CRs Hps and a LOT of players

[Valkesh]

Well i have an issue with my party, for several reasons i have found myself GMing a group of 9 players. Ive gotten them organized already (took me a whyle) and found ways to make them respect roleplay to a certain extent. The thing is, with 9 players i find myself having to place encounters more and more often to keep the gameplay session interesting so here is my issue:
If the monster can be damaged, they will do a bucketload of it to him in a round, if he cannot they will tear him apart with spells, if neither work, they will trip sunder disarm and bull rush it into submission (and with a barbarian, a fighter and a monk with a bard a cleric and a druid giving stackalicius goodness all the time, they get pretty massive bonuses). I find that the legal amount of HPs is not nearly enough for a challenging encouter
So, last session my group of 9 lvl 8 players made short work of a CR 15 encounter. I could just pump up the CR, but the thing is, the XP and Treasure for these encounters would be too far up the scale. The other thing is, if the encounter is challenging to them, the monster/npc/whatever will be close to unhittable and kill of anyone who gets near in one shot.
How can i evade this all-or-nothing scenario on monsters?

 

[haiiro]

Having more than one enemy helps -- the dogpile effect is lessened, and their focus is divided. Multiple foes that do different things, and use sound tactics, will also help (not that you're not using tactics, I'm just mentioning it). Cranking up the HP is fine, too, as you suggested.

Strange terrain, poison and other factors can help keep things interesting. Having a couple of combats close together will also wear down their short term resources (spells, potions, etc.) and make the second fight more challenging.

 

[Valkesh]

Aye, placing more things to hit would help, the thing is that running a big encounter when there are already 9pc plus cohorts/summons/controlled undeads is more of a hassle than it is worth.
Using terrain is something i didnt consider though. But just so you get an idea of how good this party is at what it does: A Fighter 7/dwarven defender 7 with full adamantine armor blocking theyr path out of a room the exact size of a fireball blast. The dwarven defender stands with AC 32 on a trigger that blasts the party with a 5d6 fireball every round. Whyle they are crowding around the hall trying to land a few good blows on the Defender, one of theyr party is actually a doppleganger rogue 1 assasin 8 waiting for his chance to do a death attack and start casting Stop Hear (from BoVD). Noone even died on this encounter.

 

[dcollins]

This should be doable. Keep in mind that all the classic 1st Ed. AD&D modules were in fact originally written for groups of 8-10 players in the first place.

A first move is to place groups of creatures (as large or larger than the party?). If they're a bunch of all the same type it should be manageable for you as DM (most complexity is in hands of the PCs to deal with). Also, throw some spellcasters at them, one or more (twins, triplets?) with a bunch of dastardly spells and a bunch of same-type mooks for guards.

A second thing is to follow AD&D and have a lot of save-or-die traps all over the place, that'll reduce your party to a more hady size.

 

[haiiro]

Aye, placing more things to hit would help, the thing is that running a big encounter when there are already 9pc plus cohorts/summons/controlled undeads is more of a hassle than it is worth.

If you aren't already, try using little tricks to speed up combat: initiative cards, time limits, grouped init for "mook" monsters, rolling damage dice with to-hit dice, etc.

 

[Spatula]

Keep using appropriate-level CR encounters (like you said, if you use higher and higher CR monsters, they will have abilities the party can't handle), but give them double or triple their normal max HP. That should allow them to stick around for more than a round.

 

[Lord Pendragon]

My last campaign was with a large party. I found that if I used monsters of a higher CR, the party would be crushed. If I wasn't careful, the higher CR critter would have an ability or quality that the PCs couldn't deal with, not being a high-enough level to have gained the necessary countermeasure.

So instead, I simply doubled the number of creatures for any encounter. If 4 3rd-level barbarians made up an equivalent CR encounter, there were 8. If one mature adult red dragon was the right challenge level, the PCs faced two of them. And so on and so forth. That way the PCs never encountered an ability that was beyond their ability to deal with, but couldn't just plow through the encounter, either.

XP should work out fine. The xp award is doubled, but there are twice as many PCs to divide it amongst.

One thing to keep in mind, though, that took me a while to realize, is that a big problem with large parties is access. So I eventually made all my dungeon rooms and corridors double-sized (10' if it was originally 5', 20' if it was 10', etc. etc.) to allow the PCs and critters (of which there would be many) room to move.

 

[Shin Okada]

Try encounters which enemy creatures appear from multiple different direction at once. Also try some encounter involving "new combatants" appear in the 2nd or later round of a combat. Those changes will lessen the fire-power concentration of PC party and will make a combat more tactical and interesting.

 

[Korak]

I have to whole-heartedly agree with the suggestions to increase the number of combatants. I particularly like Lord Pendragon's suggestion of doubling. The problem boils down to combat actions. When your PCs outnumber you in combat actions 8 to 1 or 8 to 2... or even just 8 to 5, you are at a significant tactical disadvantage even if your one or two actions are more powerful than the pcs.

 

[Christian]

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