Will Adventure Paths for 2E be designed for the full 1 to 20 level range?


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It also sounds as if the later levels (17+ish) are meant to be "legendary" adventuring of a sort that mirrors mythic play in 1E. Is that the general idea? Have mythic concepts been integrated into the core progression to any degree?

I really hope APs run the full level range by default. They've really brought on that possibility with the new edition by having better balanced play into the later level range.


Personally, I hope not. Though I can only assume they are designing high level to be less of a chore to run.


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I hope not. Not because high level is too complicated, but because, I as a GM want to have the space to conclude the AP organically after the last encounter. A post scriptum or an Epilogue if you want. With nowhere to go in level 20 that possibility is smaller than at levels 17/18


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I’d be pretty happy to have some APs hit twenty. Doesn’t need to be all of ‘em.


Maybe not 20, because adventure paths skip entire levels between books, and as noted a GM will likely want to build their own epilogue to close out the overarching stories they've built in filling in those gaps and fitting the AP into a larger story. But hitting level 17 or 18 would be nice. That way the really powerful stuff still comes online, and there's official guidance in how to deal with high level play in the form of an adventure designed to account for it.


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I really hope so, I have always been of the idea that AP should run the whole level range. Return of the Runelords is going to reach level 20, maybe is going to work as test.


I think there will be also a new Format of 3 issue AP's - or was that Starfinder? Anyway, this could open the door for AP's starting beyond Level 1, e.g. have a 3 issue Level 15-20 AP, real high Level adventuring.

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DerNils wrote:
I think there will be also a new Format of 3 issue AP's - or was that Starfinder? Anyway, this could open the door for AP's starting beyond Level 1, e.g. have a 3 issue Level 15-20 AP, real high Level adventuring.

That has only currently been announced for Starfinder. I would suspect it won't be for Pathfinder, certainly not immediately - the AP is still a significant part of their regular income, and they don't want to experiment with it too much - they'd want a year of Starfinder experience before considering it for Pathfinder, and since the lead time is about 18 months on an AP...

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One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

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I would love to see some APs designed to start at different levels.. maybe some starting out at level 5 or 10. But in general, I'll just be happy to see them going the full spectrum of levels. It kind of seemed odd having 20 levels worth of class abilities and fun.. then all the official content cut off at around 12 or 14.


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James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

This sounds a great goal. Thanks, James.

It kinda sounds trivial, but I’m hoping the PCs will reach level twenty midway (or early) in book six, rather than at the climax. It’d be nice to give them the opportunity to actually play a “finished” PC for a while. :)


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Thats too bad. Hopefully its not too hard to keep the level down or convert to PF1.

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Steve Geddes wrote:
James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

This sounds a great goal. Thanks, James.

It kinda sounds trivial, but I’m hoping the PCs will reach level twenty midway (or early) in book six, rather than at the climax. It’d be nice to give them the opportunity to actually play a “finished” PC for a while. :)

Haha, this is a good point. Finishing the last real encounter of the adventure and suddenly BING.. 20 would be a bit of a let down as you wouldn't get to really try out those neat new abilities.


Planpanther wrote:
Thats too bad. Hopefully its not too hard to keep the level down or convert to PF1.

From what we've heard, scaling things down should be easy enough- you can get the difference between "baseline stats of actual level" and "baseline stats of desired level" and apply it to everything. Almost everything scales with level, so it might even be as easy as "minus X to everything and remove the highest level spells".


Steve Geddes wrote:
James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

This sounds a great goal. Thanks, James.

It kinda sounds trivial, but I’m hoping the PCs will reach level twenty midway (or early) in book six, rather than at the climax. It’d be nice to give them the opportunity to actually play a “finished” PC for a while. :)

That would be excellent, and I'd love to see the kinds of fun the equivalent of the last chapters of the Dungeon-era APs could be, revisited with the new system and the benefit of a lot of experience with APs since then.


Sigh. Yup. Baseline assumption of going to that level, so no ap’s that can be completed by people who don’t want to deal with the ‘legendary’ type stuff. It might be advisable to still occasionally at least throw them a bone and have an ap that can be completed without it going all the way.


Arssanguinus wrote:
Sigh. Yup. Baseline assumption of going to that level, so no ap’s that can be completed by people who don’t want to deal with the ‘legendary’ type stuff. It might be advisable to still occasionally at least throw them a bone and have an ap that can be completed without it going all the way.

They are experimenting with two 3-part APs in Starfinder later this year.

Obviously it's two different games, but I'm sure sales data on those will be a useful guide to how feasible it may be to try the same with Pathfinder down the track. (Albeit that's several years away, from our perspective).


Arssanguinus wrote:
Sigh. Yup. Baseline assumption of going to that level, so no ap’s that can be completed by people who don’t want to deal with the ‘legendary’ type stuff. It might be advisable to still occasionally at least throw them a bone and have an ap that can be completed without it going all the way.

Yeah, it really would be best to produce APs with more compartmentalized sections so one can skip a low level section or stop before a high level section and have a complete story.

Two minimum, three would be better


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It's also relatively easy to tweak most issue 3 or issue 4 instalments to make their boss the BBEG of the whole campaign. I've done that a couple of times and I'd venture the players were totally unaware.

RotRL, CC, SerpSkull spoilers:
I finished RotRL after book four - Mokmurion was ultimately responsible for it all. I've also just got done cutting Carrion Crown in half and am ready to run issues 1-3. Granted that one hasn't survived contact with the enemy yet.

The other successful one was Serpent's Skull (finishing with the city exploration in books 3/4. That changed the tone of the AP quite a bit - it was all exploration with competing factions rather than a true BBEG, but it worked out okay.


Just at least in some things still provide support for people who aren’t neccesarily interested in high level play. That isn’t to say don’t produce level 1-20 aps, but I think it would be a mistake to produce ONLY those. There is a market for ones ending at lower levels and will remain so.


Arssanguinus wrote:
Just at least in some things still provide support for people who aren’t neccesarily interested in high level play. That isn’t to say don’t produce level 1-20 aps, but I think it would be a mistake to produce ONLY those. There is a market for ones ending at lower levels and will remain so.

If the first three or four chapters make a solid story with decent completion, it would seem to me each AP would be consistently providing that option as well as the full climb to level 20.

One reason I am so pumped at this idea is that it sounds like a reasonable degree of confidence that high-level play has been made more practical, and I am eager to see how that works out. And hope that whatever that entails might make it more appealing to at least some people who've not previously liked it.

Also, AP appearances for some of the cool high-level monsters in the Bestiaries that have yet to get much setting-specific flavour would be excellent, and more planar content (which seems an obvious way of avoiding too much of the kind of world-changing impact regular APs leading to 20th level could potentially have on Golarion, I'm not sure the setting would benefit from the equivalent of a Worldwound-sealing every six months) would also be a great thing to see.


Arssanguinus wrote:
Just at least in some things still provide support for people who aren’t neccesarily interested in high level play. That isn’t to say don’t produce level 1-20 aps, but I think it would be a mistake to produce ONLY those. There is a market for ones ending at lower levels and will remain so.

Again, as was mentioned above it's usually not very hard to tweak something to cut it off midway. Typically with long stories, there is a SHOCKING TWIST midway, or alternately some critical piece of information that recontextualizes everything that went before and opens a new way forward. You just... Don't trigger that. You cut that out, make the midboss the end boss, make other minor tweaks so the story has a natural conclusion. It's usually not even very much work.


So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?

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Arssanguinus wrote:
So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?

I think a better answer to this would be, instead of Adventure Paths, having modules (as they often do) and several options of modules with an interconnected, story that spans a smaller number of levels.

In general, the concept for Adventure Paths have been to provide a longer running campaign option.

This method would actually also suffice for my request for some content that starts at higher levels. Produce smaller set, connected modules. Say 3 or 4 modules that span smaller level clusters. With full complete stories. Some chains for low, medium and high level ranges.


Fifteen levels, for example, is still a long running campaign.

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Arssanguinus wrote:
Fifteen levels, for example, is still a long running campaign.

Given what I have seen of previous APs.. it would not be hard to accomplish this and still get a complete story. There's a certain degree of filler content to help gain the XP for those levels. Pull out the key story portions (often they're pretty easily called out by being the PFS sanctioned portions), retool some of the later ones for lower levels, and you've got the story covered.


Isn't the main reason APs stop where they stop is that they are pretty hard up against the page count? So if it comes down to "making the adventure clear and richly detailed" and "making the adventure longer" the former will (and should) win every time?

Like I guess maybe the PF2 APs could benefit from less text devoted to stat blocs, but that backmatter where we expand the bestiary and talk about deities or organizations is gonna be pretty important in the early days of PF2.


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Arssanguinus wrote:
So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?

Because every single 1-20 path can contain a fully satisfying shorter path within it, but every shorter path is by definition not delivering those later levels.

James Jacobs has iirc commented that in order to make Return of the Runelords go to level 20 the adventures will be longer and make up more of the content of individual AP issues. That does not sound to me like making the APs longer is going to be reducing the total content available to someone who only plays those APs as far as existing APs go now.


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Arssanguinus wrote:
So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?

I don't understand what you're asking for here from a story telling perspective.

Are you saying you want the extremely high level monsters re-statted so that lower level characters can beat them?

Or that you want satisfying stories that don't include those high level monsters


Arssanguinus wrote:
Just at least in some things still provide support for people who aren’t neccesarily interested in high level play. That isn’t to say don’t produce level 1-20 aps, but I think it would be a mistake to produce ONLY those. There is a market for ones ending at lower levels and will remain so.

I'm really hopeful the 3-and-3 model they're trialling in Starfinder next year is a success. Six months of two shorter paths every couple of years would be a good balance in my view.

Also - if the modules line can get revamped, perhaps they could be expanded to 96 pages from time to time and structured as two-part series (not exclusively, but every now and again).


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Arssanguinus wrote:
So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?

If you don't enjoy the tone of high level play... Why do you want to spend time and money on high level stories?


James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

YEEES!!!

My theory was right, thanks for confirming this, and best of lucks in this endeavor


the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote:


Also, AP appearances for some of the cool high-level monsters in the Bestiaries that have yet to get much setting-specific flavour would be excellent, and more planar content (which seems an obvious way of avoiding too much of the kind of world-changing impact regular APs leading to 20th level could potentially have on Golarion, I'm not sure the setting would benefit from the equivalent of a Worldwound-sealing every six months) would also be a great thing to see.

Yeah, I'm not quite so sure about the effects on the setting of two world shaking events a year. Although a lot of the APs are more focused on stopping some apocalyptic change than causing one from what I've seen (I haven't read or played all of them). So you have closing the Worldwound, but you also have things like preventing a second Earthfall and stopping a cult from bringing back Tar Baphon. The later two don't really change the setting. But I figure Paizo will manage to find a way to keep from constantly upending the universe while providing exciting high-level play.


I feel like if they do average "Local Politics Gone Wild" AP to go with one "Prevent the end of the world" AP per year, that's close to ideal.

I mean, the "Place X has a new ruler" events are more significant to the ongoing megaplot than "the world could have ended, but thanks to our plucky heroes, it has not", but there's a lot of places left in Avistan that could use an Adventurer's touch (Come on, let's fix Galt!)


Speaking of modules, I'd really like to see some going from 11 to 20.
High level epic modules, have they ever existed before?


James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

I am very glad to hear this. The Starfinder system has been very "Meh" in the duration of the adventure paths (I get the first one only going to 12. Not too much issue with that. But the next two adventure paths being 3 books each is very underwhelming). With Pathfinder 2nd ed using a fast XP track (at least, that's what I suspect based on Starfinder and D&D 5e making everything focused on faster leveling), a higher end level would still mean the same amount of game if not more game.


PossibleCabbage wrote:

I feel like if they do average "Local Politics Gone Wild" AP to go with one "Prevent the end of the world" AP per year, that's close to ideal.

I mean, the "Place X has a new ruler" events are more significant to the ongoing megaplot than "the world could have ended, but thanks to our plucky heroes, it has not", but there's a lot of places left in Avistan that could use an Adventurer's touch (Come on, let's fix Galt!)

But after a while of that, the place might end up fairly boring. The dysfunctional messes like Galt are one of the things that give the setting flavor and things to do. It would be a less interesting setting if for example the PCs overthrow Razmir and turn Razmiran into a normal country. The cult of a false god is just cool. Oh, also there should totally be a Ramiran AP, just not overthrowing him.

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James Jacobs wrote:

One of my number one goals for Adventure Paths in the next edition is to have each of them go from 1st to 20th level. We'll see if we can pull that off in a few years, I guess!

(As a preview, the next one, Return of the Runelords, will go to 20th level too!)

Awesome :D


kyrt-ryder wrote:
Arssanguinus wrote:
So again, that means if you don’t want to do level twenty play, you miss out on the whole story completion. In every single adventure path. Why is it somehow bad to not make ALL paths 1-20?
If you don't enjoy the tone of high level play... Why do you want to spend time and money on high level stories?

I don’t - which is why the hope some of them might end by say level 15. There is a big difference in something designed for say fifteen and having to retrofit something for fifteen.

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Hmm, just to check, do you dislike high level play because of themes it has or because of how it works mechanically in 1e?


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CorvusMask wrote:
Hmm, just to check, do you dislike high level play because of themes it has or because of how it works mechanically in 1e?

For me a combination of

(1) fights getting progressively slower to run at higher level (which PF2 may change),
and
(2) the longer the campaign goes on, the more the GM has to edit and customise because PC actions have altered the story away from the baseline assumptions.

As an example of the second, there was a supposed-to-be-friendly NPC that our party in CotCT all hated. We spent a lot of time telling the NPC to go away, and we couldn't understand why the ref kept throwing her in our face. In the end we killed said NPC, then discovered that the next bit of the modulle assumed she was with us, and the ref had to improvise rapidly to ensure we could continue.

Multiply that by 15-20 levels of missed clues, enemies redeemed, accidental crusades or just weird party set-ups, and you might have to re-write the entire last book of the AP anyway. But since lower level characters have fewer ways of disrupting the world the effect is less extreme if you end the AP at a lower level.

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Umm, that second case is problem isn't with high level campaigns though, thats more about gming and players' style(e.g. if players like to do opposite thing on purpose or otherwise like to derail things), but mostly with gming style in general. Like, if I guess right which NPC you are talking about(certain cleric of evil god), nothing in the campaign actually requires her to be with the party, its just helpful to players if they take advantage of her help, so I have no idea why they would have had to rapidly improvise anything unless they themselves got attached to character a lot and refused to allow you guys to just ignore her.


My takeaway from the announcement that PF2 adventure paths will be from levels 1 through 20:

-Fixing high level play is a top priority for PF2. I'm VERY happy about this.
-Faster leveling will also be the default assumption of PF2. This is also suggested by Paizo's move toward lowering the page count in the Starfinder APs. I am GMing Dead Suns right now and my players are leveling up on average once every 2 sessions. And this is for an adventure path that only runs to level 12. If they have a similar page count for adventure content in PF2 adventure paths, then I maybe finding myself leveling them up nearly every five hour session. From what I can guess from the class previews, it seems like there is a flatter power curve going up the levels than in PF1, but I don't think I like the "feel" of such rapid leveling regardless.


Hurrah


Meh. On all. Of them being through 20.


I'm with Ars on this one. And I'm almost never with Ars.


For more than 10 years high levels have been mostly neglected, its only fair that to throw a bone to the people who like them, besides its not like low level are being hurt by it. Kudos to Paizo for supporting all levels of play.


You're talking to someone who loves high levels and runs them far more often than these boards imply are common.

I just feel that rather than 1-20 AP's, it would be far better to have... say... 1-7, 7-15 and 15-20 linked APs.


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Kyrt-rider, so are you thinking current length ~7 level range APs? Requiring slow-advancement to fit the content then? Or the SF 3-chapter AP (ie in your example a 9-chapter, 3 arc AP?)

If regular advancement how is that different than maybe a longer than usual format module instead of an AP?


Just complete stories in the component parts

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