Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="LightPhoenix" data-source="post: 5435475" data-attributes="member: 115">I only have three players, and the companion characters work fairly decently.  They actually work the opposite of how RangerWickett implied - they get a decent array of powers (one at-will, encounter, utility, racial, role-if-leader) but use vastly simplified math (and no feats).  You can, of course, scale them up if you need to, but I'm finding they work pretty well as is.  During combat I let the players run them (unless they choose something completely contrary to the character) and during role-play I control them and have them chime in.  They're very easy to update; maybe five minutes to update one, if that.Another option would be to remove enemies from combat, or alter them.  How to go about doing this will depend on your party composition.  You can simply remove two creatures to adjust the XP total, but personally I find that makes for some boring combat.  You could try lowering the overall level of the encounter, but you still run into action economy issues.  It's more finesse than hard and fast rules.You may also want to think about your encounter set-ups a little more.  For example, make sure the PCs can take advantage of surprise rounds.  A trick I like is to stagger enemy arrival - you reduce the actions/round without reducing the number of enemies.  Make sure to provide useful terrain as well.  Allow the PCs to stage ambushes by getting up high (a few free rounds of ranged attacks), or use Bluff/Diplomacy/Intimidate to get creatures to surrender or flee.  It requires more thoughtful set-up than normal.  Also, think about encounter flow - allow the characters extended rests more often, provide items/bonuses that improve with milestones, put more difficult battles in the beginning, etc.</blockquote>

Verification