PlatinumVixen
2015-03-05, 12:09 AM
I've been running a large party, fairly high power campaign for a little while now. The high power is intentional, the largeness less so - to make a long story short word of mouth about my high-RP DM'ing spread among friends and friends of friends until the party ballooned from four to nine.
The party is progressing out of the early stages of the game now, and I'm planning on splitting the group into groups of three. I've implemented a homebrewed rule to prevent characters from being one shot unfairly - I borrowed 5e's Death save system and tacked it onto Pathfinder's negative health. With these two changes, though, I also plan to stop holding back a bit in bringing on THE PAIN.
While I haven't had too much trouble so far, I'm just curious as to whether anyone has any advice or ideas on challenging this party without being nightmarishly unfair whether split up or as a nine person group - I already know they don't necessarily enjoy campaigns where they have to reroll characters a lot and I've been asked not to simply give boss monsters more health.
I've allowed Spheres of Power and most Dreamscarred Press and Interjection Games material (this has worked shockingly well in balancing them). I've also allowed a heaping of 3.5e stuff. The party isn't allowed to take Psionics for plot reasons (big bad is an alien race of psionics and psionics are new to the world).
A quick run down of the party is below. I don't really want to go into deep details right now on the homebrew buffs applied or anything, I'm actually working on a campaign journal to post up whenever I get around to it. Everyone hovers around a tier 3 in practice and Vancian casters are rare in setting.
All Level 5 currently:
DSP Warder ('tank', enemy tripper)
3.5e Warlock with Sphere Casting (taking a couple of feats) (Touch damage specialist)
DSP Ravenlord Harbinger Refluffed as a "Spiderlord" (control, debuffing, flanking)
3.5e Beguiler with Sphere Casting (Control, general casting utility)
3.5e Dragon Shaman with homebrew buffs and Sphere casting (Breath Attack guy, buffer)
Sphere Paladin of Freedom (slapped together from 3.5e/PF) (Healer, boss stabber)
Initiator Hexblade (heavily homebrewed, inspired by Harbinger) (Debuffer, massive damage)
PF Ranger (multi-target attacker, stealth)
3.5e Scout/Rogue multiclass with a handcrossbow ("that's an absurd amount of precision damage", Runs-Around-The-Room-Screaming-Between-Attacks-Girl)
Even split up (as they've been split up before in their 'prologues') the party tends to do fairly tremendous amounts of damage and debuffs enemies into oblivion - they enjoy doing it, mind you. I'm just looking for creative ideas to challenge them in the future so they don't get bored.
Second issue:
The party, after finally meeting up and joining into a large group temporarily, just survived a horde of waves upon waves of undead of varying CR's without too much trouble, which was fine.
The only real issue we ran into was people killing things before the Dragon Shaman could reach them - he's understandably the one person in the party that's expressed frustration with doing less damage than the rest of the group and contributing less in combat, though he's had no troubles with the skill, social, and roleplaying side of things. This isn't surprising given the sordid history of the Dragon Shaman and we've done a great deal to try and buff the class; him going into Sphere Casting is just the latest buff given to him. He'd rather not abandon Dragon Shaman entirely because, as stated, the in setting RP for it has been fantastic. He's using a polearm right now, so he's at least been able to be good at AoO's and the like. Any advice on Sphere casting or making him awesome would be fantastic. (I do have a sheet of the alterations we made to Dragon Shaman to bring him up a few tiers around here somewhere but I don't have the Doc right now; it was mostly stuff like letting him choose to take dragon wings earlier and natural attacks and the like).
Third and finally, current plans for splitting the party are below. Don't know what commentary there could possibly be on it, but for completeness' sake it exists. The two people listed in bold are people I can't separate for any reason for IRL reasons, as keeping them together will make the experience more enjoyable for them. The three people who aren't bolded are the ones I'm free to move around.
Team 1:
Warder
Ranger
Beguiler
Team 2:
Hexblade Initiator
Scout/Rogue
Dragon Shaman
Team 3:
Warlock
Paladin
Harbinger
EDIT: To clarify, they are powerful statistically and in terms of dealing with problems. They are not powerful in the classic "Wizard presses his I Win problem" sense.
The party is progressing out of the early stages of the game now, and I'm planning on splitting the group into groups of three. I've implemented a homebrewed rule to prevent characters from being one shot unfairly - I borrowed 5e's Death save system and tacked it onto Pathfinder's negative health. With these two changes, though, I also plan to stop holding back a bit in bringing on THE PAIN.
While I haven't had too much trouble so far, I'm just curious as to whether anyone has any advice or ideas on challenging this party without being nightmarishly unfair whether split up or as a nine person group - I already know they don't necessarily enjoy campaigns where they have to reroll characters a lot and I've been asked not to simply give boss monsters more health.
I've allowed Spheres of Power and most Dreamscarred Press and Interjection Games material (this has worked shockingly well in balancing them). I've also allowed a heaping of 3.5e stuff. The party isn't allowed to take Psionics for plot reasons (big bad is an alien race of psionics and psionics are new to the world).
A quick run down of the party is below. I don't really want to go into deep details right now on the homebrew buffs applied or anything, I'm actually working on a campaign journal to post up whenever I get around to it. Everyone hovers around a tier 3 in practice and Vancian casters are rare in setting.
All Level 5 currently:
DSP Warder ('tank', enemy tripper)
3.5e Warlock with Sphere Casting (taking a couple of feats) (Touch damage specialist)
DSP Ravenlord Harbinger Refluffed as a "Spiderlord" (control, debuffing, flanking)
3.5e Beguiler with Sphere Casting (Control, general casting utility)
3.5e Dragon Shaman with homebrew buffs and Sphere casting (Breath Attack guy, buffer)
Sphere Paladin of Freedom (slapped together from 3.5e/PF) (Healer, boss stabber)
Initiator Hexblade (heavily homebrewed, inspired by Harbinger) (Debuffer, massive damage)
PF Ranger (multi-target attacker, stealth)
3.5e Scout/Rogue multiclass with a handcrossbow ("that's an absurd amount of precision damage", Runs-Around-The-Room-Screaming-Between-Attacks-Girl)
Even split up (as they've been split up before in their 'prologues') the party tends to do fairly tremendous amounts of damage and debuffs enemies into oblivion - they enjoy doing it, mind you. I'm just looking for creative ideas to challenge them in the future so they don't get bored.
Second issue:
The party, after finally meeting up and joining into a large group temporarily, just survived a horde of waves upon waves of undead of varying CR's without too much trouble, which was fine.
The only real issue we ran into was people killing things before the Dragon Shaman could reach them - he's understandably the one person in the party that's expressed frustration with doing less damage than the rest of the group and contributing less in combat, though he's had no troubles with the skill, social, and roleplaying side of things. This isn't surprising given the sordid history of the Dragon Shaman and we've done a great deal to try and buff the class; him going into Sphere Casting is just the latest buff given to him. He'd rather not abandon Dragon Shaman entirely because, as stated, the in setting RP for it has been fantastic. He's using a polearm right now, so he's at least been able to be good at AoO's and the like. Any advice on Sphere casting or making him awesome would be fantastic. (I do have a sheet of the alterations we made to Dragon Shaman to bring him up a few tiers around here somewhere but I don't have the Doc right now; it was mostly stuff like letting him choose to take dragon wings earlier and natural attacks and the like).
Third and finally, current plans for splitting the party are below. Don't know what commentary there could possibly be on it, but for completeness' sake it exists. The two people listed in bold are people I can't separate for any reason for IRL reasons, as keeping them together will make the experience more enjoyable for them. The three people who aren't bolded are the ones I'm free to move around.
Team 1:
Warder
Ranger
Beguiler
Team 2:
Hexblade Initiator
Scout/Rogue
Dragon Shaman
Team 3:
Warlock
Paladin
Harbinger
EDIT: To clarify, they are powerful statistically and in terms of dealing with problems. They are not powerful in the classic "Wizard presses his I Win problem" sense.