So I'm running a Jade Regent campaign for a group of friends, and have no desire to kick any of them out of the game. They're about to come up on the final dungeon of the first module, and I worry how to make the dungeon challenging for them without killing them all off.
Party comp:
Catfolk Swashbuckler
Human Samurai (two handing Katana)
Tiefling Paladin (Greatsword focus, Hospitaller and Warrior of Holy Light archetypes)
Elf Wizard (Conjuration school)
Aasimaar Cleric (Shield and shortspear)
Skinwalker Ranger (Fanglord, Archery focus)
I would say that I'm a fairly experienced GM, but I've never run a party of this size, so any advice would be appreciated.
double the monsters, that generally raises the CR by 2, which is about right for a 6 person party who are decently competent, esp if you allowed higher than 15 point buy (what its built for)
I want to have the players preroll attacks and such to save time, but unfortunately, half the players are new, they played one game before under a completely incompetent DM and have basically no grasp on the rules, and they still need guidance.
The Paladin, Wizard, and Cleric will probably be smart enough to preroll, but the newbies worry me.
I would suggest you having a sesson zero where you basically spend the entire sesson just putting the party through the "tutorial" section, try to make into your game scenarios where you can show as example how skills are done.
6 Players are what i would consider "max" for my parties, and you would save yourself a hell of a lot of time down the line to teach the players the rules and let them optimize themselves instead of forcing them onto a pace made yourself.
But even so, have them under pressure that if they spend too much time others are allowed to act before them until they know what they want to do. A paradox i know, but you learn more from combat in action, than combat waiting for the newbie to choose which spell to cast.
The point is that you make combat lively and you let the players set the pace out of combat.
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The first and most important thing to do is to add more monsters. That will offset the action economy of a large party best. It's a better solution than making a single boss more powerful, because you'd have to make him so much more powerful that he starts one-shotting PCs.
Solo bosses should get a few bodyguard monsters. Preferably monsters with some reach or suchlike so that they can influence a large area and can't be ignored by the PCs.
Your players will probably focus-fire on individual enemies, making them go down fast. That's fine, you can do that too, with moderation. Not so much that you start piling up PC corpses, but enough that the players notice it happening and hurting. This will force them to pay attention to tactics which prevent enemies from ganging up on PCs, and that'll probably make it harder for them to gang up on individual monsters quite so much. If everyone is afraid of getting surrounded, you'll see more "battle lines".
Plan battles so that enemies come from multiple directions. That prevents a single tanky PC from shielding four squishy PCs with ease. You can make this more plausible by making a point of how much noise combat makes. Unless the PCs succeed at precautions, swords banging on armor is quite noisy, as a are screams of pain and alarm. So as soon as the PCs encounter enemies on one side and make noise, it'll quickly draw reinforcements from other directions. This helps explain why the PCs are often attacked from other directions as well, even when enemies aren't setting ambushes.
Pay attention to the background/social role of the various PCs. That way, you can figure out if NPCs are interested in talking to specific PCs, and you can spread around the "lead" in social interactions a bit.
Add lots of low-level mooks, don't do solo bosses, encourage players to avoid pet classes, no Leadership feat, make sure people are ready to go with their own summons.
I would add some low level scrub monsters/NPCs to at least soak up some of the player's action economy. If that is not enough start upping the monsters AC/saves or damage rolls. No group wants to just face roll things. That is just as bad as being with a DM that thinks every fight has to kill off half the party or close to it.
Look at the GM's Guide to Challenging Encounters and related discussion thread. It provides a good review of the CR system and how to balance based on larger party size.
Simply said, each character adds to the XP value of the encounter - you can calculate the proper value based on cross referencing individual level with CR.
For 6 characters, a 50% increase in number of opponents is a decent upgrade for a campaign like Jade Regent. But you also have to deal with the encounters where a +50% numbers increase isn't easy to do. This guide provides the guidance on how to do that.
Alternatively, if you don't want to mess around with all the extra calculations, just level them up when the path says to level up. And if you're afraid it'll be too easy, add some more opponents as mentioned above.
We went through first few books of Jade Regent with a 6 person party (a couple dropped out later due to life reasons), and I don't recall it being a cakewalk. Not sure how many adjustments the GM made, though, as it wasn't me that time.
How powerful are your players' characters?
Meraki is spot-on about the leveling. Frankly, with APs I'm a fan of ALWAYS using progress-based leveling. It take away a lot of needless book-keeping.
Have you heard about 5th Edition's Lair Actions and Legendary Actions?
They're really good at balancing the action economy between 1 BBEG vs 6 PCs.
Lair Actions are basically the environment doing something fun and exciting to hinder the PCs. Most are tied to the flavor of the BBEG, and have their own initiative. For example, an undead BBEG might summon spirits that that frighten the PCs one round, have skeletal hands reach out of the ground and grapple or restrain the PCs the next round, and have dark energy prevent healing for 1 round the third round, and mix and repeat, without doing the same thing 2 rounds in a row.
Legendary Actions are similar to immediate actions, typically 3 per round, and only usable after a PC's turn. For example, if fighting a dragon:
1. Make a claw attack
2. Cast a spell (counts as 2 actions)
3. Tail slap (counts as 2 actions)
4. Move
5. Use breath weapon (if available, counts as 3 actions)
These really balance the action economy.