Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mengu" data-source="post: 5078623" data-attributes="member: 65726">It might seem like a party of 3 will be about 60% as efficient as a party of 5, but this is never the case. There is less synergy and less redundancy. And when 1 member goes down, they become a 2-man party instead of a party of 5 which only goes down to 4. So luck can make it swing very quickly in the smaller party's disfavor. (A bit off topic, but similar logic applies when running for a party of 6. An increase of 20% in monster XP budget does not seem quite sufficient.)For smaller parties, you definitely don't want to go too high with the challenges. Level+2 is probably as high as I would go for encounter. And for monsters they face, I'd say no higher than level+4. Others have already given good advice on what monster roles to use and not to use, so I won't go into that.If your group likes the higher challenge fights, one option might be to give an action point every encounter instead of milestone. Another option may be to give characters a once per day ability to refresh a daily power (akin to a salve of power).I personally prefer resource management challenges through easier but numerous encounters, over few big encounters.Last, but not least, I'm not sure if it's relevant here or not but a DMing tip... I've come close to TPK's before. If you want to avoid it, give the PC's a way out. Flight and surrender are two easy options, though depending on the group, these options get ignore a bit too much by players. But the heroic sacrifice of one character to allow the others to get away can sometimes work out. Rescue by a third party, or the appearance of yet a new nemesis for both sides of the fight, or some other event like the sudden flooding of a cave, or an explosion elsewhere, starting to bring down a building, that shakes up the encounter can be interesting, and can swing things around. When you're exploring how much the PC's can handle, you can sometimes overdo it, and having a contingency plan is always beneficial.</blockquote>

Verification