I would recommend exploring the tactics of the hostile creatures. If the party has one tank who ritualistically runs to the foreground and keeps the enemy from getting to the spellcasters, then have the enemy circumvent this by attacking from two sides - committing their chaff troops to draw the warforged to one side, then launching their proper assault from the other side.
What are they typically facing? up the intelligence of their foes to justify clever attacks. Have a group of assassins find a mimic in a dungeon they know the party is approaching, and then lie in wait until the mimic has latched onto whoever is taking point (make the mimic a door, so the artificer is likely to be the first one through). as soon as the artificer is tied up, the assassins make their move to attack the party.
Another option is to have them attacked by clever bandits - give the bandits numbers and intellect (perhaps have a super-smart bandit leader as a recurring enemy) and have them dig a pit trap off the side of the road, then fire arrows from that side. as soon as the tank falls in the pit, launch the attack from the other side.
Add foes that don't care for tanks - gelatinous cubes, shambling mounds - all of which can simply grapple the tank and keep dealing with everyone else as well whilst killing the tank.
Give the enemy reserves. Initiative matters most in the first round, and after that it's just a sequence. If you have powerful enemies who are hidden or out of sight, then the party can have their opening high-initiative round and then, immediately after they have had their stuff, an enemy can appear and attack - it might as well have had the highest initiative!
To make the encounters less of a slug-fest, make other things happen - the place you're fighting on is slowly sliding off a cliff, and the enemy is between you and the way out - rooms keep falling away behind you. Someone important has been taken hostage and is being used as a meat shield. A giant has kidnapped the population of a village and, in a show of stupid-cleverness, fashioned them into a vest of living armour to stop people trying to kill him (as in, tied to his waistcoat, not weird flesh-melding horror).
A simple way to increase the difficulty is to make the encounters for your next game as if the party are 1 level higher than they are. Give them a medium, a hard and a deadly and see how they do. If they brush it off again, treat them as 2 levels higher next game. If one player seems weaker than the others, don't up their "encounter level", and it should balance out. Keep upping the difficulty and eventually they will start to sweat. If you think you've gone too far then fudge the dice to make it a close win for them and make a note that they need just a little less than that!
First of all as an aside I find none of my players ever consider int a dump stat, but in part that’s because I make them roleplay to there intelligence stat, want to come up with some intricate plan to ambush the bad guy, sorry none of you are able to do that because your int is too low, want to interrogate the bad guy and get to the really key questions, sorry int is too low to really know what you should ask. Another thing I do is make players roll an int check to see if they remember some detail they should know, what was the NPC's name is the best one, or, what happened 5 days ago in the tavern with that thing.
Anyway I am currently running an 8 player campaign and there are a couple of things I really suggest the moment the party goes over 4.
Always switch to milestone leveling, trying to manage the logistics of tracking what everyone has earnt in XP becomes far to much of a book keeping exercise. If you instead focus on leveling up the whole party based on the story vs how they roleplay/secrets they find/ monsters they kill then you can control things far easier and, if you throw some encounters that you think where far too easy, it’s all ok it doesn't feel like you gave them a pass to the next level, especially as you judge your players actual ability.
Enemy initiative, you are going to have multiples of the same creature, standard RAW has you roll once for each type of enemy but in a large party your players get to do much more and react more before it comes back to your creatures, especially if they are all the same type. So I auto split my enemy’s initiative into 2 or even 3, 10 goblins, I roll twice with 5 each applying each roll etc. This makes your party think more strategically, they could swing and attack the goblins here, but, there is another set that are about to have another go so maybe the barbarian should run over and give a potion to that unconscious player to get them standing again so they are not killed by the 2 goblins nearby.
Enemy Tactics, split the party, I don't mean in terms of separating them totally but, do no be afraid to have some enemy's in reserve, maybe sneaking round the flank in a forest, or lying in wait for the party to pass them in the underdark. Draw your parties Melee warriors forwards, ideally out of 30 foot range of there allies, meaning a simple move and potion is not possible and then attack the rear/mid line. Force your players to think about how they position themselves and then when they start having someone sit deep to protect the squishies, just go full frontal for a while. :).
Don't be afraid to send enemies in waves. Your party deal with 5 goblins, well, have another 6 swing through soon after, then 5, then 7. Also feel free to interrupt short rests if it makes narrative sense. Especially if they have left a slew of bodies around behind them.
Do not assume encounters will take longer but, assume you as a DM will be able to achieve less in your enemies turn. One of the reasons I break up my enemies initiative is because I found very quickly that 8 players each doing a thing before you get to do anything with any of your enemies means your planned out tactics when building an encounter get thrown out the window, that bug bear who was going to be the fulcrum of your attack, dies before it even gets to swing a flail, impaled by arrows, spells and swords. The dragon you expected to get off 3 breath attacks before he died, is dead in 2 rounds despite having a couple of lizard warriors backing it up.
Don't use the CR tables to design your encounters, from my experience you pretty much have to set everything as deadly to have a hope of damaging the party let alone putting them in real danger and once you get to deadly it's hard to judge if you are too deadly or not deadly enough. I went for a really straightforward approach to gauge my players level of survivability, I used Owl bears you can use anything that is a CR3 ish monster.
My party at level 2 where travelling through a forest as the players travelled deeper into the forest they got more and more into owl bear habitat. So over the course of several days I attacked them. Encounter 1 Day 1 2 owl bears, Encounter 2 Day 2 3 Owl bears, encounter 3 day 3, 4 owl bears and a young owl bear I home brewed stats for (effectively 4 and 3/4 owl bears). This got me to a point that I could gauge roughly at level 2 my players can handle this level of threat. But, I didn't have to worry about grinding my players xp because I am doing Milestone.
Now that is all combat but my games are 55-60% roleplay. When letting your players roleplay between themselves give them space to breathe and accept that you may well be sat back observing a lot more roleplay between them, especially early on as they figure each other out, talk through plans and approaches etc and try and resist the urge to push the narrative forward unless they seem to be repeating the same things over and over. You need to also be a lot more aware of people being left out in these moment's with 8 players I find it best to just have an order written down of all the player names on a piece of paper that at first I was constantly just referring to as the players where all brand new to me, although not so much each other. Just making a mental note, has that player said anything in the past 10 mins, do I need to check in on them. Over time the list has become a mental checklist and if 2 people are having a long conversation I will track time and make sure that while that was going on I found out if anyone wanted to do anything else. NPC roleplay this is even more necessary, it is easy to be sucked into 15 minutes of gameplay interacting with 2-3 members of a large party, but, make sure you give everyone a chance to describe what they are doing, and make sure you tell them great we will come back to you after dealing with this, and then do.
With 8 players I have found the party splits, far more than I expected. Players will opt to take a short rest and 3-4 players, feeling up to continuing will scout ahead, in this case it is really important to track time, at first I was finding when I came to write up my DM notes, that in the moment multiple events that I though all happened at the same time, in reality could not have because of the short distances travelled, the combat only lasting 12 seconds etc. The 3 people scouting forward should have got much further, not as far, in the time it took the other characters to rest up. Now none of that has impacted my players enjoyment, but, on a couple of occasions early on it meant they had a slightly easier time of things.
Finally note taking and player creation, so I have 8 players, each with an intricate backstory to maintain and develop, 2 of my players made that slightly easier by deciding to be twin tabaxi, from another continent on a journey of discovery. But that left me 6 players who all came up with the bare bones of very good story's that I could then take, and shape and make something epic. But, getting all of that played out over the next 3-4 years os going to take time so I had to make those stories compatible. That meant workig with my players to tweak things a bit. For instance the Warlock, you want a water plane patron, well, over here I have a minotaur and a Satyr who's stories will take place in the Feywild at some point so, can you work with me that I will take your great idea of some water based patron, but, they are not water plane bound. player was happy, I now have 3 player stories that will be resolved during an extended stay in the Fey Wild, probably covering levels 7-10. But player note taking, make sure one player is taking good notes, and when they refer to those notes while another player is engaging in a scene allow them to remind the player of stuff they had forgotten but there character would know (or like I sometimes do make them roll an int check :)).
Finally explain to your players that the game will run slower, you will probably achieve about 50% less then a party of 3-4, this is ok, but be prepared and don't be concerned if you find your single planned session stretching out over 3-4, but as mentioned above if this happens, keep a close track of game time.
My game is 6 or 7 players depending on the week, and in order to not rehash the other advice above which is great, I'll tell you what I do that hasn't been covered yet.
1. I almost always use Max HP. It prolongs combat a little bit but prevents the monsters from being wiped entirely before they get to act.
2. Use Action-Oriented Monsters. Watch this video from Matt Colville's Running the Game series. The basic idea is that you have an action economy problem, and while one way to make up for it is by using more monsters, a different (and IMO better) way to make up for it is to design monsters that help you balance your side of the action economy equation. They're basically legendary actions, but instead of "attack again", these actions are designed to interact with terrain and minions. I'd also recommend occasionally including options to attack/move. Examples
An Earth Elemental takes a legendary action to stomp the ground and cause erupting earth in a 15' radius, forcing a DEX save for bludgeoning damage/prone and turning the radius into difficult terrain.
A Maurezhi's Raise Ghast feature becomes a legendary action instead of a full action, allowing it to reanimate a minion without sacrificing its attacks on its turn
A Harpy takes a legendary action to make one claw attack and immediately fly up to half its speed without provoking opportunity attacks
Designing your monsters in this way allows you to cut back on the number of monsters in favor of more tactically interesting encounters. It also solves the problem of "how do I throw a monster at the party with a big enough HP pool and high enough damage output to engage/threaten the barbarian, but that won't accidentally one-shot the wizard?"
Definitely use many enemies rather than just one or two.
Count how many actions the PC party is getting per round, and try to match that with enemy actions.
The idea of splitting enemies up on multiple initiatives is also a good way to spread out the actions to prevent the PCs scripting their actions in a particular order.
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I would recommend exploring the tactics of the hostile creatures. If the party has one tank who ritualistically runs to the foreground and keeps the enemy from getting to the spellcasters, then have the enemy circumvent this by attacking from two sides - committing their chaff troops to draw the warforged to one side, then launching their proper assault from the other side.
What are they typically facing? up the intelligence of their foes to justify clever attacks. Have a group of assassins find a mimic in a dungeon they know the party is approaching, and then lie in wait until the mimic has latched onto whoever is taking point (make the mimic a door, so the artificer is likely to be the first one through). as soon as the artificer is tied up, the assassins make their move to attack the party.
Another option is to have them attacked by clever bandits - give the bandits numbers and intellect (perhaps have a super-smart bandit leader as a recurring enemy) and have them dig a pit trap off the side of the road, then fire arrows from that side. as soon as the tank falls in the pit, launch the attack from the other side.
Add foes that don't care for tanks - gelatinous cubes, shambling mounds - all of which can simply grapple the tank and keep dealing with everyone else as well whilst killing the tank.
Give the enemy reserves. Initiative matters most in the first round, and after that it's just a sequence. If you have powerful enemies who are hidden or out of sight, then the party can have their opening high-initiative round and then, immediately after they have had their stuff, an enemy can appear and attack - it might as well have had the highest initiative!
To make the encounters less of a slug-fest, make other things happen - the place you're fighting on is slowly sliding off a cliff, and the enemy is between you and the way out - rooms keep falling away behind you. Someone important has been taken hostage and is being used as a meat shield. A giant has kidnapped the population of a village and, in a show of stupid-cleverness, fashioned them into a vest of living armour to stop people trying to kill him (as in, tied to his waistcoat, not weird flesh-melding horror).
A simple way to increase the difficulty is to make the encounters for your next game as if the party are 1 level higher than they are. Give them a medium, a hard and a deadly and see how they do. If they brush it off again, treat them as 2 levels higher next game. If one player seems weaker than the others, don't up their "encounter level", and it should balance out. Keep upping the difficulty and eventually they will start to sweat. If you think you've gone too far then fudge the dice to make it a close win for them and make a note that they need just a little less than that!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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First of all as an aside I find none of my players ever consider int a dump stat, but in part that’s because I make them roleplay to there intelligence stat, want to come up with some intricate plan to ambush the bad guy, sorry none of you are able to do that because your int is too low, want to interrogate the bad guy and get to the really key questions, sorry int is too low to really know what you should ask. Another thing I do is make players roll an int check to see if they remember some detail they should know, what was the NPC's name is the best one, or, what happened 5 days ago in the tavern with that thing.
Anyway I am currently running an 8 player campaign and there are a couple of things I really suggest the moment the party goes over 4.
Always switch to milestone leveling, trying to manage the logistics of tracking what everyone has earnt in XP becomes far to much of a book keeping exercise. If you instead focus on leveling up the whole party based on the story vs how they roleplay/secrets they find/ monsters they kill then you can control things far easier and, if you throw some encounters that you think where far too easy, it’s all ok it doesn't feel like you gave them a pass to the next level, especially as you judge your players actual ability.
Enemy initiative, you are going to have multiples of the same creature, standard RAW has you roll once for each type of enemy but in a large party your players get to do much more and react more before it comes back to your creatures, especially if they are all the same type. So I auto split my enemy’s initiative into 2 or even 3, 10 goblins, I roll twice with 5 each applying each roll etc. This makes your party think more strategically, they could swing and attack the goblins here, but, there is another set that are about to have another go so maybe the barbarian should run over and give a potion to that unconscious player to get them standing again so they are not killed by the 2 goblins nearby.
Enemy Tactics, split the party, I don't mean in terms of separating them totally but, do no be afraid to have some enemy's in reserve, maybe sneaking round the flank in a forest, or lying in wait for the party to pass them in the underdark. Draw your parties Melee warriors forwards, ideally out of 30 foot range of there allies, meaning a simple move and potion is not possible and then attack the rear/mid line. Force your players to think about how they position themselves and then when they start having someone sit deep to protect the squishies, just go full frontal for a while. :).
Don't be afraid to send enemies in waves. Your party deal with 5 goblins, well, have another 6 swing through soon after, then 5, then 7. Also feel free to interrupt short rests if it makes narrative sense. Especially if they have left a slew of bodies around behind them.
Do not assume encounters will take longer but, assume you as a DM will be able to achieve less in your enemies turn. One of the reasons I break up my enemies initiative is because I found very quickly that 8 players each doing a thing before you get to do anything with any of your enemies means your planned out tactics when building an encounter get thrown out the window, that bug bear who was going to be the fulcrum of your attack, dies before it even gets to swing a flail, impaled by arrows, spells and swords. The dragon you expected to get off 3 breath attacks before he died, is dead in 2 rounds despite having a couple of lizard warriors backing it up.
Don't use the CR tables to design your encounters, from my experience you pretty much have to set everything as deadly to have a hope of damaging the party let alone putting them in real danger and once you get to deadly it's hard to judge if you are too deadly or not deadly enough. I went for a really straightforward approach to gauge my players level of survivability, I used Owl bears you can use anything that is a CR3 ish monster.
My party at level 2 where travelling through a forest as the players travelled deeper into the forest they got more and more into owl bear habitat. So over the course of several days I attacked them. Encounter 1 Day 1 2 owl bears, Encounter 2 Day 2 3 Owl bears, encounter 3 day 3, 4 owl bears and a young owl bear I home brewed stats for (effectively 4 and 3/4 owl bears). This got me to a point that I could gauge roughly at level 2 my players can handle this level of threat. But, I didn't have to worry about grinding my players xp because I am doing Milestone.
Now that is all combat but my games are 55-60% roleplay. When letting your players roleplay between themselves give them space to breathe and accept that you may well be sat back observing a lot more roleplay between them, especially early on as they figure each other out, talk through plans and approaches etc and try and resist the urge to push the narrative forward unless they seem to be repeating the same things over and over. You need to also be a lot more aware of people being left out in these moment's with 8 players I find it best to just have an order written down of all the player names on a piece of paper that at first I was constantly just referring to as the players where all brand new to me, although not so much each other. Just making a mental note, has that player said anything in the past 10 mins, do I need to check in on them. Over time the list has become a mental checklist and if 2 people are having a long conversation I will track time and make sure that while that was going on I found out if anyone wanted to do anything else. NPC roleplay this is even more necessary, it is easy to be sucked into 15 minutes of gameplay interacting with 2-3 members of a large party, but, make sure you give everyone a chance to describe what they are doing, and make sure you tell them great we will come back to you after dealing with this, and then do.
With 8 players I have found the party splits, far more than I expected. Players will opt to take a short rest and 3-4 players, feeling up to continuing will scout ahead, in this case it is really important to track time, at first I was finding when I came to write up my DM notes, that in the moment multiple events that I though all happened at the same time, in reality could not have because of the short distances travelled, the combat only lasting 12 seconds etc. The 3 people scouting forward should have got much further, not as far, in the time it took the other characters to rest up. Now none of that has impacted my players enjoyment, but, on a couple of occasions early on it meant they had a slightly easier time of things.
Finally note taking and player creation, so I have 8 players, each with an intricate backstory to maintain and develop, 2 of my players made that slightly easier by deciding to be twin tabaxi, from another continent on a journey of discovery. But that left me 6 players who all came up with the bare bones of very good story's that I could then take, and shape and make something epic. But, getting all of that played out over the next 3-4 years os going to take time so I had to make those stories compatible. That meant workig with my players to tweak things a bit. For instance the Warlock, you want a water plane patron, well, over here I have a minotaur and a Satyr who's stories will take place in the Feywild at some point so, can you work with me that I will take your great idea of some water based patron, but, they are not water plane bound. player was happy, I now have 3 player stories that will be resolved during an extended stay in the Fey Wild, probably covering levels 7-10. But player note taking, make sure one player is taking good notes, and when they refer to those notes while another player is engaging in a scene allow them to remind the player of stuff they had forgotten but there character would know (or like I sometimes do make them roll an int check :)).
Finally explain to your players that the game will run slower, you will probably achieve about 50% less then a party of 3-4, this is ok, but be prepared and don't be concerned if you find your single planned session stretching out over 3-4, but as mentioned above if this happens, keep a close track of game time.
Hope this helps.
My game is 6 or 7 players depending on the week, and in order to not rehash the other advice above which is great, I'll tell you what I do that hasn't been covered yet.
1. I almost always use Max HP. It prolongs combat a little bit but prevents the monsters from being wiped entirely before they get to act.
2. Use Action-Oriented Monsters. Watch this video from Matt Colville's Running the Game series. The basic idea is that you have an action economy problem, and while one way to make up for it is by using more monsters, a different (and IMO better) way to make up for it is to design monsters that help you balance your side of the action economy equation. They're basically legendary actions, but instead of "attack again", these actions are designed to interact with terrain and minions. I'd also recommend occasionally including options to attack/move. Examples
Designing your monsters in this way allows you to cut back on the number of monsters in favor of more tactically interesting encounters. It also solves the problem of "how do I throw a monster at the party with a big enough HP pool and high enough damage output to engage/threaten the barbarian, but that won't accidentally one-shot the wizard?"
"To die would be an awfully big adventure"
Definitely use many enemies rather than just one or two.
Count how many actions the PC party is getting per round, and try to match that with enemy actions.
The idea of splitting enemies up on multiple initiatives is also a good way to spread out the actions to prevent the PCs scripting their actions in a particular order.