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This Sunday or Skull and Shackles game should be ending and we'll be starting Curse of the Crimson Throne the week after. The players have been working on the group and agreed to a half-orc martial theme to it. Thus far it looks like the players will be:
Swashbuckler focusing on Dirty Tricks
Bloodrager with a polearm
Shield Champion Bralwer
Paladin (the healer)
Urban Ranger specializing in bows
I've been looking at potential concerns for a group like this and the big ones I see right now are:
Healing
Debuff Removal
Crowd Control
Magic
To help the healing party I'm thinking of making it so that anyone can use a Cure wand outside of combat. That way they aren't packing around 2 tons of healing potions everywhere. I'm not sure about other wands though. I figure for things like ability damage they can use potions and whatnot to cover for. Crowd control, well most of them will be decent at maneuvers. Magic is one problem to overcome but I'll be adapting encounters to fit the group.
Question is does anyone have any other good advice for a martial heavy group like this? I feel like I'm overlooking things but can't place a finger on it.
For healing, you can also increase the rate of healing during rests or with a heal check. There's also alternate rules like Damage Conversion and Reserve Points
For debuff removal, you can also use heal checks to remove them during rests. And you can be judicious in the debuffs the party faces.
For crowd control, you can make some of them mooks with less than full hit points. You can also do the movie trick where they come in waves instead of all at once.
Overall magic can be handled by somebody with UMD or items that give them the capabilities they might need.
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For healing, you can also increase the rate of healing during rests or with a heal check. There's also alternate rules like Damage Conversion and Reserve Points
For debuff removal, you can also use heal checks to remove them during rests. And you can be judicious in the debuffs the party faces.
For crowd control, you can make some of them mooks with less than full hit points. You can also do the movie trick where they come in waves instead of all at once.
Overall magic can be handled by somebody with UMD or items that give them the capabilities they might need.
I like those alternate rules, might run those by them and see what they think. And good advice for the rest of it! Thank you!
For healing the paladin should take hospitalier. Lose nothing but a few smites and gains cleric like channeling this elimination the need for a healer aside from maybe a wand as a back up. If the paladin grabs extra mercy feat a time or two he should be able to remove debuffs pretty well. And the other problems there is nothing.
I don't want to look like a jerk but it needs saying... I don't advocate that every group needs a full caster but without even a 2/3 caster people are going to die. They may be ok with that but anything other than pampering the group will cause multiple deaths and probably TPK.
Tips for keeping them alive? Change the casters to something else. Give more martial encounters where possible.
He might already be taking that archetype, I'm not sure yet. I know he was talking about being healing focused.
When the group was decided to go mostly martial it was met as a welcome challenge. I'm already updating the AP to Pathfinder from 3.5 and adapting things further is just another step. Plus my home group is already heavy optimization so most previous APs we had to ramp up the difficulty as is. This will be an interesting experiment overall.
That said casters are a worry. We know this going in and while I don't plan to change all the caster I do plan to adapt them to more appropriately match the abilities of the group. Not so much pampering as throwing appropriate challenges for the party makeup. Still I thank you for the warning!
Read the forge of combat and make every player read it.
I'll have to read through it and link it to them. Thanks!
I don't think you give your players enough credit. I think they can adapt well enough to handle most of the things thrown at them. Dealing with swarms and getting improved mobility (swim, fly) will be problematic, but they can also take traits and feats that help them out (say, get UMD as a class skill)
The best way to restore HP is with a wand of cure light wounds which both the paladin and the ranger can use. So what you need a healer for is to handle condition removal. Paladins also get lesser restoration as a 1st level spell and restoration as a 4th level spell, and mercies to deal with other conditions. As long as the party can get access to scrolls, potions and wands they should be ok as far as healing. If the paladin goes for the hospitalier archetype he may want to consider an oath of charity and picking up the feat reward of life. This way he uses his lay on hand on other to heal 50% more and each use gives him some HP.
Three of your five characters are able to use magic so you do have spell casters. True they all get spell later and not as many, but they can still use magic. Both the ranger and paladin are divine prepared casters which means they get their all the spells on the list as soon as they can cast a level of spell. This allows for a lot of versatility that most arcane casters can’t match. The ranger for example gets entangle as a 1st level spell, and stone call as a second level spell. Both of these spells are decent for battle field control spells. The bloodrager may want to pick up the trait that gives use magic device as a class skill and max out the skill.
What you do have is a party of 5 full BAB classes that all have some way of boosting their combat ability higher for short periods of time. You also have three characters that have decent CHA in an urban campaign. If the majority of the enemies are human the ranger in particular could be a problem if he takes favored enemy human. While you are little light on magic you are extremely heavy on combat and your combats may be over quickly.
Is the Swash player looking to play a Swashbuckler or a Dirty Trick specialist? If the latter, a Lore Warden/Martial Master Fighter would likely serve their needs better; I would actually highly recommend this approach, a martial party could use the debuffing a CMB specialist can provide. If the player goes Lore Warden then they'll be able to do it successfully most of the time, and Martial Master allows him to drop into the more niche combat maneuvers on the fly.