Failures of a new DM, and how to correct it?

[mentle]

I am/was a new dm, with a few new (no gaming experience) players and a couple experienced players. I had concern that the new players, mainly my wife, would become bored with playing so I thought I would be making things more exciting.
So mistake number one, I let my players become to strong. Not having a large d20 type gaming background I allowed rolls for stats and we wound up with some very high rolls. I assumed scaling monsters and dungeons to compensate would be fairly easy, turns out I was wrong.

Mistake number 2, to many awards and way to powerful. Coming from a video rpg background I was used to constant rewards, again assuming the difficulty scaling would be easy to compensate.

Mistake number three, I can't say no to new players. We started out with five players and a few of them ended up not being able to continually make it, so someone asked if a friend could join. Sure we needed another player, then their wife wanted to join. Then the tank's girlfriend wanted to play. So on and so on. So I am at the point now that at any given time I can have 9-10 people wanting to play. The group is lvl 10 so starting all over would be kind of a dick move.

So currently I am considering running a, lvl 15 campaign anne cutting any item rewards in an attempt to plateau the groups power with limited to no item rewards. Any other suggestions on how to make the game more challenging again?

 

[S'mon]

So currently I am considering running a, lvl 15 campaign anne cutting any item rewards in an attempt to plateau the groups power with limited to no item rewards. Any other suggestions on how to make the game more challenging again?

Hm... giving them 5 free levels but no treasure does seem like potentially a very good way to handle your problem. I suggest you also look at their character sheets and consider how much extra wealth their over-high stats are worth - I'd be surprised if it was a huge amount, 4e pretty well assumes a starting 18-20 in the prime stat, and other stats are much less important.

After raising them to 15th level, possibly with a time break ("1 year later...") run some at-EL encounters for them. If they trash those really easily, raise the EL. Be stingy with treasure, nothing better than +3, a few thousand gp here and there, until you're sure that balance has been restored.

Then go back to using the DMG guidelines.

BTW, as you probably know, wealth goes up x5 per 5 levels. So if you need to raise them 5 levels to put them where they should be wealth-wise that's a *lot* of extra wealth you've been handing out. Even then it's only a net +1 on att/dmg & defenses. It may be that the very large group is a bigger problem; 4e is designed for 3-6 PCs, not 10.

 

[Quickleaf]

You're saying that you plus 9 or 10 friend's gather around a (big) table to play D&D? That's just nuts! Maybe one of your players would be interested in co-DMing with you?

I ran a heroic tier campaign for a group of 7 and that stretched my abilities to almost breaking point.

 

[ahayford]

10 players is just way to many to make everyone feel involved imho, nevermind the technical problems of making encounters challenging and interesting for that many people. But, thats not really an answer to your question now that you have those players in game already.

...and truth be told I don't really have one. Try to include everyone as much as possible. Make sure you pull in each character as much as you can and provide situations they'd find interesting. I suggest using a "talking stick" or "talking rock" to pass around to help keep some kind of order at the table. This might not be necessary if everyone is well mannered. Its going to be very hard for you to keep that many people engaged.

 

[mentle]

Everyone plays well together and the group dynamic is great, which is part of my problem. There is no jerk to boot and reduce group size. I'm not giving them free levels, I'm sticking all the level 10's in a level 15 campaign and giving minimal reward. The main problem run into, and what started the large group size was not knowing who was gonna show up to play. So when everyone shows up they tear through anything they come against.

 

[Truename]

Are you're sure they're actually overpowered? 4e combat looks easy to the DM and hard to the players. It has a great challenge curve, actually: the DM knows that the PCs were never in any real danger, but the players feel threatened and like they just barely squeaked by.

If your players are having a great time--and it sounds like they are--you might not actually have a problem here.

If there really is a problem, it could be related to your large group size and which monsters you're using. Paragon tier PCs are more powerful than the original monster math planned for, and large groups' synergies allow them to take on higher-level challenges with ease.

I'm not so sure increasing the level of the adventure is a good idea, as it could lead to slow and boring fights. As an alternative, make sure you're using the new monster math, and consider putting in more mass terrain effects--such as a floor that does constant damage to all PCs, or lightning blasters that hit everyone, etc.--to provide a threat that scales to your large group size.

 

[ahayford]

If you guys are having fun, don't let me tell you you are doing it wrong.

 

[mentle]

Well not literally...

Those are good ideas. Thank you. As far as characters being op, they took out a clan of 5 friday giants and a frost titan. They tend to zerg any mobs and simply over take them with sheer numbers. That's why I'm hoping a higher level campaign will help challenge them more.

 

[ahayford]

Friday Giants...the horor....

 

[mentle]

We do have fun, I try to still keep it entertaining. I'm thinking of making a time limit on round decisions to help speed things along.