How do I adjust an already easy adventure for a party made of healers and tanks?

Question

I am planning for a campaign I'll start soon, the advice sought here is not system specific but the system is Starfinder and the adventure is the Adeventure Path Drift Crashers.

My party is made out of 2 healers (a biohacker that focused 100% on healing and a healing mystic), 2 "tanks" (a nanocyte that enjoys the concept of tanking in all our campaigns and a vital evolutionist self healing) and 1 other player playing a solarian that I don't know where they'll fit in.

While planning I realized that the adventure is easy, even on later parts most enemies are CR 1/2 and 1 and there aren't many combats per day before we rest and recharge. I told my players that the campaign is not gonna be hard and that they have 2 healing focused characters and 2 characters focusing on being sturdy front liners, and that they are leaning too heavily on survivability but everyone stuck to their characters so I moved on.

I know party composition is not the most important thing and tanking in TTRPGs is a very loose concept, but since no one wants to change characters, I am trying to balance around them to maximize the fun they can have with these characters, I fear that if I buff enemies then combat will be very slow since they have no one focused on doing damage, but if I don't then they won't have anything to do because they are always full HP.

How do I balance an already easy adventure around a party with 2 healers and 2 tanks?

Answer 1

You do not need to balance to maximize the fun here

This is a bit of a frame challenge, but I think you are making a mistake in your assumptions when you say "I am trying to balance around them to maximize the fun they can have with these characters".

Yes, in the long run, an unbalanced game with no real challenge is going to become boring. In the long run, you want challenge and the risk of harm to keep things interesting and exciting. However, it has been my experience that many DMs vastly underestimate how long players can go trumping and dominating the opposition before it gets old and stops being fun.

Being strong can be fun. There is absolutely no problem with the odd aventure that is entirely unbalanced in favor of the PCs -- where they essentially are playing on easy mode or story mode. Some of the most fun and most fondly remembered adventures with my groups have been when I used adventures -- unmodified -- designed for challenge ratings several rungs below the PCs level. There are three reasons for this: first, the players dont know this. You do not need to tell them it is going to be easy. When they do not know if the adventure is deadly, the tension that the hammer is still to drop will hold quite some time, especially if you normally play on a challenging or balanced mode. (In your case, unfortunately you told them, so you lose that benefit). Second, if the next adventures will be tougher again, a change of pace can be a great experience from the normally constant pressure and being at your limit. Third, being awesome and winning is just fun in and of itself.

You are just starting out. The first few levels in systems with levels is where most player death happens, where the PCs are most vulnerable to a stray crit taking them out. At higher levels the variance of a single roll does not matter as much any more, as you have much larger hit point pools to average things out. At the start having a bit of extra security will not hurt. And if they level quickly, because they easily defeat all the encounters collecting XP, well, that problem is self correcting: they soon will face tougher foes, with more unusual attacks and tricks.

It's not all about combat. The last important aspect is that fights and crunch is only one of the three pillars of adventuring. There also is roleplaying social interactions, and exploration. Having an adventure where the challenge level is low allows you to focus more on these two other aspects. It may actually make play richer if the monsters do not stand a chance to win in fights, and therefore are more willing to negotiate and strike deals. If the players can focus on the story, on solving riddles and conundrums, instead of spending a lot of time on combat resolution.

Conversely, I think you are right, making the monsters tougher with more hp against a high healing, low damage party runs the risk of turning combat into longer boring sloughs. You do not need to take that risk, so don't. Leave the monsters as they are, and let the PCs kill them quickly while staying at high health if it comes to that. Do players enjoy running around at low hp and without a safety buffer? Hell, no. They love being near full hp.

So, let them rip. As long as easy mode does not become the long-term norm for the campaign, you will not hear any complaints.

Answer 2

You're the DM, you decide how the monsters act.

The OP stated issue The original question is how to deal with an unbalanced party -- specifically, your party runs the risk of coming up against encounters they can survive but not resolve quickly.

Not every encounter has to be to the death.

Why not give each monster a Save-or-suck-to-escape power, so the monsters have a reliable, interesting way of running away? That way, it's up to the players to decide whether to extend the encounter by tracking them down. Everything can run away of course, but that gets old.

With a few examples of mobs attacking travelers who will reward their rescue and be on their merry way a moment later (or at level 10, aliens that pop off back to their own dimension), you can make it clear that the adventurers have won. You can especially make sure they understand that still means full xp and commensurate rewards. If the monster is the kind to take their treasure with them, make sure an NPC saw the encounter, and rewards the party. Or the monster's cut-and-run power is to throw down their weapons and/or coin purse and hoof it in the opposite direction.

With intelligent foes, they'll be able to tell they're not making a dent. This opens up the possibility of combat turning into a diplomatic encounter.

It's pretty rare that you'll see an animal in nature fight to the death -- generally only when they're cornered or guarding their offspring. Any monster with friends or better gear or better cover nearby will probably take the same tactic. That could lead a greedy party into an ambush or a diplomatic encounter.

Are they survival-focused or just built for survival? They need to decide.

This question can propose an interesting set of moral tests for your party. When they survive encounters with desperate, impoverished punks who run away when their first member goes down, do they:

• relentlessly pursue to get any available xp and treasure?
• take the abandoned punk to the hospital and rehabilitate them?
• torture the abandoned punk for intelligence?

And do you:

• punish this by social input from bystanders?
• reward it with treasure?
• lure them into an ambush where the 2 tanks get grappled right away, or a party member gets separated by a devious puzzle?

See the answers to this thread for other ideas on mixing things up

It's about a 4e campaign, so there's a lot of talk about Strikers, Defenders, Controllers, and Leaders. But that's not all there is.

Answer 3

By doing math.

Tanks and Healers vs 'Easy adventure' is not hit bonuses, AC, expected damage, spell slots, healing per day, healing per round, enemy incoming damage, enemy AC, number of enemies, expected enemy tactics, terrain advantages, whether the combat is likely to split into multiple smaller scuffles due to situation, etc.

To 'eyeball' an encounter strength vs your party you need to look at the encounter, look at your PCs sheets, and compare the numbers. If you can't do it in your head, you need to sit down and run a mock combat.

If during the combat, the PCs roll nothing but 1's and the enemies roll nothing but 20's and the PCs forget they can use healing magic or decide to run away but one of them stays to fight the entire thing by his lonesome, you might need to alter the encounter on the fly to make it easier, or give the enemies some reason to take someone alive, or some circumstance or luck that allows someone to survive when they wouldn't (anakin falls off the bridge but manages to grab the bottom side of it, the people on the bottom think he's fallen to his death - protagonists are generally fairly lucky people, because we don't tend to hear about the unlucky ones - the anakin who falls off the bridge to his death doesn't get the story written about him by the bard later).

There is a fair amount of wiggle room in this. Players can demolish the occasional encounter and that's totally fine - people should feel like Big Damn Heroes sometimes. Players can have a hard, nails-on-chalkboard fight sometimes and that's also fine - fighting should feel dangerous. Your goal with this math is to keep things within that range, and not all on one end of it. No TPK, and not a continuous stream of pointless fights (fights take up screen time and should be meaningful, both narratively and mechanically).

Fights that are too easy should be resolved narratively - 'you beat up the goblins, who have no real chance against you'. Fights that are too hard should be foreshadowed so the party knows that they should typically be trying to hide from Bogulos the Terrible, not fighting him and his Army of the Damned (at least not til they have some advantage). There is the trope of the hero standing up against impossible odds but that can be hard to do correctly as people will (often rightfully) expect that you've simply made the odds not impossible, so there is a level of build up and timing and lying required to get that trope to play out well.

At the very least, people should have some warning about a fight that is unwinnable (or 'too hard'), enough that if they do choose to engage with it, that is their choice and not you just killing them out of the blue.

There is no specific silver bullet that will help balance encounters for 'tanks' or 'healers'. If a guide, website or source claims otherwise my general experience is that it is wrong.

A major mental stumbling block for people is trying to use mmorpg terminology to design for or balance things for tabletop games in the first place. Instead, use math. Math will be far more reliable and helpful.