Scaling adventures for less players

[QuestingAce]

I am looking at running the adventures in the Gamemaster Screen Pack, however my game group is just myself and two others. We'd like to start a sandbox game in Dragon Pass, however a lot of the adventures assume more adventurers.

Does anyone have advice on scaling the adventures for less players?

[AndreJarosch]

No the answer you are looking for, but you could just do it like Greg Stafford has done in the 1970s: Two characters per player. 

[Bill the barbarian]

In a game like RQ this serves two purposes. As one can lose a character quite easily (and it does take time to reroll a new one), one has a back up all ready in the game or ready to bring to the fore.

Edited July 15, 2021 by Bill the barbarian

[QuestingAce]

One of the players doesn't like running multiple characters (found out when pitching Dungeon Crawl Classics). That was my first idea.

[Godlearner]

1. They should never be outnumbered in any encounter.

2. Perhaps they can pick up a friendly NPC or a pet

3. Bump up their skills, give a few more points of spirit magic or Rune Pools.

[jajagappa]

1 hour ago, QuestingAce said:

I am looking at running the adventures in the Gamemaster Screen Pack, however my game group is just myself and two others. We'd like to start a sandbox game in Dragon Pass, however a lot of the adventures assume more adventurers.

Does anyone have advice on scaling the adventures for less players?

Rather than have players run two characters, you can let each have a retainer/follower/sidekick.  These have minimal skills: 3-5 noted capabilities (e.g. one is a healer who has First Aid, Treat Disease, Heal 6, and Plant Lore; one is a hunter who knows Devise, Scan, Track, Peaceful Cut, and Bow Attack).  When the players want one of those tasks performed, they can choose to roll on the retainer's ability vs. their own personal ability.  And otherwise they are simply in the background.  That keeps focus on the central character for the player.  In one of my games, one of the players had a main character who was accompanied by the Two Blue-clad Healing Women.  Never had actual names, but they functioned to provide emergency healing in battle or other dire situations.

An additional option along this line is a GM NPC who is part of the adventurer team.  Sages, healers, and tricksters often work best for this, but could also be an extra fighter.  In my current Colymar game, I run the fighter Pagara in this fashion.  She's an ex-7 Mothers soldier who the PC's saved from bandits, and joined the PC's afterwards.  She guards the horses when the PC's are venturing into dire Caves of Chaos, provides occasional commentary about the Lunar Empire or army, or adds other tidbits of interest as an "outside" voice.

Otherwise, you'll likely want to do three things to scale back:

1) if you want an actual fight, keep the # of foes minimized.  The JC scenario Duel at Dangerford handles this via individual challenges.  So no 2 PC vs. 10 trollkin battles - the 2 PC's call out a challenge to the cowardly trollkin to have their champion come forward.  If they do, you have a 1x1 or 2x2 fight.  The rest of the foes submit to the results.

2) if you want the PC's to be threatened or captured, keep the # of foes up.  Clearly the PC's cannot overcome via a straight-on fight.  If they are captured, they are captured and are held for ransom (or must find ways to escape their captors). 

3) keep the adventures focused more on investigation, problem solving, bargaining, and leadership.  This can tie into the retainer idea above.  The PC's may bargain or orate to get the local farmers to help them fight the foe.  You can abstract these as a group (e.g. 10 farmers at 50% attack/parry) vs. the foe group (e.g. 6 dark trolls at 60% attack/parry).  Just use the Opposed Roll chart for this instead of individual by individual results each round while your PC's perform the main action (i.e. the 1x1 fights).  One player can roll for the group of farmers while you as GM roll for the dark trolls.  And for each level of difference each melee round, X number of "losers" are incapacitated (e.g. as one example the Farmers roll a success, dark trolls roll a special - dark trolls have +1 advantage, so 1 farmer is out of action for next round).  (There are other variations you can have on this, but the overall idea is to keep focus on the PCs while other events going on around.  And let the PC's make successful Rune or Passion or skill rolls such as Orate or Battle to influence their ally's chance of success.)

 

[Bill the barbarian]

3 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

Rather than have players run two characters, you can let each have a retainer/follower/sidekick.  These have minimal skills: 3-5 noted capabilities (e.g. one is a healer who has First Aid, Treat Disease, Heal 6, and Plant Lore; one is a hunter who knows Devise, Scan, Track, Peaceful Cut, and Bow Attack).  When the players want one of those tasks performed, they can choose to roll on the retainer's ability vs. their own personal ability.  And otherwise they are simply in the background.  That keeps focus on the central character for the player.  In one of my games, one of the players had a main character who was accompanied by the Two Blue-clad Healing Women.  Never had actual names, but they functioned to provide emergency healing in battle or other dire situations.

 

I like this and take it to be part of having an intelligent (or not) pet. 

 

4 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

An additional option along this line is a GM NPC who is part of the adventurer team.  Sages, healers, and tricksters often work best for this, but could also be an extra fighter.  In my current Colymar game, I run the fighter Pagara in this fashion.  She's an ex-7 Mothers soldier who the PC's saved from bandits, and joined the PC's afterwards.  She guards the horses when the PC's are venturing into dire Caves of Chaos, provides occasional commentary about the Lunar Empire or army, or adds other tidbits of interest as an "outside" voice.

 

Patrons as well!

 

5 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

1) if you want an actual fight, keep the # of foes minimized.  The JC scenario Duel at Dangerford handles this via individual challenges.  So no 2 PC vs. 10 trollkin battles - the 2 PC's call out a challenge to the cowardly trollkin to have their champion come forward.  If they do, you have a 1x1 or 2x2 fight.  The rest of the foes submit to the results.

 

good for game balance, quite un-trollkin like.

5 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

2) if you want the PC's to be threatened or captured, keep the # of foes up.  Clearly the PC's cannot overcome via a straight-on fight.  If they are captured, they are captured and are held for ransom (or must find ways to escape their captors). 

 

Nice!

6 minutes ago, jajagappa said:

3) keep the adventures focused more on investigation, problem solving, bargaining, and leadership.  This can tie into the retainer idea above.  The PC's may bargain or orate to get the local farmers to help them fight the foe.  You can abstract these as a group (e.g. 10 farmers at 50% attack/parry) vs. the foe group (e.g. 6 dark trolls at 60% attack/parry).  Just use the Opposed Roll chart for this instead of individual by individual results each round while your PC's perform the main action (i.e. the 1x1 fights).  One player can roll for the group of farmers while you as GM roll for the dark trolls.  And for each level of difference each melee round, X number of "losers" are incapacitated (e.g. as one example the Farmers roll a success, dark trolls roll a special - dark trolls have +1 advantage, so 1 farmer is out of action for next round).  (There are other variations you can have on this, but the overall idea is to keep focus on the PCs while other events going on around.  And let the PC's make successful Rune or Passion or skill rolls such as Orate or Battle to influence their ally's chance of success.)

 

Nice!

[Baron Wulfraed]

1 hour ago, jajagappa said:

1) if you want an actual fight, keep the # of foes minimized.  The JC scenario Duel at Dangerford handles this via individual challenges.  So no 2 PC vs. 10 trollkin battles - the 2 PC's call out a challenge to the cowardly trollkin to have their champion come forward.  If they do, you have a 1x1 or 2x2 fight.  The rest of the foes submit to the results.

For those with access to RQ2 (original or reprint "Classic"), applying the calculation for treasure factors to the player party (as a group), and then to the opponents (individually -- so you can pick&match until the running total is similar to the party total, MIGHT be a means of equalizing the encounter.

 

[Lordabdul]

My own 2 cents (with some overlap with what's already been said):

1. Reduce the number of enemies, or make them dumb(er). I'm very good at running dumb NPCs because I run them the same way I play my PCs. I'm not very good at combat...
2. I like @jajagappa's idea of retainers as an alternative to 2 characters or more per players (I don't like playing more than 1 character, except for DCC-type funnels, funnily enough!). But I would personally just make it obvious that they can grab NPCs from their communities or wherever they currently are. This makes it possible for the GM to have fun with a small gallery of NPCs that come for help (which further opens up story options), or for the players to have fun with various sidekicks (if you let them control these NPCs when they come and go).
3. Note that in Call of Cthulhu, having the PCs underpowered and outnumbered is the default premise of the game. Calling upon contacts in the police or the mafia, drawing upon the resources of Delta Green or whatever organization you're part of, and seeking non-confrontational solutions (such as a grimoire with a banishment spell) are all what you're encouraged to do, because direct combat isn't viable. So you can adapt CoC's gameplay tropes by having the PCs draw upon allies and family, look for new alliances and ancient historical precedents from some obscure parchment in a Lhankor Mhy temple, and other such non-combat ways to solve a conflict.
4. Of course, unlike CoC, in RuneQuest we *do* want direct, epic, glorious combat, but it can be all about honourable 1:1 combat against the enemy champion, or big battles where armies clash and the PCs are in the middle of the battleground like everybody else. It's only in the "middle ground" of combat encounters (PCs against 10 Scorpionmen) that you run into balance problems, so you can avoid those when you can't balance the encounter.
5. Alternatively, you can make many combat-encounter-oriented scenarios into heists, basically. What was previously meant to be a party of 6 warriors cleaning up a troll cave is now a party of 2 sneaky spies trying to assassinate the Kyger Lytor priestess or steal one of her magic items.

 

[RandomNumber]

7 hours ago, QuestingAce said:

I am looking at running the adventures in the Gamemaster Screen Pack, however my game group is just myself and two others. We'd like to start a sandbox game in Dragon Pass, however a lot of the adventures assume more adventurers.

Does anyone have advice on scaling the adventures for less players?

Lots of great advice from other contributors. I recently ran The Broken Tower and Apple Lane for 3 PC's.  For the Broken Tower I had the clan send a couple of herders along with the PC's to help them wrangle the 60 cattle (39 as it finally turned out but that's another story). This meant that I had a couple of extra pairs of arms and legs available in the form of henchmen.

Spoiler

When the players met the Rock Lizards I had the Lizards split their attentions between the cow they had already set upon and the the PC's with the two herders lurking at the edges to soak up the surplus numbers and ensure there were enough Rock Lizards free to attack the PC's to keep the pressure on for a few rounds.

On the way to Apple Lane my PC's met the RQG pre-gens at Asborn Thriceborn's Stead and travelled with them to Apple Lane. My intention was to have the RQG pre-gens on hand to cover some parts of Apple Lane with my PC's covering another.

Spoiler

As it turned out a very effective multimissile from a PC took Xiobalg out of his saddle as he was charging the gate of the Tin Inn. This led to some disarray in the Tusker ranks and a series of equally matched engagements that I could resolve with the players whilst the rest were hand-waved for background colour.

 

Edited July 16, 2021 by RandomNumber

[Akhôrahil]

Sidekicks are good, and plus if the main character dies, it’s easy to upgrade a sidekick into a full PC. The PCs can also be encouraged to round up temporary allies for bigger fights.

[soltakss]

18 hours ago, QuestingAce said:

I am looking at running the adventures in the Gamemaster Screen Pack, however my game group is just myself and two others. We'd like to start a sandbox game in Dragon Pass, however a lot of the adventures assume more adventurers.

Sounds good, I hope you and your players enjoy it.

18 hours ago, QuestingAce said:

Does anyone have advice on scaling the adventures for less players?

Our old RQ Campaign had three Players, so 3 PCs, but one had to go away for work a lot, so they had two Players, 2 PCs and one PC who didn't do much except act as support.

17 hours ago, QuestingAce said:

One of the players doesn't like running multiple characters (found out when pitching Dungeon Crawl Classics).

It might be Ok for one Player to have one PC and the other Player to have 2 PCs.

In our RQ2 campaign, some Players had more than one PC and some stuck with one, which worked well.

16 hours ago, jajagappa said:

Rather than have players run two characters, you can let each have a retainer/follower/sidekick.

Retainers are good, especially when played as friendly NPCs by the GM, which gets around the Player not liking multiple PCs.

If you have a lot of them then it can get confusing, especially in combat.

 

Other advice:

1. Let them have lots of healing, give everyone some Healing from the start, make healing potions common and easy to get
2. Don't flood them with large parties of NPC opponents, keep enemies at roughly the same number as the PCs
3. Make Resurrection fairly common and available, if you don't want them to roll up PCs every few sessions
4. Be generous where death is concerned, for PCs. I never have death at 0 Hit Points any more, if someone has 12 Hit Points I play they don't die until they have reached -12 Hit Points and, even then, they might not actually die but might just hang on to life.
5. NPCs that take big wounds should drop out of combat or run away, very few should fight to the death

 

[QuestingAce]

Wow! This is all great advice.

*takes down a lot of notes*

I am going to add a few helpful npcs, and roll up a few of the PCs siblings and family members as well. I think later on when we all have a better grasp of the rules, I can defer the control of the allied NPCs to the players during combat and the like

[jajagappa]

3 minutes ago, QuestingAce said:

I am going to add a few helpful npcs, and roll up a few of the PCs siblings and family members as well. I think later on when we all have a better grasp of the rules, I can defer the control of the allied NPCs to the players during combat and the like

A couple other practical points based on experience:

1) If you are bringing along helpful NPC's as the GM, keep them largely to the background - you want the PC's to shine, not the NPC's.  When you do give voice to these NPC's, have them take on distinct, perhaps archetypal (or even stereotypical) voices that mix warnings (e.g. "I've heard dragonewts eat people"), suggestive curiosity (e.g. "dragonewt weapons are always magical"), and specific strong attitudes (e.g. "A dragonewt ate my brother - I'm going to avenge his death!).  You can also do a "good cop/bad cop" approach with 2 NPC's to suggest two possible, but contradictory paths.  Those approaches help to avoid having the players feeling like you're always cautioning them from certain avenues or railroading them in specific directions. 

2) Avoid rolling dice against yourself except in very rare circumstances. (e.g. if there's a need for an NPC to make a roll, have one of the players make those rolls).  You can just decide/declare what happens when two groups of NPC's interact.