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Our group was playing Kingmaker, but it sort of fizzled when we were at level 10, largely because our group of 5 PFS-legal PCs stomped on most enemies, forcing the GM to invest too much of his time trying to modify encounters so they would challenge us. Can anyone suggest a more challenging adventure path?
Reign of Winter. Make sure your GM apply weather conditions: they can be real killers.
Your GM needs to add more mooks to up the CR of encounters.
My basic steps for upping difficulty
Step 1: Give everything its maximum possible hp, which is usually twice its default hp. Edit: It's not actually twice the default because of the constitution modifier, but feel free to use twice anyway, because it's often a lot easier.
Step 2: If the npc is unique or alone, then give it the advanced template, which is +2 to everything. Don't be afraid to apply the advanced template twice if the enemy already had the template.
Step 3: If the encounter features a group of creatures of the same type, then just add one more of those creatures.
Basically, try each step in order, and add them together until your party starts feeling challenged. These steps aren't ordered in how effective they are in upping the difficulty, but in how easy they are for the DM to apply on the fly. Adding more mooks is the most reliable way of upping difficulty, but will also make combats take much longer, as you will have more npcs acting in combat with pcs needing to spend rounds on those npcs.
I really like Hell's Rebels, which I'm currently running. I've found that the first 2-3 books of it are pretty slow going from the challenge side, but book 4 rapidly ramps up the difficulty of the AP and the encounter at the end of book 3 is potentially very, very gross.
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Our group was playing Kingmaker, but it sort of fizzled when we were at level 10, largely because our group of 5 PFS-legal PCs stomped on most enemies, forcing the GM to invest too much of his time trying to modify encounters so they would challenge us. Can anyone suggest a more challenging adventure path?Did your GM use the level-up suggestions, slow down the leveling rate intentionally, or divide up Experience Points?
A group of 5 should start off with an advantage and over time become 'under-leveled' so as to be challenged in their own way.
This is a really good point. I have a group of 5 players I run APs for. I go 20 PB for them. I max HP of enemies and sometimes even triple it. At about level 6 I start to hold the party about one level behind the advancement track (I don't use XP). Those are my tips for running for 5 people. Regardless if you chose to adopt them or not, you will need to make adjustments if you want to challenge a group of 5 using the AP material.
I have never played or seen Kingmaker but from what I hear it's (in)famous for it's low number of encounters per day. If you can blow up most encounters with your strongest spells and abilities because you can just rest afterwards, the game gets very easy.