D&D 5E Phandelver with 2 characters: goblins become kobolds?

[adam_antio]

Hi! As hinted in the title, I'm going to play with two long time friends. Unwittingly, they're going with a quite balanced party: a human urchin dex-based battlemaster and a half-elf soldier moon druid. So for a two men party, they've got stealth, exploration, healing, social skills, some utility spells, and a bunch of hps!

Now, after two home brewed campaigns with other groups, I wanted to give a try to the acclaimed Lost mine of Phandelver. Obviously I need to rework the combat encounters, and I was thinking, at least for the first chapter: would switching from goblins to kobolds, from wolves to giant weasels, and from bugbear to gnoll, halving each creature's CR, be enough to have a balanced adventure for two first level characters? What do you think? And maybe take out a goblin/kobold or two from every encounter?

We wanted to avoid having the characters to just start at higher levels because they have not played for years, and never with next, so the lesser we need them crunching numbers and managing resources, the better for them: they'll avoid the extra effort, and they will have less choices to make, minimizing the risk of making the bad ones.

Edit: I mean: I did the math myself and the switch seems fine, maybe the boss encounters will need more smoothing but everything else works ok... in theory. But I'm not really confident it will give a pleasant result so I'm asking you experts anyway!

 

[mlund]

I'm actually in a similar boat. I'm running the Lost Mines of Phandelver for a pair of friends. They happened to wind up both playing Rangers - a sharp shooter and a dual-wielder, pretty complementary stuff. Here's my big take-away from the initial experience: just lowering the CRs won't cut it, start at level 2. The additional features for both those classes at level 2 are very minor in terms of book-keeping.

The thing that kills you is the variance. With two characters at the table you throw less dice per round. Combined that with first-level hit-points and that's less throws of the dice to have things sort of average out. It's very easy to have a fight devolve into rocket-tag, where a single crit or a couple of lucky rolls just ends the encounter in TPK. Case in point, the initial ambush scene started out with the ambushing Goblins running in and scoring a Critical Hit and a Regular hit on the hapless dual-wielder. Even though I scaled down the goblinss damage as part of the adjustments, it left him a hair's length away from death and he and his companion missed horribly on their turns. Given average rolls next turn the whole thing should've ended in disaster. The dice turned around in a hurry, but the problem had made itself painfully apparent.

So my recommendation is to start their characters at level 2 and shave the CRs a bit from there. Mostly you're focusing on action economy, so cutting out a normal-strength monster from each encounter is a good starting point.

Good luck!
Marty Lund

 

[Zaran]

I wouldn't change them for kobolds. Kobolds have pack tactics and that's rough to have all the kobolds having advantage against your PCs.

 

[Dragoslav]

I ran a two-player one-shot session recently. I started them at level 2 for extra survivability and flexibility, and I also used average damage instead of rolling for monster damage to further reduce swinginess. I highly recommend the latter, especially since it speeds up combat. You can always switch to rolling once you're confident that the players can handle themselves.

 

[adam_antio]

[MENTION=50304]mlund[/MENTION] thanks a lor for the input! I ran a couple of test combats for that first encounter and still it seems that having 3-4 kobolds is not really an issue. Either the characters are so unlucky even if they were 6 they would have died, or even with one man down the other one should be able to ko at least 2-3 kobolds and then rescue his ally. That's probably thanks to their synergy! The fighter, having 16 in both dex and con, the dual wielder feat, and wearing a chain shirt, attacks with 2 rapiers, has an AC of 16 and 13 hps. That's usually 1 kobold per round and he can take at least two hits. OTOH, the druid can just obliterate the kobold menace with thunderwave. I think that what I'm saying is: even if in your game they were level 2 characters, and even if you nerfed the goblins, they still were "just" two rangers, and lacked the unrelenting, quasi-optimized firepower of a druid and a fighter. Not to say that even if they remain at 1 hp each, the just need a goodberry, a second wind, a short rest, and they're ready to go. So I'm not really sure there's the need to have them start at level 2 just to keep the goblins. Also, the druid gains a whole lot of options and new rules with level 2, especially if he goes down the moon path (which I think he will). I think at this point I'll just have them decide: higher level, tougher monsters, or level 1 against the kobolds.

[MENTION=56710]Zaran[/MENTION]: yeah, pack tactics is a pain in the ass! If only we had the stats for some other CR 1/8 evil humanoid... however, other CR 1/8 bad guys usually have higher stats than the kobolds', so I probably still like them more, since good positioning can hamper their main trait.

[MENTION=6690267]Dragoslav[/MENTION]: average damage for the monsters should greatly reduce the variance, thanks for the suggestion!