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My group is currently doing book 6 of Hell's Rebels. We are currently all at level 13-14. Our party is made up of a Skald Spell Warrior, a Cleric, a Vigilante/Shadow Dancer and my character is a Barbarian/Rogue.
The problem is, we are absolutely DESTROYING all enemies we come across within 2-3 rounds. My Barb/Rogue specializes in non-lethal damage and after the buffs I average something like 90 HP's Non-lethal per attack or 60 lethal damage per attack. The Vigilante does about 60 damage per attack. Since I currently get about 5-6 (3 base attacks, Haste, Hurtful and Opportunist) attacks per round and the Vigilante gets 4-5 attacks, BBEG's can't survive more than 1 round against us. If I hit with all my attacks while full attacking and flanked, I average about 350 damage and the Vigilante averages 240. I am an intimidate monster as well. Every time I kill an opponent, I can spend a free action to Intimidate all enemies within 30 feet and cause them to be Feared or Panicked. The fear effects limit any kind of coordinating that the GM can do and pretty much lets us easily pick off the enemies. No enemies have been able to resist me, unless they are undead or immune to fear effects.
As powerful as my character is, the Skald is arguably more powerful and causes our GM even much more grief. With the great buffs, awesome spells, extremely powerful social and knowledge skills he gives our GM lots of headaches. He has also come into peak counterspelling proficiency. Our last session, we explored an area, killed all the minions and then the big bad. The BBEG was a CR 14, but only had 10 levels in sorcerer. He had excellent spells, but our Skald just counterspelled all of them, which is really good for us, but puts a damper on the GM's fun. We killed the whole dungeon in 4 rounds.
We consoled the GM after the game ended, but he was somewhat upset at the lack of a challenge being presented to us. We gave some suggestions for him. We recommended doing one, or more, of the following: upping the CR of the enemies, coordinate minions a bit better(for the most part the adventure path isn't very good at enemy tactics) and adding more class levels to the BBEG's(a 14th level Sorcerer wouldn't worry about counterspells for his more powerful spells).
What other things can our poor GM do to make things more challenging?
Did the group have fun going through the dungeon? Did they all have fun playing through the AP?
Hmm, perhaps your party is just a little too optimized for the adventure path. I generally have to dial back my own characters when I play the premade adventures, even with the 15 point-buy and the house rules we use (only one Multiclass allowed, only one archetype).
I’m currently playing Hell’s Rebels and our group is not having an “easy” time with it, but that was intentional on our part. We have a Human Vigilante (Teisatsu), Tiefling Inquisitor, Elven Unchained Monk, and a Halfling Vigilante (Zealot). (We we’re all originally Vigilantes but some people decided to change classes). Only the Monk is strength based.
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The GM has quite a bit of experience. He does a very good job. I think his problem is that he follows the AP a little bit too literally, and Paizo doesn't do a very good job with their written tactics.
Most adventures have to be written for the expectation that not everyone is an experienced system user. It is common that our GM (and myself when I run games) to adapt the tactics of the enemies to suit the abilities of the players. It is very common for me to look at the stat blocks of the enemies and groan at what I see. But then, we are not new players. Sometimes, I rebuild the NPCs with new archetypes and feat choices.
Some ways to make the adventure more challenging:
-Double the HP of all monsters
-Increase the number of enemies by half or double
-Increase ability scores by 2 (which would increase most other stats, like hp, AC, attack, damage, etc.)
-Change locations to make the terrain more favorable to the enemy (can be tricky and time consuming, but rewarding)
-Add problems that challenge the PC's other features, like skills, puzzle solving, social skills, etc.
-Throw in a "timer." The bad guys will accomplish one of their goals in 3 days if the PC's don't stop them. If the PC's fail, the next set of challenges get harder and their resources get stretched thin. Try to avoid making failure=PC death if possible, but the consequences should be meaningful.
adventure paths are written for average\a bit of above average players in mind. good optimized characters (not to mention truly optimized characters) can breeze through most if not all encounters in them.
when i played Rise of the rune-lords i was asked twice to redo my monk character's build since he one-round shot everything. (unmonk jump-kick + jabbing style\master + Medusa's wrath, and i wasn't even trying to optimize him too much)
The GM has quite a bit of experience. He does a very good job. I think his problem is that he follows the AP a little bit too literally, and Paizo doesn't do a very good job with their written tactics.
Paizo writes the game so completely un-optimized characters that spend all their feats on skill focus and play wizards that primarily use longswords still have a chance to succeed at the AP.
In other words, it's written for people "who don't know what they're doing" to still succeed. Optimized characters will find that the CR usually needs to be increased to CR + 2 or CR + 3 to be challenging at all. For my party, for boss fight scenarios, we usually run at CR + 5 (at higher levels, at low levels it can still be run per the AP most of the time).
The GM has quite a bit of experience. He does a very good job. I think his problem is that he follows the AP a little bit too literally, and Paizo doesn't do a very good job with their written tactics.Paizo writes the game so completely un-optimized characters that spend all their feats on skill focus and play wizards that primarily use longswords still have a chance to succeed at the AP.
In other words, it's written for people "who don't know what they're doing" to still succeed. Optimized characters will find that the CR usually needs to be increased to CR + 2 or CR + 3 to be challenging at all. For my party, for boss fight scenarios, we usually run at CR + 5 (at higher levels, at low levels it can still be run per the AP most of the time).
That's true for all adventure paths. Optimized characters with many sourcebooks can easily win most fights even if you double the enemies.
The simplest way to fix this from a player perspective is to simply stop optimizing so much. Take a level or two in a side class for the fun of it. Spend your feats adding cool tricks instead of becoming even unstoppabler. Trade in one of the Big Six for one of the cool items nobody ever plays with because they take up the wrong slot.