Dealing With Large Parties

Part 1: Challenging Encounters

About a year ago, I wrote a "Dungeoncraft" article for Dragon Magazine regarding handling large encounters, both from the point of view of large groups of NPCs and large groups of PCs. Now, as I find myself running a weekly game with seven players, I find that there are still more "tricks" to handling large groups than I had even mentioned back then. Further, there's a real difference between a large encounter and a campaign with a lot of players.

Challenges for Large Parties
The Challenge Rating system is based around the idea of having four PCs go up against the challenge. What's more, they are four typical PCs. Truthfully, it's based around having Jozan, Lidda, Tordek and Mialee -- four of the D&D iconic characters -- go up against the challenge. But that's not everyone's group, and we knew that (obviously) when we created the system. The idea is not to make everyone play with four characters just like those very typical PCs, but to create a baseline. That is to say, if this was a challenge for those four, it'll be slightly too easy for my group, because my group is tougher and/or larger. Alternatively, you might say, my group has only three 3rd-level characters, so this CR 3 encounter might be a little tough for them, but since they're so well equipped, they can handle it. Or whatever. The point is, it's a level baseline upon which you can judge challenges. If your four 4th-level PCs get beaten by a CR 4 monster, it doesn't mean that the Challenge Rating system is broken. It could mean that the monster's Challenge Rating was off. It could mean that circumstances made the encounter tougher. It could mean that the players rolled badly or made a silly error in strategy, or any of a number of things. So, "CR 4" does not automatically mean it's an appropriate encounter for your 4th level PCs.

But I digress. In my specific campaign right now, the PCs are both tougher than normal and the group is almost twice the size of the typical four-character party. So how do I know what kind of encounters to use in the game? I test them. First, I start simple. At 1st level, I throw a CR 1 encounter at them. Do they defeat it handily? I'm sure they do. So I raise the stakes. Can they handle a CR 2 encounter? Yes. And so on. This is an inexact science, but it is sort of a science. Realize, for example, that an encounter that comes after a series of other encounters is by its very nature tougher. Doing the video game thing and putting the "big boss monster" at the end might be climactic, but it's also potentially going to be deadly. (Sometimes, a good way to handle this is to have the lead-up encounters to a really hard one be particularly easy. Another way is to offer the characters a chance to rest and recuperate right before the big encounter.)

In the tests of my own large group, I've found that I can easily throw CR 3 and CR 4 monsters at my 2nd-level party without problem. Last week, I used a 3rd-level bugbear cleric (CR 5), two more bugbears (CR 2 each), and a krenshar (CR 1) for a total of EL 6. It was a bit tougher of an encounter than I had thought, but that's all part of the process. That bugbear cleric was, in retrospect, too powerful for them -- although they pulled it off and survived. I can't safely go with monsters of a higher Challenge Rating than probably about CR 4. The special abilities (with their fairly high save Difficulty Classes) are too much for them. But lots of low Challenge Rating opponents aren't the perfect answer either. I threw a ridiculous number of 1st-level warriors at them a few sessions ago and it wasn't particularly challenging -- although it was interesting for the novelty of it. (As an aside, what it did was to make the low-level casters feel slightly less useful. Their contributions were minimal unless they had purely damage-inflicting spells. Why daze or distract a foe that can be hacked down by a fighter with ease?)

Beef Up the Hit Points
One solution I've come up with is to inflate the hit points of the foes they face. The thing about a large group in D&D is that the sheer weight of numbers is overwhelming. A foe with some interesting abilities to use against the PCs may never get the chance after all seven of them take their turn whacking on him. With fewer players, the foe might be around for 2 or 3 rounds, making it an interesting encounter. With a large group, the foe will be lucky to get one action in. Thus, more hit points just makes the encounter about the same as it would be with fewer players.

There is, however, a drawback. Facing foes with more hit points rewards two types of characters: those who can do things to befuddle NPCs (such as a spellcaster who keeps using daze against the powerful foe or a monk who keeps stunning him) and those who can dish out a ton of damage. See, normally the game is self-correcting at low levels. Even if you min-max your character so that he can deal 10 to 12 points of damage a round, it doesn't matter, because the foes you face only have 4 to 8 hit points. Your extra damage is wasted, and the guy dealing 4 to 8 points of damage a round is accomplishing just as much as you. If the foe suddenly has 20 hit points, now the damage machine is "in the zone," so to speak.

Variety Works Best
High Armor Classes, particularly at low levels, can accomplish the same thing, but potentially can skew things even further in the favor of spellcasters (the high-Armor Class foe might not also have good saves), as well as those with huge attack bonuses.

The best way, I think, to present a good encounter for a large group is to stage a varied encounter. Have a few foes with lots of hit points, a spellcaster or creature with some weird abilities, and a few miscellaneous "little guys." This gives everyone in the group something to do. But don't make the "little guys" just cannon fodder. If the rogue in your group takes out the goblin running to pull the lever which will cause the room to cave in, he's accomplished just as much as or more than the fighters who are trading blows with the ogre at the same time. Make every action the PCs do important.

Next Time: Part 2: Handling All Those Players