One thing I loved about the old Dungeon mags was how to scale the adventure to different level parties. How come such information is not provided in any Pathfinder AP or module?I believe that the reason was that adding in a sidebar with scaling information takes up space, and they usually are pretty similar... most of the "scaling the adventure" sidebars in Dungeon looked pretty similar, basically telling you class levels or templates to apply to or remove from creatures.
James said this was exactly the reason. They are pretty hard pressed to squeeze everything into the allotted space and they want to maximize content. You can't really include enough information in a sidebar to properly scale an adventure in any case, ultimately it boils down to DM discretion. A good DM will do it right without the sidebar, a sidebar won't contain enough to help a poor DM much at all.
Creative Director
|
We don't do scaling sidebars in Pathfinder for several reasons.
1) They take up a lot of space and time. Authors almost never write them, and that means the editors have to write them, and the time it takes to do a scaling sidebar that's WORTH printing is often several hours, since you have to do more than just add or subtract hit dice. And if you go the other way and just list the monsters and say how many HD to add or subtract, then they all end up looking the same and feeling too repetitive.
2) Adventures are often built with a specific level in mind. Some adventures don't scale well as a result. A murder mystery for 4th level characters, for example, assumes the PCs probably don't have access to speak with dead. If you scale it to 5th, suddenly that's not an assumption you can make, and that requires a relatively extensive rewriting of key clues. Not something you can handle in a single sidebar.
3) Scaling the adventure sidebars first appeared in Dungeon at the start of 3rd edition primarily because at that point, there were only a very few number of adventures for folk to play. Scaling the adventure sidebars were mostly intended to make the adventures available to a wider range of groups. Now that there are hundreds and even thousands of adventures out there, the need to make each individual adventure usable across a wide range of levels is less.
4) And the Big Reason for the APs: Pathfinder adventure paths aren't one adventure. They are complete campaigns. They start at 1st and go to 15th or thereabouts, and everything pretty much builds on the other. The adventures are intended to be run this way, and thus scaling the adventure sidebars in Pathfinder APs opens up a whole new can of worms.