Scaling to small party size

[Hambot]

You think two PC's are hard to balance encounters for? Try one!

I'm playing with just my girlfriend. She is an eladrin rogue, just multiclassed into wizard at second level for more magic powers. She'll get ritual casting later to cover major party abillity requirements. But she couldn't ever flank!

My solution came in the kobold article - I looked at the Kobold piker, then realised that although my gf can't run 2 PC's properly, she can easily add a monster. So I changed it into a human piker, then added 2 fighter encounter powers with recharge 6 to make up for the lack of daily powers, and upped the number of healing surges to fighter levels.

This is a great way to do a "pet" as the turn goes so quick yet adds so much strategic depth to the encounter. Yet her PC is obviously way cooler than the monster hireling.

I agree with the OP - things are tricky. Black lady strings of bad rolls for the PC's and good rolls with the monsters become very scary very quickly. Just go easy on bad combinations - don't do all brutes vs classes that can't withstand the beats for too long. And use minions because they work really well. Having the good guys with recharge powers is really fun too and works really well. I wish there was a 4e feat to give your encounters recharge 6, because they usually don't recharge in a fight , but when they do its fun. And it makes the martial powers make more sense - it feels like your PC is waiting for the right moment to bust out the power rather than just getting tired.

Consider giving PC's in small parties recharge 6 to their encounter powers today!

 

[Baumi]

When I began Roleplaying, I was the only Player for about three years and it worked fine because .... I bought slaves and send them forward

While I wouldn't recommend buying SLAVES anymore, but why not simply let them hire Soldiers and hand out the appropriate MM stats, which are damn simple in play and still effective (I do that in Savage Worlds all the time).

So the game still focus on the 2-3PC's (in and out of combat) but they still can handle bigger fights and keep them Interesting. It also makes most Adventures a bit more realistic because why should the Heroes always send to their tasks without help?

 

[Jack99]

I play a campaign with just 2 players; a cleric and a ranger. As DM I play a DBorn Pal (with a INT 5 so no useful ideas from me!) and it works fine. Having the little extra healing from the Pal means that the party manages to do OK against a 4 PC challenge (400XP, we have only just started and are all level 1).

So I would recommend having a DM run (stupid as a post) PC with a 2 player group

Ugh, gotta be careful with those.. Many campaigns have been wrecked by a DMPC (at least, if various boards are anything to go by).

Anyway.

Yesterday, I got to play (as a player) for the first time in 4e. It was me (a paladin) and one other guy (a cleric)

We had the following encounters:
at level 1
3 gray wolves (375 xp)- way over the budget, but none the less, only the cleric was in a bit of trouble, I still had plenty of juice left, and could easily have gone on for a few more combats.

at level 2
1 goblin sharpshooter, 1 goblin warrior, 3 goblin minions (300 xp) - a bit over budget, but the fight went fairly well, even though the cleric again took a decent deal of damage, mostly because they came while he was sleeping.

1 visejaw crocodile (175 xp) - under budget, but it followed the goblin encounter (via the river encounter, where we each lost about 2-4 surges), so that we did not have any kind of rest in between, so no surging or renewal of powers. The cleric almost died, and here his armor wouldn't have helped him since the croc rolled 2 natural 20's in a row. Ouch. Yet we made it again

2 elf scouts and 1 elf archer (375 xp) - again, over budget, and while we were both hard pressed at times, we won. Do note that this was the same day for my character, so at this point, he had been through the goblins, the river, the crocodile and now the elves.

4 Fire beetles (400 xp) - again, over budget. Now, this fight was just nasty, their fire spray is just plain nasty. Luckily we made some good tactical choices and it was mostly my paladin who was getting hit by the sprays. And since he is a tiefling, it helped some. Still after this fight, which was yet again the same day as all the others, my paladin had very few surges left
We still moved on and then...

1 Ghoul (200 xp) - under budget, and it never had a chance. Glad I made my save though, else it might have tipped the davantage to the undead.

After that, we were done and went to sleep. So my paladin basically made 1450/2=725 xp, or what represents what he should have gotten for almost 6 normal fights. This was all on the same daily and surge numbers.

5 min day? Not always at least. However, I am pretty certain that if you play with fewer players, a healer of some sort becomes more important. In fact, if you wish to meet monsters head on, he is almost a must in smaller groups.

I am also pretty sure that the defender/leader combination is the most stable one in smaller groups. Other combinations will have a hard time matching their staying power, their durability if you will

my 2cp

 

[slaguru]

Rather than 2 characters each, one might try the "gestalt" approach — each player has one character, but that character has two classes, getting the powers and features of each, but only one character's worth of actions per turn. Probably using a higher-than-normal point buy, too — just eyeballing it, it doesn't look like it'd even be too awful to double the normal point buy allocation to 44 points.

This makes it much easier to keep the game a role-playing game rather than becoming focused on the minis.

Very good idea. Anything to make this edition of D&D more of an RPG and not a War-Game

 

[Marasmusine]

I ran a game with two PCs (tiefling cleric and gnoll fighter, both level 1), three encounters total; dire rat with four giant rat minions, two gnome lurkers and finally a drake needlefang swarm in a room with a pit trap. They managed just by the skin of their teeth with only short rests. I don't think it would have worked without the cleric.

A friend joined in for the next adventure (same PCs as above at level 2 plus a lizardfolk ranger at level 1) First three encounters - 2 stormclaw scorpions + giant scorpion minions, then human guard with 7 human rabble minions, then three bandits - were all handled easily, no daily or APs were needed. I wanted a larger fight for the final battle of the session; with 10 rabble minions backed by up a human wizard. To even the odds, the gnoll player had intimidated a small group of locals to form a militia (as minions! Which pleased that player a great deal and cheered when they performed well against the rabble.) Again, victory seemed pretty easy (although the story won't let them have an extended rest just yet.)

In summary, there was a big difficulty difference between 2 and 3 players. With 3 I was perhaps being "soft" with the encounters but now I'm not worried about being a bit tougher. The use of lots of minions was popular with the players. I had arranged the terrain rather in the PCs favour, but there was still plenty of flanking. The use of minions on the player's side was also a hit; the gnoll got to use her intimidate skill to order them around and they evened out the battle numbers.

 

[SSquirrel]

We have a 3 player party ourselves, so I extrapolated the XP table for encounter design. This lines up with the table on page 57 of the DMG

1 300
2 375
3 450
4 525
5 600
6 750
7 900
8 1050
9 1200
10 1500
11 1800
12 2100
13 2400
14 3000
15 3600
16 4200
17 4800
18 6000
19 7200
20 8400
21 9600
22 12450
23 15300
24 18150
25 21000
26 27000
27 33000
28 39000
29 45000
30 61000

 

[DrSkull]

I'd second (or third) the idea to let the PC's have some Monster-Statted flunkies.

I'd suggest Human Guards, Elf Scouts or Halfiling Thieves be your base set. You might allow Hobgoblin Soldiers or Orc Raiders (with or without a Name and Fluff Change, depending on the savoriness of your party).

Make sure they get a cut of treasure and XP as if they were players. You may want to increase the henchmen Healing Surges, to 1 per level, instead of 1 per tier.

You might want to peg their ability to player behavior. If they treat the henchmen like crap, the next time all that shows up are Human Rabble or Goblin Cutters instead. If they treat them well, then maybe Dwarf Bolters or a Berserker shows up next time.

If you do a DM PC: here's my suggestion: have the Players create the PC, not the DM, so he has less of an emotional stake in the character. Have them create 2-3 of them and then the DM plays one either at random or based on party need. But, make sure you switch DM PC's each session, so they stay in the background of the story.

This solution should do well, as long as your two players aren't defenders.

 

[Terwox]

The DMG advice is to, for a 2 person party, play a defender and a leader, not a defender and a controller. Healing is more potent with two characters.

The 3 person party recommends dropping the striker or the controller... not the leader.