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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Journeymanmage" data-source="post: 4573900" data-attributes="member: 63814">Scaling the encounters back is good (best place to start)adding levels to the players also goodbut the issue now becomes: you only have so many bodies and have to few actions.(From a similar experience, we have 5 players but on a particular night may only have 2 or 3 players.)We are testing out "companion characters"."Companion characters" are 2ndary characters that are 1 level lower than the group of "Main characters".  Any time we have only 2 or 3 players, people break out their companion character and now the party has 4 to 6 members for the task at hand.  It gives you enough bodies and enough >actions< to handle an encounter.  The generic encounters work out fine.  The "Big" encounters may need to be scaled down a little as half your party is a lower level.  Companion characters are treated the same as your main characters, race/stats/classes, but they are lower level than the Main characters and they don't get treasure "aimed their way" ... they get "hand-me-downs" from the main characters or a similar arrangement (can't have the companions fall too far behind on the power curve).  Don't worry about xp for the Companion characters, they level up when the Main characters level up.Your Main characters are the "Stars of the show".  The Companion characters are not the focus of the adventures, they are "Supporting Cast".  They add "meat" to the party, they take up positions on the battle field to support the main characters.  They take some of the heat of the main characters, they lend their actions to the fight, but as less skilled and less geared than the main characters, they may have less of an impact.Modify idea as needed <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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