I need advice /tg/. I'm DMing a pathfinder adventure path

>>55030711
Pathfinder is a rules nightmare. The only way to balance it is to not play.

Haste and various spells/abilities can give you an option, though remember that an extra turn allows a quicker set-up of a villain's overall battle strategy to come to fruition quicker and could potentially make the experience frustrating for the party if they haven't come to support each other well enough in their chosen skills and powers to do the same. Of course, the better option in my mind would perhaps be design some challenging but fair additional abilities for your villains that can give them a fighting chance against the party or understand what the party's effective level is and try to beef up encounters with additional monsters that would bring the CR in line with them (pro-tip, don't just stick more of the same monster in or at least have something unique going for the ones you do add besides 'generic hobgoblin'). That would be how I would balance it out as a relatively well-experienced player (roughly 7-8 years, with Pathfinder being a big part of it) and one-time GM (while I had some fun with the duties, I just didn't have the time to work everything out and wasn't enjoying myself as much).

In any case, what adventure path are you running? That might give us some ideas, plus we can give you directions to the GM threads on the official Paizo threads where they discuss issues like this and what causes them.

>>55030834
Carrion Crown, they ran over every encounter at the end of the first book (Splatterman, Lopper). I gave one of the mobs in the second book double turns and it lasted a little longer but still got run over.

In a future encounter I planned on giving a "boss level" monster multiple turns and gave him additional mooks to counter the sheer numbers (they have multiple pets).

>>55031036
Right, so sadly, I haven't had the chance to play Carrion Crown yet despite wanting to for awhile. However, I can at least link you to the Paizo forums GM thread for the first book that has link to the other threads for the rest of the books, so you could use them as a reference material for solutions to any potentially underwhelming encounters you might find in the actual book.

http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2lzx4&sort=0&page=1?Haunting-of-HarrowStone

What's the party composition at the moment? I would be rather surprised that there are enough players who can field combat-ready companions and such since most of the classes have animal companions that I wouldn't consider combat-focused or at least not beefy enough to last long in them. They certainly shouldn't be upsetting the balance as much as they are if they're the chief cause of the imbalance (well, unless you have a Summoner, original or unchained, but the Summoner is a special brand of awful in terms of fielding an army of not!Pokemon that fucks with balance). Honestly, if anything, I would better understand imbalance occurring if you happen to have a Paladin in the party with the Aura of Courage ability, since that would give a +4 to the whole party against fear effects and immunity for the Paladin against them and if I recall, book 1 is a lot of ghosts and such that rely on fear-effects. Seriously, the passive buffs Paladins will give against those and charm effects might really fuck you up, since if I recall, some of the later books have beasts that rely on charm-effects. It's not a matter of nerfing Paladins though, it's just they're a great passive team player in adventures focused on monster utilizing fear and charm effects.

>>55031315

Paladin, Druid, Summoner and some other non-pet classes that aren't really tilting things either way. The paladin has big numbers if he hits and the druid/summoner bring pets that have been more effective than most PCs. I don't want to just blackball them and outright block the pets, but at the same time it's been hard to scale the encounters to the level of the Eidolon and Paladin.