ZEITGEIST Encounter balance in Zeitgeist 4E

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Ran my first game of 4e and my first game of the Zeitgiest adventure path last week. My players had a great time and thought it was cool - as did I. I did have one issue though and am now wondering if I need to do anything about the encounter balance.

With a group of GM + 4 players and ran the first two encounters straight out of the book and they beat them pretty soundly. The first encounter is obviously a soft handed intro, but the 2nd battle is a climatic set piece. As the players were playing smart/rolled well I gave them favorable setups, but I don't think they were seriously taxed. People were holding dailies until some mild prompting.

However, for the next session I am getting a 5th player and am wondering if I will need to change the encounter balance. If it was moderate-easy to four players, will it be way to easy for 5? One of the players is an experienced 3.5/5th GM and he had was of the view that I might need to step it up slightly.

I wasn't consciously soft handing the monsters, and I like to think I am a fairly smart/tactical player. My players are generally reasonably optimised (e.g. 18/18 or 20 attack stat lineups) with the group comprising a sensibly built twin strike bow ranger, predator druid (who is a sharp tactician as well) and a less well optimised, but still solidly designed dragonborn inspiring warlord and a Goliath warden. The 5th will be rolling some sort of sorcerer or wizard.

 

[RangerWickett]

For the first adventure I stuck assiduously to 4e encounter guidelines (except when throwing a 20th level doom eladrin at them), because nothing sucks more than building a character, coming up with how you fit into a campaign, and then dying in the first adventure. Later on things get tougher.

The key question is, did the players feel like it was too easy and thus not fun?

Oh, and yeah, optimized PCs in 4th edition are leaps and bounds ahead of 'average' ones with primary stats at 16 and minimal synergy. If this is your first time running 4e, it's definitely the case where the party might be punching a level or 2 above their weight. If they get through the island and aren't fazed by taking the lighthouse, you might want to just bump all the NPC defenses, attack bonuses, and damage by 1.

And if that still doesn't work, bump by 2 starting with adventure 2.

 

[The_Furious_Puffin]

Did the lighthouse encounter - they insta-gibbed the rebel controller as he was coming up the ramp and then the solider couldn't hit with the glaive slide which prevented him tipping them ff the ramp. The Warlord went down due to forgetting to use inspirational healing, but overall the fight was probably to easy. My tactics were a bit bad (I should have been more careful with the controller), and I got a bit unlucky, but so did the players.

I had asked the players the all important are they having fun question and asked it again (I ask for feedback at the end of every session). They considered that the fight in the coal-tongue was good (which was done with 4 people), but the rest (done with 5) were a bit easy, so I will ramp up the difficulty a tad.

I don't like ramping up monster defenses as I think that goes against being a fan of characters. I think I'll move the encounter budgeting up to 6 players which by my reckoning is just adding 1 standard at level monster or 4 minions to an encounter which I can do quickly and easily.

 

[skotothalamos]

I've mostly been running straight out of the book with 6. The only modifications I've made is that we're using the gun rules where they so an extra 2[w] damage, so I've added a couple of dice to enemy shooters, and when a bomb is going off, I generally bump the damage so it averages around 100. Over 19 levels, we've had 6 or 7 deaths. Seems hazardous enough.

 

[eamon]

I'm currently running 5e, but I ran 4e before that, and from my experience - that's pretty much par for the course.

If your party is reasonably well optimized, and *especially* if encounters start mostly on their terms even numerically "deadly" encounters often seem trivial.

As levels rise, the difference between an optimized party and baselines grows further.

Personally, I'd follow Ranger Wickett's advice and make things more difficult, but just to mix things up; sometimes you can add additional monsters or add extra attacks to existing monsters instead of raising attacks/defenses, and I almost always raised damage (even post MM3).