Designing encounters for 7 characters


Advice


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I'm starting a new campaign with 7(!) PCs, and I'm a little worried about designing properly tuned encounters for them.

The rules tell me to start with APL, and add +1 if there are more than 4 PCs. They're all starting at 1st level, so APL = 1 + 1 = 2. Then let's say I want it to be a "challenging" encounter, so I add another +1 to that, for a total encounter CR of 3. This gives me a total XP budget of 800 -- or two CR 1 creatures.

I cannot help but worry that 7 level 1 PCs are going to absolutely demolish two CR 1 creatures.

Am I wrong about that? I mean we're talking about a mechanic, a soldier, an operative, an envoy, a solarian, a nanocyte, and a witchwarper against... a pair of trained squox. The squox will be lucky if they last 2 rounds.

Any advice? Should I bump up the APL by one more? Or should I just relax and trust the math?

* My players are not really min-maxers, and neither am I (none of us has the head or the patience for it).

** Please don't say "split the party up". I could offer each player $100 in real money to split up and they still wouldn't do it.


Start with the Cr as written and up the difficulty as you see how well they do. If they destroy their first combat encounter add one or two more opponents for the next one, and repeat until you getting the fight your looking for. That will give you an idea of how to scale fights up in the future.


Trial and Error as Karrg basically said. The problem with CR is it doesn't fully take into account the creatures abilitiy vs PCs. The Squox for example is a skill monkey style, so in combat they don't survive. A spellcaster based one might hurt in the first activation, it surviving more then 1 round after it is very unlikely.
One of the things a GM I played with did was up the numbers by 50%. We had 6 characters (This was Pathfinder) and the adventure path was based on 3-4 players. He just added 50% to the beasties there. Made some interesting encounters and was fun


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Add more enemies rather than more powerful ones.

Starfinder math is really tight. if you increase the ACs and HP and damage reduction, like what happens when you increase the CR, the critters can become frustratingly unhittable or get clocked with a save or die./save or bite ability without a whole lot of in between.

Don't be afraid to nearly double the foes. A party of 6 rather than 4 probably has twice as much damage output despite having merely 2 extra players. Why? You don't double up on the healer or face, most groups double up on different kinds of murderation.

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