New GM, Need Advice

[Chris Wasson]

So I have been wanting to run Pathfinder for my normal game group for a long time but never had the opportunity. When I finally had a chance to run, the group had dwindled in size slightly, so I decided to send out some invites for my game. My first session is tomorrow and I just found out today that my party has grown to 5 regular players with 2 players who will come and go when they can.

So I am asking for some ideas on how to challenge the party in combat, they are all experienced players so i'm not worried about being too harsh on them but I also don't want anyone to be bored. Should I just increase the amount of monsters per encounter? Should I make a "leader" type in each encounter to up the CR of the fight? Should I just let the party run over everything?

Right now i'm leaning toward just increasing the amount of monsters per encounter but i'm open to ideas

[Humphrey Boggard]

I think that's fine at early levels. At much later levels combat tends to bog down and introducing more enemies may make for slower gaming. Just dive right in and see what works for you. Sometimes it'll be more monsters, other times it'll be advancing monsters or throwing in challenging environments.

For example, at level one a "Hard" encounter is APL+2=3. For 4-5 PCs it's 200XP per PC or an XP budget of 800 or 1000, depending on whether you have four or five PCs, respectively.

An encounter for four PCs:

Experience budget is 800 XP. So you might have

2 Lizardfolk (400 XP each).

An encounter for five PCs:

Experience budget is 1000 XP. So you might have

1 Advanced Lizardfolk (600 XP, has advanced template)
1 Lizardfolk (400 XP)

or

2 Lizardfolk (400 XP each)
1 Human Zombie (200 XP)

[S'mon]

PF/3e combat is very swingy, so there is not the 4e thing where larger party size leads to inevitable easy victory; even with a large group PCs may still be getting killed.

The only thing I'd advise is not to boost the offensive power of individual monsters, this just gets the front-line Fighter types killed even faster. Adding more mook monsters works ok; increasing monster hp can work, but may just encourage save-or-suck spells even more.

[Gilarius]

Another way to reduce the party's effectiveness is to use a lower point buy, such as 15 instead of 20.

Or ask them to design quirky rather than optimised characters. Otherwise, I agree with the previous posters. Add mooks. Add some pre-buffs eg with potions. Or stick to the total wealth for a party of 4 instead of increasing it for extra characters.

[S'mon]

Gilarius wrote:

Or stick to the total wealth for a party of 4 instead of increasing it for extra characters.

For longer term play I think just running APs as written with no modification works pretty well; if the PC group averages 6 then their level will settle at about 1 below what the AP expects for 4 PCs, and the wealth by level will work out about right too. If they still seem too powerful, perhaps because the players are hardcore/competent/powergamer types, then an easy fix is to use Slow Track XP, which over time will put them down another level or two.

XP/level is one area where I feel PF/3e is pretty robust, the system tends to self-balance without much GM adjustment needed. It's not like 4e where XP is poorly geared to threat level - in 4e threat level increases faster than XP awards as the Encounter Level goes up, because 4e uses x2 XP per 4 levels but actual power increases more quickly. With 3e/PF the x2 XP per 2 levels works out about right; trivial threats give trivial XP so over time the PC level adjusts to fit the threat level.

[Callum]

I'm running Rise of the Runelords with six PCs currently. I haven't made any adjustments so far, and it seems to be working fine. We used a 15-point buy for characters. As has been said, combat can be very swingy, particularly at lower levels, so there's a risk in increasing the difficulty of encounters. As the party gains levels, I may start adding one or two weaker monsters to the encounters, if I feel it's necessary. Hopefully, the slight lag in levels and wealth will be enough.

[Kalshane]

I have a group of six mostly experienced gamers and I've had to add mooks and boost bosses a bit to keep things interesting. The biggest problem we've run into, though, is that for the first 2.5 chapters, a lot of the combat occurs in tight quarters, which makes things incredibly crowded with 2 more PCs and 2-4 more mooks in every fight. One thing I wish I had done early on was increase the size of some of the maps so there's more room to move and PCs don't get left out because they can't get to the bad guys. (I was reluctant to because I'm running the game in Roll20, so a mis-sized map is obvious, but after talking it over with my players, they said they'd rather have to ignore the occasional 10' wide single door on the map if it means every fight isn't squeezed into a tiny area.)

[Skeld]

This comes up often enough that I have a compilation post of my advice (and it points to other threads where this subject comes up).

you may have a more difficult time planning out encounters if you're going to have players constantly dropping in and out between session, which will make your APL variable. I'd suggest keeping a GM copy of each character sheet. When someone can't make it to a session, have another player play that character. This way, you'll always have the same number of PCs from session-to-session (assuming no deaths) and everyone stays at roughly the same experience level (and you avoid the logical/logistical problems associated with PCs disappearing between one dungeon room to the next).

-Skeld