I haven't played before and want to run the demo adventure, but probably will have only two players attending. How should I scale down the creatures? Or should I give the players a third (or fourth) character to control?

Anybody out there who also did the demo with only 2 players?

BeardFan said:

First, I haven't played this scenario.

Second: in my opinion, a good wfrp scenario should never depend on any particular type of characters, or their amount. We don't need the 'children of bhaal' or 'the chosen ones' here.

If you feel, however, that the enemies are a bit too tough for your PCs to handle, weaken them. But I always prefer to play as written.

I ran this for two players last week. I dont think it needs any scaling at all. The encounters have the mooks scalled #no of characters.

Just make sure to warn them how tough pt 2 of that initial encounter will be...

Granted the Troll Slayer in my group was staggering around with 3 critcal hits (all to the face) after the fight streaming blood from his nose shouting "Is that it?" at the fleeing Beastmen with only a single hit left before he passed out, but that added to the Drama

I ran this for two players as well, and the first encounter was alright, but I removed one of the gors from the second party. Otherwise, I think it should be fine for just two players. The Troll Slayer too, took lots of hits, but both adventurers made it out fine.

So you played with the roadwarden and the slayer (and not the roadwarden plus the envoy as suggested)?

I actually allowed full character creation and self chosen careers, so a friend chose the Dwarf Slayer while my girlfriend used a Wood Elf thief. I wrote a little about the session here. It was great fun and the players did the unexpected by throwing the irritating merchant in front of the Wargor. My advice would be to monitor when the players are having too much on their hands, and perhaps give them a shot by allowing the beastmen to break morale and retreat. If it's just an one off session, then I guess it doesn't matter if one player dies- in a dramatic fashion of course (like slaying the wargor with his final breath).

All the best!

A good idea. I probably should also have my players build their own characters. After all that's a part of the fun in RPGing and we will probably have more than enough time to do this and play the demo. So all that's left then is maybe exchange the adventure hooks on the fly after character creation. Whose friend is with the coach, what's in the parcel (or maybe it's some other good that is delivered to one of the players etc.).

Thanks to all for the suggestions.

I also let the PC's make their own Characters. They ended with a Troll Slayer and a Human Scout (though he was more dandy highwayman)

They were actually shocked that the 'Stock' PC's were much better than them (well not much, but some) Starting with a Pistol for openers !

A short report after play:

Scaling down the henchmen from 3 to 2 worked fine. Characters survived the combat, but one of them only barely. I could have killed him after he dropped unconcious from his 3rd critical wound, but the beastmen decided to leave him alone (he looked dead after all). The second character was already trying to escape (already long distance from the coach) when the beastmen retreated due to the storm.

It was also a good idea to create characters (if you have the time, it took around 3 hours), because the players made some not-so-good choices, and now understand how actions/talents etc. work together and will probably build the characters differently when the real game starts (they didn't invest much in characteristics, but they all hat lots of skills and specialisations and lots of extra actions).