Hi! My group is really loving Hell's Rebels so far, but I'm having a bit of trouble. See, so far my party (Unchained Rogue, Bard, Unchained Monk, Gunslinger) haven't been having a very hard time in most of the fights They don't optimize much, but they do tend to angle for surprise attacks. Without giving them any extra treasure, or them really buying better gear, the Gunslinger/Monk/Rogue all have ACs around 22-24, and the Monk can get up to 27 with mage armor, so most of the enemies in this chapter can barely hit them so it doesn't matter that they all have pretty low HP (Menador guards, once I fixed the math on their statblock, have a +7 to hit) and they deal a lot of damage too, so nothing can really last long. They lack magic power, but I've found Hell's Rebels doesn't really require to much of that so far. After the aboleth and draugr in Dead in the Deep went out with a whimper (the Aboleth died in about 2 rounds of attacks) I have decided I'm going to need to boost the difficulty somewhat. However...
Menador Keep is a scary place. ~50 guards, an advanced Erinyes and Host Devil, 2 slithering trackers, and Lucien + his wyvern mount. And the group is currently in disguise, sneaking around trying to find the Anvil of Unmaking. I know that individually they could take any encounter in Menador, but if they raise the alarm they are guaranteed to have everyone in the Keep on them in 2-3 rounds, given the speed at which some characters can reach them.
So I guess I have two questions really. For one, is Hell's Rebel's just a really easy adventure path, and I need to up the difficulty across the board?
And, does anyone have any experience with how difficult Menador Keep is in general? I can't tell if the group triggering the alarm would be a TPK (they seem to think so, anyway), or if the group would be able to handle it.
tl;dr I ended up treating my party as +1 level fairly early, and +2 levels by book 4. I also started rebuilding some NPCs.
My experience and reading about APs is that they're assuming a suboptimal party, so if your players are good at optimizing that may be a part of making it easier. There's also usually a few encounters that are quite difficult. In my experience, this AP's tough mode encounters are the Ruby Masquerade and the Temple of Asmodeus. Others seem to have had Nox in book one as a tough one, but not for my party.
All adventure paths assume 15 point buy, I believe, so if you're not using that boost your encounters. I used 20 point buy. If you're using all books for the party, that's increasingly going to be an advantage.
And there's a ton of bonus skill feats and ranks. Those will typically boost the party's ability a bit, either by providing extra options or allowing the player to focus on boosting their ability to sneak/disguise. Enhanced ability to start encounters on their terms makes the resulting combats easier.
In general, this AP's concept and structure lets the PCs start a lot of encounters on their terms due to enhanced ability to select which encounter to do, do recon, buff ahead of time, and try to get surprise. That's awesome and fun, but it does put the NPCs at a significant disadvantage.
Finally, there's a surfeit of clerics and martials, but only one arcane spellcaster. Your players might be evolving to optimize to deal with that kind of opponent. Mine did.
Menador Gap...
Here's my report out from that set piece Note that I changed it from many crappy soldiers to troops, which are significantly easier to run and more effective. Also you'll need to audit the individual soldier stat blocks if you do use them: they're a mess. Note as well that the boards believe that there's some discrepancy over how many soldiers are supposed to be there. (And six troops is a lot more than they have there.) The waves approach really worked well.
Not noted there: they killed the wyvern a couple of days previously attacking the rear entrance. That made Lucien less effective.
And Lucien's not terribly effective, here's how I altered him That whole thread is useful for upping the major NPCs found in books 3-4. I highly recommend it, and there's some other threads where major NPCs get a rewrite: Barzillai, the Nidalese cleric, etc.