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I have come to these boards a few times looking for assistance concerning a party that just absolutely obliterates everything in its path. Suffice it to say, things have gotten worse not better as time has gone on. (The one upside, and I hesitate to call it an upside, is that the barbarian had to drop out of the game. If he was still in the party I shudder to think.) Right now the party is about to reach Jorgenfist and they are all level 11. They honestly don't have much in the way of awesome gear, they are just very good at min/maxing and taking good feat combos. The party has weaknesses that have shown themselves in the past (Being outnumbered, enemy spellcasters with minions, SR, DR, negative levels, traps) but the AP has not had much in the way of it yet.
The party consists of a Paladin, Monk, Druid, 2 Sorcerers. Both of the sorcerers are heavy on evocation magic (one is lightning dragon subtype so his lightning bolts are doing STUPID amounts of damage and an AC vs giants of 29). The paladin is a crit monster with a falchion and very high strength who does a combo that is hitting for over 100 damage now (Enlarge person + bulls strength + power attack + 15-20 crit range). The monk can literally not miss anything with an AC below 24 unless he rolls a 1. Druid is basically there for moral support in case one of them takes a crit to the face. As an example, they actually killed Longtooth on round 9 of the Sandpoint Raid. I had to fudge his health numbers by a significant margin to make that whole scenario the least bit challenging.
So I am thinking of making the following changes to encounters, and would appreciate some feedback or suggestions for improvement.
1. Give Cinderma the advanced template, max out health of runeslaves
2. Make a few of the camp leaders of the Jorgenfist army coming back from a strategy meeting inside the fortress when the players arrive.
3. Give the harpies the advanced template, max out health
4. Give all mammoths advanced templates
5. Give Embers a Handler, perhaps a Stone Giant Ranger
6. Give all normal stone giants in the caves the advanced template
7. Give Enga some minions, and perhaps a better way of using the necklace of fireballs trap.
8. Ogre tanners now have the kreeg ogre template
9. Lokansir I am very worried about, he is the type of guy my party just mows under without breaking a sweat. I am looking for some suggestions on this one.
10. Nualia is MIA, and I have been planting evidence of her trail wherever Lamashtu is brought up. Want to make her have a brief appearance with the Lamia priestesses or perhaps strong evidence she was recently there. Not sure how to do it but I want to make this fight memorable and challenging.
The rest of the section looks good. Probably doesn't need any changes aside from maxing out health. Has anyone else had problems with PC power this late in the AP? If so how did you balance it out.
Pathfinder level 10+ starts to get hard to DM. If you want to challenge players you have to do a bit of finagling behind the scenes. I am currently starting book 4 in ROTRL myself and my party is Magus (swift action give my sword flame, shock, frost, oops I crit 74 damage, 3 more attacks another 5000 damage trolol oops) 2 rangers with giants as favored enemy (splat) and a mage and cleric who are both just merely ok in comparison.
I give things the advanced template and near max health without increasing the xp reward. I sometimes add 1 or 2 mooks to a battle. I would only worry about making it too challenging for common enemies as long as your people are having fun.
For named stuff maybe double stack advanced template or add lots of mooks. It is fun to chain encounters together too. That kobold Barbarian might realize quite quickly she is in over her head and run for help. If you get two or three encounters chained together (always try and have one guy run away) then it can get very hairy.
Some enemys like Mokmurian will get the drop on PCS which is what will make it challenging. As soon as they open the doors to his chamber he gets a ready action spell off then you go to initiative and he gets to go first with another spell.
The next adventure is what I am looking forward to running. Crazy wizard battles everywhere and ran to their intellect should be a hard time for any group.
As for Lokansir I think two advanced templates and a fiendish template would beef him up considerably. Puts his AC to 32, gives him DR10/good which will help mitigate some damage and gives him a +4 to hit and damage. You could also increase his spell resistance some if you felt the need or give him some better fast healing as well that works all the time whether he is in the earth or not like fast healing 10 say.
Use the Mythic Rules - but only for the Monsters (not for the PCs). It's interesting how deadly a critter gets when it has Epic Damage Resistance and acts twice in a round.
Do they have a lot of answers for grappling? Swapping a couple feats for grapple-focused stuff like Improved Grapple, etc., on the harpy monks could potentially give the sorcerers quite a handful.
My own group just had a near TPK against the lamia priestesses and I haven't been changing anything; they're certainly not unoptimized, but there are only 4 of them and only 1 full spellcaster (a witch). The dungeons under Jorgenfist are a pretty long grind to go through all at once, so I would say if you could add some kind of time pressure element to make sure they're not popping in and out to rest as they feel like it would go a long way towards burning those spell resources enough to make the dungeon challenging.
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I have the same issue with my group. But, honestly, I just rebuild the monsters using Hero Lab. Remember that your guys are the heroes. While we GMs need to have fun too, its our job to make sure they are having fun. And trust me, the game balance WILL shift. Book 5 and 6 are just mean. It's my understanding that most partys don't make it past page 350-someodd in the hard cover reprint.
My party has been mowing down almost everything I've thrown at them.... until they met the giants on their own turf. In the first battle, arrogance turned into three out of eight down and one dead. And that was just the intro battle.
Also, something I've learned is that the NPCs with 16-18+ intelligence are SMART. Meaning they will somehow know the party's weaknesses, and be prepared for them. I used to think of it as metagaming, but now I see it more along the lines of the Sherlock Holmes series, where through hyper-aware observation and logical conclusions, he was able to deduce ALL sorts of stuff about his enemies.
He scrys Sandpoint after the battle and notes the damage. Scorched strikes on rocks? Lightning. Melted store fronts? Acid. Big burn blasts? Fireballs. Giants cut to pieces? Melee slashing. Dragon riddled with arrows? Bow attacks.
Counter with energy resistance, stone skin or fly, and windwall or protection from arrows.
He successfully listens to NPCs talking through scry after the fight. Human paladins? Elf sorcerer? Half-orc ranger?
Appropriate bane arrows and weapons. Get sunder ready for those paladins and their weapons. Teach your guys snatch to grab holy symbols from clerics. Ways. There are ALWAYS ways.
Why shouldn't the NPCs be able to do the same. Mokmorian HAS to know that the PCs are coming. At this point, they have made themselves readily known. So he and his cohorts should be prepared appropriately. Represent his high intelligence correctly by making some preps to counter the PCs. Use their own tricks against them! A 20 intelligence HAS to count for something!
Stone giants rangers with a level in barbarian for rage + Enlarge person + improved critical and critical focus?! Create pit spells? Black tentacles?
There ARE ways. Legal ways. Logical ways. Hell, Mokmorian isn't dumb. Party comes in, have his guys have a preset signal set up to launch a firework. Giant encampments see firework, merge on fortress. Any party looking down into the valley to Jorgenfist should be TERRIFIED if they are at all smart. Over a hundred giants and mammoths! If they don't all have flight, they should understand that unless they are VERY smart and VERY quiet and VERY fast, they. Will. Die.
"Come into MY house, will you? Now, you pay!"
My players should not read this
I have kind of the same problem. My party of experienced players after the raid on sandpoint has a half-orc barbarian with pounce, a half-elf fighter who's AC is so high I can almost never hit him, A human witch who has gotten herself 24 int and the slumber hex, A gnome cleric who is really really good at keeping people in the fight, and a halfling thundercaller bard, who brings buffs, debuffs, and damage. Plus their 2 cohorts, a dwarf fighter who dies or almost dies a lot, and Shalelu. I've been increasing the difficulty of fights since we started book 3. Advanced template, an extra class level or 2, better gear, proper planning and most of the time they get though with no problem.
Here's my thought. while it sounds like your party is rolling everything, and mine was too for a while, I feel like book 4 after the raid you are supposed to feel that way. I feel like the players get to feel great killing extra large giants and evil monks, and stuff to make them feel awesome, until they get to the runeforge and realize they might still be in over their heads.
As for how to make things a bit tougher, Will is right about planning. I got told this at Gencon last year, bad guys are usually pretty smart, and your group is actually famous at this point. they will know your strengths and weaknesses. Also minor changes to the environment can completely change encounters. If a monster would benefit from being mobile, give him more space, worried about the caster being charged immediately, rough terrain on the floor, or a statue to hide behind.
1 more thing, perception checks and potions. Unless your party is stealthing, bad guys will probably know something is coming by the screams of death from their friends. This means they can have drank a potion or 2 that will last for hours or minutes. Bulls strength, enlarge person, barkskin, shield, displacement, blur, fly, see invisibility, these are all good potions for bad guys.
Keep in mind, published adventures, modules, AP's whatever you want to call them are written for a set of lowest common denominators - average number of PC's (typically 4 where the OP's group has 5) average ability scores, magic items, spells known, even player intelligence (which can be dangerously low :) Writers have to account a great deal of variability in players and characters - prime example in this AP: just about every encounter area has elaborate (and I'll admit internally consistent) excuses for why the various monsters/enemies don't immediately converge on intruders and instead sit politely in their rooms waiting for the players to visit and exterminate them.
If your PC's are having a cake-walk, the first step is to turn that crap off.
Where I come from lightning is accompanied by quite a bit of noise. Combat is loud. Unless we're talking about a couple psions trying to psychically crush each other, everyone within 50 or 100 feet should hear combat and come running, pausing only to buff per published tactics. Sure many residents of these area's don't particularly like one another but they all dislike the PC's even more. And all should fear their leader's wrath for any failure in security.
Enlarged paladins and evokers blasting everything in sight is a fine way to kick out damage, but it sure isn't synonymous with stealth. Try throwing 2-4 neighboring "rooms" worth of monsters at them at once or staggered by a round. That might fix their wagon. And don't stop. The longer the fight goes on, the more residents should appear.
Second tip: in a world like Golarion (or any PF/D&D world) only the most backward villagers and 1st level characters are confused about who the most dangerous combatant is: spell-casters. Everyone else should have a primary tactic: kill the casters. That means taking attacks of opportunity to engage the puny wizard and pound him into a pulp, because if you don't he's going to blow your brains out. Or heal up all the damage you just did to the grunts. Seriously, isn't this what your PC's do? (Take out enemy casters, not necessarily take reckless AoO)
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. Use the same tactics your players use - concentrate fire, ranged attacks and use healing. This AP does a good job of providing healing ability for several of the PC's potential enemies. Make sure those get used and on the meat shields not hoarded for themselves. Sure they're evil but they're not stupid. If a enemy spell caster has healing ability, it should be used early to keep allies up and fighting, not saved until late in the battle when it's usefulness will be low and chances are the caster will die with those spells uncast.
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Thanks for the advice. They got to the valley and were scouting via druid bird form and an invisible flying sorcerer. Suffice it to say, they were scared s+@#less and spent most of the session discussing how to get into the fort without alerting the army outside. They keep using scrying on Ameiko who was captured and they think she is in the black tower. They are using the Druid's hide campsight spell to remain hidden in the small valley leading through the iron peaks. They are currently in the deathweb cave and found the redcap tunnels. The gnome sorcerer begins to scout the tunnels without any way of seeing, and quickly bumps into a group of redcaps. As a side note, I am adding in WAAAY more redcaps to those tunnels. They are by far the funniest creature I have come across in the bestiary.
That is where we ended. Was a pretty good session overall. The druid is using his abilities to get a mammoth to follow them around now. The army is not alerted to anything yet. My prediction is they are going to skip right down to Enga and miss out on Cona, Black Monk etc. Gonna try to work Cona back in but we all know they will eventually have to go back and face the black monk if they want to get into the library. That first fight with Enga is going to turn into a horrible chain of baddies walking in on it.
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If your PC's are having a cake-walk, the first step is to turn that crap off.
LOL! YES! I almost always ignore tactics, and instead look at their motivations, their intelligence, their abilities, and react accordingly!
@LordCoSaX - I just turned off XP, and started telling the party to level when the AP recommended leveling. It's made things a lot easier and the players really liked it once they adapted to it.
@Verta - Sounds like you have things under control then. Chapter 4 is a beast. And what Latrecis said about an expanding battle works. I once pulled an entire dungeon against a party because they were loud and had let bad guys get away to warn. Just be careful to give them an out unless you plan on ending the campaign. Granted, that WAS my plan, but still, it worked really well... too well.
Keep in mind, published adventures, modules, AP's whatever you want to call them are written for a set of lowest common denominators - average number of PC's (typically 4 where the OP's group has 5) average ability scores, magic items, spells known, even player intelligence (which can be dangerously low :) Writers have to account a great deal of variability in players and characters - prime example in this AP: just about every encounter area has elaborate (and I'll admit internally consistent) excuses for why the various monsters/enemies don't immediately converge on intruders and instead sit politely in their rooms waiting for the players to visit and exterminate them.
If your PC's are having a cake-walk, the first step is to turn that crap off.
Buff. Buff. Buff.
Don't hesitate to increase the power of your critters. As Latrecis reminds us, this was written for 4 PCs. 6+ cohorts, or 5 buffing min/max'ers (who work as a team) are going to mow down foes. Too many of the final fights in the AP are against a single BBEG. So don't be afraid to change things up. Cruise this Forum for advice -- back in the bad old 3.5 days there was an entire thread on beefing up the AP for 6 PCs -- adapt that for PFRPG. Chaining encounters and using smart tactics is a good start.
CJ