I am a DM with general experience, I am not a beginner, and I am certainly not an expert. My DnD group initially started as your typical four people, all casual friends, then one of the members had to move away, and another person we had to remove from our group for outside reasons. The problem is that I had started the Curse of Strahd with four members, and now there are two in the party.
I had asked them if they wanted to continue Strahd, and they did. Still, I feel as though I am left with two options,
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completely re-vamp Strahd so that the monsters are more manageable for two magic users (a Druid and a Wizard, both level 4 currently), or
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add a DMPC, which I haven't heard the best things about doing.
If there are any suggestions on how to handle this situation or adequately use a DMPC so that I am not overpowering my players but am not giving them an impossible shot at the campaign, please let me know.
Best Answer
As an extension to ruffdove's answer, I've found it easiest to create (or use your existing) characters as DMPCs, but do not run them in combat. So for role playing purposes you'll control the DMPCs, but once combat starts hand the character sheets over to the actual players.
This gives the players the combat support they need and allows them to be the ones making all combat decisions (nothing's more boring than watching a DM roll for both a player and a monster and essentially play the game all by themselves) without them needing to constantly RP or otherwise own two characters themselves.