How did they do stats? Have they gotten a lot of extra gear? Also I find the CR to be more of a guide then hard fact.
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the book guideline is somewhat wrong. 5 players is worthy of increasing the APL by +1. You could even increase by an additional +1 if the group is optimized.
Generally without knowing too much about your group going to say to consider that your party APL is +1 (so level 9) in that case, adjust accordingly and don't hesitate to use max health on bosses. Usually always remember that AP are made with this in mind:
-4 players with 15 point buy, so most fights aren't greatly optimized for 5 players with 20 point buy or whatever you decided to do.
In Pathfinder, adventure paths are constructed with the expectation of a 15-point buy for characters, and that it's a group of 4. Like Eltacolibre said, you could justify increasing the CR of encounters by +1-2 and I would certainly max health on the enemies.
I really recommend this guide. It has a lot of information on how to construct challenging encounters for your players. The biggest take away from it should be that action economy is everything!
Best of luck, Rise of the Runelords is a really fun AP! :)
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Depends how much work you want to invest into it but might be worth adding some mythic ranks and tiers to some bosses, Amazing initiative, does wonder for solo bosses fight since they can 2 turns while the pc took one. In general solo bosses are fairly hard to pull off (Kudos to the final boss in Iron Gods and yes they did use Mythic ranks).
Instead of flat out making the boss more powerful, give them side kicks.
1 boss gets 1 set of actions/rd. Giving them sidekicks gives you more actions and forces the group to spread out damage and actions.
+1
Action economy issues have killed many a BBEG.
In Pathfinder, adventure paths are constructed with the expectation of a 15-point buy for characters, and that it's a group of 4. Like Eltacolibre said, you could justify increasing the CR of encounters by +1-2 and I would certainly max health on the enemies.
I really recommend this guide. It has a lot of information on how to construct challenging encounters for your players. The biggest take away from it should be that action economy is everything!
Best of luck, Rise of the Runelords is a really fun AP! :)
Again +1. Nargemn beat me to recommending Alexander Augunas' guide.
GM’s Guide to Creating Challenging Encounters is a really good grounding for how to adjust encounters to fit the party. The core rulebook suggestion for CR adjustment is just that, a suggestion.
5 characters plus two companions = 7 actions. Any boss is going to go down quickly unless you have something that splits the party's attention. That can be minions, extra mythic actions for the boss, or tasks that must be accomplished in combat that pull one or more characters away from direct combat.
Thinking about your group, an 8th level character CR+0 encounter equates to 1,200 exp. So four characters = 4,800 exp for CR+0. Interestingly, when you add a fifth 8th level character, you're expecting the party to handle 6,000 exp for CR+0, which is about CR+1 for a four character group. Looking at the bump across each CR level, you'll see that adding that fifth character come close to bumping the CR up by one for a four character group across the board. In other words, boosting the strength of the encounters is a good idea when dealing with an extra character.
Also, with rolled stats, you're likely looking at the party level equivalent to a 20 point or 25 point buy. Easy enough to audit. When you work with higher point buys, you need to again consider upping the CR difficulty for the encounters.
The guide and related thread provide good practical guidance on adding minions/mooks as well as other ways to affect the action economy. For smart bosses, play them as recognizing the hazard of a full adventuring party & don't hesitate to have them delay, retreat and reconfigure before fully engaging. That can make the fights much more epic.
Confusion spells are your friend. In a party that size at least a couple are bound to fail. Heck, any set of mind affecting spells can be devastating.
Big fan of cloudkill as well. Best way to lower HP than can't be healed immediately.
As a player in RotRL (don't worry i'm in book five at this point) I see two major things that lead to easy encounters, Action economy and bane. Early on (books 2-4) our ranger figured out that giant humanoids were going to play a huge part, and a ranger with bane arrows and favored enemy can cut through a 5-6 group of giants like a hot knife through butter.
Also when they get to Mokmurian (boss book 4) he needs minions. We hit him with a gust of wind (the AP gives you a staff that can cast it) blew all his mists to s$%# and then basically cut him down easy.
Overall I'd suggest adding allies to group fights that are of a similar type to make it challenging for your large party and many minions to boss fights so they BBEG has time to get off the many spells and buffs they have.