That's very noble of you to not look at your players' character sheets in a Power-Gaming setting, but um............
If you're adamant on this, then the best advice I can give you is to have a group auditor - a third-party person with no investments toward you the GM or them the players. This way, you're still kept in the dark , and they won't get away with any shenanigans.
As far as any other advice, I'd need to know the level of the PC's first.
I don't quite understand the reasons for some of the parameters such as the GM not looking at the character sheets. There should be a synthesis of ideas brought to the table by the PCs and the GM. That said, if you want a tough dungeon, just throw them into Rappan Athuk.
As far as any other advice, I'd need to know the level of the PC's first.
He did state they were starting at level 9. That said, I kind of agree with Cuup on the idea of an arbitrator, but obviously you know your players better than we do.
The cynic in me says to just adapt Tomb of Horrors to PF (if it hasn't been yet). That should take care of any power gaming issues. Regardless though, I think you are off to a good start. The one thing I would caution you on is that odds are, you won't beat them in a straight up fight. Things will almost assuredly need to be tilted in such a way as to give the "Home Field Advantage". Frankly though, this actually makes sense. Your monsters/NPCs live in the dungeon, so its only natural that they would have adapted to it, and tailored it to suit their needs. For example, you won't find many White Dragons living in a Volcano, but a Red Dragon wouldn't have too many qualms about it.
Additionally, I would look at traps and puzzles. These tend to be the easiest way to level the playing field so to speak, though traps can still be negated by a good rogue. This is also the kind of challenge where Save or Die effects are more acceptable in my opinion (they may be acceptable anyway, but obviously the inherent agreement here is that you are going to do your best to actually kill them).
Finally, when designing your BBEG, I think its fair game to stat him in the same manner as the PCs. If the PCs are given a really generous chargen system, so should the BBEG. This will particularly help with things like save or die/suck effects as the added point buy points allow for a higher stat for determining the base save. Bad Guys with class levels are also a good idea here rather than just relying on stock monsters, etc.
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There's a thread with a lot of talk about how to make creatures like kobolds tough. As one of the participants, I'll say that there are quite a few good ideas floating in the air. You're not going to be using kobolds, obviously, but this is a good place to start thinking about how you can boost "mook" monsters (like orcs and gnolls) to be powerful in a fight.
Creating a hard, challenging dungeon without knowing what your players will throw at you should involve a number of things:
1) Environmental challenge. The environment needs to work against the players at times. Fighting underwater when going up against merfolk, fighting in total darkness when up against Drow, climbing a ladder while under fire from snipers, being in an antimagic field while grappling with robots... these are all situations where the environment is working against the players. This may not be as huge of a factor considering you're looking at a 9th level party with all the spellcasting that comes with that (so you're going to be hitting levels when people are levitating over difficult terrain and what-not), but it's still something you should take into account.
2) Alarms and patrols. A dungeon should feel alive. If the party attacks a trio of trolls, one of those trolls should start banging on a gong or something to alert the rest of its tribe. Now the whole gaggle of trolls is chasing the party out of their den.
Alarms, as I discuss in the other thread, can come in the form of a lot of things: spells, creatures, traps, bells, mushrooms. Having a good alert system keeps your dungeon rough.
3) Resting issues. Not every spot is a good resting spot. This ties into the alarms/patrols/living dungeon concept. Your players should be forced to be choosy about where they rest, either choosing a place because it's secluded, because they cleared the whole level out already, or because it's a defensive position.
One thing I do to encourage good resting habits for my players is I have a pair of notecards for use during resting periods. One notecard will have all the random encounters possible for the place they're sleeping, which normally has a safe number (1-50) in which nothing happens, encounter numbers (51-100), and then REALLY rough encounters (101-120). I roll a d100. This may not make sense yet; the frequency of encountering monsters may seem way too high, there's no way to roll a 120 on a d100, etc. Read on.
The second notecard has a series of modifiers that I apply based on how the party's resting. There are ways to reduce encounter chances and to increase them. For instance:
Decreasers - Secluded area, adequate camp defenses, camp alarm, constant watch, cleared level, defensive position
Increasers - Frequented area, campfire, enemy patrols, corpses nearby, party is being loud
So they can decrease their chances of having an encounter down to 10% through various modifiers, but they can increase them to the point that they can encounter monsters well above the typical CR for the dungeon level / for the party if they don't rest safely.
4) Switch up your tactics. Let me start with an example for this one.
In the megadungeon I'm running, the party's dealt with kobolds for their first level. It was rough, but they got used to the kobolds' style of fighting: ambush, surround, swarm, and knock out the combatants still standing.
Upon hitting level 2, they went on out into an abandoned city street and encountered a pair of ghouls. The ghouls were pretending to be corpses, and they supremely failed their stealth checks as they tried to get up and attack the party. Despite having that advantage over the ghouls, the party almost lost a member of their party to them due to one ghoul paralyzing him with a bite and the other picking the body up and bolting off the battlefield with it.
Your tactics should be flexible and changing as you design the dungeon. Don't stick to one sort of encounter throughout the game; have a variety of approaches. In one fight, focus on swarming. In another, focus on using grapple to remove casters from the fight. Perhaps you can design a fight based around paralyzing your players and then delivering Coup de Graces. Etc.
5) Challenge ratings do NOT always equal party level. Just because your party is level 9 doesn't mean you should just throw four CR 9 encounters at the party and call it a day. Indeed, the best recipe involves a few fights that are below the party's level, a couple at their level, and a few above it. You should also be throwing serious high-level zingers at the party for particularly memorable encounters, such as a boss fight or to capture the feeling of fighting off a horde of enemies. Sticking to Challenge Rating = Party level for all encounters makes for a boring game.
6) Combat isn't the only kind of encounter there is. Trapped halls are dangerous - or, better yet, a magical mirror maze with floors that are hidden trapdoors leading into snake-filled pits is dangerous. A door of riddles hiding treasure behind it that shoots fireballs at the party each time they get a wrong answer is dangerous. Underwater exploration in an anti-magic zone can be dangerous (thanks, drowning). Etc.
Social encounters can lead to combat encounters should the party fail to do things the nice way (or the scary way). That's worth keeping in mind as well.
I'll post more general thoughts as they come.
I don't quite understand the reasons for some of the parameters such as the GM not looking at the character sheets.
I think its specifically so the GM doesn't know what exactly they're doing, and hence can't design encounters specifically around them and their weaknesses.
You know, like if somebody had "Immunity to all damage that doesn't come from wood", if the GM knew that going in, he'd be tempted to have someone grab a table leg as an improvised weapon for no good reason. If he doesn't know about that weakness, then there's no temptation to exploit it unfairly.
Just sounds like a good old fashioned "get it out of your systems" game to me.
Tucker's kobolds.
But make them goblins.
But also make them barghests.
But also also make them greater barghests.
Done.
At level 9 you want to introduce resource exhaustion.
I would actually make the very first fight look dangerous but have it be a pretty low CR / cake walk, with new characters the players will probably be overly eager to throw down their coolest stuff right away. After that begin to cut off avenues of escape, the easiest way is to get them into areas that prevent teleport or put them into demiplanes or other planes that make teleport increasingly less useful.
Poison, ability damage, status effects, they will run low on lesser restoration and restoration (which is expensive) very quickly, either the cleric will have buffed with delay poison he didn't, same goes for deathward (get them to pop it early on a non threat, then go in for the kill once it wears off).
Have them be hit with scrying, either they begin to waste dispels or private sanctums (which don't move) or they put up with having an enemy watching them, greater scrying as a level 7 spell could be begin to push into the unfair but a consumable scroll could be used and will also scare them once the censor doesn't vanish after 15 minutes.
Enemies with fast healing and greater teleport can also wear them down quickly with easy pop in and out tactics, if they can't take down the DR/10 evil creature in a round or two it just vanishes, look for creatures with abilities that are at will, outsiders can spam all sorts of bad stuff all day long while the wizard will be sweating after casting his 3rd or 4th dispel magic for the day.
I like skill challenges!
Such as the one where the girl had to spin straw into gold. Failure means death.
or maybe a few knowledge checks with a very obscure knowledge. Correct answers are rewarded with a potion of reduce person. Failure means being thrown into a maze where the only exits are actually smaller and smaller holes. With a time limit.
So what stops someone giving themselves 1,000,000 HP and +20 to all saves at level 1 if nobody is reviewing the sheets?
It's not too original, but make the final encounter be an exact copy of the PCs as they entered the dungeon, or as they entered the last room, except the copies are fully healed and have a full suite of spells, while the PCs are hopefully ground down a bit from the rest of the dungeon.
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So what stops someone giving themselves 1,000,000 HP and +20 to all saves at level 1 if nobody is reviewing the sheets?
Uh, a desire not to cheat?
If you're playing with people who would cheat at the game without GM oversight then you need to find a new group.
So what stops someone giving themselves 1,000,000 HP and +20 to all saves at level 1 if nobody is reviewing the sheets?Something that obvious would be noticed?
How?
So what stops someone giving themselves 1,000,000 HP and +20 to all saves at level 1 if nobody is reviewing the sheets?Uh, a desire not to cheat?
If you're playing with people who would cheat at the game without GM oversight then you need to find a new group.
If you're playing a group where nobody is reviewing a sheet and QA over third party material and troublesome things like game balance are not an issue then I really don't see how you would get caught (unless you are super careless) but more importantly why anyone would care even if you were. You're practically cheating anyway under the above conditions.
The DM in this instance has established an impossible set of game criteria to really present a credible challenge. The rules of the game - including character creation - provide a basic framework in which to present the story and challenge the players. The premise as established in the OP is laughable.
I would suggest establishing a more clear framework in which to operate. Impose some real conditions. At the very least, auditable character sheets.
It's not too original, but make the final encounter be an exact copy of the PCs as they entered the dungeon, or as they entered the last room, except the copies are fully healed and have a full suite of spells, while the PCs are hopefully ground down a bit from the rest of the dungeon.Hard to do when he isn't looking at their sheets.
Actually, it'd be some hybrid IC/OOC brilliance. He gets to see their sheets (or, at least, the output of them) when they interact with the world. So throw a bunch of minions intended to be challenges, but also have a bunch of minions whose only purpose is to feel them out. It's a malevolent, magical AI trying to build a team of peak efficiency murderbots (murderementals?) by experimenting on the PCs. The best way to win, which you don't have to hint at unless you're feeling nice, is to conceal your strongest abilities until the end.
You could also have a bunch of non-traditional traps that do things like Detect Magic. It'd be pretty cool.
Says the image of an angry eyeball on my computer O_o
If you applied the Ghost template to a swarm, would its ability-draining touch attacks automatically hit everyone in the area?
Ghost bat swarm.
Against power gamers: play the NPCs like they want to win!
(warning, may be tough on some egos and literally is a gm-vs-players game, but if they like tactical challenges it can work fine).
No suicide charging in small groups, but instead hit & run, ambushes in places with traps, calling for reinforcements, illusory reinforcements, delaying tactics if the players use short-term buffs, etc. Never give them enough time to rest and buff (unless of course they actually need it), but let them earn every victory.
Templates! Look at Pod-Spawned (-1 level adjustment, penalty to CHA, whoop de do...).
Advanced, Giant, Half-Dragon...
Devil Bound...
Vampire.
All of these are fun, especially when you stack them.
One of my favorite monsters is the Moss Troll/Half-Red Dragon.
Immune to fire, regeneration that isn't countered by anything. Hard to kill. Only CR 5. Make them Pod-Spawned, CR 4 and they lose some CHA.
Give them four levels of Fighter and the Advanced template, they get pretty scary.
Anything that explodes when you kill it is good.
Make sure some of the treasure they find is cursed.
Anything able to cast Animate Dead should have Bloody Skeletons with them (does not raise CR, but fills out the ranks with nearly indestructible minions that have fast heal).
Half Dragon Trex has an 18 HD breath weapon, and gains 2 claw attacks... for CR 11 (10 if Pod Spawned, oh no, CHA penalty!).
Dispel Magic is your friend.
Magic dead areas can be fun.
Ropers.
Fill the dungeon with water. Even if they can breath, it makes combat REALLY different.
Diminutive, invisible Ghosts.
Shadow Giants (CR 13) have energy drain on every attack...
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So what stops someone giving themselves 1,000,000 HP and +20 to all saves at level 1 if nobody is reviewing the sheets?Uh, a desire not to cheat?
If you're playing with people who would cheat at the game without GM oversight then you need to find a new group.
If you're playing a group where nobody is reviewing a sheet and QA over third party material and troublesome things like game balance are not an issue then I really don't see how you would get caught (unless you are super careless) but more importantly why anyone would care even if you were. You're practically cheating anyway under the above conditions.
The DM in this instance has established an impossible set of game criteria to really present a credible challenge. The rules of the game - including character creation - provide a basic framework in which to present the story and challenge the players. The premise as established in the OP is laughable.
I would suggest establishing a more clear framework in which to operate. Impose some real conditions. At the very least, auditable character sheets.
Fear of getting caught isn't what keeps honest people honest, fear of getting caught is what keeps cheaters honest.
Don't play with cheaters.
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Convert a Beholder from WOTC to PF and give it the advanced template.
Create a pit covered by an illusion floor, except the pit is really a purple worm, and failure to make the Will save to believe that the floor is real results in a swallow whole by the purple worm as the PC falls through. Succeeding at the believing the floor is real prevents those PCs from seeing (and attacking) the purple worm for at least one round before choosing to disbelieve the floor. Cutting your way out of the worm has a 50% chance of ending up in the tunnel behind it.
After swallowing someone whole, the purple worm could retreat into it's tunnel. If the PC cuts himself out, he's now in complete darkness one on one with the purple worm until the other PCs make it past the illusionary wall, then drop 50ft straight down the tunnel before it becomes flat enough to stand on and help fight the worm.
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Wage a war of attrition.
If you are restricting yourself to keeping encounters within CR parameters start off with several encounters of swarms of low level creatures, let them blow spells and points on the low level stuff before you start throwing your big monsters at them.
This will also give you an opportunity to see what they are before you play all your cards.
Have several different sets of monsters in reserve and make a few adjustments on the fly to ensure you throw only the most challenging ones at the party.
I advise against using a single creature in any given encounter, make sure they have to split their attention and spend resources controlling every encounter so they are drained before they reach the end.
If its a dungeon, have it set on some kind of timer, it is slowly filling up with water or sand, etc, that way they have to keep moving and cannot stop to rest and recover hit points or spells, and have to push from one encounter to the next with debuffs from previous fights/traps still active. You could do a push/pull method with this, not only is the dungeon filling with water but the sahaguin have captured an NPC critical to the PC's success and are spiriting him away into the dungeon as fast as they can. Forcing the PC's to either sacrifice a substantial tool for future success, or blunder haphazardly through the pits and traps you have set up for them in a mad goose chase.
EDIT: Ok I just saw the no ad hoc adjustments. That will significantly increase the difficulty of your task. Go overboard setting up traps, spelltraps and illusions, ambushes...get down and dirty. Reverse gravity trap, gelatinous cubes on the ceiling (eats all their gear), rust monsters, charms, dispels, level drains, ability drains. Hammer them with debuffs and traps, keep them on the move with environmental pressure (the dungeon is filling with water), and don't let them catch their breath at any point.
Give everything a Poison or Disease effect.
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Wage a war of attrition.
If its a dungeon, have it set on some kind of timer, it is slowly filling up with water or sand, etc, that way they have to keep moving and cannot stop to rest and recover hit points or spells, and have to push from one encounter to the next with debuffs from previous fights/traps still active.
Yes, this. Or have it filling with something very dangerous, like poisonous fog, or a negative energy cloud that drains levels. Or have it filling with a cloud of darkness that is filled with swarms of very hazardous creatures that only attack when you enter.
Yes, this. Or have it filling with something very dangerous, like poisonous fog, or a negative energy cloud that drains levels. Or have it filling with a cloud of darkness that is filled with swarms of very hazardous creatures that only attack when you enter.Wage a war of attrition.
If its a dungeon, have it set on some kind of timer, it is slowly filling up with water or sand, etc, that way they have to keep moving and cannot stop to rest and recover hit points or spells, and have to push from one encounter to the next with debuffs from previous fights/traps still active.
I like these even better.
Use traps in surprisingly beneficial ways. For instance, make the entire dungeon covered in reverse gravity traps and make the ceiling a nice floor, and the floor covered in poison-coated spikes at the bottom of an acid pool. You fail your save and get to walk on a nice comfy ceiling, or you succeed on your save and get to wade through liquid death.
And then, just when you think you've got the hang of it, make a few patches where there just is no reverse gravity trap, so the instant you walk out of the reversed gravity's effect, you get a one way ticket to poisonacidspikeville. The dedicated trapfinder might be able to detect the Reverse Gravity traps, but can he detect the ABSENCE of reverse gravity traps?
Another fun idea: make traps that are mostly undetectable. Make two stone compartments. One of them is an elevator, and the rogue figures out that if you trigger the "trap", it just goes up to the next floor. The other one also goes up, but it goes up to a lava vat, or a one-way gate to the negative energy plane. To protect your trap from further analysis, coat the whole thing in an anti-magic field. If the PCs dispel the AMF, it causes the elevators to become affected by reverse gravity, causing them to overshoot the next floor and slam anyone in the elevator violently into the ceiling, while the elevator itself was sealing a vast chamber of Cloudkill, which now falls up at any of the party smart enough not to be standing in the elevator when they dispel the AMF.
Really, as long as you're not limited to pulling traps out of the core book, you can do some tremendously nasty things. Remember, luring the PCs into breaking a totally safe, helpful, functional thing in a way that causes it to be tremendously dangerous is not a trap, it's just an environmental hazard. A 10d6 pit trap would be unfair for a first level party, but a 100 foot cliff that for some reason they insist on jumping off of is totally fair game, for example.
Get really devious, have illusions cast on rust monsters to make them look like kobolds or something.
Rooms full of foilage, and Stirges
http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/monsters/stirge.html
Trap of hideous laughter, draws the attention of 20 something stirges.
@Jiggy, instead of commoner dies mission failed, the commoner has a +5 vorpal dagger on his belt and the monsters are just a couple trap laden rooms ahead of the PC's at any point, dragging his unconscious body to their Wizard overlord.
If you want to try and be as 'fair' as possible you'll need to spend time calculating XP budgets and treasure. Depending on how many PCs there are and with your high point buy You're looking at an APL of around 10 or 11 which gives you 9600 or 12,800 XP per encounter and you'll want to throw 4 or 5 encounters at them per day or rest cycle.
Since you're allowing leadership with a generous stat buy for the cohort you should just assume that everyone will have a level 7 buddy in tow. You should also further assume that players will be bringing in animal companions, improved familiars, and maybe even an eidolon, and of course lots of summons. While normally a GM would adjust encounter difficulty on the fly in accordance with high well all those builds work and synergize together, but since you don't want to do that you should just make it as hard as possible within the above constraints.
As for treasure, it's a little more complicated but you're looking at around 5450 to 7000 per encounter, with some things like NPCs throwing that number way off. Be careful with treasure because if the PCs start out steamrolling your encounters and you give away too much treasure too quickly they will just pick up momentum and eat through your set pieces even faster. The cruelest way to go about this is to give monsters consumables as treasure and ensure they consume them, second would be to make the treasure useless to the PCs, "what another valuable 10 foot oil painting?", a fairer way to go is to just have the magical treasure be stuff the monsters use (eventually another +1 cloak of resistance will be useless anyway and the PCs will probably all start with a better cloak than that anyway).
To organize yourself I would follow emmits advice and put together lots of CR 11 encounters, be sure to calculate the treasure and hand it out to your critters, and then be sure to toss 4 or 5 of them at the party per day while they dungeon delve. If you want to be really modular you can give each stated out encounter a map that can just pop right in as needed, then just roll randomly to see which each new area it is, and if the players decide they want to stop before they've had their daily regiment, roll on a random encounter table you've built for wandering monsters(same thing but sans map and with the idea that they are wondering predators so be sure to give them lots of senses and stealth and the ability to break down doors, glide through stone, turn ethereal, or whatever is useful for mobility).
Actually, at level 9, the party would be silly for walking into a deathtrap without some means of restoring the dead. Letting the level 1 aristocrat housewife die, then carrying her body to the finish line and using raise dead would be a mostly painless way of completing the escort mission.
On treasure distribution: potions of CAUSE x wounds are always fun to give undead and very strange living folk. Otherwise, a lot of +1 items will strengthen your dungeon dwellers without helping the PCs very much except maybe for outfitting cohorts for whom there was no money left over. For added fun, include those random, overpriced magic items that the PCs might be able to make useful, but only by being really creative.
Synergistic opponents:
* Werewolves with rust monsters
* Gorgons with gargoyles
* Red dragons with iron golems
Put two creatures that complement each other in the same fight. Those are just three ideas, but there are loads more.
Not necessarily adding to the challenge, but more adding to the fun ... make every room subject to a random effect from Rod of Wonder (use an expanded list floating around out there).