>>43322317Your players sound like my players.
Spoilers below for Lost Mine.
Running LMoP, they got TPK in the first cave (no trap, no hobgoblin, just terrible tactics and assuming they were gods, us all being new to D&D and 5e). So when they rerolled I let them roll level 2 characters, and rerun, same setting.
This was a mistake.
They got through the cave decently, and to the town. They are kinda murderhoboish, so just to mess with them and encourage roleplay instead of 4 thugs in the bar, I put 14.
Long story short, they won.
I, surprised, started ramping up encouters to match their antics and poor decisions. For example, assulting the thugs but waiting a few days before attacking the hideout resulted in mass produced, but slightly malfunctioning, invisibility potions being used by the thugs. They also attacked the town. I also increased the number of enemies in every encounter.
According to the kobold site in the links, for their level and number, every single encounter has been Deadly. I've used tactics, I've been trying to kill them fairly (if you consider constant Deadly encounters fair) and I've followed the plot of the module fairly well.
They just fucking scrape by every time! And the XP they get has been leveling them even more! Just finished Thundertree, they were all roughly level 4.
I threw over 100 twig blights, 15 dragon cultists, I forget the number of ash zombies, 5 giant spiders (which had alreasy taken one of them captive due to wandering around drunk shenanigans) and the dragon which supposedly TPKs parties onto that map before they started, not to mention 12 more invisible thugs waiting in ambush. They arrived to rescue their 4th player, 3 level 4 PCs. By the end of it the druid is dead, the thugs are dead, the surviving zombies are boarded up in a building, half the village ruins are burned down (the spider webs included), yhe cultists are dead, the twig blight horde is sticks and smolders, and they are... continued
