As DM I'm about to finish my actual Pathfinder campaign and since I usually don't have enough time to prepare sessions I'm seriously thinking to run an Adventure Path.
Can you people give me some advice regarding which AP is good to start?
I also want to know which is the usual rate of advance, I mean how many sessions per booklet can we take? we usually take 4 hours sessions.
Thanks.
Which AP to choose really depends on the play style of your group. Kingmaker is sandboxy and open but requires a lot of backup work from the GM. Rise of the Runelords is a lot more linear and self contained with some good dungeon crawls but if you want to run RotRL you might want to wait a couple of months and get the SE hardcover edition when its released.
Is it also a thing that every AP gives you a campaign trait to start as a bonus on top of everything else? Also, do you give your players programmed campaign boons ever level or something?
I've barely investigated AP's ever and I'm running a homebrew campaign that I want to FEEL like an AP, even if it's not.
If AP's typically hand out such bonuses I'd like to mirror the mechanic. The AP I've LOOSELY based the game on is Haunting of Harrowstone (I liked the setting so I stole a bunch of Ustlav and repurposed it for this campaign) but I don't have a Harrowing Deck to hand out cards from, nor do I fully understand the mechanic since I haven't purchased and read the AP.
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The following AP's take a lot of extra effort from the GM so I would avoid for your first AP:
Kingmaker
Second Darkness
Serpent's Skull
I would suggest one of the following:
Legacy of Fire
Rise of the Runelords
Curse of the Crimson Throne
Council of Thieves
Jade Regent
Carrion Crown
Jade Regent contains an eastern (Japanese) theme, Carrion Crown does gothic horror, Council of Thieves and Curse of the Crimson Throne are predominantly city based campaigns and Legacy of Fire is Arabian. Rise of the Runelords is a more "vanilla" AP and is good as a start point. However your best bet is to choose a theme that inspires you and your group and run that.
As for how long a game takes? Well it depends on you and your group. I run really really quickly with a bunch of sessions (including weekends) and it takes me 6 months (ish) to get through an AP. I doubt you will find a group that runs quicker than that. Most groups about a year to run an AP some can take much longer than that. It depends on you and your group really.
As DM I'm about to finish my actual Pathfinder campaign and since I usually don't have enough time to prepare sessions I'm seriously thinking to run an Adventure Path.
Can you people give me some advice regarding which AP is good to start?
I also want to know which is the usual rate of advance, I mean how many sessions per booklet can we take? we usually take 4 hours sessions.
Thanks.
My group is not quite a year into "Rise of the Runelords," and we've only just started the third module of six, after 41 sessions.
As for our play style, we play one session per week with each session having only about 2 to 3 hours of actual playing time. (Our sessions are scheduled for 4 hours, but some of my players are perpetually 30-45 min late, and we get frequently get side-tracked with socializing/storytelling/food/etc.)
I've also added about 10 sessions' worth of extra/homebrew content to the AP.
So, at this rate, we'll take three years of real-world time to complete the AP.
MI would go with rise of the runelords.we tried second darkness as our first ap and it did not work. However we fished runelords in about 8-9 moths with 5-6 hr sessions.
Right now I want to avoid non PFRPG APs (like Rise of the Runelords) because I don't want to spend time making conversions from 3.5.
Regarding our regular game speed, we usually take 3 or 4 sessions per level and since APs seems to have 3 levels per booklet I assume we will take something like 80 sessions (2 years for us).
I'll give them the options of City (Council of Thieves), Horror (Carrion Crown) or Oriental (Jade Regent).
Thanks to everyone for the advice.
Though, if you wait 2 months, the updated PF rise of the Runelords will be out.
We want to play, two months is too much ;)
Run a Pathfinder adventure module or two until RotRL is re-released this summer. Some of them are quite fun.
For what you two say, it seems that RotRL is quite better than most of the APs, thanks for the advice.
Council of Thieves is great AP if you as the GM put the extra work into. My advice is read through the first book as that is where you will start but before you play read the last book. A lot stuff happens there that if know ahead of time you can set the players for success otherwise the last part just get too chaotic and you have prod you players along. If done right you can have it so the players figure it out all themselves which is much more rewarding.