So I play weekly at a game store who has the rule of open tables up to a certain number. Normally our group is about 6-7 but lately it’s been 9 (at 9 the store will let us turn people away). This is with a weekly rotation of GMs.
my request of advice is for ways to increase the difficulty of fights for larger parties without falling doing unnecessary TPKs (some encounters I don’t mind making crazy hard if the story demands it, but not every fight needs to feel like playing dark souls).
I’m running a module for my week of running the game (normally I only home brew) and last week for what in my opinion is one of the toughest fights in the game they crushed it due to action economy. Most encounters I know you can just throw more minions at them but in a minionless fight (say the module calls for six specific enemies that spawn, adding more than one of the specifics could drastically change the CR vs. say a handfuls of inconveniences)
so here are some ideas I have had but am open for more:
1. Have all enemies pre buffed for say 4 rounds where they take half damage from everything (outside of a critical hit) this way the numbers stay the same but monsters are not dropping as fast.
2. Add crowd control traps (more for boss rooms) these are more for shutting down a player vs. actual damage. Like runes of hideous laughter for example
3. add minions even if module doesn’t call for them. Nothing insane but maybe some trash mobs to bait the bigger abilities
Give the monsters effectively Legendary actions to help even out the action economy. Have them act normally on their turn and then give them something cool and reactive to do at one or two more points in the initiative chain after a player has gone. Maybe it's another attack. Maybe it's a special movement that avoids provoking attacks. Maybe it is some special ability that de-buffs or changes the battlefield in some way. Just give them more things to do.
In general using twice as many monsters as you'd use for a 4-5 member party will work, though CR math will work even worse than usual because the way they value area damage generally assumes hitting 2 targets, and against a party of 9 you can very probably hit more.
However, to avoid horrific slog combats, I would likely go with monsters that are heavy on the area damage that are nominally slightly weaker. An advantage of a lot of monsters that have area damage is that they're often very frontloaded; if the PCs survive round 1 they'll probably win.
So I play weekly at a game store who has the rule of open tables up to a certain number. Normally our group is about 6-7 but lately it’s been 9 (at 9 the store will let us turn people away). This is with a weekly rotation of GMs.
my request of advice is for ways to increase the difficulty of fights for larger parties without falling doing unnecessary TPKs (some encounters I don’t mind making crazy hard if the story demands it, but not every fight needs to feel like playing dark souls).
I’m running a module for my week of running the game (normally I only home brew) and last week for what in my opinion is one of the toughest fights in the game they crushed it due to action economy. Most encounters I know you can just throw more minions at them but in a minionless fight (say the module calls for six specific enemies that spawn, adding more than one of the specifics could drastically change the CR vs. say a handfuls of inconveniences)
so here are some ideas I have had but am open for more:
1. Have all enemies pre buffed for say 4 rounds where they take half damage from everything (outside of a critical hit) this way the numbers stay the same but monsters are not dropping as fast.
2. Add crowd control traps (more for boss rooms) these are more for shutting down a player vs. actual damage. Like runes of hideous laughter for example
3. add minions even if module doesn’t call for them. Nothing insane but maybe some trash mobs to bait the bigger abilities
Give the monsters effectively Legendary actions to help even out the action economy. Have them act normally on their turn and then give them something cool and reactive to do at one or two more points in the initiative chain after a player has gone. Maybe it's another attack. Maybe it's a special movement that avoids provoking attacks. Maybe it is some special ability that de-buffs or changes the battlefield in some way. Just give them more things to do.
In general using twice as many monsters as you'd use for a 4-5 member party will work, though CR math will work even worse than usual because the way they value area damage generally assumes hitting 2 targets, and against a party of 9 you can very probably hit more.
However, to avoid horrific slog combats, I would likely go with monsters that are heavy on the area damage that are nominally slightly weaker. An advantage of a lot of monsters that have area damage is that they're often very frontloaded; if the PCs survive round 1 they'll probably win.