I'm running Abomination Vaults with a bunch of weirdos (my friends)
I'm running Abomination Vaults with a bunch of weirdos (my friends)
Potential Abomination Vault Spoilers Below
My group primarily plays homebrewed DnD 5e campaigns but we have enjoyed playing the beginner box so much that we have decided to play another Paizo adventure using Foundry VTT. So we have chosen Abomination Vaults which I will be GMing. I figured I would make posts about our shenanigans in the Vaults both as a way to provide some content to this community and to encourage me to take detailed (read: useful) notes to document our misadventures. Our group has 3 primary GMs that trade off each week, GMing our respective campaigns and sometimes special 2 or 3 shots ( We are running a 5e converted Tomb of Horrors module in a couple weeks for our most Masochistic DMs birthday, which should be... Fun?). Which is to say that updates on our shenanigans will be few and far between.
All that said Id like to introduce y'all to the cats I'll be wrangling. Hopefully their characters can serve as inspiration and/or be good for a laugh.
Meet the Chucklefucks
Preparing for the Adventure
Ive decided to add several elements from the AV expanded document, including: Starting the campaign at level 2 with a festival celebrating killing the dragon from the beginner box, The Scribbles, Rajani’s daughter, as well as the ritual to release the original Roseguard heros from the gem lenses. But most of these things will come later. Right now I am trying to decide how best to balance encounters for a party of 6 experienced and creative ttrpgers. Right now ive decided to use the Elite versiom for encounters against mostly one creature and just increasing mobs by about 50%. But I would love any advice in this regard!
These are some pretty goofy characters lol. Honestly some of them are to the point where I personally would veto some of the players choices because they are bleeding into a style of fantasy that I don't like to include in my homebrew, but I'm not gonna yuck your yum. I know lots of groups enjoy really zany fantasy. I really like that you tied some of the characters into the town by making them residents of Otari.
As for how to deal with such a large group, I think it will be a bit trickier than just ticking Elite on some of the monsters. I run for a group of 5 players and I usually find some way to level up the encounters. Sometimes this is just making the one monster in the room an Elite, sometimes it's adding more enemies (this one works pretty well in any room with exactly 4 enemies by the book, since you can assume the designers intended for even numbers on both sides). Sometimes you can do a combination of both.
There was a fight on the fourth floor where I Elite'd two enemies and also added two enemies, and it still didn't pose much of a threat to the PCs. More PCs add exponentially more power because more teamwork and action economy become available.
The tricky thing with adding more enemies though is that this adventure suffers the same problem that I've heard a lot of published Paizo adventures have, which is that the encounters are often extremely claustrophobic. Adding more enemies will really exacerbate that, since suddenly any sort of maneuvering will be tricky with 12 characters trying to elbow their way through a 20 square room (lots of the rooms in the early floors are only like 20-25 squares).
The other option of course is to simply play everything by the book. This will mean that the PCs will earn less XP in the beginning, but fights will be easier. Then, as things ramp up in difficulty, their XP scaling will begin to catch up naturally. Foundry supports this quite well, as the encounter tracker will tell you how much XP a fight is worth based on the enemies and allies included in it. I use this particular method when my players return to a lower level area to mop up something they missed. But I could actually see it working well across-the-board for a big party since the combats are naturally going to take longer since there are more people. You don't necessarily want encounter balance right out the gate since balanced encounters are naturally slower to play out. It might be better if the heroes feel like badasses squashing bugs at the beginning and then once they start delving deeper the danger ramps up naturally. I suspect that's something you are shooting for anyway since you're starting them at level 2.
We are certainly an odd group lol and zany is exactly how I would classify the majority of our antics, we like to get a little silly with our war crimes. I followed your advice from a few weeks ago and required the players to have some personal connection to Otari or Absalom which is how they came to be residents. I even offered them all a free extra hero point for the first session if they tied their backstory to Wrin in some way. Only 2 of them took me up on it however.
I started on the first floor of Gauntlight keep by increasing the number of metflits and bugs by anywhere from 50-100%. However I do plan to make the Metflits more likeable to encourage the PCs to work with them. In the adventure text Boss Skrawng is having his tribe train large insects to invade Otari. Which is very silly in my mind. Like, how would they know there is this coastal town a mile away through the fogfen, first of all, if they have been pushed up out of their previous lair by Morlocks? It seems more sensible (to me) for the Muddlickers to be preparing and training to retake their previous home from the group of Morlocks that killed their homies than the entire town of Otari lol. So I plan to paint the Metflits as neutral toward Otari so that the PCs can either aid them in their assault or if the PCs piss them off Boss Skrawng could order his dudes to attack with their new monsters to "blood" them, so to speak. Hopefully this makes the Metflits more 3 dimensional as a faction.
I hadn't considered the issue of overcrowding the maps when adding more enemies, but now that you point it out I will certainly try to be cognizant of that going forward.
Taking your advice into consideration I think I will run the first Gauntlight event with the teleporting Scalathrax by the book and just see how they do. This will be the first combat encounter since the AV expanded document recommends running this encounter at the very end of the festival as the big hook to get the party to explore Gauntlight. I'm still unsure if I will actually be using XP progression or milestone progression. I might do a hybrid type deal and just keep track of their XP so I don't over or under do it by a large amount.
I really appreciate your help! I'm very excited to run this adventure.
I really like the change you're suggesting to the mudlickers. I totally agree that it doesn't make a ton of sense for them to be plotting against a town so far away.
That's a good idea to start them off with an unmodified encounter just to get the sense of how unbalanced things will be. I'm a bit confused about it being the Scalathrax though. Shouldn't they fight zombies and skeletons first in the "dead tide for Otari"? The Scalathrax is meant to be like a final boss for that event.