Help on scaling encounters for a DM

[Campbellk8105]

I am play in a campaign with a fairly large group of characters. There's 6 people playing, not including the DM and almost everyone has 2 characters.
We are all level 5, and our stats are fairly high. We use roll 10d10's, add 10 to the roll and pick the best 6. Myself and a few others are more optimizers so we are generally more powerful than the others in the group, but we still like to have everyone participate in encounters.

The members in our party are as followed:
Myself: warforged city brawler barbarian 1/ warlock 4(going clawlock) power attack, beast strike, eldritch claws for feats.
Myself: dragonbrow human Druid 5. Feats: Greenbound summoning, greensinger initiate, extra wildshape.
Person 1: doppelganger +4 LA/fighter 1
Person 1: human rogue 2/ barbarian 3
Person 2: human fighter 4/ sorcerer 1(going sorcerer 6 then swiftblade)
Person 2: human cleric 5
Person 3: human sorcerer 5(using quintessential books)
Person 3: human fighter5(using quintessential fighter for bows)
Person 4: Goliath +1 LA/ barbarian 4
Person 5: half celestial +4 LA/ bard 3
Person 5: human favored soul 5(VoP)

My friend who is only being a DM for his second time, (has played in many campaigns with us) is having trouble scaling encounters and fights against us. With the size and power level of the party, I'm not surprised.

A few random encounters we've faced during the night, my warforged has taken care of because he doesn't sleep. I killed a black bear in 2 hits the first night, and again, killed a brown bear in 2 hits the second night. The third night a Dire Bear comes in, and gets dropped in the first round by 3 people.

Any tips or ideas I can give him to help scale the party encounters up a bit without it being too ridiculous?

All books from 3.5 are allowed, we prefer to stay away from psionics though. If you have any other questions I will try to answer them as best as possible.

[Aegis013]

The biggest thing to consider is that you guys have 12 characters. That's 12 turns to an enemy's 1 turn. Considering a normal CR 5 encounter should be a reasonable fight for 4 lvl 5 characters, I think 3 CR 5 creatures would be similar, except from the sound of it you're playing with rather huge stats etc, so 3 CR 8's or 9's would probably be a good challenge.

If he wants to do single monsters, give them a Belt of Battle. And an X of Battle in every other slot too. Single enemy's are going to have to either be nigh impossible or shred the action economy to ribbons to be challenging.

[Madcrafter]

In my group we tend to play high powered, and usually each party member has the ability to solo monsters 5 or 6 CR above their level. Our DM has a difficult time keeping up as well sometimes, but a few things tend to work.
-Having multiple enemies that can engage/damage multiple people (eg. some alchemy beetles that exploded on death and caused chain reactions)
-More non-combat scenarios (traps etc.)
-Debilitating effects (spider webs, pits)
-Surprise rounds (especially when sleeping, having to get up takes a long time)
-Alternate objectives (protect your convoy, destroy the evil gem)
-Just using enemies that are more intelligent than bears (though bears are fairly smart) and use actual tactics. Casters can wreck people too if used effectively (they can disable multiple party members at once).

So there are ways to work around this. Any combination of the above would work, and as pointed out, try and make sure the action economy of each side is somewhat similar. Most of the above methods work by making sure that the PCs are slower to engage, and therefore their opponents get more time to organize and attack.

[Campbellk8105]

Well the first encounter we had to start the campaign was 1 level 10 captain and 170 level 1's. It was the 11 of us a few higher level NPC's, and about 60-70 commoners. We were all level 3 starting out. In the first round, right off the bat my Druid hit the captain with a Splinterbolt. 4d6+4(acorn of far travel) and IC from the bard. I rolled a natural 20 and did 48 points of damage, the bow fighter crit him once and shot him for a normal hit. The level 10 died there. Other fighting happened with the other characters attacking the level 1 mooks. Second round, I used summon natures ally II and got 3 wolves with the greenbound template on them. Wolves using entangle at will? I think so.

Anyways, we ended for the campaigns sake, fleeing the town so we could get on with the rest of the campaign. The DM was fairly awestruck since he wasn't expecting us to completely roll over most everything.

I was just curious on what the input would be if he should just bring more on the same CR creature or just bump them up and bring higher different CR monsters.

[Madcrafter]

I would think a mix of both. It seems that your characters don't have too much of an issue with the CR of the monsters (they don't have impenetrable DR or something) so they can be raised a bit, and having a few more so you don't kill them all immediately.

The two big things I would suggest to your DM is to play the enemies intelligently (including having them run away and hide if necessary) and throwing in more casters. Though that requires some more thinking on his part, hopefully he is up to the challenge.

[Campbellk8105]

Yea I suggested this all to him, he said he should have everything ready and an actual challenge come next Saturday.