D&D 5E Suggestions for running Lost Mine of Phandelver with small party?

[redrick]

I have a group of three players that will be starting out with the Starter Set, and I was wondering if folks had any experience running through it with smaller groups. We're all fairly inexperienced at D&D (two new players, and then I and one of the other players don't have too much under our belt,) so I was looking at a way to keep the adventure as written for wiping my small party off the map without making things any harder than they already are for a table-full of newbs.

I know there are several obvious solutions: start the characters at a higher level (say lvl 2), have players run more than one PC, provide hirelings or similar NPCs, retool all the encounters to have a lower XP value, or live dangerously and leave it alone. I'm just curious to hear all y'alls thoughts as to how these different solutions will play out over the course of the adventure, both in terms of extra work for me as the DM and in terms of diminished fun for the players.

-red

 

[fba827]

It's a new system so I think running extra pcs each, or starting at higher level may not be a good idea as that slows down learning for some people.

What I would do is retool/weaken the first few encounters. And then speed up the xp gain

 

[Jake Johnson]

I'm in a similar situation. I have four players. Half are new, while the others are experienced players. I was thinking of running one of the fighters as an NPC hireling. I'm still hoping to round up one more player. My other thought is to have one of the experienced players run two PCs.

 

[SquareKnot]

I'm running the Starter Set adventure right now with a party of between 2 and 4, depending on who shows up for a given session. One player is experienced, the other 3 are new. I'm DMing and have played for years.

We're about 1/3 of the way through. I've had no problem just adjusting the number of monsters using a straight fraction over 4 (e.g. if 2 players, I cut monster numbers in half, rounding down). There are occasional boss monsters that can't be divided, but in those cases I just had the leader monster spend a single round gathering its weapons, protecting its treasure, or shouting orders to its troops. That was enough to give the PCs time to drop some spells and even things out. I also had an NPC give the party some potions of healing. The party prayed at the Shrine of Luck in Phandalin, so I gave the party a shared Inspiration token (one use by anyone in the party). With these little helps, so far several PC's have gone unconscious, but no one has permanently died and no TPKs yet.

 

[redrick]

Thanks for the suggestions. I guess the math isn't too complicated to just reduce the goblin count by 25%, and if nobody picks the cleric, I can start the party out with a few healing potions.

And if they still feel like they're getting hosed all the time, I'll encourage them to pick up a hireling / companion in town. 4e had a nice set of guidelines for adapting a monster stat-block to fill a missing role in the party while avoiding the complexity of having a player run multiple full-fledged PCs. If needed, I might try something like that as well. (A wizard or cleric who only knows a couple of spells, for instance.)

I'm just trying to keep everything on easy street so I've got some creative capacity left to improvise all the unexpected ideas of my players. Still not very good at that...

 

[Gilwen]

here's an encounter design article by Mike Mearls that you can also use to scale.
http://www.wizards.com/DnD/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20140707