We abandoned the campaign after Kings of the Rift, maybe 10 months of play into it (playing 1-2 times a week). As the GM, I frankly just didn't care anymore. The player would have preferred to continue, but not very strongly.
The later modules weren't really working--both for mechanical reasons (the PCs had become hyper-optimized in order to survive the earlier modules, and suddenly were too powerful for their opposition) and for roleplaying reasons. The PCs refused to connect with Alhaster, they intensely disliked Manzorian (and no wonder), and once they knew what the pyramid in Alhaster was, they wanted to force the showdown three modules early. Forcing them not to do so felt painfully artificial.
High points were Three Faces of Evil and Champion's Belt. The player also liked Spire of Long Shadows but I was bitterly disappointed by it. Nothing after that worked for us at all. We're having a lot better luck with RotRL.
We had only one TPK, in HoHR, but it had a bad effect on the game--that was the start of the pernicious drive to optimize the PCs. By the end of the campaign, the PCs' strategies were very effective but incredibly boring to GM for. They involved moving as fast as possible to maximize surprise and extend the use of the buff spells--meaning that the player had no attention left to look at scenery or talk to anyone. I felt like I was mechanically adjucating a video game, and frankly, computers are better at that than I am.
Both of the SCAP games I'm aware of died at roughly the same point, and for fairly similar reasons, except that in those games the PCs never got ahead of the power curve and the games remained brutally hard. In those, it was the players rather than the GM who cried quits.
Mary
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I gave up on the SCAP (magazine version) as I, as DM, got bored. Round about the time of the Smoking Eye. It just seemed one combat after another, and not much in the way of character development. To be fair, I think a lot of the fault was mine, as I didn't really invest the setting with life, especially Cauldron. Never tried the other APs in Dungeon.
My group did make it through the Age of Worms and yes, the bad guys were pretty decked out in comparison to my group of players.
I scaled down a few of the badguys - primarily reducing the saving throw DC's for some of their effects.
I also edited out some of the combat encounters, especially in the later modules. The combat did grind on quite a bit, especially in the later modules. I just gave them the XP for the stuff I dropped to keep them on par with where they should have been.
For the final adventure I stripped out everything except for the battle with K himself. I had the PC's allies take care of the sidequests to lower K's power level.
It worked well and seemed to help rekindle not only my players' interest in the campaign but my own as well.
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For those groups who did cancel the campaign early; please could you confirm whether you were using core rules only, or if not, what supplements you used?
Our group is having a lot of success with SCAP, and I suspect that is due to us using the additional spells, feats and prestige classes.
The DM is using much of the opposition as written, though we have encountered some that have had adjustments. One of the minor Cagewrights was changed to an evil duplicate of our party cleric, challenged him, and the rest of us stayed out of it, since they were the only ones who could hit their own AC!
I don't believe you can make blanket bans of whole rulebooks; sure there are some contents that are not thought out, or seem to have not been playtested. I have picked new spells, read them properly later, and asked the DM to allow me to change, because they are simply too powerful (Energy Transformation Field? Get your level 1 henchman to cast Summon Monster 9? I don't think so.). I work on the assumption that anything the PCs can do is fair for the NPCs, and I don't want an arms race of broken abilities.
There are other elements that I can't understand not being core. Improving your rolls vs Spell Resistance, or having advance warning of incoming teleporters (and delaying them a round) improved our odds very often, and seem like the kind of spells that would have been common tactics for all, not some obscure knowledge tucked away in some wizard's private research.
I think everything needs to be considered on a case by case basis, with the caveat that 'you use it; the opposition can use it'. That should reduce any silly demands.
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My group did make it through the Age of Worms and yes, the bad guys were pretty decked out in comparison to my group of players.
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I also edited out some of the combat encounters, especially in the later modules. The combat did grind on quite a bit, especially in the later modules. I just gave them the XP for the stuff I dropped to keep them on par with where they should have been.
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It worked well and seemed to help rekindle not only my players' interest in the campaign but my own as well.
Like Niko, in my group we made it through the AoW, although it was a real drag toward the end. I didn't have the PCs allies help as much as Niko did, but they turned up somewhat.
We did skip a number of combat encounters. Some I combined, some I let the PCs diplomasize their way through.
2) The campaign seems pretty high powered, at lease compared to what my group is used to. I mean there are some pretty heinous bad guys in there! How many groups ended the story with a TPK? Or multiple TPK's as they tried to restart with a new batch of PC's
The campaign was very high powered, I thought. My party used a number of WotC splat books (including the Tome of Battle, which was a significant part of the party's power). It seems that the bad guys were ramped up to deal with the power-creep of late 3.5. If the PCs didn't have access to a lot of the spells that they did, or the Tome of Battle for the primary fighter, I can seem several occasions were the party could have TPK'd.