XP Progression and sidequests


Shackled City Adventure Path

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

I've just bought the hardcover Shackled City. I've not read it through yet (I've started, but most of my time is running on converting Night Below to 3.5 for another group).

I primarily picked up Shackled City because our groups are having a bit of a quest crisis (over both groups there's really only three of us that run anything). We've ended up using more modules than I'd like because (in theory) it's quicker to convert a module than write one myself. Night Below is actually the first one that might actually meet that requirement; by previous two conversions Vecna Lives/Vecna Reborn/Die Vecna Die and Dragon Mountain (the latter boosted to levels 14-21 for the same party that did the Vecna quest!) actually were stupidly huge...Dragon Mountain topped out at 150 pages-equivilent of stats, which is nearly as much as the whole damn module...

Anyway, getting to my actual point, what's the XP progression in Shackled City like? I.e. am I going to have to add any sidequests and whatnot outside the main adventure to keep the PCs the right level? Typically in my own games, I award half combat XP for anything I don't consider a BBEG fight and add more story awards. I can work round this easily enough, but it would help to know if the standard progression is sufficent to use as my basis.


Adventure Path Charter Subscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Adventure Path Subscriber

It's really hard to say: it depends critically on party size and play style.

For our Core party of 6 PCs there was never enough XP or treasure to keep them anywhere near recommended levels, and the AP, which started out very hard, slowly moved to being impossibly hard (reached that point around module 5). The same GM ran a game for 4 PCs which worked out somewhat better--the players didn't start complaining until a sudden leap in lethality around modules 7-8. (Both games folded at #10.)

I think that even for 4 PCs, XP and treasure are both on the low side in this one; if you play it strictly by the book I believe you'll need to introduce side adventures or risk having the PCs fall behind.

Personally, I have given up on awarding XP in Adventure Paths. It's just too stressful and too likely to go wrong. I give out levels instead.

Mary

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

In theory, the party will be four characters, probably stats generated with my now-usual method of starting all 8 plus 30 points, points for point (typically giving you a 18/16/14/12/10/8 set-up). That's the minimum at any rate.

Hmm. Potentially problematic then. I was hoping I wasn't going to have do anything extra. Looks like I'll have to do what I've been doing with Night Below and work through the entire adventure path calculating minimum and maximum XP. Sigh. I was trying to avoid that.

(That said, the party playing this will be my Monday group, who will have access to more or less the entirity of 3.5 (and my mods thereof) and whom are regularly capable of shattering encounters...thus far up to chapter 3, I've been fairly confident they'll cake walk it...)


I think you can run this without side quests if you are just looking for as little hassle as possible.

There are some pretty good threads on experience on these boards if you haven't searched. I have 5 players and I thought the XP was just a little behind. The treasure lagged at first, but I've been pretty pleased with the higher level modules. But other people have just handed out levels at appropriate points, while others have added side quests.

Personally, I would rather avoid the sidequests to move along the main plot, but other groups like the extra stuff.


Since my previous post seems to have been eaten by the boards, let me try again.

I had no problems keeping everyone on expected level for half the book now. I must admit, though, that my group (of 5-7 characters) thoroughly went through the early adventures and collected > 90 % of all available XP. If your group likes to shortcut or avoid hazards wherever possible, you should aim to give them the XP that they otherwise miss out on.

I recently ran a little behind on XP, but I have an explanation. Sign of the Smoking Eye requires a number of random encounters on Occipitus, which I despised as being boring. I couldn't get myself to work all those random encounters into a big side-trek storyline (but there's material in that regard at therpgenius.com), so my group came out a bit short on XP from this chapter (especially since the group had Kaurophon as a 7th player). I used the plane shift, which they had to make back to the material plane to drop them into Sasserine, where they stumbled upon some foreshadowing events and a vampire hideout, which I took from a different module, giving them plenty of XP to advance ahead of level expectations for the moment.

I'm not concerned as I haven't seen many reports about groups being ahead of plan on the messageboards. I assume that the upcoming events are going to be a bit random and that I may have to resort to giving out levels instead of XP, which should also be fine.

In a group of 4, I would not be worried at all about meeting the expectations, you should rather be careful not to kill the party off in the beginning. Starting new characters at lower level is going to be the main reason for not matching the expectations, IMHO.

Cheers,
Nib


Aotrscommander wrote:


(That said, the party playing this will be my Monday group, who will have access to more or less the entirity of 3.5 (and my mods thereof) and whom are regularly capable of shattering encounters...thus far up to chapter 3, I've been fairly confident they'll cake walk it...)

How good are they at min-maxing? If they have access to everything and are pretty good at min-maxing I think they'll be fine. Don't punish for min-maxing unless its really outrageous. I'd still not allow a handful of 'broken' things in 3.5 such as Dust of Sneezing and Choking and the Frenzied Berserker but mostly it should be all good.

This adventure is freaken hard but every single book - thats pretty friggen powerful, especially Tomb of Battle and the Spell Compendium.

RPG Superstar 2008 Top 32

Jeremy Mac Donald wrote:
Aotrscommander wrote:


(That said, the party playing this will be my Monday group, who will have access to more or less the entirity of 3.5 (and my mods thereof) and whom are regularly capable of shattering encounters...thus far up to chapter 3, I've been fairly confident they'll cake walk it...)

How good are they at min-maxing? If they have access to everything and are pretty good at min-maxing I think they'll be fine. Don't punish for min-maxing unless its really outrageous. I'd still not allow a handful of 'broken' things in 3.5 such as Dust of Sneezing and Choking and the Frenzied Berserker but mostly it should be all good.

This adventure is freaken hard but every single book - thats pretty friggen powerful, especially Tomb of Battle and the Spell Compendium.

Put it this way...a month of two ago (admittedly with me playing and not DMing) we managed to butcher an encounter that the DM said was supposed to be a "PCs are captured by overwhelming force" encounter...By use of tactics, good buffing spells and a little luck (highlight; my Pale Master sliced a charging barbarian in twain with his scythe!)

I'm pretty capable of optimising myself (certainly enough to disallow the most broken combos, since I know them myself; you should see the rampant horror of optimisation that is my conversion of Dragon Mountain!) Two of the other players are pretty good (one nearly as much as me and only less so because he deosn't spend as much time on the WotC boards as I do!) Moreover, the players have a nasty tendancy to work as a lethally cohesive team...I'm not at all worried by the difficulty of the adventure (unless they fall seriously behind in the XP department).

More or less every book (excluding the enviroment and races books), which excludes some of the really, really broken stuff (Shivering Touch, looking at you!)

I may well annoate the SC Fighter classes with my tweaks whatever, to bring them into closer parity to ToB; that's not a long job.


I really do recommend doing away with XP and just leveling the party at the appropriate points in the adventure. Most adventures has a logical place to level in the middle, and then you level the PCs again at the end of the adventure.

It has worked out great for me and my group.


Frank Steven Gimenez wrote:

I really do recommend doing away with XP and just leveling the party at the appropriate points in the adventure. Most adventures has a logical place to level in the middle, and then you level the PCs again at the end of the adventure.

It has worked out great for me and my group.

Did you run into issues with party death or magic item creation?


Frank Steven Gimenez wrote:

I really do recommend doing away with XP and just leveling the party at the appropriate points in the adventure. Most adventures has a logical place to level in the middle, and then you level the PCs again at the end of the adventure.

It has worked out great for me and my group.

This was going to be my advice as well.

I switched to this method for my current game and I greatly prefer it over figuring experience. I have found that if the power curve gets a little off it's easy to bring it back into check by having the party level an extra time or skip an advancement point. My current game had a point where the party was too powerful so I skipped one advancement and everything is fine again. I am currently nearing the end of the Eberron path, [u]The Forgotten Forge[/u], Shadows of the Last War, Whispers of the Vampire's Blade, and Grasp of the Emerald Claw, converted to my homebrew world.

I am preparing Shackled City and should be starting in a couple of weeks. I have written into my notes where I want people to level. This allows me to add or remove as much as I want without having to track experience. I don't know how this will affect magic item creation and other things that have an XP cost but it makes everything else so much easier.


Dedekind wrote:
Frank Steven Gimenez wrote:

I really do recommend doing away with XP and just leveling the party at the appropriate points in the adventure. Most adventures has a logical place to level in the middle, and then you level the PCs again at the end of the adventure.

It has worked out great for me and my group.

Did you run into issues with party death or magic item creation?

For magic items, I just removed the XP requirement. The cost for creating magic items is now money and time. Since I want my players to buy, sell, and create magic items without much hassle, this worked for me.

For death, a raised PC gains a persistent negative level that goes away after a few game sessions.

Multiclassing incurs no experience point penalty for uneven levels. Instead, characters gain 1 extra skill point (x4 at first level) when leveling in their character's favored class. Humans and other races with "Favored Class: Any" need to specify what their favored class is during character creation.

I haven't have to deal with the XP components of spells yet. But I suppose I would limit spells that cost less than 1,000 XP as a component would instead be limited to being cast once per day, and wish/miracle could only be cast once per adventure.

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