fest down there, and rest unmolested to continue UP to the next level today.
Note that the environment dictated not only the party's actions but the monster's as well.
This means I don't have to pull any punches. I can just hit them HARD, with waves of (weirdly mutated) bad guys, and just see how much they can take. I actually made the tank run away (he's never done that before). These sorts of fights are burley but they challenge the party to desperately fight for survival.
And they love it and keep coming back for more. Killing the BBEG should be an epic event for the party to accomplish. I intend to hit them with a LOT of hobgoblins (with a few elites thrown in), just to get them depleted a bit before the two or so boss fights I have planned.
these boss fights are the real adventure.
The point I'm making here is that the it's less important to craft "CR appropriate" encounters than it is to get a real sense of your party's capabilities, and then work on PACING. Sometimes you can go 3-4 CR higher than the party and just have 1-2 encounters for the whole day.
Sometimes you want lot's of little guys to blow through to get to a BBEG fight where the party is already half spent. Sometimes you even want the party to lose and have to run away.
You have to build your own sense of how much punishment the party can take, and if you kick it up about 2 CR HIGHER than that once in a while, the players have to get resourceful. THIS is what makes the game fun.
The other thing you NEED to do, is you need to make the player's actions COUNT. Modules suck at this. This is because when a party fails at a mission, you have a whole new plot-line on your hands, and modules can't take this into account. You want the party to feel like it's actions matter to the way the world works. I had an adventure end badly, and the party failed to prevent a zombie plague from being unleashed upon the land. Did I PLAN a zombie plague to happen in my game world? No. But I sure as hell had one, and the next 3 adventures were built around containing and stopping a zombie plague. The whole game could have gone a different way. I let the outcome be determined by the players and went with it.
Try some of this stuff. I promise your players will love your for it.
To build on what PS is saying, try not to think of the bandit encounter as a static ambush. If the party hits them, fully charged w/the ability to "Nova" or use all their best powers all at once, more than likely they'll just wipe 'em out.
Think instead of how that bandit encounter fits into the skein of their entire adventuring day. They might have encountered some outer guards (2 CR 1 wolves and a CR 1/2 Ranger 1 "huntmaster") who started their day. The Huntmaster got off a horn blow as a Swift action somewhere in the combat and that plus the sounds of battle drew the attention of x5 stirges who mobbed the barbarian just as he was finishing the last enemy.
These 2 encounters, back to back, take up some time and set up the idea that the bandits further down the trail learned of the PCs and some of their capabilities (The big guy's really angry; the old man in the pointy hat lobs fire with magic, etc). This way they can set up the best kind of ambush.
However the bandits still have an ace up their sleeve. They know the trail the party's following will slow down their movement with rough terrain, so their Plant Cleric also uses Entangle to make it worse, then takes off while their ranger and fighter creates a devious swinging branch trap.
Finally, after all of this is negotiated by the party the epic ambush begins. The party fights desperately and barely survives, driving off one of the bandits alive who shouts: "I Reynald swear to avenge my fallen gang!" and now you've got a recurring villain and the party has been thoroughly tested.
The point here is that if they wander right up on the bandits, they will whomp the villains, yawn and move on.
lots of good advice, thanks both of you.
I tend to use this for building encounters these days. The players never run into an encounter with a single monster in it unless it is a boss monster, and even then I have found throwing a single CR+3 monster at a party of 4 people is easier than 4 CR (APL-1) monsters. These are set for each individual player, so things are just additive per player. You can also mix and match the below so long as it is within the same parameter (If there are 4 players you can have 1 (APL-1), 2 (APL-3), 3 (APL-4), and 4 (APL-5) monsters to form one encounter, but NOTE: the lower the CR of the monster the more it needs to focus on using its CMB for everything, so pick monsters with high CMBs [The undead Owl-bears, CR2, have around +12 to grapple] or monsters who focus on using magic for everything so long as it is effective [Magic Missle always hits unless the target has the Shield Spell, CL 1 Magic Missle averages 3.5 due to the +1, in multiplicity this becomes 4[14], 8[28], 12[42], and 16[56] average damage in 1 round, so never underestimate the power of 16 level 1 wizards/sorcs. It doesn't matter if they die in 1 hit, NPCs should be damage focused not suitability focused anyway.
The real power of the 4x[(APL-8) to (APL-5)] elements are when they are used as traps--possibly compound traps that activate EVERYTHING. Pit traps that are set to not fall for the first 3 on the way down a dungeon and then all of them activate when the last trap activates tends to hit the entire party if they are in line formation. Anyone who fell in is now stuck fighting up against the enemies who were watching the party and now are attacking them from outside the pit.
Be aware that you should always mix things up, send neither continual commando squads 4x(APL-1), nor hordes 16x(APL-8), nor mix and matches, but mix it up by using all of them so the party cannot adapt to just that one thing. Also, do use compound traps such as rope bridges that dump the party into bear traps, rooms that have one or two pillars of 1,000 arrows, but are also filled with hidden beartraps that are pinned to the ground.
Do have bandit parties be acting as merchants, walking with the party, sharing their ale--it might be genuine!--only to attack when the party disarms for the night. Alternatively, this group of bandits might just decide that the party is probably too strong for them and leave them alone. Fat merchants with hired bodyguards are far easier to kill than a group of bad-ass heroes.
4 monsters per player (4 players = 16 monsters)
CR (APL-8), CR (APL-7), CR (APL-6), or CR (APL-5) monsters (Standard), (Difficult), (Hard), (Epic)
3 monsters per player (4 players = 12 monsters)
CR (APL-7), CR (APL-6), CR (APL-5), or CR (APL-4) monsters (Standard), (Difficult), (Hard), (Epic)
2 monsters per player (4 players = 8 monsters)
CR (APL-6), CR (APL-5), CR (APL-4), or CR (APL-3) monsters (Standard), (Difficult), (Hard), (Epic)
1 monster per player (4 players = 4 monsters)
CR (APL-4), CR (APL-3), CR (APL-2), or CR (APL-1) monsters (Standard), (Difficult), (Hard), (Epic)
NOTE:
I use these with my homebrews. Modules are a little more tricky, but ultimately you should already be changing aspects of them to effectively challenge the party.