Adjusting encounters for more players

[Festivus]

I'll start off with I haven't DMed Pathfinder yet, but I want to give it a try. I am thinking of converting Red Hand of Doom for pathfinder. My biggest problem isn't converting the monsters, that seems easy enough, but scaling it up for 6 players (the adventure is designed for 4). It's also been a few years since I have DMed 3.x, so I am not as familiar as I used to be.

Is it best to add more monsters of roughly the players level (similar to how it's done in 4e), or scale the monsters up by giving them some more levels (which seems rather time consuming)? Or is this something totally situational? I looked at the encounter calculations and my eyes glassed over, not something I really want to deal with.

Does anyone have any recommendations? Alternatively, if someone has already done the trouble of scaling this up to 6 players for 3.x, I can do the pathfinder conversion of it... but my google fu is too weak to find such a document.

 

[Scott DeWar]

Trailblazer document by bad ax games is perfect for calculating what you need. I will try and find the link to it here on enworld and post it here, but it was about a year ago that it was posted.

You may have to google for it.

this what i get so far: websight

ok, found it!

the table

 

[Papa-DRB]

Over on the Paizo boards, one of the people (TheChozyn) posted this in the Kingmaker area:

===
Since Each mob is assigned a unit of XP the easy way to ramp up encounters for me is.

(Encounter XP/4)*# of Party Members.

For example: The book says 3 goblin commandos at 200xp and 5 reg goblins at 135xp

Total xp: 1275/4 is 318.75(what a part of four would recieve for this encounter)

Say you have 10 party members. For them to all get the individual xp that the encounter provides you'll need an encounter xp of 3187.5

At this point you can level up the goblins to bring the XP in line or just add more goblins.
===

-- david
Papa.DRB

 

[Grymar]

I tend to do the adjustments in a less scientific manner. Mainly, I increase the HPs of the creatures, from 50% of max to 75% or even 100%. This allows them to stick around longer in the fight without making them exponentially more lethal.

Adding levels/hit dice can also really affect their offensive output, so a moderately powerful creature suddenly becomes capable of one-shotting a PC.

 

[frankthedm]

More bodies has the added benefit of making sure everyone has a chance to kill something.

 

[Scott DeWar]

PAPA-drb has a method very close to what the trailblazer document has. with the tb doc you can design mixed creature and misxed el to equal a "budgeted" amount.

 

[ruemere]

In order to calculate encounter budget, I usually do the following:
(variation of Pathfinder encounter building system)

1. Decide overall challenge level and put down canonical encounter budget.

For example, average party level [APL] is 6, and I want to deliver super easy encounter at (APL - 2), i.e. CR 4. Canonical encounter budget is 1200xp.

2. Determine encounter budget and divide by four, then multiply by actual number of players.

For CR 4, encounter budget is 1200xp.
Let's say we have 7 players (my current party size).
So, the total encounter budget is
1200 / 4 * 7 = 2100.

3a. Purchase monsters as per standard method, however take care NOT to exceed canonical encounter budget or base CR.

In other words, we want our opposition to grow in numbers (i.e. horizontally) not in unit strength (i.e. not vertically). Two reasons for this approach:
- sometimes higher CR monster use abilities which cannot be properly countered by lower level parties
- economy of actions (noticeable at higher levels) - higher CR monsters have proportionally lower number of actions against greater groups, i.e. CR may become invalid due to overwhelming number of actions

3b. Be wary of situations where monsters can easily concentrate their attacks on a single, weaker PC target.

It is a good idea not to purchase additional ranged attackers or sneak attackers. Melee monsters are perfect for this, as they have the most limited means of doing that.

At this moment, I do this under OpenOffice Calc - a VBA macro for calculating overall encounter budget and deduction of xp as per monster CRs. Going by CR list, I can quickly assemble an interesting encounter.

Regards,
Ruemere

 

[Festivus]

Given I am converting / adjusting a premade adventure, often times I don't know if the encounter is overly "easy" or "moderate". I like the idea of dividing by 4 to get to the base budget xp amount per character, and then multiply by number of actual players.

BTW, I am sold on Trailblazer for at least scraping ideas. I just need to decide print or pdf version. Thank you for the pointer to that.

 

[Blackbrrd]

Just add additional monsters, especially when there is only a single monster.

(It's actually much easier to scale encounters in 3.5 than it is in 4e, coming from a 4e DM that has DM-ed the Red Hand of Doom in 3.5 with 7 players)

 

[Smeelbo]

5th/6th players worth 2 characters EACH

I have found in practice that the 5th and 6th players are really worth as much as 2 characters each. That is, I up the encounter by 50% for 5 player groups, or double for 6 player groups.

Because PathFinder characters are about as powerful as characters a level higher, I give 3.5 encounters a +1 level bonus to attacks, saves, and damage.

This gives me good results with a minimal amount of additional work.

Smeelbo