RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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I love Paizo's APs. While there are other rules systems out there I might prefer to PFRPG (although PFRPG is fun and gets the job done), nobody even comes close to Paizo for adventure design and writing.
However, after having played or GM'ed several APs, beginning with STAP, I have noticed something I dislike regarding level progression and time. To wit, the APs (with the exception of Kingmaker, which I gather can be played through at quite a leisurely pace), take too little in-game time for the level range. It sort of breaks verisimilitude for me when you start the AP as a 17-year-old apprentice or novice or squire or what have you, and within mere months of in-game time you have rocketed your way up to becoming a 17-year-old 15th-level archmage or high priest or greatest-swordsman-in-the-world.
There are some points in APs where, as GM, you can say "okay, three years pass." However, those moments are few and far between in most APs, and in certain APs with a built-in "doomsday clock," such as Second Darkness or Carrion Crown, you really can't pause for the PCs' lives to catch up to their own abilities.
As a GM and as a player, I would prefer to see more APs designed with the potential for long pauses in the action in between chapters.
Thoughts?
Well if this bugs you, then I'd have to imagine that you dislike Lord of the Rings as well.
If you stop and think about it, from the time the Fellowship formed, roughly a year passes before they return to the shire. In that time they:
-Explore Moria and lose Gandalf the Grey
-Encounter and kill a large number of Uruk-Hai and lose Boromir
-Meet Gandalf the White and restore Theoden to full health
-Defend the people of Rohan at Helm's Deep
-Cast Saruman out of the Order and neutralize him as a threat
-Raise an army of the Riders
-Ally with the traitorous men in the mountain
-Travel to the White City and defend it's people
-Re-establish the bloodline of Isildur by Aragorn taking the throne of Gondor
-Gather a new army of men and march to Mordor to pose as a distraction
-Fight the armies of Mordor while Frodo destroys the Ring
-Return to Gondor and begin the rebuilding process
-Re-establish peace in Middle Earth
During all this, they walk from one side of the continent to the other, and back again. All in a year. Keeping that in mind, I don't think the time periods are too much of a factor considering the people of the APs are being pushed to their limits and beyond to protect their lives, their loves and the world. If, at the end, they win and emerge still alive, is it really that unbelievable that they are amongst the most powerful people alive? I don't think so.
The amount of time alive does not make someone good. The amount of practice(experience) does.
If I take 6 potential years of practice, and spread it over 10 years that won't really make me any better. I will probably be worse since the time away might due to break might cause my skills to degrade.
They could write an AP where the bad guys are acting over a period of years, but then they have to write in a way such that the players will not or can't not continue pursuit in order to keep them on the rails.
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RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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Well if this bugs you, then I'd have to imagine that you dislike Lord of the Rings as well.
That isn't a good comparison. That's about like saying that APs are written for a party of 4 and the Fellowship was 9 so I must dislike it.
Anyways, you may misunderstand me. It isn't that a lot happens in a few months. It's that the characters advance too fast in a few months. Nobody in LotR suddenly became competent as a result of those adventures. Either they were already highly competent (Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli) and stayed that way, or they were largely incompetent (the hobbits, at adventuring, anyways) and achieved a measure of competence.
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RPG Superstar 2015 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2013 Top 16
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The amount of time alive does not make someone good. The amount of practice(experience) does.
If I take 6 potential years of practice, and spread it over 10 years that won't really make me any better. I will probably be worse since the time away might due to break might cause my skills to degrade.
True, but if you try to take 10 potential years of practice, and compress it into 4 months of practice, you won't achieve the same result.
They could write an AP where the bad guys are acting over a period of years, but then they have to write in a way such that the players will not or can't not continue pursuit in order to keep them on the rails.
That isn't hard until you get into the upper levels where divination and travel magic can remove blocks in just about any plot. Also all the chapters in an AP do not have to be part of one overarching, unifying plot. In fact, in some APs the chapters are only loosely connected, with only hints of the larger metaplot. STAP was like this. You could pause for virtually any amount of time between certain chapters--although some chapters were more sequential than others and did not allow for significant interludes.
I agree with the 10 years in 4 months thing, but it is a common thing in literature for the character who can't even take on the town guard to be taking on the all powerful BBEG within a year's time.
As to the divination thing, smart players can make it difficult to hide plot realistically. By the time you get 5th level spells the GM still has two more books go through. They may also try to hire a spellcaster. That can be a hard denial if they meet a powerful NPC or if they are in a metropolis.
PS:I do think some AP's should have a longer in-game time line.
Well if this bugs you, then I'd have to imagine that you dislike Lord of the Rings as well.That isn't a good comparison. That's about like saying that APs are written for a party of 4 and the Fellowship was 9 so I must dislike it.
Anyways, you may misunderstand me. It isn't that a lot happens in a few months. It's that the characters advance too fast in a few months. Nobody in LotR suddenly became competent as a result of those adventures. Either they were already highly competent (Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Gimli) and stayed that way, or they were largely incompetent (the hobbits, at adventuring, anyways) and achieved a measure of competence.
Granted yes, they didn't level up in LotR, however, the amount that they do is still the basis of fantasy. You did, however, seem to ignore the ending paragraph of extraordinary people being thrown into extraordinary circumstances. They are being ground down to the very basis of their mortality, pushed beyond all limits, and rising above the challenges. If they do not, they die. Their family dies. Their friends die. The world ends. Given that if they don't succeed, everything they know and love will end, they don't have a chance to fail.
I think the key factor to Adventurers is the fact that they are Adventurers. Normal people could never do what Adventurers do every day. They could never fight dragons, overthrow empires, slay liches, travel the plans etc. while an Adventurer can. The fact that they can quickly learn to become some of the most powerful people in existence isn't unbelievable. The stats of Adventurers have stats and abilities modifiers up to 5 times greater than anything a normal mortal could ever have. I think that easily contributes to developing skills up to 5 times faster as well.
As a GM and as a player, I would prefer to see more APs designed with the potential for long pauses in the action in between chapters.
I agree.
Looking around these boards, I often feel terribly old-fashioned. I ran a D&D 2nd edition game in high school. We played at least once per week. It took the group more than two years in real time to go from level 1 to 14, and many in-game years, the latter mostly due to indeed there being a lot of down time between adventures. Characters honed their skills between adventures, recovered from injuries and traumatic experiences, started families, spent time with their families / hobbies / researching / appreciating nature / serving their faith or community in less adventurous ways - whatever was appropriate. It made the whole thing richer roleplaying-wise, the characters and the world felt more rounded. Almost all the players played the same character for the whole time. Now it seems like most people play a character for six months, during which he goes from 1 to 15 in about the same amount of in-game time. And then they need to move on anyway because they grew bored with him.
I chalk it up to times changing, just like characters becoming more and more powerful per level by comparison to earlier editions. I don't like it, it feels a bit silly to me, but it's the way it is, and I don't have any real arguments against it. It comes down to personal taste, and I assume most will prefer what they are used to and/or started out with, according to the edition/system and their group's approach.
I think some of the problem is the players, some is the GMs. Pre-Pathfinder, I played in the same group for something like 5 or 6 years going from 1st to 17th. In game, only about a year went by. A lot of that was the GM who never gave our characters a day off until at one point we said, "F##! it, let the world die, I'm tired". It got really annoying because my character had a +1/+1 double orc axe from 6th level, until 15th, but we had something like 300,000 gp each in undistributed loot because we were never in a place long enough, or the place was too small to sell it. A very common theme in the game was, "Alright, you guys are going to have some time on your hands to sell off your loot, have some rest, get new equipment. Take some time to think about wha.. *all hand him lists we've pre-constructed* ..Oh cool..... On second thought, 10 dragons attack... *sigh*" Don't get me wrong, the game was awesome, and we really enjoyed, but my character is 17th level with oodles of gold and thinking, "I didn't need a +5 armor to get me here, why do I need one now?" and facing retirement.
Wow, ranted there a little bit.
On the flip-side, the current Kingmaker I'm playing in took us a year to get to level 5 IRL, and I'm not sure why. I start CotCT 3 months after Kingmaker and my characters in Curse, after a year IRL were 10ish over a period of roughly 8 months in game, vs 16 months in game in Kingmaker.
Excluding things like '3 days or world ends' scenarios, APs can almost always be slowed down, within reason, to allow the characters to do what they wish when it comes to role-playing and other scenarios. However, if you really want to take what a 'realistic' time frame, you could, as I think you mentioned, continue running on slow progression, and force the players to have more encounters than the AP has written. For example, instead of just full on assaulting a fortress of woe, they instead engage in a series of hit and run guerrilla attacks disabling supplies, transports and whittling away at troops and defenses before the final assault. Or if they have to track someone down, instead of just interrogating one person, they have to do several as the guy is constantly on his guard and moves from hide-out to hide-out.
BEA-TRICE!!!!!
To offer some ideas on how to work with this (as compared to debating if this is a feature/bug):
* Earthdawn Revisited: A slight twist on the cosmology. Every PC is, in essence, magical. While some openly show it with a super mastery of spells, others subsume their magic in outrageous feats of skill and abilities. Blame it on Divine bloodlines, prophesies, heroes writ large or what have you. No normal human can compete with the speed of their "training" no matter how gifted.
* Pendragon Solution: Middle Age winters are brutal. No matter how much people want to go to war or advance their plans, everything but downtime activities stop dead in winter. Thus every adventure marks a year of game time. (Some similar excuses are rituals going on need a better planetary alignment, closed mountain passes, etc. etc.)
* Cut and Paste: Cut XP by a fraction of what you want (1/2, 1/4, etc.) and add more adventures. This makes the AP more of a "Plot Point" structure than a sequential one.
* We are all Adults Here: The PCs are older, and maybe very rusty. As they adventure, it all comes back to them. A spin on this would be ...
* Villain's Revenge: A one-time spell by a blackheart cast amnesia on the heroes (or cast them in new untrained bodies, etc) and they have to relearn their old skills.
* Magical Sanctuary: A zone or magical town that puts them in null-time. Here they have time to do their downtime stuff as the outside world freezes. There are limits to it, to prevent metagame abuse. The other spin is that will still get older. Friends and family will see the PC age rapidly as they trade off years for power. That cute teenage waitress isn't going to want to date someone as old as her father. ... Wait this is the Middle Ages, right?
But the old leveling mechanic vs story has been with D&D forever. Let's not even get how many of 10th level common soldiers are running around after a great war is over.
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However, after having played or GM'ed several APs, beginning with STAP, I have noticed something I dislike regarding level progression and time. To wit, the APs (with the exception of Kingmaker, which I gather can be played through at quite a leisurely pace), take too little in-game time for the level range. It sort of breaks verisimilitude for me when you start the AP as a 17-year-old apprentice or novice or squire or what have you, and within mere months of in-game time you have rocketed your way up to becoming a 17-year-old 15th-level archmage or high priest or greatest-swordsman-in-the-world.
It depends on your group... I have a CotCT group who is almost 5 game years into the story and just starting the third book. They took days scouting out locations first before going in (over 2 months for lamm's place). Almost every AP is designed in a way that you can have months or years between parts. (again the above CotCT) I put a year and a half between the first and second books.