Nick Lyons 45's page

...I have to wonder whether the party being so blithe about cooperating with Aulthunn is partly a passive-aggressive revolt against the AP's writing.

Huh. I remember getting that distinct impression when it originally came out - to the point where I felt rather disappointed that the first full-fledged 'sequel' to RotRL was focused on what I consider the least interesting part of the game - and I also have the impression that it was fairly common knowledge, but off the top of my head I can't immediately think of a specific source for that knowledge.

I have to say, thank you so much for playing this monstrosity of an AP. I now know not to ever run it. And I hope that Paizo is reading this thread carefully to learn what NOT to do in the future. *sigh*

TBH, I've never had any interest in playing Shattered Star, specifically BECAUSE it was always 'sold' as the Dungeon Crawl AP. Dungeon crawling doesn't have to be inherently terrible - certainly there's no need for the more abusive stuff like the endless Not Actually Traps - but if it's your primary selling point that does historically imply groups who want to do more than "kick in the door, kill the monsters, repeat" may not be the top priority.

Honestly, NobodysHome - given that you seem to know your group's preferences pretty well, I'm curious why you even decided to run this?

Well you can’t save everyone from bad decisions.

I was in an Underdark campaign in 3.5 once where my Viking buddy convinced my dwarven abjurer to link arms and jump into a pit where the bottom was concealed in fog. That didn’t end well for us either!

...How'd he pull THAT off?

Mostly I was just figuring it would be good to have one central reference point. Going through hundreds and hundreds of forum threads to find feedback on the APs sounds pretty tedious, so I figured it couldn't hurt to just go ahead and ask about this specific thing, which is one of my least favorite roleplaying tropes and so something that I'm kind of on the lookout for more than usual.

(I did read one campaign journal complaining about this sort of thing in Book 4 of Strange Aeons, but I'm not sure how common a response that was, especially since everyone involved seemed to have burnt out on the AP during the previous adventure anyway.)

For what it's worth, I actually don't have any particular adventure path picked out to run at this time - Carrion Crown was just on my mind because of the (sigh) Halloween decorations I saw for sale in a store recently.

While reading about Carrion Crown on the forums in preparation for a possible future game, I noticed that Part 2 had a fair amount of criticism regarding the apparent assumption in the text that the PCs will loot Count Caromarc's castle, even though it's been taken over by outside forces and the count turns out to be a mostly-innocent prisoner. This sounds particularly problematic since I've also seen a lot of criticism about Carrion Crown being a low-treasure AP in general. While it's not THAT hard for a GM to massage this into something more palatable for more heroic parties, it made me wonder: are there any other spots in APs that seem to make an assumption that the players are operating in a "kill everyone and take their stuff" fashion that might need adjustment on my part, since I know that's not the sort of game I enjoy?

(I'm not counting things like Skull and Shackles where being criminals of some kind is the central premise).