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Greetings fellow Pathfinders!
I am about to run my homegroup through Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, and I wondered how difficult/advisable it is to run it for 6 rather than 4 players.
I hesitate only because I ran 6 players for a 2+ year Kingmaker campaign and I had to be a fair amount of work to adjust challenge ratings and encounters because of it. Other factors were the presence of a gunslinger who hit way too easily and the fact that many fights we agains one BBEG.
Will I run into these issues if I wanted to run 6? Any advice to make the work load a bit less?
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RotRL is more challenging than Kingmaker in my opinion. Gunslingers will have the touch AC advantage as always so just make sure you challenge them proper like with a large mook ogre in the face.
When it comes to the adjustment I don't tend to make it to fancy. I tend to add more mooks that have a level in a appropriate class (usually fighter, barbarian or rouge).
Also 15 point buy for 6 players is what I recommend. 20+ point buy with 6+ players tends to make you adjust more from the book.
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Greetings fellow Pathfinders!
I am about to run my homegroup through Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, and I wondered how difficult/advisable it is to run it for 6 rather than 4 players.
I hesitate only because I ran 6 players for a 2+ year Kingmaker campaign and I had to be a fair amount of work to adjust challenge ratings and encounters because of it. Other factors were the presence of a gunslinger who hit way too easily and the fact that many fights we agains one BBEG.
Will I run into these issues if I wanted to run 6? Any advice to make the work load a bit less?
This topic comes up a lot. For 6 players, I recommend:
1) Max HP for bad guys.2) +50% more minions in most fights.
3) +1 or +2 class levels to bosses.
4) All bosses accompanied by some minions.
5) Don't add treasure to encounters, although substitution/customization works fine.
6) Go XP-less and level when appropriate to the story, then keep the PCs about 1level behind the advancement guide in the book.
7) Stick with the adventure's assumption of 15 points for character generation.
I've had 6 players for a long time and the above works for us.
-Skeld
My rule of thumb is pretty close to the above. In theory, you want to up the CR of everything by 1 (A CR3 monster is worth 800 XP, or 200 each split 4 ways, a CR4 monster is 1200, or 200 split 2 ways). I go ahead and increase treasure by +50% too (although it can take a while). The handy little design point there doesn't work perfectly because the real pattern is that +2 CR is always doubling and that takes higher priority. +1 is +50% if you're going from odd to even, but +1/3 even to odd. +50% is the designer intent though, so I just calculate the XP as if I were making no changes, and there were only 4 PCs, then slap my +1 CR in however. Keeps the level-ups in the same places and that's the real important bit.
There's 3 real basic ways to add that +1 CR: More creatures in the fight, slap a +1 CR template on everything, or get all fancy, adding extra levels to NPCs.
Generally, you don't ever want to do the extra level bit. It's either going to be a ton more effort, or it's going to make no real appreciable difference.
Extra creatures usually works out nicely, especially when you have a multiple of 2 monsters in the room, especially if the extra PCs in the party are melee oriented. They spread out a little, fight on two fronts, and that works out fine. You run into a huge problem though if you have a party leaning heavily on crowd control tactics (fireballs, pits, bombs, lightning bolts, cleave feats, etc. etc.) because he same number of spells/cleaves pretty much get the job done regardless of the monster count, and you also have a problem of maps getting too crowded (about the first half of Runelords is just too cramped to do this much). The other concern is tactical. When you have a 4 member party opening a door with 2 Kreegs behind it, them being big dumb fighters and both piling onto whoever steps in first works out to a couple real nasty hits before you can maybe drop one, but if you just put 3 in that room, and do the same thing, those three hits when the fighter's coming through the door will probably kill him outright. You'd need the extra one coming around a corner, dealing with the spare fighter or something.
There's another variation on this that really just works for boss fights, where you take that bigshot chapter capping solo boss, and give them a sidekick. Royal pain since you're building an NPC from scratch and having to work them in plot wise, give them a reason to be in the room (not hard in this AP though, most of these bosses make easy friends with all sorts of weirdos). Do it right and this can make things really memorable.
Upping the CR of each individual creature is easier to do as a blanket action. Just take say, the simple advanced template, and slap it on EVERYTHING. The downside here though is that it can push a few numbers to unfair heights. Simple advanced adds 4 AC. If it's low to start with, that's fine. If you're going from like, 25 to 29 though, you're turning a fight from "OK let's lay off the power attacks and pin this guy down" to "we need a nat 20 to hit this guy." Boosted saving throws can really frustrate casters too, and CMDs get cranked through the roof... Plus, like crowd control thwarts the swarming method, massive overkill hurts this. Doesn't matter if this ogre is twice as tough if focus fire is bringing him down before he even gets a turn. Bow-happy characters are particularly bad for this in my experience. Also, if you're doing like me and upping the treasure so each PC gets the same cut they normally would, this gets a lot more fiddly. If you're going from 2 kreegs to 3, you get that +50% treasure automatically. If you're just making each one tougher individually (which in that particular case is really the way to go)... let me see how I actually loaded all of them up:
large +1 Ogre Hook (1162/20), large Javelin (0.5/4) x2, large +1 hide armor (582.5/50), large boots of the enduring march (750/4), 120 GP, 25 SP
Sometimes it gets tricky, sometimes you luck out (giving someone two +1 keen daggers vs. a +1 keen and a straight +1 worked out great). Actually, if you go that route, PM me, I'll just pass along all my loot conversion notes.
Ideally, you want to mix between the two methods as you can, and make a few extra tweaks based on how your party rolls. I'm running this for a WEIRD party of six- Bow-focused paladin, swiss army ranger, flying long-reach synthesist fake-fighter with high AC, buff-happy wizard, rogue, ninja (both heavy hitters). Really offensively top-heavy, not a lot in the way of defense, awful at healing, and as I implied, since there isn't room early on to add more monsters, I'm mostly beefing them up, and this paladin is just chewing through everything big and nasty like nobody's business. Mostly I'm giving things a bit more HP than I should to give them a little staying power, leaving AC as written, +2 to hit and damage, winging it with saves. But those tweaks are specific to this group.
Piling a ton of HP on to the big end of chapter bosses is a must no matter what.
Oh, and traps and haunts and such I'd just run out of the book and give the XP you'd give a 4 player party for'em. Throwing more characters at things like that doesn't really change how they play out.
Overall though, this is actually a real nice AP to scale up to 6 people. The most memorable chunk of chapter 2 works a whole lot BETTER with six PCs than 4, and the special mechanic for chapter 5 is pretty darn friendly for bigger groups too.
If you adjust nothing, the party should work out 1 level lower over time due to reduced XP gain. I think it pretty much evens out? Maybe increase hit points for BBEG NPCs, but DO NOT raise their level! :)
That does more or less work out, but the reason it works out is that you are lessening the effective CR of every encounter by 1, and thus, largely playing the AP on easy mode. And there are places where falling behind the level curve causes problems outside of combat. APs are generally pretty good at not assuming class X of level Y will definitely be in the party, but to give a specific example, the bulk of chapter 2 becomes significantly more dangerous and potentially lethal if nobody is picking up remove disease around the usual time most parties do.
Plus, a lot of party composition issues throw things off in weird ways. Any solo boss is likely to go down in a hurry to any party of 6, even with some augmentation, because instead of the expected 1 or 2 people who can really dish out the damage, you're almost definitely going to jump straight to having 3 or 4 people with nothing better to do but pile it on. More art than science and all, but still, generally I find preserving the XP gained per encounter per character the same is the safest baseline to work from.
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I run a group of 8, Darius (above) being one of them. I've run with a group of 13 (it SUCKED) before. For years, I juggled with the whole XP/GP earning issue and the Wealth By Level (WBL) crap. Then, I stopped paying attention to individual XP, and just awarded blanket XP to the players there. That helped some.
Then Paizo started publishing a leveling chart with their adventures, in the fifth AP I think. God send! Absolute GOD SEND.
As some have said before, get rid of XP. Level them when the book says, and you're fine. Then, just parse the treasure to keep it balanced (double normal for 8 players) and you're gtg. The rest of the advice above is spot on (gotta remember that Max HP thing).
Luck, and feel free to post when you need more advice.
Greetings fellow Pathfinders!
I am about to run my homegroup through Rise of the Runelords Anniversary Edition, and I wondered how difficult/advisable it is to run it for 6 rather than 4 players.
I hesitate only because I ran 6 players for a 2+ year Kingmaker campaign and I had to be a fair amount of work to adjust challenge ratings and encounters because of it. Other factors were the presence of a gunslinger who hit way too easily and the fact that many fights we agains one BBEG.
Will I run into these issues if I wanted to run 6? Any advice to make the work load a bit less?
Increase mooks by 50% and max the boss' hit points. That tends to be the simplest way to handle +2 players.
I'll often add additional mooks in waves so that I can keep em coming if the party is having too easy a time of it or hold them back if some bad roles put them at a sudden disadvantage. The important thing is that it be appropriately challenging for the group, not that it equal some predetermined formula.