Minor Wrath of the Righteous spoilers. Also, Maurice, if you're reading this, shoo!
Not sure if this belongs here or more in the AP subforum, but that one's kinda lifeless. Feel free to move it if necessary.
So, I'm GMing Wrath of the Righteous, and I'm considering fiddling with adding class levels to monsters to make things more interesting. Problem is, I'm not entirely certain it's a fair fight.
They're level 2 right now, with 20 point buy. Party consists of an Evangelist Cleric, Summoner, Sorcerer, Swashbuckler, and Occultist. Level 1 mostly consisted of things with 5-8 HP that all horribly died within one round of combat. And now they're going through a minor dungeon with loads of Mongrelmen. Like, five times the same two Mongrelmen in a small room. To prevent things from going stale, I was thinking of adding class levels, and upon researching how to do that, I found they become much more terrifying. There's one combat with a single Mongrelman scripted who has a single class level and I'm confident they can manage that, but two might already be pushing it.
I was thinking of maybe not increasing all of their stats, but just their main attribute (a Cleric will get +4 Wisdom, for instance, but not necessarily more CON). By just doing half-measures and not necessarily giving them an increase in BAB and HP and stuff, things should become much more manageable. My intent is also to not optimise my encounters and plonk two Barbarians in the same room, but maybe a Bard and a Monk, a Wizard and a Slayer, and so on.
To give context to the threat level of the rest of the dungeon, other encounters there feature a single monitor lizard (the poison could be interesting), a giant amoeba (meh), a level 3 Human with class levels and a badly statted level 1 Rogue, and some more, but that's the main gist. To be fair, I'm not too thrilled with most of these combats and I'm considering adding a mook here and there, but my main worry are those Mongrelmen with identical stats and tactics.
So, what I'm asking, I guess, is which of the following should I do?
A. Keep as-is, it's fine.
B. Give class features and maybe a slight stat bump, but no full class levels.
C. Give full class levels.
D. Something else entirely.
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It literally doesn't matter, the first part of wrath of the righteous is just them walking around and getting ready for the final confrontation of book one. After book one, when they get their mythic powers, it goes a bit downhill from there, everything becomes very easy for them.
But well general adjustment of 5 people instead of 4, assuming the party is at least considered experienced players: adding one or more mooks usually do the trick, no need for class levels and the likes. Other options is simply to use the simple class templates like simple barbarian creature, simple cleric creature etc...it won't increase the creature power level significantly.
I'd definitely lean keep it as is - some of the pairs should definitely join into ongoing combats unless your group is super stealthy, which freshens things up.
Your party's resources will probably take a knock just through sheer mass of mooks, and adding sneak attack or something all over the place might increase the danger level a little more than you'd expect.
I tend to bias towards the lower end of the lethality curve for the first 3 levels or so of gameplay, though.
You could use the Simple class templates. That would be pretty close to your alternative B, but you get help doing it.
Adding class levels in NPC classes is also an option. The impact is much lower, since the creature doesn't gain any increases in their ability scores. A single level of Adept and you've got a simple mage that can annoy your players by using Cure light wounds on her buddies (players, at least in my experience, hate enemy healers undoing the damage they've done, even though in-combat healing is rather ineffective anyway).
To me, it sounds as if you should add more enemies to encounters. Single enemies are almost always easy to stomp over due to the laws of action economy, and you've got a bigger-than-standard party. Add one or two extra mongrelmen to those encounters with 2. Give the new ones ranged weapons if you want to spice things up a bit.
I often figure out ways to add extra enemies later in the fight. That way I can season as needed.
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Adding a single class level is often presented as a +1CR move. However, when the monster gets both the front-loaded goodness of a class (including +2 on strong saves) and increases to base stat array, it starts to look more like the first class level could almost be +2 CR.
Particularly when things synergize very nicely (ghoul rogues, barbarian on any critter with several natural attacks) it's too much for +1 CR.
I suspect that the Advanced template is actually much more balanced for monsters, than for people who advance with class levels. People with class levels tend to have class features that get a lot more powerful when ability scored increase, so they profit twice.
Mongrelmen are nice in that they're basically vanilla humanoids without any special powers. Slapping NPC levels on them sounds like a good idea, that keeps things in check while still spicing things up.
I'm hesitant to throw in more monsters, as the dungeon rooms are pretty small. I annoyed them with 5-foot corridor combat last time as well.
Ascalaphus: Agree. As I said, I wasn't intending to throw highly optimised NPCs at them (no Barbarian levels and Power Attack or something), just something to spice things up. And as I said, Mongrelmen are kinda boring. No special abilities, no stat they particularly excel in.
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Just ramp things up step by step until you hit a difficulty you're comfortable with; but pay attention to multi-encounter attrition while the party closes in on the bossfight.
I switched out the level 1 warrior orcs in Iron Gods book 2 for level 2 orc barbarians built with 20pts; my players still went through them like butter (i.e. molten by level 8 fireballs), but at least now the orcs stood a chance of hitting back if they didn't die instantly.
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I suggest a different tack. Mongrelmen are all bizarre critters with a mixture of all manner of weird body parts.
To spice things up (a) remember the base DC of -10 to hear combat; and (b) have each Mongrelman sporting a minor unique "thing".
Find a quick-n-dirty random appearance generator of some sort and roll 'em all out before the next game.
The lobster-clawed one? gets grab.
The one with a luminescent eye? 1d3 fire damage ray to close range (fire variant ray of frost).
The one with the oversized tongue lolling out? reach 10 ft as if it has the prehensile hair hex (per Witch). 1d3, maybe some change, can grab and whatever else.
Just vary things up based on what the characters see (matching at least loosely expectations from experience to the result). If you can find a gallery of mongrel-folk images online somewhere, you can simply steal those to inspire their goodies.
Oh, and Random Name Generate their names. Let the players overhear conversations using names and/or nicknames. They're heroes - let's see if they can act as such (presuming that these particular mongrelmen are not on the Black Hat List).
I suggest a different tack.
This is absolutely right, up to a point. It'll make the combat much more memorable (which is what you're really after) provided that they're not just a speed bump. So the lobster claw needs to survive long enough to use that grab, even if it dies soon afterwards. And so on.
Mad Comrade, that's fantastic. I'll try to come up with some good examples, that'll make things really cool without worrying about being too strong.
I suggest a different tack.This is absolutely right, up to a point. It'll make the combat much more memorable (which is what you're really after) provided that they're not just a speed bump. So the lobster claw needs to survive long enough to use that grab, even if it dies soon afterwards. And so on.
Depending on how much damage your group's characters are dishing out .. just give 'em a "hit point kicker". 20 hp for the bruisers, 10 hp for the rest.
Mad Comrade, that's fantastic. I'll try to come up with some good examples, that'll make things really cool without worrying about being too strong.
Thanks! :)