I'm about to begin running Shattered Star for one of my home groups -- we're blessed with a large group, and we will have 8 PCs for the campaign.
My search-fu is failing me -- I haven't been able to find any definitive information on the party size (number of PCs) to which the AP is written. I strongly suspect that it's fewer than 8, and I know that PFS scenarios are written for a base assumption of 5 PCs.
I plan on trying to scale rewards (and number of opponents) as appropriate for the larger party, but I need to know what the baseline assumption is before I start that.
Any information would be greatly appreciated!
Four players with 15-point builds.
While it is claimed a fifth player won't unduly disrupt this... it does.
Thanks for the info!
We're doing 20-point builds, but of our 8 players, I'd peg one or two, at most, as being anything approaching character optimizers, so I'm not too worried about individual characters being nutty.
It also depends on a couple other factors. The start of Reign of Winter can break the most experienced of players, at least until the players get to 3rd level and become slightly less squishy. The start of Wrath of the Righteous however is probably less lethal and becomes significantly less so with the 3rd book (and the maturation of the Mythic abilities you had in the 2nd book).
Does anyone know any very quick tricks to scaling up or down an encounter?
I'm running Jade Regent for 5 players (just finished the first book) and they seem to mostly breeze through the encounters.
I've heard that giving the advanced template or adding another enemy or two are good ideas. But when to use each trick? And are there any others?
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Scaling down:
> Remove enemies from groups. Smaller numbers are always easier than larger.
> Templates. For *most* things, the Young template is a CR drop. (The odd ones out are weird things that take no penalties from the reduced stats, like incorporeal critters). Drunk, Pod-spawned, and various weaker undead templates can also reduce CR. Reflavor as needed.
> Looser tactics. Play them dumb.
Reverse these for scaling up. Add more enemies, make them tactically smarter, and use boosting templates like Advanced.
As for when to use what, it's a matter of experience and intuition, mostly. And knowing your group well.
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^^and people complain about me changing my avatar^^
;)
looking good Orthos:)
It is 4 to 5 players.
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Adding the Advanced Template is not sufficient for Solo encounters against eight players. It's a little thing called Action Economy. There is in fact a very good article on this subject, but I'm not sure where the URL vanished to. But one thing it did suggest is in the case of a single big bad... well, don't. Add a couple minions to that encounter that will eat up the players' actions (and not Undead as it's entirely too easy to destroy multiple undead with Channel Energy).
Fortunately, Mythic Adventures has a Simple Mythic Template that is built to make your boss-encounter viable against players: The Mythic Agile Template (scroll down a tiny bit). One important aspect of this template is Dual Initiative which lets your encounter go twice in one round - once at +20 to its initiative, and the second on its initiative. And yes, I know Mythic is broken in some ways... but when used on monsters, it can make an encounter that proves to be a threat. (Especially if you rule that Smite Evil doesn't overcome Epic/Mythic damage reduction.)
Adding the Advanced Template is not sufficient for Solo encounters
Really, with very few exceptions, you could just leave it at this. Solo encounters are, 99% of the time, a bad idea in Pathfinder: action economy simply eats them alive. The rare exceptions are creatures that are just that much more powerful than the PCs - in which case you run the risk of the opposite problem, having the monster curbstomp them into a TPK - or creatures with unique abilities to bypass/ignore action economy limitations, like the template linked by Tangent.
Most of the time it's just easier to give the boss monster some minions to equalize the action economy a bit more. But if you think it's necessary thematically to have the solo encounter, you'll have to do some fiddling to get it to work, and prevent the PCs from simply overrunning them.
Again, I wish I still had the URL to that article someone wrote.
They took an encounter in the Carrion AP and showed how you could slightly weaken the end-encounter with several interesting small minions that could still prove quite problematic.
That said, he has double the number of players. So he could take the CR of doubling that solo encounter and turn it into several minions that all-together would equal that extra CR (or even be a little bit less) and that would be sufficient to make it a more even battle.
There is also that thing called "fudging" where if the GM overdid an encounter, just spontaneously lower the hit points of the Big Bad or the like so that one last strike could kill that encounter. Or have the Big Bad capture them and use them for his or her (or its) own ends.
Pretty sure what Tangent is talking about is thus...
https://docs.google.com/a/isu.edu/document/d/1nx-o8VAjhUwh3nnfzDQT-JA5eFLnN _BZJiBitGjBMDg/edit?pli=1