Well if you're that bad at cooking, you get someone else to do it for you. Which in this food/DMing analogy means that you don't run the game at all, you let someone else do it (and ideally you observe and learn from them).It's like comparing a meal you make yourself to one you drive forward and get in a bag. Which is to say, you cannot compare the two.Depends how well you can cook.
Alas, I ate all my friends. :(
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CoDzilla, don't take offense to this, but why do you come here? You seem to hate almost all aspects of the Pathfinder RPG, you've now revealed that you dislike Paizo's adventures as well. Is there really a reason that you come here other than just to share how much you despise everything that is published with a purple pi-shaped golem on it? Wouldn't your time be better spent on something that you DO enjoy? I may sometimes disagree with the direction something looks like it may be taking, or wish they had done something a bit differently, but I overall love Paizo's work. Pathfinder is my third favorite RPG. (Sorry, Paizo folks, Call of Cthulhu is top dog, and Swords & Wizardry Complete just leapfrogged over you all to claim the #2 spot.) If I didn't like it, I wouldn't be here.
Were they delicious?Alas, I ate all my friends. :(Well if you're that bad at cooking, you get someone else to do it for you. Which in this food/DMing analogy means that you don't run the game at all, you let someone else do it (and ideally you observe and learn from them).It's like comparing a meal you make yourself to one you drive forward and get in a bag. Which is to say, you cannot compare the two.Depends how well you can cook.
They were better than Burger King.
@CoDzilla: Predicting/foreseeing everything that is available in terms of spells and ways to deal with things for 3.5 is nigh impossible in my experience, but I agree that there are some glaring loopholes in some APs that needs to be covered. You should have seen my face when I realized the players could ignore parts 4 and 5 of Kingmaker with simple applications of core spells. Which made me revamp and retool the entire thing, with some good help from Jason Nelson (thanks again) into something that should actually challenge my players, and not be winnable by a single day of spell slots between the two casters in party.
BUT, I will in their defense say that they NEED to scale things down a little for the APs to be playable for the common folk that has little to no system mastery (after all, there are more of them than us, and it is not a sane marketing decision to aim for the niche).
Ideally (IMO) they would eliminate some of the extraneous stuff in the AP (never read a single one of the novels) and add "How to tweak the AP to take X into consideration" section. If I was playing with less experienced players, with less optimized characters, Kingmaker Part 4&5 would be plenty fine as written.
Can't speak for the older APs, because that was released in my college days when I had barely enough for instant ramen and textbooks, and we prefer the updated stuff to save on work (yes, we are a little lazy)
Here's my view on prewritten adventures, APs, or other prewritten stuff. It can never factor in every single option out there, not even all the core options. An experienced party will almost certainly be able to break any prewritten material put in front of them, with the only real exception being organized play, due to all the restrictions on material and severe limits on wealth and crafting and the randomness of the parties, and even then, an experienced party of players used to each other's characters still has a good chance of sending it in directions that completely blow the scenario apart. Given this, expecting prewritten material to be anything other than a guide is borderline foolishness, no matter what system is being discussed. It takes pretty severe limitations for living systems to maintain even a semblance of balance and control that makes it possible to write modules for dozens of completely random parties. As long as they present a good basic storyline, and good samples of encounters for DM's to work off of, they have done their job; expecting them to not have holes is setting yourself up for disappointment.
I would very much like to canvass opinion on the above issue.
Could you please indicate your preference on a scale of 0 to 5, where the two extreme marks mean:
0 - you prefer your GM to run the adventure exactly as written,
5 - you are happy for your GM to make whatever modifications he wants.
Many thanks
Richard
EDIT: Since a number of players have already pointed this out, give PFS and non-PFS answers if you wish
5 - My GM does extensive tailoring to the PFS APs and they are a much better fit to our specific players and characters. I've run an 'as-written' PFS AP and a pretty heavily modified one. The heavily modified one was simply better based on the players' feedback.
Because I'm smarter than Paizo? No, because I know my players and (I think most importantly) the AP became 'mine.' Pride in craftsmanship matters, I think.
I run and would prefer to play at 5's (I don't really use modules - I take pieces of modules and kind of jig-saw things. Mostly I always run my own games, based on not much of anything other than my imagination and what the pc's tell me they want to play around with and general hopes/expectations for long-term junk).
For PFS - ... non-score/non-started for me. I've played all of 1 organized game.
I will NEVER play such a thing again ... at all. It was just a terrible, terrible example of role playing (mostly because there was not a single bit of it going on - it was all just grid and combat ... YUCK!).
As far as plot goes, I would say a 4. There's nothing sacred about the plot in a published module.
As far as changing combat encounters goes, I would say from 0 to 3, depending on how good the GM is at balancing encounters. I've seen too many instances where the GM gets all excited about a new pet creature he's created, only to have it be clearly way too powerful for the party to handle.