My players almost die in my encounters every time. Does this mean my encounters are too hard?

Question

I'm running my first campaign with three friends. This is the first time any of us have done any table-top role-playing. I'm working the party through the H1: Keep on the Shadowfell campaign using just PHB1.

So far they have made it through the first two encounters and barely escaped death. To be perfectly honest, they probably would have died if I didn't fudge some of the enemy attack rolls ever so slightly.

I know my role as a DM isn't to keep them alive or kill them off, but I'm trying to at least not kill them for the first few encounters because I want to make sure they're having fun and I'd hate for them to worry about actually dying right out of the gate.

Yes, the players are having fun. They haven't complained about nearing death both encounters and it gives them a lot of satisfaction because they succeeded while staring death in the face. My question is then more abstract: is it normal for players to get so close to death in every encounter?

Answer 1

Keep on the Shadowfell is balanced for parties of 5 players

The default party size for 4e is 5 players, and all the official modules are designed to be an appropriate challenge for a party of 5. This is not to say that the game won't work well with 3 players (my experience has been that it starts having trouble when you have 2 or less players or 8+ players), just that the amount of monsters you'll find in each fight are intended to be a typical challenge for a group of 5 players, rather than 3.

Keep on the Shadowfell is admittedly pretty poorly balanced, since it's the very first module ever produced for 4e, back before everything was really thoroughly playtested, so how close to ideal it is for a party of 5 is debatable; nonetheless, it was designed for 5. I highly recommend checking out the rewrite of KotS that Brian Ballsun-Stanton linked.

Regardless of whether you stick with the original module or switch to the rewrite, you're still looking at something built for 5 players, so the real question is how do you deal with that? I've got 3 possible approaches.

1. You can rebalance things for a party of 3 by removing approximately 40% of the XP worth of monsters for each fight; not 40% of the monsters, but 40% of the fight's total XP value worth of monsters.

2. If your players are happy with the current difficulty level, you can always keep going as things are. Later on your players may need to seek advice (the official 4e Character Optimization forum would be a good place) on how to keep their characters sufficiently capable.

3. You can compromise between approaches 1 & 2 by reducing the XP total for fights by 20%; this will balance things for 4 players, which should still be fairly challenging for a party of 3 but will also reduce the "almost dying every time" factor.

Answer 2

No. First level has a very risky dynamic and Keep on the shadowfell is a very very old module that needs refinement.

First: initial players to 4e take a while to get system mastery. The relative lethality of first level doesn't help. They may have made choices in character creation that don't fit their requirements of "not dying horribly."

Second: Here is an excellent rewrite of KotS that... brings it more in line with the 4e design philosophy. Some of those early modules are just horrible.

Third: 3 newbies going into this module is something I would consider to be a "challenge". While a properly optimized party should have no problems, it requires a significant amount of system expertise necessary to achieve that kind of synergy. If you have any experienced players, perhaps ask them to play some moving meat-shields. Otherwise, drop a few monsters from the fights. (Don't pay attention to XP. In playing a 1-30 campaign, we ended up levelling when the plot called for it. The points just don't matter.)

Fourth: Magic items are important. If you give the players a large allotment of items appropriate for their characters early, it can make life much easier.