Creative Director
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Will the above mentioned "Mushfen support article" be included in the web enhancement? That'd be especially interessting and quite useful not only for "Curse of the Lady's Light" but also for ** spoiler omitted **
Concerning the thread topic: all my players and myself are PFS members, we like the society and the scenarios and we all are looking forward to returning to Varisia (were we all started with the unforgettable "Rise of the Runelords") as Pathfinders. Having the chance to use fame/prestige within an AP sounds fun so no reservations from here :-).
My only frustration comes from the fact that although it's already Thursday I still haven't received anything from my monthly subscriptions. -.- Very annoying.
Nope. The "Mushfen Suport Article" changed late in the game to "Additional encounters on the way to the adventure" because we knew that the Torag article at that point was probably going to muscle its way into the adventure. When it became blatantly obvious that even that option wasn't working, the two encounters that resulted from repurposing the originally-planned Mushfen article simply got cut along with an extended encounter in Magnimar. Those 3 encounters (one of which involves a new NPC ally) are what comprises the web enhancement.
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I just finished reading the first book today. I am somewhat underwhelmed as well. I see the idea to bring back the classic dungeon crawl, but that does not appeal to me that much, to be honest. For my style of gaming these days, even the best backstory and interesting encounters for a dungeon will not excuse clearing some 80 rooms to reach the goal. Seeing that dungeons will play a big part in the AP, I guess it could be one of those APs I don´t even read completely (as Second Darkness was).
However, count me in for the more experimental APs. Exotic locations, unusual setups, interesting challenges (I thought the anti-paladins dinner party of the Age of Worms AP was one of the most disturbing yet memorable encounters ever). All elven or dwarven APs? Cool idea. All wizard AP? I would love to see how you pull that one off. I love to see APs based on the areas drawn from exotic (from an "western" world view) real-world cultures, be it Linnorm Kings or Vudra. I guess it comes down to setting up APs that really force the authors to think outside the box. Designing a good dungeon is something you know how to do, but it will still be a dungeon. But I think you really excel at the unusual stuff.
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I join the crowed and think this one lacked something (talking only of the first adventure so far). The Urban parts were great and seemed like a lot of fun, as were parts of the dungeon, but the crawl is just WAY to big for either mine or my player's tastes - we get to play less then three times a month and by the time we do, we usualy want to have something more intresting then "doing another 5 - 10 rooms", most of which are not very intresting.
Still gonna read most of it, I think. The second volume sounds really good (love me some
anyho, knowing that Winter Rein is up next makes me excited!
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Creative Director
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This is very much a big dungeon crawl AP.
Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5 all REALLY focus on the big dungeon. Part 3 has a smaller dungeon spread out over 3 locations in and under Kaer Maga. Part 5 has a relatively small dungeon but it's a weird one.
But yeah... "Shards of Sin" is a pretty accurate portrayal of the amount of dungeon stuff you'll be seeing in 2/3 of this Adventure Path. By design.
If you're not a big fan of big dungeons, Shattered Star might not be the campaign for you, in the same way that if you're not a fan of pirates, Skull & Shackles won't work for you, or if you're not a fan of horror, Carrion Crown's a bad choice.
I do hope that you check out the rest of Shattered Star... if only to see if what we're trying to do to make big dungeon crawls NOT get boring works... but as with any Adventure Path... I go in fully expecting it not to please everyone. That's not possible. That IS why we do 2 a year though!
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I dont see how the opening for Skull and Shackles was any more railroady than any other AP. They all pretty much force you to get together.And I don't see how that's a bad thing. Since it's what lets you play a game with four or so players in a party. If an adventure doesn't set up a group... you don't have a Pathfinder game. You have four different games being run simultaneously by one GM and that's not fun at all for the poor GM!
I've NEVER met a game that wasn't press ganged together, by either explicit device or fiat of the players or DM. It is swell when the players come together right an awesome group back story that magically makes them the best of chums and adventuring buddies, but it is still fiat. As for DM plot device you have any of the following:
- The king gathers the heroes of the land- The pathfinder society assigns some members to a mission
- The local priest calls upon warriors of the faith
- Your uncle gives you a magic ring and asks you to return it to the factory because it is cursed.
- Your ship wrecked together
- Your kidnapped together (prison, or boat)
They are all cliche, but the adventure has to start somewhere.
Really if it isn't any of the above options (or variants their in, because most of those are actually just variants of one another) then your left with "So you all meet in a crowded tavern." Which actually now that I think of it was a cleverly done in Second Darkness.
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@Galnorag, the "meet in a tavern" thing was also done in Council of Thieves.
I think people have a stronger gut reaction to the way Skulls and Shackles started more than usual, because it basically says, "You PC screwd up and got caught by pirates, and you have nothing to say about that, and now you are kind of a slave and attempting to do something the captain of the ship you are on dosen't want you to do will result in punishment, maybe even death."
I'm sure you can see that's very diffrent from, "The Pathfinders, a group you work for, calls for your help." Players who don't like railroading want to have as much control over their PCs fate as possible, and so they would rather feel that the PC chose to get to where he/she is at when the adventure starts.
I'm with you on that though - I think the on a slightly higher layer of abstraction there is little to no doffrence between the beginning of Skulls & Shackles and that of any other adventure. I even find the fact that Skulls & shackles feel diffrent very refreshing.
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Creative Director
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I think people have a stronger gut reaction to the way Skulls and Shackles started more than usual, because it basically says, "You PC screwd up and got caught by pirates, and you have nothing to say about that, and now you are kind of a slave and attempting to do something the captain of the ship you are on dosen't want you to do will result in punishment, maybe even death."
I'm sure you can see that's very diffrent from, "The Pathfinders, a group you work for, calls for your help." Players who don't like railroading want to have as much control over their PCs fate as possible, and so they would rather feel that the PC chose to get to where he/she is at when the adventure starts.
I'm with you on that though - I think the on a slightly higher layer of abstraction there is little to no doffrence between the beginning of Skulls & Shackles and that of any other adventure. I even find the fact that Skulls & shackles feel diffrent very refreshing.
Which is why we made no secret of how Skull & Shackles started, and why GMs shouldn't make a secret of it either—forcing actions to happen on the PCs without their input is bad, and the only point at which I can really ever see it working at all is before a campaign begins AND with the players' foreknowledge and acceptance. For a published adventure, in any event.
For everyone else, come on, you can't possibly run APs as fast as Paizo churns them out. I am sure you have a great backlog of non-dungeony stuff to tide you over for the next few months!
Ken
You have no idea how fast some of my groups can plow through campaigns. :P
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You have no idea how fast some of my groups can plow through campaigns. :PFor everyone else, come on, you can't possibly run APs as fast as Paizo churns them out. I am sure you have a great backlog of non-dungeony stuff to tide you over for the next few months!
Ken
Really? I think if you are able to start and complete an AP within half a year, you either have a LOT of free time and motivation to play, or there's a big chance you are missing out on a great amount of fun by rushing things! I mean, hack, I just played Edge of Anarchy for the entire last weekend, for aaproximatley 8 hours total and the PCs only just now hit level 2 and are through the first 25% of the adventure. including all the in-between-adventures stuff I'm gonna add to the campaign, it would appear that the AP will take well over a year, and that if we manage to play for entire weekends twice a month (which is doubtful).
A great part of the fun of APs is the immersion in them - savor all of those little details, 'cause they are making the adventure special!
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I would say for our group to finish a AP adventure it takes anywhere from 8 hours(which is two game sessions) to 16 hours. Most of them falling around the 12 hour mark, enough time to finish the AP and do some wrap up RPing etc. So for us on avg it takes 3 game sessions per book.
But to be fair our combats tend to be short. We have all played together now for years and everyone has years of experience with the system. So they have good tactics and everyone is ready when their turn comes up and we have a policy of the GM makes rulings on the fly if we are unsure and then look the rules up at the end of the game to check if we got it wrong.
I think the big factor is how fast one group or another gets threw a AP often is decided by how long combat takes. If a single combat takes 2-4 hours to resolve it is going to take a long time, if your group knocks them out in 1-2 hours you will get a lot more done.
I really can't imagine playing an AP adventure in three 4-hour-sessions without missing, leaving out or glossing over a lot of stuff in the adventure. I just don't get it how that could be possible. My groups take anywhere from 12 to 20 sessions of roughly 3-4 hours.
My groups take anywhere from 12 to 20 sessions of roughly 3-4 hours.
For a single adventure? Ouch!
And I thought our group was slow (usually about 4, sometimes 5 sessions per adventure, usually around 6 hours each). Given the fact that we play monthly, this makes an AP last about 2 years.
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Some encounters are not done sometimes, but we get in RPing as well. Just our fights tend to be very short.
Next game session they finished up under the glassworks I think that total took about 2 hours or just over. The did a little RPing around town for about a hour, then went after the Goblins in Thistletop. The made it there and threw the thicket, then we stopped for the night. just over 4 hours.
Next game session they cleared the top of thistle top and got into the first dungeon with little RPing beyond interparty stuff and with the horse. About 4 and 1/2 hours.
Last one finished the rest of the dungeon both levels which took about 3 hours then they went back to town and did some RPing for about 2 hours before we called it. That one was about 5 hours.
When I said 4 hour game sessions I meant at least 4 hours though we almost never pass 5 hours so really they are between 4-5 hours normally, with 4 1/2 hours being the norm. The longest time we took in a fight was the goblin raid. To be fair we don't use mini's or a grid map. Also as I mentioned everyone knows what they plan to do. So as soon as it is someones turn they state their action and roll the dice. We keep printed out sheets for spells etc so no looking up rules ever. I found this little magnet board with lines on it that I use to track init. I have magnets with plastic covers on them I write on. I print out all the monsters with full stats so no book flipping, with spell information for casters on spells I don't know by heart. Plus printing out the monsters lets me just makr off their hp as they get hit, write any debuffs on them etc. Doing all that and combat tends to fly by.
Like fighting the goblins with the seagull I think took about 10-15 mins total.
Kingmaker aside, where we added loads and it took 60 x 4 hours sessions,
its about 7 sessions per module (so 25-30 hours)for us in CC and SeSk
ROTRL was about 4 x 5 hour sessions, so yeah that one is quick
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This is very much a big dungeon crawl AP.
Part 2, Part 4, and Part 5 all REALLY focus on the big dungeon. Part 3 has a smaller dungeon spread out over 3 locations in and under Kaer Maga. Part 5 has a relatively small dungeon but it's a weird one.
But yeah... "Shards of Sin" is a pretty accurate portrayal of the amount of dungeon stuff you'll be seeing in 2/3 of this Adventure Path. By design.
If you're not a big fan of big dungeons, Shattered Star might not be the campaign for you, in the same way that if you're not a fan of pirates, Skull & Shackles won't work for you, or if you're not a fan of horror, Carrion Crown's a bad choice.
Feeling very much underwhelmed, but not surprisingly so, after I read the preliminiaries some weeks ago.
The problem is "dungeons" is not a theme, it's a setup. And to be frank, a very lazy one, because a "setpiece" Dungeon is far easier to conceive and pull off than a living town, village or small region.
Paizo dropped a surprisingly high, and not really campaign-furthering amount of dungeons into their "Pirates" AP. Heaven knows why Pirates and dungeons should go together..... And now we face another 6 months of dungeon + dungeon + dungeon.. and surprise, another dungeon !
It is not even relevant where these dungeons are actually set, it is the fact that dungeons are commonly more "hack-and-slayish" than say, the sandbox adventures from Kingmaker. It is the fact, that really great APs had less-than-sterling dungeons dropped into them for whatever reasons. Like say "Skeletons of Scarwall" which hit a previously (and afterwards) rather socially active and urban campaign, the blessed land of diplomacy, bluff and sense motive... with the motherload of undead castles ?
And now we get a full six months worth of ........ dungeons ? As the crowning achievement of five years of APs ? Excuse me, but is this the paizo or rather the "4E DnD/Descent 2E" party ?
Having looked over the first installment on the weekend (we actually had a readout of the AP with the whole grou, which has never happened before, because we found the concept so ludicrous), everyone handwaved it as "not really useful" and "uninteresting"... never mind two guys asking whether someone was "crazy"... "Boring" too.
And oh yes, noone cared for the PF society either, before somebody asks. The "society" has reached almost comedical status around here, sorry to say.
But since everyone is apparently asking for a "all-dungeon" AP... could we landscape-players please get an "All sand box - explore the Continent AP " next ?
And then there are groups spending whole sessions withou a combat...
Roleplayers and roll-players. The old adage
Really if it isn't any of the above options (or variants their in, because most of those are actually just variants of one another) then your left with "So you all meet in a crowded tavern." Which actually now that I think of it was a cleverly done in Second Darkness.
And then there was "Curse of the Crimson Throne", which actually had a fantastically different take on that clichee. It's just a matter of trying and actually thinking hard enough.
You have no idea how fast some of my groups can plow through campaigns. :PFor everyone else, come on, you can't possibly run APs as fast as Paizo churns them out. I am sure you have a great backlog of non-dungeony stuff to tide you over for the next few months!
Ken
Really? I think if you are able to start and complete an AP within half a year, you either have a LOT of free time and motivation to play, or there's a big chance you are missing out on a great amount of fun by rushing things! I mean, hack, I just played Edge of Anarchy for the entire last weekend, for aaproximatley 8 hours total and the PCs only just now hit level 2 and are through the first 25% of the adventure. including all the in-between-adventures stuff I'm gonna add to the campaign, it would appear that the AP will take well over a year, and that if we manage to play for entire weekends twice a month (which is doubtful).
A great part of the fun of APs is the immersion in them - savor all of those little details, 'cause they are making the adventure special!
"A lot of free time" describes me (and my fastest group) quite well in fact. :P We play long sessions, and do so often, so we get far into books very quickly, and they usually manage to not miss anything. The players are also very fast with combat, which accounts for a fair bit of the speed. By about 3rd level they can pull off intelligent group tactics on the fly without stopping to discuss it among themselves.
For example, the speed of our Jade Regent campaign:
--Book 1 lasted about 4 days before everything had been done.
--Book 2 slowed down a bit, as the group was getting used to micromanaging a master summoner, and had to deal with a PC death. About 2 weeks.
--Book 3 went fast, considering how long it is. About 3 weeks for everything leading up to the final dungeon, 1 week for the dungeon itself.
--Book 4 took roughly a week and a half.
--Book 5 took a while, due to what we considered a drastic complexity jump in plot. It was finished in about 2 months.
--Book 6 has been running for about 2 months so far, and they're in the final stretch.
All-in-all, it'll probably be about 6 and a half months for the whole campaign unless someone dies in the final stretch (which is quite possible I admit). And as I said, that's with very little content missed out on. Had we started the campaign the moment book 1 came out, they actually would have gotten ahead of the release schedule for half of the books!
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From what I've heard, the amount of time it takes folks to play through an Adventure Path varies from faster than we can publish to years and years and years.
We started Rise of the Runelords within months of it coming out. We just started the 5th book.
I started my Curse of the Crimson Throne Campaign after we got our hands on PFRPG beta. We finished 2 months ago.
Just some perspective for how long things can take. :)
vikingson: I just want to point out: I never meant to imply DarkMistress group were 'rollplayers', I just wanted to point out that the speed of combats isn't the only nor has it to be the main measure for the lenghth of time an AP installment takes to play.
I know. But actually, with a combat-oriented group, often enough the "hack-n-slay" encounters are the most boring stuff in a campaign, because stuff gets one sided. Very much so. So having encounters with some... diplomatic depth, careful spying, indirect trickery, some "kill them within the next five minutes" situations... I love those.
Going to places like Xin-Shalast, or the Hook Mountains, the Fey Realm in Kingmaker or the dark alleywaay of Lipidstadt, how can one not indulge in the athmosphere, strangeness and enjoy the sights ?Which of course terribly shortens down the APs.
Played "Crimson Throne" for three years, "Runelords" before that for a year (which ended in a premature disaster in AP-IV) . Been playing "Carrion Crown" for 16 months now (and are in the fourth part). 24 months for our "Kingmaker". Currently on "Skulls and Shackles"... which apperantly will have to hold out some more, because all the other APs are taken or deemed "uninteresting" (Darkness, Bastards, Seventh Skull )
My group is working our way through Legacy of Fire at an average rate of about one year per book. We're currently in the early days of book three. However, we meet online, with relatively short sessions and occasional long gaps, which slows things down; we get about a "month's" worth of gaming done when we meet up in person at cons once or twice a year. So, I expect it to take us about six years to complete the AP. However, if we met each and every week (which isn't feasible), it would probably be close to three years.
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Wha, Gluttony and Dark_Mistress totaly confused me by having the same avatar (are you two in the same group? the way you describe your games is similar...)
Anyway, I didn't mean that there is a "right" or "wrong" pace to play the adventure paths. For each his own, and all. However, I do believe that a rather large part of enjoying a "campiagn", like an AP is, is to get invested in it. take it slow. If you level up twice a week, and blaze through quest after quest, I think you don't get quite the same personal feeling the story that I enjoy when playing.
Now, in regards to Shattered Star... I guess that groups that meet often and can tick through a combat like it's nothing, this seems like it could be a lot of fun. I really like some of the things Iv'e seen thus far. However, for those of us not lucky enough to have the luxery of playing often, finding ourselves playing twice a month, tops, it could become oppresive. Returning to an avdenture after TWO WEEKS just to find out we are still in the dungeon that we were exploring the seesion before.... and the one before that.... and the end of the crawl is no where near... that's too much, or at least coual easily become too much after months and months of this sameness. I can see this working somehow for one or two dungeon focused modules (like in CotCT, with a late module being a really kickass dungeon dripping with flavour) but as a campaign?! no way.
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Nope different people. We average playing about 3 times a month. But it varies like for example we played every week for 2 months, then missed 4 weeks in a row, then played 5 times in a row, missed 1, played 2 in a row, missed 3 in a row and just started yesterday again. We use slow advancement so we interspace other stuff in with the AP. Like we are doing RotRL now. We started off with a modified Hollow's Last Hope and then Crown of the Kobold King. Then we moved onto RotRL AP 1, which we finished and the last two game sessions have been doing The Feasts of Ravenmoor.
After they finish that they will go back and finally hit level 4, like have one session of straight RPing to give them more ties to Sandpoint and I plan to make the PC's learn to really like a certain Nobleman they saved in the first part. Then I will start AP 2.
For time I was only measuring how many game sessions it took to cover each AP adventure and parts in the book.
Yeah, we're different people. She had the avatar first, I picked mine partly because it had the fewest other users out of the avatars I liked.
My fast group averages playing about 12 to 15 times a month (during the summer) I guess. When some of us have to go back to college and uni our play time slows down a bit.
The length of an AP also depends on the length of the individual adventures. That sounds pretty tautological I know but it's really less so.
For example, I'm running Second Darkness right now (I want to get it out of the way before picking up Shattered Star) and we're at the beginning of book 4. I expect book 4 can be made to last forever. I plan to run it until we get bored. It might be months. Reading ahead I expect book 5 to take 3 sessions of 4 hours each, probably less.
Short adventures make for short APs. Long adventures make for long APs.
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I am going to go the opposite of the OP. After a quick read through the first of SHS, I LOVED it. The intrigue was great in the beginning and the dungeon sections reminded me a lot of old Caves of Chaos fun. Without going into spoilers, three of the "heavies" in the dungeon section were hysterical in a very black comedy way, but still pretty darn Challenging. Gimmie more of that old time dungeoning with a Paizo feel. Vaughn, great job accomplishing what I think is most difficult: making an introductory module that rocks by itself and sets up the campaign. That takes serious chops.
One note, can we leave off the "lazy" comments. These people do put a lot of time and energy into their art. If you don't like something, fine, but don't challenge their work ethic. Under serious deadlines, Paizo consistently puts out superior work.
I am going to go the opposite of the OP. After a quick read through the first of SHS, I LOVED it. The intrigue was great in the beginning and the dungeon sections reminded me a lot of old Caves of Chaos fun. Without going into spoilers, three of the "heavies" in the dungeon section were hysterical in a very black comedy way, but still pretty darn Challenging. Gimmie more of that old time dungeoning with a Paizo feel. Vaughn, great job accomplishing what I think is most difficult: making an introductory module that rocks by itself and sets up the campaign. That takes serious chops.
One note, can we leave off the "lazy" comments. These people do put a lot of time and energy into their art. If you don't like something, fine, but don't challenge their work ethic. Under serious deadlines, Paizo consistently puts out superior work.
I heartily agree. Whilst the 'niche-y' APs have been well done, horror, asian fantasy and pirates really arent my thing. Very glad to get back into a more traditional D&D setting. It's early days yet, but it's shaping up to be one of my favorites (potentially even rivalling RotRL for second place - I doubt it will dislodge CotCT).
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Good Job Mister JJ and fellow co-workers at Paizo.
I have been a loyal support from the start and many of the Ap's i like, a few not that much.
I have never been a great fan of dungeon craw, but in this ap it does not matter, for i love the plot line. It's old school way relly speaks to me and the way you can twist things into your own design.
i am a big fan of Varisia and master the rise of runelords 5 years ago and it's currently running the new anniversary edition, and my old players love that there old char it's a part of the history in the new ap.
On another note i am stil player in the curse of the crimson throne, running in it's 3rd year and we are only on book 5. Maybe one of the best AP all time, with a fantastisk master.
Keep up the great work...
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So... an AP where the whole party has to be elven paladins of Iomedae, exploring the new demiplane where Treerazer has begun to rebuild his extraplanar fortress? I'm in!
You would have to be elves, because after SD (which we loved) no one in Golorion particularly seems affectionate to the Elves anymore (at least around our table.)
Honestly, after the 5th module they honestly were like "if it weren't for all the other people who would get hurt when Kyonnin became Golorion's second b~&& h&@&, we would let it happen."
I guess well cool, becoming meat puppets in the 4th module also didn't help either.
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I'm sure you can see that's very diffrent from, "The Pathfinders, a group you work for, calls for your help." Players who don't like railroading want to have as much control over their PCs fate as possible, and so they would rather feel that the PC chose to get to where he/she is at when the adventure starts.
Maybe it is my age, but I find it hard to get upset about the railroading, and in fact look forward to it, and by age I don't mean my absolute age, but my life stage, and that of my peers. We are all entering into the dark wilderness that is our middle ages, having young children with shed the last of our self delusions that we are not adults, and we all recognize that we have time and responsibility commitments that restrict our game play. APs have solved for us our biggest impediment to playing, which is that no one had the time to craft a campaign from scratch. In exchange for that we've given up some of our autonomy. Our expectation when we come to an AP is that we are following the APs story, and we are excited to see how it unfolds.
Regardless of the mechanism of party fusion, we all work to bend our characters and our role playing so that the unlikelihood of our motley band forming (let alone not killing one another) never is allowed to seem unnatural. We self railroad so that the gaming group works, and then we allow the APs to railroad us onto the path the campaign has set.
The GMs (we rotate per AP) all do their best to adapt the AP to the choices, and characters we make, and less us proceed some what non-linearly through them. But their is no burden to dramatically re-envision them when we got wildly off the rail, because we all work to stay pretty close to said rail.
In an earlier life stage, when I had more free time they I can fathom I was happy to DM a campaign where the players just roamed about doing what ever struck their fancy. Maybe I would drop in a module from Dungeon if I got lazy, but it was really a players: "lets go kill some dragons!" and the DM would reply "sure thing, here you go! Rawr!"
So with that I find it really hard to be critical of an AP product for being a railroad, it is a form of entertainment I have purchased so I didn't have to write my own, it would be like going to a Jerry Bruckheimer movie and being shocked that their was a bunch of explosions and loud base.
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So... an AP where the whole party has to be elven paladins of Iomedae, exploring the new demiplane where Treerazer has begun to rebuild his extraplanar fortress? I'm in!You would have to be elves, because after SD (which we loved) no one in Golorion particularly seems affectionate to the Elves anymore (at least around our table.)
Honestly, after the 5th module they honestly were like "if it weren't for all the other people who would get hurt when Kyonnin became Golorion's second b@@% h+#&, we would let it happen."
I guess well cool, becoming meat puppets in the 4th module also didn't help either.
heavy sigh
Which is the primary reason why I want to redo the 5th adventure for Second Darkness. It was SUPPOSED to be the adventure that makes the PCs into friends of the elves, but it misstepped hard, alas.
@Galnorag, the "meet in a tavern" thing was also done in Council of Thieves.
I think people have a stronger gut reaction to the way Skulls and Shackles started more than usual, because it basically says, "You PC screwd up and got caught by pirates, and you have nothing to say about that, and now you are kind of a slave and attempting to do something the captain of the ship you are on dosen't want you to do will result in punishment, maybe even death."
I'm sure you can see that's very diffrent from, "The Pathfinders, a group you work for, calls for your help." Players who don't like railroading want to have as much control over their PCs fate as possible, and so they would rather feel that the PC chose to get to where he/she is at when the adventure starts.
I'm with you on that though - I think the on a slightly higher layer of abstraction there is little to no doffrence between the beginning of Skulls & Shackles and that of any other adventure. I even find the fact that Skulls & shackles feel diffrent very refreshing.
I take that very differently. Railroading at the start of the game bothers me very little. Some is inevitable, even if it's just forcing everyone to be in the same town. It's campaign premise. Buy into it or don't. If you don't, then why are you playing?
Bingo, thejeff. As a side note, I don't think "railroading" is the right word to use for a campaign premise.
Double site note, I am totally digging this adventure and the whole premise. I get a feel about it that just screams adventure.
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My only real issue with this AP after reading through Book One is that they seem to not want the PCs to do any of the research themselves. They pretty much hand all the information about this artifact over to the players through the NPCs who have already done the research or will have done it by the time the PCs finish their quest. That, I feel, is a mistake. The research should have been integrated into the campaign as an adventure in and of itself, I feel.
Naturally, I know that I will be able to integrate it myself by changing things up to include it . . . which I will, of course! Would have loved to see what the authors of this AP could have done with the research aspect though. They're brilliant writers and could have made a fantastic go of it, I'm sure. =)
My only real issue with this AP after reading through Book One is that they seem to not want the PCs to do any of the research themselves. They pretty much hand all the information about this artifact over to the players through the NPCs who have already done the research or will have done it by the time the PCs finish their quest. That, I feel, is a mistake. The research should have been integrated into the campaign as an adventure in and of itself, I feel.
Naturally, I know that I will be able to integrate it myself by changing things up to include it . . . which I will, of course! Would have loved to see what the authors of this AP could have done with the research aspect though. They're brilliant writers and could have made a fantastic go of it, I'm sure. =)
Hey, post what you come up with please? It sounds like it will be relevant to my interests...
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So... an AP where the whole party has to be elven paladins of Iomedae, exploring the new demiplane where Treerazer has begun to rebuild his extraplanar fortress? I'm in!You would have to be elves, because after SD (which we loved) no one in Golorion particularly seems affectionate to the Elves anymore (at least around our table.)
Honestly, after the 5th module they honestly were like "if it weren't for all the other people who would get hurt when Kyonnin became Golorion's second b@@% h+#&, we would let it happen."
I guess well cool, becoming meat puppets in the 4th module also didn't help either.
heavy sigh
Which is the primary reason why I want to redo the 5th adventure for Second Darkness. It was SUPPOSED to be the adventure that makes the PCs into friends of the elves, but it misstepped hard, alas.
James your making me actually laugh out loud, I'm going to share this with our group, I guess the over arching issue, is that if your a race that lives for a thousand years, spendings a decade brooding isn't considered bad manners, but when you task a bunch of high level characters with baking cup cakes and calling every one into the board room to sing kumbyah only to have it end when one of them pulls suicide by demon invasion the characters get very ambivalent.
Oh dear it is all coming back to me... that was just the icing on the cake, after the ambush in kyonin, followed by been dropped into elf prison for "your protection" by the queen who was secretly doing it to get your help, and then sending them elf gate hopping from the prison to treebole.
I think I really turned it around in book 6 by having the queen be much more diplomatic and highly apologetic. She threw in a paladin and a philosopher stone to sweeten the deal.
Alright, back to the thread, I LIKE the way you guys write stuff, even when it isn't perfect, keep it up!
You have no idea how fast some of my groups can plow through campaigns. :PFor everyone else, come on, you can't possibly run APs as fast as Paizo churns them out. I am sure you have a great backlog of non-dungeony stuff to tide you over for the next few months!
Ken
Really? I think if you are able to start and complete an AP within half a year, you either have a LOT of free time and motivation to play, or there's a big chance you are missing out on a great amount of fun by rushing things! I mean, hack, I just played Edge of Anarchy for the entire last weekend, for aproximatley 8 hours total and the PCs only just now hit level 2 and are through the first 25% of the adventure. including all the in-between-adventures stuff I'm gonna add to the campaign, it would appear that the AP will take well over a year, and that if we manage to play for entire weekends twice a month (which is doubtful).
A great part of the fun of APs is the immersion in them - savor all of those little details, 'cause they are making the adventure special!
It takes me about 6 to 8 hours per book when I GM. We don't rush though. My players are greedy and loot every copper they can get while trying to gather all of the clues they can. It does help that not having to look up a lot of rules help because between myself and the other GM the corebook stays closed a lot. I am not saying other people don't know the rules. I am just listing one reason why we are efficient. I will also admit that I don't normally add things to the AP's.
At a rate of meeting twice a month we finish one book a month normally, so an AP can be done in 6 months. I ran Kingmaker and AoW as a mashup, and meeting about 2 or 3 times per month I got the players to level 21 in 8 months.
I also have to say we only do story relevant RP also. If the NPC is not important, as in the guy selling me arrows he does not get much screen time. Some groups like to interact with unnamed NPC's more, which is not a bad thing, but it will affect how much you get done.
It takes me about 6 to 8 hours per book when I GM. We don't rush though.
I can't even begin to fathom this. My crew played a roughly 10.5-hour game session in RotR that essentially succeeded in getting them from Sandpoint to Turtleback and doing a bit of investigating there.
Yeah, we're roleplayers . . . and do love what we do! ;)
? 6-8 hours per book.... How in the nine hells is that even possible ?
Wraith, old chap, that is real efficient
we too never roleplay buying a cloak, and leave heavy IC-RP to a forum we have
pretty much on top of the rules,
i hand-wave a lot when im GMIng (and so get PFS mods within 2.5 hours in a con with strangers) and even at my most awesome it would be 4 x 4 hours per mod
we are rattling through jade regent but again 12-16 hours maybe
not sure how fast we will do a dungeon AP
Most certainly a different type of brush for everyone. But 6-8 hours for an AP-Adventure ? Looking at Skulls and Shackles AP parts I-III here... really ?
That seems... very much like running things through on rolls alone. Gotta go with subcreator here. Long sessions with fun, twisting talks with the NPCs are our rule hereabouts. Some weird and intricate plans. Even decision finding within the group...
Really don't see how an IC-Forum is going to help there, especially with the NPCs
Really don't see how an IC-Forum is going to help there, especially with the NPCs
we are mostly going to ue it for JR, so pcs can have 1 to 1 interactions with the major npcs