In PF, how would you optimize for soloing Rappan Athuk?

[upho]

It's possible, but at least in the author's circumstance, I find a high degree of implication that he's insisting/making an appeal to the DM that the characters shouldn't win this one. It sure sounds a lot to me like, "this is the end, don't let the players outplay you, Orcus is better because I said so just now."

Nah, it's obvious the author believed the stats he gave Team Orcus would be enough to make the encounter somewhere between "absolutely unbeatable" and "extremely difficult" depending on the number of temples destroyed, when run according to his instructions and the PF RAW without any GM fiat (at least against any group of six players and PCs he imagined playing RA in a real game).

I might be inclined to see his words more along the lines of your interpretation if there was any indication or leeway in them hinting that they could win.

How 'bout (my emphasis):

Spoiler: Author comments and encounter info indicating the PCs could win:

Show

Consequences: Now the fight begins! If the PCs lose, their souls are devoured and they are forever dead. If, on the other hand, they win, Orcus is banished from the Material Plane for 666 years. The GM should take care with this, as all priests of Orcus lose their ability to cast spells of 7th to 9th level for 666 years!

Special Note to the GM: If the PCs are to have any chance, they must have destroyed the evil temples on Levels 4, 9, and 14. If they have not,the avatar has his full powers and is absolutely unbeatable. For each shrine destroyed, the demon prince is weakened, and his ability to hold mortal form and fight the PCs is diminished. As you will note, only if all three shrines were destroyed is there really any hope of the PCs ridding the planet of this evil god.

Treasure: [there's a whole lot of it]

Experience: It is left to the individual GM to award experience for this encounter as there are too many variables. Needless to say, encountering Orcus, even if the PCs flee through the teleportation circle, should be worth enough experience to gain a level.

As a sidenote, again I find Orcus' CR 35, not to mention the certainty expressed by the author whenever referring to the power of Orcus as written, not just sadly comical and embarrassing, but also a bit confusing. Because while most of the other combat encounters in the adventure I've looked at are pretty straight-forward, they're decently well designed, and their CR and any comments he makes on their difficulty reasonable. And some of the opponents employ surprisingly unconventional yet smart tactics and/or weird and truly nasty shenanigans full of flavor, and the effectiveness is reflected in the encounter CR. In my mind this, along with his very reasonable advice regarding for example the more powerful "robbers" a party may face outside the dungeon and the above quote regarding xp for surviving Team Orcus, indicates he normally has a pretty good grip on CR and the actual power of various different combos of mechanics and tactics.

Of course, this is where communication comes into play. In a rules-heavy system, I tend to take an author's words far more literally than I would in other contexts because it's a far more efficient way to parse them.

FWIW, I tend to do the same. But in this case I don't find it problematic that the author sometimes mixes up his advice and instructions (but never actual rules elements like stat blocks) with descriptive comments not as strictly necessary to run this kind of extremely mechanics-driven dungeon crawl. I think most readers quickly learn to recognize which comments not to be taken literally by their slightly hyperbolic and/or ironic tone, and like me also find they actually often help get the general idea behind parts of the adventure across.

Which as I said before, I'm entirely in support of. What I'm not in support of is assuming you have all the angles figured to the point that a certain outcome is inevitable, and then trying to force your way to that outcome when you're wrong.

While I personally welcome a bit of well hidden GM fudging to say correct a mistake in preparations or save a fun/interesting part of the adventure from being ruined by fluke, I would probably be more hesitant if I hadn't also been spoiled with fantastic GMs who first learn their players' preferences and then fudge accordingly. So yeah, I would definitely leave a game if the GM turned out to have serious control issues they try hide behind mechanics tailored to render the players/PCs unable to meaningfully affect the narrative. And it certainly wouldn't help if the GM also resorted to obvious fiat because their lack of system-fu might otherwise cause them to lose control over their precious script.

Once again, I'm basing this off of the quote you did share.

I can definitely see how that quote might give the wrong impression when taken out of the specific context relevant in my reply to Quertus.

The CR assumption is just one of many indicators of someone who endorses this kind of game/table, as experience has taught me. So it's entirely possible I'm being unfair.

Well, more generally speaking, I also associate things such as the CR assumption, not to mention the inclusion of mechanics to resolve an event which is explicitly expected and intended to have only one outcome, with a type of adversarial/competitive GM style I've realized actually exists but which I've thankfully never experienced.

But I must say this doesn't seem to apply to RA, while it appears the adventure's general unfairness and deadliness are greatly exaggerated in a lot of the claims people make about it (including in this very thread). Yes the old-school style is certainly preserved, and it's intentionally designed to be difficult, with many opponents using far smarter, dirtier and deadlier tactics than they would in a typical modern adventure, but it's not even remotely as wacky or insanely lethal as say the original Tomb of Horrors. When run according to the instructions and GM advice it's AFAICT highly unlikely adventurers who are careful, methodical and suitably paranoid will accidentally run into any surprise TPKs, even if taking the most straight-forward route through the first five main levels.

And speaking of, now that I've had a more proper look at the first levels, I believe my earlier suspicions about RA being near impossible to solo were wrong. At least if the GM advice/guidelines are followed, treasure and xp awards remain as written and at least all lower level/cheaper magic items can be easily traded, also with slow or even half normal level progression I'm now pretty certain an optimized Master Summoner starting as early as 5th would be able to solo the entire adventure. AFAICT, such a build could have the combat effectiveness, wide range of skills/utility and staying power to quite reliably survive the first four main levels of the dungeon, which in turn should generate more than enough treasure and xp to improve the build's success chances to be at the very least on par with those of the sorta mid-op party of six the adventure seems to be designed for.