Smaller player group balance

[SSquirrel]

Ok, the standard party in 4E assume 5 players rather than the 3E standard of 4 players. Our group will just have the DM and 3 players, so we're trying to figure out what is a good balance. Our initial guess would be run us thru KotS starting as 3 3rd level characters, but I thought I'd run that by and see what people thought. Is 2 extra levels enough to keep the encounters the same? I think our DM would rather run the encounters as is instead of looking at each one and trying to figure out how many guys to pull out.

EDITage 57 of the DMG shows a chart with groups being 4 5 or 6 PCs. Extrapolating makes it look like the XP balance for 3 person groups 2 levels higher is about equal to a 5 person group encounter.

 

[Cheesepie]

I just ran the first few encounters of KotS last night (up to and including outside the kobold lair) for three players: a dwarf TWF ranger, an eladrian tactical warlord and a dragonborn S&B paladin. I scaled down the encounters to an appropriate level for 3 PCs and it went pretty well, considering we were still learning and getting used to the rules. I can post my modified encounters for you if you'd like!

 

[Yaezakura]

I DO think the best option would be for the DM to go in and remove 40% of the exp total from each encounter... however... I don't really know if level 3 would be enough. They've stressed how you're able to dip much lower into the level ranges for monsters and have them still pose a credible threat to the PCs. It may take a little work to figure out an appropriate PC level if you wanna run all the fights as-is.

 

[SSquirrel]

Ok I just finished extrapolating the chart and L3 3 man group says 450XP, 4th level 3 man group says 525. So if we keep encounters the same we may need to do 4th level characters. Here is the 3 man group chart:

1 300
2 375
3 450
4 525
5 600
6 750
7 900
8 1050
9 1200
10 1500
11 1800
12 2100
13 2400
14 3000
15 3600
16 4200
17 4800
18 6000
19 7200
20 8400
21 9600
22 12450
23 15300
24 18150
25 21000
26 27000
27 33000
28 39000
29 45000
30 61000

 

[Zelgadas]

And really, scaling encounters is pretty easy. If you want to scale all of the encounters down for 3 players, all you have to do is remove X number of XP from each encounter, based on the chart in the DMG, where X is roughly equal to two critters of the encounter's level (so 200 XP for a Level 1 encounter, 250 XP for Level 2, etc.).

Take the Irontooth encounter, for example. That's a Level 6 encounter for 5 PCs, which is going to be very close to impossible for 3 Level 1 characters. So you're probably going to want to remove about 500 XP worth of monsters from it. Since the XP value for each monster is listed right there on the stat block, it's pretty easy to see what you can nix. For example, you could get rid of two Kobold Skirmishers, one Dragonshield, and five minions. That leaves nine critters still in the fight, and each critter in the fight is still represented by at least one individual. The encounter as a whole is worth 750 XP, which is equivalent to a 6th Level encounter for 3 PCs, if you extrapolate the math on the DMG chart. It'll still be tough, but it'll be manageable, at least.