Large group adaption

[i.am.stack]

Long story short. The players around my table have shifted a lot recently; losing a few - adding a few. We've been pretty hardcore Pathfinder for years and I'm used to having a large amount of players (5-8). There is significant interest with the new table in not only switching to Starfinder but playing through this campaign. I don't want to boot anyone from my table so I'm reading through to see how I can fudge a few numbers to accommodate five or six players rather then the recommended four.

I don't think I've ever GM'd a campaign straight through before. Usually I take the Paizo campaigns as fantastic starter guides then adapt them into my world and I've been able to fudge Pathfinder campaigns to accommodate my group size in the past. I've adapted a lot of them over the years.

I'm a little nervous jumping into the differences of Starfinder *and* immediately twisting things in the first campaign that I GM. :-)

I thought I'd ask for advice before mangling it. I primarily don't want to screw it up and make it boring or too easy for my players.

Thanks!

[i.am.stack]

I've made it most of the way through the first book (with many side tracks to look up various other Starfinder information bits) and I skimmed details in the other books. I don't see anything particularly off about having more then four players other then a potential for slight GM tweaks for a few encounters. I've still got a lot of prep reading to do to familiarize myself more with Starfinder and am planning on reading through the rest of this forum before game day.

If anyone has any advice or thoughts on the matter, please let me know.

Thanks!

[Kishmo]

If you're alright doing large groups in general, and are ok with all that that entails (everything taking longer, etc) then I don't think this AP specifically will have any special challenges for a larger group. I think most encounters could fairly easily be upscaled: add in another minion, or use the Array Tables from Alien Archive 1 to fairly easily add +1 lvl to big boss monsters or single-monster encounters. It'd take a bit of work, but sounds like that's ok for you!

One thing to think about is Starship Combat, which is new to Starfinder. Maybe try a Session 0 Starship Combat to see if your group is ok with it - groups tend to either love it, or hate it. A large group may exacerbate one of the primary complaints (that being that starship combat takes a long time) so it's worth having a go of it, even if you just use like, pregen characters and pregen ships or something.

This AP doesn't have a lot of Starship Combat, and those encounters it does have can fairly easily be turned into roleplay or skill encounters, or skipped altogether if your group tends to hate it. It does relegate the Sundiver, aka the special macguffin ship that lets you dive into the sun, into even more of a macguffin if you're not fighting with it, but that's not that incredulous. (It may help to bring up Lu and her Sundiver as background news pieces in chapter 1 or 2 so make it more a part of the setting, rather than PCs hearing about it for the first time in book 3.)

Other than that, check out the other threads in the Dawn of Flame subforum, especially the "GM Thread" for each chapter! Myself and many others have tons of thoughts about them, and there's loads of good ideas.

Lastly - having PCs of telepathic species, and/or PCs from Asanatown in the Burning Archipelago, will really pay off. It's not required, but it gives those PCs great motivation for the AP.

[i.am.stack]

Thanks Kishmo! I appreciate the feedback.

Looks like my party is five players with one still on the fence. I'm consuming a lot of information to get up to speed with Starfinder and I appreciate the tips.