How long to go through an AP?


Pathfinder Adventure Path General Discussion

Liberty's Edge

I am curious how long it takes the typical group to complete an Adventure Path. My own group, which plays every 2 weeks for 3 or 4 hours, managed to just finish the second volume of Jade Regent after 8 months of play. I actually kind of burnt out running it, given it seemed like I had another year plus to go.

Please, answer in sessions or at least give your typical gaming schedule (how often and for how long). One of our group is looking at starting the revised RotRL soon and I am curious how long we can expect to be engaged in it.


I think the danger of the question is that it is SOOO dependent on how your group plays.

I'm typing this up after completing a 5-hour session where my players didn't have a single encounter. The just roleplayed spending time relaxing and shopping in town, and interacting with each other and the NPCs.

So Module 1 of RotRL took around 55 gaming hours for us to complete, which is just ridiculous. But the players are loving it, I'm loving it, and even on our weekly schedule we've got another year to go.

My other party went through Curse of the Crimson Throne much faster; 5 months for the first 5 modules, but we were playing 2-3 times a week and doing far less roleplaying.


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Rulebook, Starfinder Adventure Path, Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Yeah, same here. I got one group which meets every week for only three hours and thus they try to get a lot done. An AP campaign takes a little more than a year with them.

I got another group which meets regularly ( we try every week, but scheduling conflicts make that difficult ) for about 5 hours of play. They have a much more relaxed pace. We are at the start of Nights of Frozen Shadows right now and for the last two sessions we are still traveling from Brinewall to Kalsgard. ^^ I think the AP will take quite a while longer with them.

Dark Archive

I've experienced roughly the same pace of gaming for the APs (but haven't felt the burn-out), a session every two weeks for 3-4 hours of play.
I also discovered that adding even 1 hour to the usual amount makes a huge difference - so much that's noticeable in the short run.


It took us 63 sessions to go through Kingmaker.


If you want a totally subjective and in now way very accurate ballpark figure, the average seems to be around 150-250 hours of play time. As has already been said, it all depends on your GM style, party play style, AP length, session length, number of players, preparation, PC classes, PC level, etc. I like to figure about 10-15 hours per level usually but again, that all depends on a huge number of factors.


Legacy of Fire, converted to PFRPG on the fly by me the DM,

First session: 10/05/2009
Last session: 12/20/2010

We play Monday nights for 3 hours, perhaps 45 times a year, so we played about 50 or so sessions for the complete six chapter AP. Our other campaigns, including the two that are going on now hit about the same mark on the same schedule.

As far as burn out, yea. I understand that. I am currently DM'ing Kingmaker and the other DM is doing Serpent Skull. We alternate Monday nights at my house (central location) and are both just at the end / finished chapter 2. With the extra "mini-systems", I am just about done with my enthusiasm for Kingmaker.

My guys are really, and I do mean really, kick in the door, kill it, take its stuff, move on for the most part, so the kingdom building gets to be a bit hard.

Next up, I will DM Shattered Star and will probably play Rise of the Runelords since both are a lot more kick in door, etc. type APs

-- david
Papa.DRB


My group consisting of 3 players usually goes through about one AP per year playing once every two weeks for 4-5 hours. We never use random encounters in order to speed things up and when I give them an encounter and its clear they are breezing through it, I say ``dispatch`` and it ends there. Usually first chapter takes about 5 sessions, and then they tend rest get shorter and shorter as we go along.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber

My group of 7 players got through Legacy of Fire in roughly 20 months of meeting perhaps every other week for 6 hours at a stretch.

It would have been faster with fewer players.


Let me think, about 40 - 60 for my group to get through the first book of Carrion Crown. Which in session wise is about 6 - 8 session of about 6 - 8 hours every Saturday.

Silver Crusade

Our average is one AP every 4 to 5 months or so. I doubt you will see quicker than that.

Grand Archive

We play once a week for 3 hours (we'd like longer but there's no more time at our FLGS) and it has taked us 1 year to get through the first two books of Jade Regent. Soon we will only be playing that one every other week and we are going to alternate Rise of the Runelords with Jade REgent so who knows when we will finish either of them.

But I don't really care, other than the fact that they keep bringing out great new APs


Our group of 5 has been playing Jade Regent and will complete chapter 2 after approximately 5 months. We play approx 2/month for 8-9 hours of actual gameplay (read that we start at noon and play to 11, but there's leveling time and dinner and joking and such). We do extra roleplay in this one, along with the GM likes to add adventures for us based on our background rolls.

Our smaller gaming group has been alternating between Serpent's Skull and Crimsone Throne for the last 15 months. CT just started Ch5 and SSk is complete through Ch4. We meet for 8-10 hour sessions, at least once a month, usually 2-3 times.


When I DMed Legacy of Fire it took us 27 sessions (6 hours) over the course of 10 months. I had to cut short 6th chapter because one of the players was moving out of country, so we finished it in 4 sessions.

Carrion Crown took us 9 months (42 weeks to be exact) and 34 sessions (so average is 4 sessions in 5 weeks).

We'll be starting Curse of the Crimson Throne in January, so I'm hoping I'll be able to cut it down to 8 months.

With that being said, other DMs (some of whom are my players) are DMing at a much slower rate. I played in a Kingmaker game and it took us 38 sessions over the course of 17 months (73 weeks). In the end, it also had to be sped up during another player moving out of country. Other DMs also had campaigns that lasted well over a year.

Since groups are basically the same in terms of amount of RP, I came to a conclusion that it depends on the DM the most. How much effort will he put in organizing the games and so forth.

I agree that it takes about 150-200 hours, depending on the group.

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