Curse of the crimson thrones to easy?

[Fooly_Cooly]

WARNING MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS .So we just started curse of the crimson thrones today. One of my usual players wanted to try her hand at dming and picked this ap since I had run it and could give advice. Now when I ran it I had 7 noob players and they faied miserably. 5 out of the 7 getting taken out by lamb and his croc. They were decent builds wit rolled stats 4d6 minus the lowest die reroll anything below 13. Now we started tonight and we are 2 players each running 2 chars. We are using 25 point buy. We have a half orc archery urban ranger,helf elf combat healer cleric,half orc invulnerable rager barb and a human knife master rogue. We killed lamb and his croc with no damage in 1 round. We also took out the rest of the dungeon with only the barb taking light damage. Now the dm was getting good rolls and other than reading the map a little wrong she did great. So did curse just not age well or was it always so easy?

 

[Asmo]

Spoilerwarning, please?

Asmo

 

[Lwaxy]

Rather sounds you were lucky. I ran this AP 3 times and all the time the group took at least some damage.

 

[Fooly_Cooly]

I guess that may be possible. The barbarian actually rolled 3 1's in the battle against the spiders. They ended up beinjg the most challenging fight I think. We are playing again tonight and I will see if the next mission ends up being anymore challenging. So I noticed that the enemies actually still have spot and listen. I ran this forever ago so I didnt remember that detail. Had pathfinder just not implemented perception yet?

 

[Crothian]

I guess that may be possible. The barbarian actually rolled 3 1's in the battle against the spiders. They ended up beinjg the most challenging fight I think. We are playing again tonight and I will see if the next mission ends up being anymore challenging. So I noticed that the enemies actually still have spot and listen. I ran this forever ago so I didnt remember that detail. Had pathfinder just not implemented perception yet?

It was written under the ogl of 3.5 as the Pathfinder game was not out yet. Council of Thieves, the fifth AP is the first to use Pathfinder rules.

 

[Fooly_Cooly]

Really? Well that makes sense then. Do you guys recommend a different AP for an upstarting GM or do you think curse is a good starting point?

 

[Crothian]

For the AP's you really want to find one that fits the kind of game you are most comfortable running. One thing Paizo has done a great job of is giving most of the AP's different feels so they play differently.

Curse of the Crimson Throne should be fine for a DM that does okay with an Urban feel and for players that are not as experienced since the first few books the PCs are reacting to events and don't have to be proactive about anything. If you can keep the mystery

[sblock] that the queen is evil [/sblock]

for a while I think that would help the player wondering what's going on. The quest to get the item though in books 4 and 5 does come out of practically no where so I'd find a way to either foreshadow that or maybe rewrite those to fit the rest of the AP better. Then again that might work for you so you wouldn't need to change it.

 

[Wycen]

We started this and made it through the first "boss" fight with Mr. Lamb. It probably depends on your party and luck to make it easy or difficult.

Our group has 7 members. You'd think with 7 people we'd have walked all over them. In fact, we had a rough time at least through middle. We are using 15 point buy without max cash, just 100 gp. I'm not sure if we'd have more points to spend with less players or not.

We had 2 players out for most of the fight. The halfling ranger was negative pretty early into the battle just before the alligator emerged. The fighter himself got taken out by the alligator. Strangely, the wizard set to work on rescuing the fighter as he sank toward a watery grave. That was after we killed the alligator.

The wizard is an enchanter, so his combat options at this level are limited.
My cleric is for buffing and utility, with a 10 STR, so I don't plan to be in the front line.
We have another cleric who's better suited for smashing things, except he's a cleric of Abadar so uses a crossbow.
We have a ranger who in my opinion spent too many stat points on INT.
We have a rogue.
We have a fighter.
We have a bard, who's supposed to be a little old lady.

I suspect our combats will continue to take a long time, as the battle with Mr. Lamb took basically 3 hours, give or take.

 

[Fooly_Cooly]

Wow...3 hour battle. mustve been intense. Well maybe too many people really does make that fight more difficult. As when I had seven people playing they experienced similar fates. Except they had amazing stats and decent gear .

 

[James Jacobs]

One thing to keep in mind...

Our adventure paths are designed assuming that the party of PCs consists of four characters, each built using the standard 15 point buy.

If you increase the point buy above 15, increase the number of characters beyond 4... then yes. The adventure becomes progressively easier. Doesn't really have much to do with 3.5 vs. Pathfinder power levels at that point.

If you're running an AP with nearly twice the recommended characters and a point buy of 10 higher... the GM should either expect the adventure to be easy (perhaps getting less easy as the campaign progresses as the XP split is less and the individual PCs end up leveling up more slowly), or he should add more foes to each encounter. And should make liberal use of the Advanced simple template.