What's the smallest party that can successfully complete a Paizo Adventure Path while not getting any break from the GM (except for a slight break on point buy that is commonly given anyway)?
Here is my inspiration for this question:
This thread about hard Adventure Paths
This more general thread about parties of 2 characters
This thread about 6/9 casters that also dealt with the concept of having only 3 PCs in a party
You can use almost(*) any non-Mythic (but see below) Paizo material, but it must be current (sorry, no pre-Errata Scarred Witch Doctor), with no Gestalt (however, VMC as presented in Pathfinder Unchained is allowed), and the GM isn't going to give you ANY breaks in running the AP, except for allowing you to start with 20 point buy (since it seems that most people do this anyway, as does PFS) instead of 15 point buy. Consider that the answer may not be the same for every AP (maybe some APs absolutely require more than 2 PCs and/or require breaking the final Extra Credit recommendation?), and consider that highly urban APs may give problems for classes dependent upon medium/large pets that cannot be dismissed or otherwise hidden. For Wrath of the Righteous (the only Mythic Paizo AP so far), consider this to be 2 alternate APs: one Mythic and one non-Mythic.
(*)No super powerful things like a PC being a Gargoyle -- races are limited to Core Group, Featured Group (Drow excluded before Second Darkness), Uncommon Group, Standard Group, Android (Iron Gods and later only), Lashunta, Shabti, and Syrinx -- the remaining Advanced Races and all Monstrous and Very Powerful Races being excluded for being too powerful for a normal-sized party (remember, this is supposed to be a challenge.
Extra Credit to anyone who actually made it through an AP with a constantly under-sized party.
Also Extra Credit if you can do this without Leadership or related feats (Torchbearer, Herald Squire, and any others I might have missed), and without using Master Summoner or similar archetypes that have a nova Summons ability (and using two such characters is legal but frowned upon :-) ).
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It is possible to solo an AP if you are a skilled enough player and are sufficiently optimized.
Until you roll a 1 on an important saving throw.
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It is possible to solo an AP if you are a skilled enough player and are sufficiently optimized.
Until you roll a 1 on an important saving throw.
Yup. This.
The game involves Save-Or-Lose effects, which only take out the party if everyone fails their Save. The fewer PCs there are, the more likely that becomes, and in a multiplicative sense rather than additive (ie: if the odds of one person failing are 1/4 the odds of two doing so are 1/16, three doing so are 1/64 and four doing so are 1/256). In the course of an AP, any individual character is almost certainly gonna fail at least one such Save...so if there's not at least one other person, it's a problem.
So I'd say the real minimum is probably two of them. Pets really help, too.
Here is the thing.
Mythic makes the game unbalanced... when you have a party of four Mythic adventurers.
A group of two Mythic characters? It is far more balanced.
One other thing to consider is this: if both players take the Leadership Feat, then they can fill voids in their group - especially if they started out with front-line types, and use the Cohorts for healers or other spellslingers.
If you can get undead earlier your minions can stroll through an awful lot of reign of winter
Didn't someone complete an entire AP as a solo Wizard?
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If you can get undead earlier your minions can stroll through an awful lot of reign of winter
Now that gives me an idea for a devious variation on an AP -- a previous group of heroes tried to do it and failed. Then a Necromancer showed up and soloed it with a horde of Undead minions and sub-minions, but decided to take over the problem rather than actually cure it. NOW, the current crop of PCs have to deal with the Necromancer, in addition to much stuff left over and repurposed from the original AP . . . .
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I think a druid or summoner has the best chance. Wizards, even sorcerers have limited spells, and they might not be able to rest without being hassled or running into a random encounter without the GM softballing things.
Even if a druid or summoner runs out of spells they can be halfway decent in melee, plus they have a pet to help them out.
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Cleric. They can take a Feat letting them do Summons as a Standard Action. And they can heal themselves.
