D&D 5E Adjusting difficulty of Dragon of Icespire Peak based on number of PCs

[alienux]

My 13 year old son has taken a liking to the idea of being a DM.

He wanted to fully run Icespire Peak by himself for me as a solo PC with a sidekick that he controls, so we started late last week and have run a couple of the quests. We ran 2 of the starter quests so far, and these quests would be deadly for a group of 4 1st or 2nd level characters, but we're running them with my PC and my son's DM run sidekick, making them much more deadly than even that.

I read somewhere that the adventure book contains info on how to adjust the encounters based on the number of players, but he can't find anything like that in the book. Because my son wants to run it all on his own without help, I don't want to read through the adventure book for him.

My question is, does the adventure actually contain a section like this, and if so, where is it in the book? Again, I don't want to look at the book as he really wants to do it all on his own, but I could at least point him to the right page if a section like this does exist.

 

[Prakriti]

My question is, does the adventure actually contain a section like this, and if so, where is it in the book?

Some of the quests have a table telling you how to adjust the encounters based on the number of PCs in the party (see, for example, p. 38 of Dragon of Icespire Peak). Most of the times, however, it's written in the location text, as on p. 41 for area T5: "The number of [monsters] present equals the number of characters in the party, including sidekicks (maximum three [monsters])."

So it's not one section of the book, it's scattered throughout the text. Any time a monster is mentioned in a quest, pretty much, the book will tell you how many there are based on the number of PCs.

 

[alienux]

Thanks! I'll give him those examples so he knows what to look for.