I'm a very green Game Master. Not counting a three-session stint with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in high school (good ol' second edition), I've literally been doing this for about two months - maybe seven gaming sessions. Beyond the month or two I spent pouring over the Pathfinder core rulebook, before people even started rolling their characters, I have pretty much just been figuring out how certain mechanics of the game work the day or even the minute before my players do. I had suspected that we all mostly just accepted that everyone was new to this particular game and its rules, and as such understood that there was going to be a process.
Well, tonight I got called out on being too mean on the party. We've gone through too many imbalanced encounters where the players have barely gotten through alive, that either they don't have enough gear to handle what they're getting thrown at them or there are just too many things being thrown at them at a time.
To start off, I want to get it clear: yes, the odds have been stacked more against the kids than not. Fact of the matter is, the first few sessions I ran, they wiped the floor with everything I threw at them. Bandits, groups of kobolds, a couple big spiders... even a giant bugbear went down in pieces within the span of just a few rounds. The way the party was, fact of the matter was they were actually a pretty tough group to challenge within reason.
So then we had the first serious dungeon crawl where there were traps everywhere, a whole slew of monsters, and in the end a double-crossing rogue who was actually supposed to be an unwinnable situation. There was a lot of fighting and they were pretty nicely battered all around, but in the end I flubbed a few rolls and forgot how certain mechanics worked. In the end, they actually won the unwinnable situation. I was a bit put off by that.
THAT said... I'm not one of those "GMs from Hell" whose sole purpose is to torture and murder their players. Frankly that's not what I want to lead people through and it's not what I'd consider fun. I do want to see them succeed. I want them to sweat plenty, but I still want them to succeed.
So then aside from the one girl who was choked to unconsciousness in the mine (by a monster aptly called a "choker"), the fact of the matter was that the players really didn't sweat very much. Aside from an exciting first day of playing EVER, the vast majority of those early encounters were complete curb stomps where the one big monster just died instantly. My players simply didn't have any particularly strong survival instinct; they never needed one.
I needed something else in those lower level monsters to throw at them...
