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If there is a creature or creatures in an AP I want to increase in power, add Advanced template or add 2 class levels (i.e. Fighter or something appropriate)? I know the Advanced template is easy to do but I feel that using this is taking the easy way out for a GM to challenge a party of 6, while adding class levels is more fluid to the baddie's strength. For example, a stone giant with Advance template vs 2 levels of Fighter.
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or you can keep them 1 level below the suggested Level Guide in the AP. Typically works out to be the same but requires a LOT less math and DM work.
Good suggestion and I've already been doing that. My group just crushed the final encounter in a book in 3 rounds of combat, to which I also added a few additional mooks. Need to tweak future encounters further to challenge them.
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A party of 6 should be treated as if APL + 1 when estimating encounter CRs. The problem is that the extra actions gained by more PCs makes encounters against single opponents harder to judge; the difference between "easy" and "TPK" can come down to a few (un)lucky rolls.
With a larger group of PCs, it's generally better to add more creatures to each encounter; this splits the actions of the party (making the fights usually last longer) and makes things less "swingy." For single monsters, add a second that's two CR lower (or replace with a pair and apply the Young template to both using the quick rules) to end up with an encounter with an equivalent CR of one higher. For encounters with multiple creatures, just add more to increase the equivalent CR by one.
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+1 for the 15 point buy.
Written APs are designed for a 4 man party on a 15 point buy.
If they are CRUSHING and ripping through encounters at -1 level then you can either increase the level deficiency by another 1 or start adding Simple Templates to the creatures. Or start giving them an extra minion or 2 to help extend the life of the main creature. The summon Monster line of spells will help you with that...just cast the highest SM spell a wizard of that level can cast and Cast it as they are summoning 1d3 of a creature that level below....use the Critter stats and Reskin the Minion...also give them mundane gear as to not increase wealth.
Incremental increases Until you feel things are back to the challenge they are supposed to be at.
I frequently do this, and I find I just need to play the enemies smart, and maybe give them max hp to help encounters last a bit.
Increasing the CR means increasing the XP. That seems likely to just turbo charge the PC rise to power. I wonder how using the Slow XP chart might work out. On another note, a 3 round combat sounds pretty reasonable. Are you sure that the players as a group feel the encounters are too easy, or could you just be facing some DM fatigue from the monsters always losing?
I'm kind of facing the opposite problem since I'm running an AP for just 2 PCs. I gave them a couple of extra levels to even out APL vs CR, and they've been blasting through the early encounters with comical ease. I figure it should probably even out a bit later on though. If they end up getting too weak they'll also have access to cohorts and such if desired.
@Duiker - I don't like it much when DMs don't use XP but then crank up the difficultly of the encounters without any effect on rewards. Maybe you haven't had a "no XP" DM go nuts with CR on you, but it made several folks in a campaign I played a while back nearly give up. I think it actually contributed to one guy leaving the group, and several had begun to complain quite a bit.
@Saldiven - If you increase the CR there's more XP to divide among the PCs, so they go up in level faster than they would if you didn't increase the CR. Of course you can account for that by continuing to increase the CR in future encounters. I was just wondering if using the Slow XP chart might slow leveling enough that the PCs would naturally gravitate to a level where the encounters would be challenging as written. Obviously that wouldn't help much at the beginning of 1st level, but the beginning of 1st level is usually a pretty dangerous and exciting time anyhow.
Just an idea...
For the stone giant fight I would add 2 advanced dire bears
Hate saying it use basic math. If it a cr 8 fight set up for party of four then that is 4800 /4 =1200 exp per person. So add 1200 for each person after four. So that 2 cr 4 for 2 extra players.
When the encounter is 1 creature vs large party, I find it is sometimes fairly difficult to increase the power of that 1 creature to the point it is a challenge without causing a TPK. They have 6 times as many actions. Even if their actions are slightly weaker, they probably aren't that much weaker.
Once you start to get it powerful enough to compensate for 1/6 as many actions, you are at the point where it just may start killing the PC with one hit. Or an area affect spell that can potentially kill any of them with some bad rolls. Or that they suddenly can't affect at all without rolling a 20. Etc...
Conversely, the common suggestion of adding a few very low level mooks doesn't seem to make much difference (*).
A single area affect spell can probably clear them all or even just completely ignoring the mooks to go after the BBEG since the mooks aren't really a threat.
If 1 creature isn't a challenge, try 2 of the same creature.
OR
1 creature plus 3 with the young template.
OR
If you think it makes more sense in this case to add mooks, don't make them so low in level that they aren't a threat. They have to have a significant chance of hitting, combat maneuvers, surrounding and interfering with the casters, etc...
Also, sometimes based on the nature of the party, it is better to completely redo the makeup of the encounter while keeping the same sort of theme.
Example: Encounter is supposed to be dangerous and difficult. It is waves of low level undead with a higher level leader charging at the PC's across a small open area. Well the undead smiting archer paladin and the positive channeling oracle made it a complete nothing of an encounter. The GM would have had to change it to at least 3 or 4 times as many waves to get through their channels and smites or made them much more powerful to have a chance of surviving the channels and smites.
So to keep the same intended spirit (undead, creepy, dangerous), the GM changed things up. The leaders were neutral necromancers (it did fit the storyline). Some of the undead were types smart enough to head for other doors to try and surround the party. Some had ranged weapons (including alchemical vials). They also had different speeds and were coming from more than 1 location. So they weren't all bunched up for single blast elimination.
The encounter still had the same 'vibe' as intended. The actual CR wasn't changed much. But the party still had to work at it a bit to win.
Granted, this is much more work than the advanced template or double creatures. So I wouldn't recommend doing this all the time. Just for 'significant' encounters.
If I have time perhaps I'll do some analysis and make a chart of how the level progression would go. I've seen a lot of people advise amping up the encounters in APs even for a 4 PC party, so maybe if the PCs ended up a few levels behind that would theoretically be a good thing.
I figure that eventually the dice will favor the monsters and the PCs will have some tough challenges, but honestly I'm on my first AP as a DM. The fact I usually run homebrew material might have skewed my view of CR to make higher CR encounters seem deadlier than they are. I rarely need a CR of more than APL or maybe APL+1 to challenge a party unless there's something unusual going on. Maybe the AP encounters won't measure up though. I'm eager to see how it goes.
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I ran a 6 player Kingmaker campaign and used a mix of +50% creature numbers (especially adding minions to solo boss fights), Max hp on leaders/casters and also kept the players 1 level behind the APs suggested.
It worked pretty much perfectly,the fights were tough and the players loved it but despite people going into negatives and spending a few hero points (I limited them to 1 with a refresh after important achievements) no-one died. Players are generally far tougher than most AP encounters, especially if they're 20pt buy.
On a slight tangent I also used story based leveling (when they made impressive achievements) rather than exp and it went down very well, we switched over after the first book of the AP. It made them far more willing to talk or avoid pointless fights rather than go out of their way to seek out and murder everything possible for the extra exp and ended up with a much better game for it.
And Kingmaker has lots of "1 Encounter" days, so it's REALLY beneficial to toughen up those encounters. I ran Chapter one of it, and there was a really big build up for a new monster in that module, and the PCs spent WAY too much over planning an encounter with them and totally steamrolled them. I think some were one-shotted. The PCs kind of felt ripped off since they were expecting a challenge, and it was a total cake walk.
As a GM, I probably should have increased the number of baddies there, toughened them up, and made some of their special abilities a little less drawn out, time- and round-wise. My bad. But we still laugh about those wimpy wyrms.
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Amusingly, my group never once encountered any of the multiple tatzylwyrm encounters in the whole AP, they decided it was just a local myth started by bandits to scare people away, despite the local hunters swearing they were a real thing! :D
Beefing up encounters and frequent use of random creatures who lived there wandering around helped avoid the once a day nova effect for me, it meant a bit more effort at the start preparing but I rolled a few months worth of encounters for all different terrains and it let me set them up as living creatures with lairs etc. That plus using pre-rolled weather really added a lot, your players haven't known pain until they're lost in the middle of a plain, at night, in a snowstorm, desperately trying to fight hungry wolves for the only tree shelter nearby :D
Folks frequently bring up Kingmaker as an example of an "easy" AP. The many one encounter days really can allow some "nova" tactics, but there is some extended adventuring at certain points in the AP (or at least our DM forced us into some), and more importantly some of the random encounters in the wilderness can be absolutely brutal.
There were also some encounters with lots of wolves and later lots of giant dragonflies which nearly killed the archer though perhaps she'd neglected melee defenses a bit. The random dragon encounters were absolutely the worst though. At 11th level we ran into 1d4 CR11 Adult Black Dragons in the Hooktongue Slough. They came upon us while we were sleeping, creeping up with +20 Stealth. Luckily somebody had prepared Communal Resist Energy to guard against will-o-wisps, and luckily my PC happened to be very good at fighting dragons. It was still nearly a TPK though. Later on another random dragon encounter, CR16 I think, ended up being a tougher fight than the much ballyhooed CR17 dragon we met later on. That's not to say that the CR16 dragon was tougher, just that we didn't show up to fight it buffed, ready, and loaded for dragon.
There was also a pretty nasty green slime trap in one dungeon which I used a Hero Point to boost my saving throw against. The DM still gloats that my PC surely would have died otherwise, and I still insist that he can't know that for sure since we did have good Knowledge skills and casters with fire spells.
I recall 1 PC who was around dying twice and spending Hero Points to survive at least a couple of other times. The guy who replaced him later in the campaign due to scheduling conflicts survived one fight only because the DM rolled a bunch of 1s and 2s on a big full attack and another only because we used the scroll of Last Breath I'd bought as my PC's "insurance policy" on him. One of the other original PCs had to spend 2 Hero Points to survive the big random encounter from the spoiler above though my PC had Ultimate Mercy by that point and could have easily brought her back. We only had 3-4 players for most of the campaign, but it seemed to me like there was plenty of danger. The DM, on the other hand, felt like we were steamrolling everything and kept asking if he should increase the challenge for us.
Jason Bulmahn advises to increase the action economy when you need to increase the CR of any encounter by adding more minions/creatures to the board.
It seems that no matter how much a boss is amped up, the players will gang up and one shot it before initiative even starts. lol Adding other monsters gives them something else to attack before they can one shot and gives the baddies a chance to get a few attacks off.
From running one path, I got the idea for single monster encounters to have dual initiative, even if they aren't mythic. Helps with action economy.