Hey all,
I am getting ready to piece together a group for Reign of Winter. For the past couple of days I have done some research before going out and buying the AP. I found the synopsis for the storyline relatively cool and decided to read up some reviews.
The reviews all agreed: The start is weaksauce, the loot is a bit excessive, and the story is a smidge too linear (geas as an example). The loot paired with gamers who will naturally build optimized characters seems like I might be preparing five to six of my friends with a cakewalk. I don't want that to happen, but I also want them to have fun!
So my question is, is this adventure path worth investing my time, effort and money in? I don't mind spending some time between classes fleshing out adventure and interactions, buffing some fights, and nerfing some loot. (I like to actually tone down loot quite a bit). Is there anything I definitely should add, remove, or adjust? Also, how should I have my characters build? (point buys, extra feats etc.) And any character classes/races flavors that will fit and make the game intriguing for roleplay? What should I also avoid?
I was going to remove Aasimar from playable race because in the past I have found the race quite overpowering, and wanted to toss out Changeling as a race. I thought that a daughter of a hag could provide some extra content for my characters while remaining true to the theme.
Well, only the first half is out yet. (And I haven't yet received my hardcopy of Book 3), so it's a little hard to give a big-picture assessment.
I've read through The Snows of Summer and The Shackled Hut, (although not at the level I'd want to if I were about to run them) and they both seemed to have very well-crafted storylines, interesting NPCs with a lot of excellent role-playing opportunities, and quite a lot fairy tale weirdness. In short, I think they look great so far.
That said, since they're not all out yet, no one's played through the whole thing, and relatively few have played what's out so far. The plot does look pretty linear, and if your PCs are used to an open world sandbox play style, they might not like this one.
You might want to take this to the Reign of Winter discussion board for more info.
Awesome, I moved it to the ROW thread: http://paizo.com/threads/rzs2ppdl?ROW-DM-and-Character-Suggestions#1