Playing D&D with 3 people

[UngeheuerLich]

I believe the good thing in a 2 person party is that you can use any characters that you like.
Even when your marking mechanic isn´t use most of the time, you have decent standing power if you are a defender.
A striker has power to focus fire on a single monster, usually has no fear of beeing focus fired.
Leader... heal yourself and be happy...
Controller... usually you can find powers to greatly disable one or two monsters... should be enough... or you are facing minions a lot... happy times!

 

[Klaus]

Originally we had 5 people(including me the DM). 1 for each type. Controller defender etc. But 2 people dropped out. While the other 2 are dedicated to play and getting more people is out of the question.

My question is there any way I can supplement the missing roles? or should I just keep encounters at a fairly weak level?

Your two options are:

Find a companion character (basically, a character build like a monster) to fill the missing role (Controller -> Controller; Striker -> Brute, Artillery or Skirmisher; Defender -> Soldier; Leader -> Leader).

Tailor encounters to account for the missing role. No Controller? Don't use lots of minions.

 

[Greatwyrm]

If you really can't get any other players, I recommend the companion characters. My group can usually only get three players reliably, so we've been running with a companion leader (based on the Warlord) and striker (based on the Avenger) for quite a while.

They don't get all the bells and whistles of a full character. At the same time, they cover the basics and have minimal bookkeeping.

 

[BobTheNob]

I remember back in the 2nd ed days I ran a campaign with two players. We had a 7 man group and I invited two of them (the two most dedicated) to do a campaign on the side as a sort of experiment, as I was theorizing that we were getting bogged down.

That campaign is still lauded to this day by the three of us as the best campaign ever! It was just awesome. As a DM there was less to track, for players, far less downtime. Challenges were just more challenging because you didnt always have someone with the right skills. Overall, there was just a greater feeling that the guys playing were the heroes.

We didnt run it for long, it was just an experiment and it did alienate the other players a bit, but what a success we had. Let there be no doubt : small parties can be great fun.

So as an alternative, have you thought about scaling the adventures to a smaller party size?

 

[gjnave]

We have this problem all the time... the PHB3 has given, what i consider to be, one of the best gifts to the small party - the Hybrid.
This way you can cover two roles with one... ie. Defender, Leader.

As for how to run a published adventure: you need to just make the encounters easier - you can use the DM1 to do that.

Cheers!