Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Entropicurity 10-24-07, 02:07 PM	Hello all! Alright, went through a bunch of resources and one of my favorite so far is the Craft:Adventure stuff provided by RPGA. Though, a while ago I was trying to figure out how to determine what would be challenging for smaller groups of players and someone gave me the following table for determining effective CR: 2 Players = (APL-4 = CR) 3 Players = (APL-2 = CR) 4 Players = (APL = CR) 5 Players = (APL+2 = CR) 6 Players = (APL+4 = CR) Where APL is Average Player Level and CR is Challenge Rating Now the Craft:Adventure doesn't put this into account. In fact it uses a time table to determine how many encounters can fit into a single session and then uses the sum of the average level of all the characters in the party and divides it by the time alloted or encounters put together. Now this is GREAT for a group of 4 players, but if we go to 6 players (my current campaign) I find that if I am going to give them any experience at all I would have to eliminate entire encounters and add the sum of entire encounters together to get the encounters to be of any challenge to the players. So the question I have is as follows and I'll use an example to help out. Lets say I have 6 level 3 players. Now, they all have 32 points put into stats, so I usually increase their ECL by 1 for the porpose of determining CR. SO thats a total of 24 "Reserve." According to Craft Adventure you "should" have about 6 encounters plus 1 "bonus" in case game runs short. This gives an average encounter level of 4.....which is equal to the average player level. Thats effectively 4 levels below the level of "average" or "challenging" for 6 players. So concidering I never really go over 2 levels above the average player level for NPCs in encounters I would probably have teams of NPC's that summed up to +4 APL. So the question now is should I toss the timetable out the window and stick with just the APL as my limiter, or should I come up with a new equation all together for my adventures andkeeping them within my 200minute timeframe? OR Should I take the Sum of the 6 players levels, divide that by 4 and treat that as the "Level" in which to base time and number of encounters off of? Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated
pres_man 10-24-07, 02:35 PM	Ah, yeah whatever. Usually when you increase the number of players, it is often better to increase the number of monsters, not the level of the monsters. For one thing, 1 powerful monster versus 6 PCs is going to quickly get taken out (6-1 number of actions). But the monster may just randomly kill a few PCs before dropped (for balanced encounters PCs are meant to win, using up about 25% of their resources for a day). What I would do, is figure out what size and strength of encounters I would use for a party of four, and then scale the number of foes from there. So for 4 3rd level PCs you might have: 1 CR 3 foe 2 CR 1 foes 4 CR 1/2 foes 6 CR 1/3 foes 8 CR 1/4 foes So for 6 3rd level PCs you might use: 1-2 CR 3 foes 3 CR 1 foes 6 CR 1/2 foes 9 CR 1/3 foes 12 CR 1/4 foes