Appropriate Encounter For A Large 1st Level Party?

[Tollak Vargsson]

I’ve got a new problem I’ve never had. I have a large group. Instead of scraping for players, I have almost enough for 2 games. Unfortunately, I have no idea how to build an appropriate encounter for a party that big. I have a mixture of players who range from completely optimized to try to optimize but lack system mastery to RP is more important than optimization.

The party is a summoner, a halfling life oracle, vanara investigator, a dwarf gunsmith, a human barbarian and an aasimar hunter.

6 players, 2 pet classes.

Obviously I want lots of weaker creatures so they don’t annhilate things based on action economy but I find calculating encounter size by number from the book really confusing.

For an average encounter, as a rough estimate how many basic goblins would an average encounter be?

What would a hard encounter look like, with a big foe and minions?

[Halek]

Just throw a goblin each at them. Avoid focus fire or ranged weapons.

[Groundhog]

For six players, you want 1½ times the normal size of encounters.

So if you'd normaly have them fight four goblins, for a party of six you bring six goblins instead.

In book terms, your party's average level effectively increases by one.

So your party's APL is 2.

According to the book, encounters split into Easy(cr=APL-1), standard(cr=APL), challenging(APL+1) hard(+2) and epic(+3).

That said, you should know that these things are written with the assumption that players don't optimize at all, and even further, the "breaking point" where the encounter is as strong as the PCs themselves is at CR=APL+4, so even an "epic" fight is biased heavily in the PCs favor. Also, most PCs will optimize more than the CR system assumes.

That aside, we'll look at

Easy Encounter; CR 1, 400xp. An example would be three first level warriors. Goblins are traditional. Your party will tear through them like so much tissue paper.
Standard Encounter; CR 2, 600xp. Three first level orc warriors and a zombie.
Challenging Encounter; CR 3, 800xp. Go with three 1st level warriors, orcs or goblins or whatever, and add two 1st level spellcasters.
Hard Encounter; CR 4, 1200xp. Three ghouls, or an ogre and two pc-classed 1st level orcs.
Epic Encounter; CR 5, 1600xp. Three 1st level warriors, two 1st level pc-classed NPCs and 1 ogre.

[Tollak Vargsson]

That is a huge help. I haven’t ran a serious game in almost 5 years.

[Wheldrake]

A few principles of encounter design for low-level groups:
- avoid high damage or high crit adversaries. Although you want to challenge your PCs, they need to see death looming to feel the thrill of danger, so you don't want to put them down with a single strike.
- use terrain as much as possible to separate the PCs and make them work for their kills.
- have goals beyond killing stuff, like keeping the last enemy from escaping, keeping a couple alive for questioning, or for ransoming back.

I agree that your group is huge, and it's counter-productive to play with such a large group. But if you delegate some tasks, like keeping track of initiative, it will help keep things rolling along. Also, don't always wait for one player to finish his rolls to start the next. Get them in the habit of rolling and calculating as quickly as possible, to keep the pace up.

[Slim Jim]

If the human barbarian has a polearm and combat reflexes, you're going to need about three times as many goblins.

[Groundhog]

Just make them use ranged.

And six players is plenty manageable, don't worry.

[Slim Jim]

I like to use the first combat to establish "Rules of Engagement" within your campaign. For example, if you're OK with murder-hobos-on-a-rampage, then let the PCs kill everything in sight and get away with it. It's fast & easy: grab monsters out of the books and throw 'me down.

But if you desire a more complex sort of world, you'll set up situations where the "enemy" are neutrals (rather than evils), and survivors run or surrender after a few get kacked, and murder-hobo tactics result in Wanted posters going up (with their artwork gradually improving to the point that the PCs are going to have to skip town until the heat dies down).