Hi Everyone!
I’m mainly playing (and GMing) systems like Warhammer, nWoD and Savage Worlds. However Pathfinder has recently gained my interest because of the great support.
I have looked through available Adventure Paths and as I can see they are mainly focused on Dungeon Crawling/Hack&Slash. My friends like to explore the role playing aspect of the game more and want to play adventures with investigation, social encounters etc. Basically – Combat and action should be addition to the great story. (Not great story being addition to a combat).
I’ve seen that Kingmaker has some elements of economy and kingdom-making, which can be interesting part for my group. On the other hand Course of the Crimson Throne and City of Thieves are advertised as gritty and urban adventures, which reminds me of Warhammer gameplay.
Which Adventure Path (or Module) will be the best one for my group?
Curse of the Crimson Throne has some very nice RP opportunities, and seems designed almost with alternating RP scene/Combat scene chapters. It also introduces the Tarot-like Harrow deck to the campaign setting which gives you the opportunity for some nice card-reading scenes.
Note however that it's pre-PFRPG (designed for 3.5 rules). That isn't much of an issue, though, as long as you don't mind doing a tweak here and there (and if combat is secondary anyway then it'll hardly matter)
Kingmaker is something I like to compare to the old CM1: Test of the Warlords module for the D&D Companion Set: a good way to get characters running their own dominions/kingdoms. From the introduction of part 2:
"While it can be
tempting to race through an Adventure Path and assume
that its events more or less play out in real time as you
play the game, Kingmaker benefits from numerous long
breaks in which the PCs take a step back from adventuring
and spend time relaxing, running their nation, crafting
magic items, and so on. Not only does this increase the
verisimilitude of the campaign (nations don’t become
sprawling kingdoms overnight, after all), but it can also
allow for game play elements that often get left behind in
campaigns that don’t pause now and then for air. With a
slower-paced game, PCs who want to craft items will have
plenty of time to do so. And watching a beloved character
grow old or establish a family can make the rewards of a
successful adventure even more poignant."
Note that the Kingdom+City rules in Kingmaker have been revised and republished in the recent Ultimate Campaign hardback book, but you can happily play with the original version if you don't want to pick that up (or alternatively, pick up Ultimate Campaign for the rules to use with your own campaign)
As for Council of Thieves - how can you get any better than an adventure that involves becoming actors and putting on a stage play? There's also NPCs introduced in part one that are then left without further official roles in the adventure, specifically so you can use them for ongoing RP without worrying about the plot.
yeah, a rp heavy city-urban PF-AP would be most welcome. Need good interplay between the PCs, not just NPCs
And lots of 'choice'
Thanks for your suggestions guys!
The other problem with most DnD modules I’ve read is story being addition to dungeon crawling/hack&slash. The great amount of combat isn’t a problem, but most encounters should be important for the plot.
This is a “typical dungeon” problem. For example - Before you reach the bad guy and learn his evil plans, you must fight his dogs, enormous spiders in the basement and wicked goblin servants.
To summarize – action movie style adventure paths/modules, rather than dungeon crawling style ones("random encounters" and "tones of unimportant enemies").
(I know that Pathfinder should be focused on “dungeons”, but which one contains the less amount of them?)
Creative Director
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When I'm developing Adventure Paths, I try to make sure there's a LOT of roleplaying opportunities in there, even in dungeon-heavy campaigns like Shattered Star. In the end, of course, it's really up to the GM whether or not that stuff gets presented as roleplaying opportunities in the adventure, and then up to the players to do something about it.
(I know that Pathfinder should be focused on “dungeons”, but which one contains the less amount of them?)
Council of Thieves has the PCs visiting, lets see...
* A Sewer
* A Demiplane
* Two Basements
* Ruins
* An actual dungeon, with cells
* One traditional "maze and monsters" RPG Dungeon
Everything else (the other approximately two-thirds of the campaign) takes place in either city or wilderness locations, with enough NPC notes to easily turn it into a mostly-RP campaign.
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Council of Thieves is almost the "forgotten AP" having come out the same time the core rulebook was released and thus overshadowed. However, possibly because the rules were in flux whike it was being developed, it is by far the strongest of all APs in terms of RP content. It is nowhere close to my favorite (CotCT) but if you have a more rules lite free formy group of players, or a bunch of LARPers at your table it is the best possible choice.
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IMO, Kingmaker affords the most role playing possibilities. The players get to determine how fast or slow they want to take exploration. If they want to spend time getting to know a (what is in the adventure) nameless NPC, that's their call. There's very little overplot that is forcing them onto the next area. Heck, the second module doesn't have much, if any, plot. It is really nice for players who want to do things like get married, create serious magic items, develop long lasting friendships with NPCs, advance age categories, convert a tribe of kobolds to good alignment, you name it. IMO, that AP is a roleplaying gold mine.
Just as a heads up, Wrath of the Righteous has some significant potential for roleplaying, as there is a cadre of NPCs who will interact with one another and with the PCs. I would even suggest giving bonuses to Diplomacy rolls if they effectively roleplay (or even forego the Diplomacy if they RP it sufficiently).
Rise of the Runelords (the Anniversary Edition) has some nice areas where there's plenty of RP opportunities. Diplomatic players can make some good allies in their travels if they don't shoot first and then cast divinations on the corpses. There's also a goodly amount of fan-made material to enhance the campaign.
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The problem with Council of Thieves is that its' metaplot is entirely forgettable. People (me included) were eagerly expecting an AP that's about urban guerilla warfare against oppressive Chealxian government, rooftop battles against Inquistors of Asmodeus, storming Hellknight citadels, political tussle with diabolic nobility and all that and what we got instead was a completely forgettable BBEG with an unremarkable agenda.
Also, adventure 1 is kinda blergh.
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The problem with Council of Thieves is that its' metaplot is entirely forgettable. People (me included) were eagerly expecting an AP that's about urban guerilla warfare against oppressive Chealxian government, rooftop battles against Inquistors of Asmodeus, storming Hellknight citadels, political tussle with diabolic nobility and all that and what we got instead was a completely forgettable BBEG with an unremarkable agenda.
Also, adventure 1 is kinda blergh.
True, but prerelease hype coloring player expectations is not much of an issue this long after release. Book 2 is the heaviest RP issue of any AP to date, and the play is a great way to get newer RPers into the spirit of it.
As far as Kingmaker, simply having a slower pace isn't really enough. Kingmaker as a sand box is incredibly player driven and simply does not have the cast of colorful npcs that other APs have. While other APs have great characters JR doesn't make much use of them except as side quets unkess the GM really works to integrate them, while Serpents Skull just kind of flounders as a whole and Runelords (original) had too little connection betwern books to make any of the relationships meaningful.
Top 5 RP
Council of Thieves
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Reign of Winter
Skull and Shackles
Second Darkness
The fact KM is player driven adds to the RP. Chatting to npcs isn't the only route to good RP. Players are much more alive, colorful and in depth than any paragraph of an npc
In all the APs I've seen, role-playing is largely up to the players and GM. For example, in Jade Regent, there are NPCs who travel with your group. Their personalities are described. Occasionally the adventure will say, for example, that Koya suggests the group takes a particular course of action. You will get bonus points to your relationship score with Koya if you give her the right sort of present, or achieve tasks you'd probably have wanted to do anyway.
What you won't get from the books: dialogue for Koya, reasons to talk to Koya. That's up to the group.
I'm also gonna favor KM. As a player in a KM campaign, I feel that the narrative is much more player driven than any other AP we've ran/played so far.
Council of Thieves seems like a good suggestion, but there is a lot of disconnection between the main plot and the modules' inter-connectivity, to the point that significant portions require either a rewrite or working in material from the latter modules into earlier ones. There's a lot of good DM material in that AP's Forum on these boards, so don't let that discourage you. Just know that you're going to have a little bit of work cut out for you if you try to just run the modules 'as-is'.
I'm really suprised Carrion Crown isn't mentioned by anyone, each of the AP books has significant role playing section in the first part of each.
I do agree with prevoius posts Skulls and Shackles and Curse of the Crimsson Throne are role playing heavy.
Kingmaker is structurally an extreme load on the GM. Yes, you can create your own roleplaying opportunities ad infinitum, but you have to lift that weight by yourself. The other more guided AP's leave less space for deviation from the beaten path, but at least they give you more material to work within that path.
Personally, I'd recommend Curse of the Crimson Throne or Jade Regent. Both have lots of roleplaying opportunities. So far, Wrath of the Righteous is looking very good in regards to RP, too, but that one has just begun and who knows if the whole mythic framework will hold up when the party begins to sling some real power around (i.e. module four and forward). We are basically doing the field test on the entire ruleset on that one.
An adventure path which has surprising amounts of RP material to it is Shattered Star. Sure, there is a ton of dungeon crawling. But if your party is willing to engage the different people they meet diplomatically, you'll often come away surprised at what you can accomplish.
Reign of Winter has you meet a lot of interesting characters. It is up to you and your group, however, to make them permanent companions and develop them after the modul from which they come from ends. Same for Carrion Crown, although the last module basically is combat encounters from front to back, with very little chance at using social skills.
I'm really suprised Carrion Crown isn't mentioned by anyone, each of the AP books has significant role playing section in the first part of each.
I do agree with prevoius posts Skulls and Shackles and Curse of the Crimsson Throne are role playing heavy.
I thought about mentioning it (As I'm DM'ing for one group).
The Role-Playing in the AP is fantastic, but the difficulty...If you're a new group, this AP could be a rough welcome to Pathfinder, especially the second module.
they all have ample opportunity for roleplaying, i'd like to know which ones you think are primarily "hack n' slash" and before you start i'm well aware of The City of Seven Spears and their criteria for claiming the various districts, thats just one book in the series otherwise it has plenty of roleplaying.
are you sure you're not confusing Pathfinder with another edition from another company that shall not be named?
are you sure you're not confusing Pathfinder with another edition from another company that shall not be named?...and just when I was about to suggest Scales of War.
i've never heard of it, to be fair that could refer to a bunch of companies and games including one that rhymes with Hobotech (now THATS a game to make, parasitic size people piloting Hobos vs slightly larger aliens after booze to power their Hobos lol)
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The higher hack and slash ones are Legacy of Fire, Shattered Star, Serpents Skull, and Runelords. Also book four or five (or both) of every AP yet that I have read or played. (RoW looks to be the big exception). It is almost like how Star Trek has the odd number curse, Pathfinder has the book 4/5 curse.
I've found Runelords has excellent RP opportunities, should the GM pursue them. Any of the APs can devolve into rollplaying without much effort. Even RoW and WotR, which has multiple Diplomacy checks and the like, could just be resolved by rolling dice without ever roleplaying things out.
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To be honest one can make nearly any sort of AP focused on role-playing. It is a false dichometry to think that role-playing =! no combat. Role-playing is playing a role and acting as your character would.
So in games with combat, remeber to describe how you fight and how it feels to have the gnoll blood splattered against your face as you go and save the poor child that the took as a slave. Or perhaps how you jump over fallen trees to finally kill that snakemen or stop the rival team from getting to the city first.
combat is often part of stories. act how your character might act, they likely might be tired after an epic battle. go into more descriptive ways of how you fight.
Scales of War was the big 4E Adventure Path Wizards of the Coast did in Dungeon Magazine after they went digital. The adventure installments I saw were a design mess of repetitive and uninspired encounters with little to no logic or reason and certainly no roleplaying.
i tried to read the wii page it made little sense to me:)
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I dunno, there were some interesting bits that could be RPed in Scales of War. The final chapter in the heroic tier starts out as an investigation into a missing priest and requires the PCs to do some sleuthing. The second chapter in the paragon tier has the PCs begin to put together a resistance movement against the invading githyanki army. And while the epic level stuff's more or less just hack and slash, there are some big important names that pop up that hit home that the PCs are now a Big Deal. Just to name a few: Kas the Bloody-handed. Dispater. Moradin. They're all one-and-done scenes with them, but still, how often do you get to meet these people?
The real problem, of course, is that the roleplay is diminished by the worst thing to come from 4E: the skill challenge system. I get what WotC was trying to do with that, but I've never really been a fan of any skill challenge presented. It was their attempt to quantify an insubstantial element: storytelling. The fact that they had scads of articles on it for years should tell you that nobody really knew what to do with that system, but they were stuck promoting it all the same.
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I read the first handful and they were more of the same that was being produced for 4E. Repetitive and overly complicated combat encounters with the barest of stories to string them together. It was far too much like Keep on the Shadowfell in its design for me to want to keep up with it. 4E just fell flat for me on so many levels but the combat encounter focus with maybe some roleplaying in between design philosophy really killed the game for me.
I agree that roleplaying can be anywhere and that is certainly how I run my games. Some adventures promote and encourage RP interactions more than others but ANYTHING can be run as an RP heavy or RP light game. 4E can be run RP heavy and World of Darkness can be run RP light if that is how you decide to approach it. Writers and designers clearly have a focus in mind when they create however.
We had excellent success with both Kingmaker and Council of Thieves, but not out of the box--I'm not sure you *can* run Kingmaker out of the box (picks up empty box and rattles it in puzzlement).
Council of Thieves has the most extended non-combat sequences of any AP (in book 2) and is relatively dungeon-light. But you will need to flesh out the politics a lot.
Kingmaker is an awesome opportunity for PC/PC and PC/NPC interaction, but it's more like an outline than a worked-out adventure; figure on adding 2 episodes for every 1 episode the AP gives you.
I hesitate to recommend Second Darkness as most of it is, in my opinion, highly problematic. However, module 4 is a great roleplaying arena, especially combined with the support material in the back. It would be worth considering running it as a stand-alone (whatever you do, don't follow up with #5, often regarded as the low point in AP modules).
In all of the APs, we have found that the roleplaying tends to dry up past module 4. I don't like high-level play much anyway; if you have the same feeling, it's worth looking for ending points before module 5. (I ran Skull and Shackles 2-4 plus Legacy of Fire 4 as a mini-campaign, which was...okay, but pirates are not really our thing.)
For me, Skull and Shackles probably had the most Roleplaying, with Kingmaker a real close second. There's something about being pressed into service on a pirate ship that gets the players characters plotting right away, and the AP certainly provides a colorful cast of NPCs to get to know, love, and/or hate.
Okay. Here's the thing. A good part of this is up to the GM. A good GM can make even the most hack-and-slash campaign settings into a roleplayer's dream. And a dice-roller can turn the most involved RP encounters into a dice-rolling encounter that doesn't do anything.
It also depends on the players, mind you. If the players are uninterested in RP, then you're not going to get RP out of them.
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Okay. Here's the thing. A good part of this is up to the GM. A good GM can make even the most hack-and-slash campaign settings into a roleplayer's dream. And a dice-roller can turn the most involved RP encounters into a dice-rolling encounter that doesn't do anything.
It also depends on the players, mind you. If the players are uninterested in RP, then you're not going to get RP out of them.
Yeah, i've noticed everyone has a different recommendation, which is why i either suggest them all or point out the flaws in the argument and crack a few jokes (how is it no one has yet to favorite my Hobotech post? my wife thoght it was funny:) they're all good for roleplaying opportunities (even Serpent's Skull) now if i can only get my wife to dress up as a sexy Shalelu.... )
An adventure path which has surprising amounts of RP material to it is Shattered Star. Sure, there is a ton of dungeon crawling. But if your party is willing to engage the different people they meet diplomatically, you'll often come away surprised at what you can accomplish.
That I had forgotten. We had an mostly evil party so there was lots inter-party banter and most monsters where at least questioned, berated, taunted etc before being slaughtered!! They had great fun with
Yeah, i've noticed everyone has a different recommendation, which is why i either suggest them all or point out the flaws in the argument and crack a few jokes (how is it no one has yet to favorite my Hobotech post? my wife thoght it was funny:) they're all good for roleplaying opportunities (even Serpent's Skull) now if i can only get my wife to dress up as a sexy Shalelu.... )Okay. Here's the thing. A good part of this is up to the GM. A good GM can make even the most hack-and-slash campaign settings into a roleplayer's dream. And a dice-roller can turn the most involved RP encounters into a dice-rolling encounter that doesn't do anything.
It also depends on the players, mind you. If the players are uninterested in RP, then you're not going to get RP out of them.
Wait, Hobotech ain't real? Damn! I wanted to go out and buy it! I trusted you!!!
Wait, Hobotech ain't real? Damn! I wanted to go out and buy it! I trusted you!!!Yeah, i've noticed everyone has a different recommendation, which is why i either suggest them all or point out the flaws in the argument and crack a few jokes (how is it no one has yet to favorite my Hobotech post? my wife thoght it was funny:) they're all good for roleplaying opportunities (even Serpent's Skull) now if i can only get my wife to dress up as a sexy Shalelu.... )Okay. Here's the thing. A good part of this is up to the GM. A good GM can make even the most hack-and-slash campaign settings into a roleplayer's dream. And a dice-roller can turn the most involved RP encounters into a dice-rolling encounter that doesn't do anything.
It also depends on the players, mind you. If the players are uninterested in RP, then you're not going to get RP out of them.
its not real....yet! still in the play testing, dennis quaid or martin short still wont return my calls and the Hobos have been.... uncooperative. ;)
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I'll echo the rather surprising sentiment that Shattered Star is great for role playing. I'm a player in that one, but from my side of the screen I can honestly say this is the rp heaviest game I've ever been involved in. Still lots of dungeon crawling, mind you...but the role play that came up *in* those dungeons has been really awesome. For example:
As a GM, I found Jade Regent to be really great. There was a huge emphasis on character and relationship development, and it covered a long period of time. It took my players 2 years in-game to finish the adventure, with lots and lots of personal growth happening in those years.
Is it for Pathfinder rather than 3.5, and if not have the PDFs for Shattered Star been converted to Pathfinder from 3.5?
Shattered Star is one of the newest AP's, the one before Reign of Winter.
Thanks! I may very well pick it up.
It'd be nice if Paizo converted its PDFs for the older APs to Pathfinder rules. They don't even need to do an Anniversary Edition or the like (though admittedly smoothing out discrepancies between each chapter like they did with the Runelords Anniversary Edition would be cool); just revamp it for the newer system. (Though I suspect what with WotC having rereleased its 3.5 D&D books in an effort to thwart the growth of Pathfinder as a superb alternative to D&D, they could still do good sales of their older print copies of the 3.5 APs.)
I would suggest if your group tends to the rp heavy before jumping (and investing) into an AP you may want to try a stand alone module. A really strong rp module that is also level 1 is Hangman's Noose. It was designed for 3.5 but should be minimal work to run in PF. See how the players like the system before jumping into a full on campaign. Another good (and again 3.5) rp introductory adventure is Hollow's Last Hope (and its free). It also has some good rp qualities. I don't know much about Crypt of the Everflame which was the PF introductory adventure.
That said if your players like to rp they will create those opportunities. The system while not as rules-lite as Savage Worlds is not necessarily the most relevant item when it comes to rping.