Running a 5-10 Tier game

[Tyranthraxus]

Indeed. I tend to see a lot of panic situations.

A) Monsters and Parties meet each other
B) Players/characters stress over metagame concepts of Monster or in game issues with number/ type of monsters
C) Party member goes down
D) Accusations of 'this is too hard' or 'why did you do that'
E) Party starts wailing on monsters and taking them down fairly easy
F) Fight is resolved in parties favor with no casualties with same players who were panicing earlier saying 'that was easy' .

 

[kalani]

Thanks. Im just hoping it dosnt end badly for the group. They havnt worked too well as a team in the 1-4 games (feels a bit like an EPL club where there are lots of 'stars' on the team who all want to be the shiny ones). One druid who just spams moonbeam most battles.

One of my DM tricks to reduce difficulty is to ignore some of the monsters action choices. I can always use that action if the party is finding the encounter easier than intended.

For example: in 2-2 there is a flaming skull. When I ran this encounter, said monster could have easily wiped the party with a single fireball (of which it could cast multiple). Rather than TPKing the party, I simply had the flaming skull use its eye rays which it focus-fired. This made the flaming skull deadly to the point where the party struggled to defeat it without causing a TPK.

If you think that granting the Knight's allies an extra 1d4 to attack might be OP for the parties level/tactics, I would recommend one or more of the following strategies:

• Never activate the Knight's leadership ability
• Activate leadership (as it takes one of the knights actions they could have used to attack with), but try to keep no more than 0-2 of the Knight's allies in the AoE at any given time.

 

[Tyranthraxus]

Ill certainly play it by ear, as Ive stated in other threads Im not too good at judging party power until really Ive realised it but by then its too late.

As you can see below there is a LOT of Arcane power there (nearly half the party). Clerics are VERY thin on the ground in my Area. The Druid often dosnt heal, or heals under protest. He generally is either summoning a crap load of big birds or using Moonbeam. There are no Fighters

One odd thing about my area. There are 5 unique Rogue characters on my tables.. ALL of them are Assassins.

Wizard 5 (Arcane Caster)
Warlock 5 (Striker - Ranged)
Wizard 5 (Arcane Caster)
Assassin 5 (Striker - Melee)
Barbarian 5 (Light Infantry)
Druid 7
Assassin 5 (Rogue)

 

[kalani]

When it comes to judging party power - I tend to make adjustments to the encounter difficulty on the fly. For the most part, I make such adjustments in respect to NPC tactics, and whether they are ruthless with their various abilities, or on the opposite extreme, whether I play them "overconfident" and have them provoke more opportunity attacks.

An example on the difficult end: I had an encounter with 4 assassins in a sewer. Rather than take the predictable path whereby each assassin tried to sneak attack each round, I instead opted for them to focus fire on a single individual, making liberal use of ready and dodge actions. They also focused on splitting the party, which they did successfully when severely injured PCs fled to the outskirts of the encounter. At that point, I had them disengage, and pursue the injured PC - cornering them and KOing them in the process. They then took readied actions to attack any PCs that came to assist their unconscious ally.

I had no intention of TPKing the party (but was willing to let one or two PCs die if the party failed to adjust to the assassin's tactics), and was paying very close attention to the ebb and flow of combat. My goal was to make it a very tough encounter, but ultimately let the party prevail. To that end, I adjusted my tactics to be just slightly in the PCs favor while still making them sweat. By the end of the encounter, I had KO'd 3 of the 5 PCs at least once each (with one PC being KO'd three separate times).

 

[kalani]

Another tactic I use to slightly increase encounter difficulty, is to choose the race of NPC opponents. When I use this tactic, I usually opt for a race (or races) which have abilities that counter the parties primary tactics - such as dwarves vs. grapplers/shield masters; half-orcs for the relentless ability; or humans for their bonus feat (to which I have used things from sentinel, to the rarely chosen feats).

In your particular case, I would strongly recommend you use mage slayer and sentinel humans on occasion, which would force your PCs to adjust to these feats.