I have some years of experience in PBP gaming and I've always been interested to try to do one of the AP, and as right now I don't have a table group I thought of maybe doing one by PBP.
The thing is, we normally go with one post per week, so I think that a lot of things will have to streamlined like combats and, especially dungeons.
With that in mind, I wanted to ask which APs would be best/easiest to do and any ideas of thing that could be cut short,...
Although it will be appreciated I'm not so much looking for general advice, like forgoing xp in favor for story level-ups or methods to streamline combat as ideas about which AP to run and any possible changes.
Thanks in advance for the help!
Curse of the Crimson Throne has a lot of high-roleplay material, which suits PBEMs. As you probably know, traditional exploration-based Dungeon Crawls and PBEM make a very poor fit. Since APs focus on dungeon crawls, I wouldn't personally advise any of them, but CoTCT has less material that would have to be omitted or truncated than the typical AP.
Another suggestion would be Kingmaker; wilderness exploration and kingdom building fit PBEMs better than do endless dungeon corridors; although KM has some of that, it's not the campaign focus to the same extent as most APs. If I were going to try it I would cut out a lot of dungeon stuff and look to add a bunch of political stuff with Brevoy to replace it, eg maybe the PCs send retainers down dungeons to do stuff on their behalf. A bit of a Game of Thrones feel might work well. At best you'd be using less than half the page count of the published AP, but it could be done.
I have some years of experience in PBP gaming and I've always been interested to try to do one of the AP, and as right now I don't have a table group I thought of maybe doing one by PBP.
The thing is, we normally go with one post per week, so I think that a lot of things will have to streamlined like combats and, especially dungeons.
With that in mind, I wanted to ask which APs would be best/easiest to do and any ideas of thing that could be cut short,...
Although it will be appreciated I'm not so much looking for general advice, like forgoing xp in favor for story level-ups or methods to streamline combat as ideas about which AP to run and any possible changes.
Thanks in advance for the help!
One post a week is very slow so I think shorter paths would work better. Freeport trilogy from Green ronin, Dragon Cult Saga from Goodman games or Goodman's interludes sequence. Freeport in particular has a lot of room for roleplaying interactions and limited dungeons that I've found work well in pbp.
For Paizo full APs I'd recommend Reign of Winter. There are tons of roleplaying and story hooks and plenty of dungeon and combat encoutners that can be cut without big problems. I'm running it now face to face and it has plenty of NPCs to interact with in interesting ways and lots of lore to discover. It is set up with brutal russian combat in the snow all the time in part to xp grind but dark fairy tale is the theme and combat and dungeons can be de-emphasized fairly easily either through party approach or DM plotting and adjustment (for example in book 2 trolls in the clocktower can be called out to the general troll empressment to deal with the market situation leaving a dungeon with only five monsters and tons of neat exploration and some NPC interactions).
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One post a week is going to take forever to do an AP. I've been running Shattered Star since July 2013 (about 8 months now) and we're just wrapping up Book 1 of Shattered Star. That's with everyone regularly posting daily, often multiple times a day. Granted, this AP does have a bit more dungeon crawling then others, but still, going one post a week, I'd be shocked if you completed a single book in under a year. At that rate, it'd take 6-7 years to finish one AP. That's a lot of time for possible disinterest, players being unable to post anymore, or other problems. :S
As Voadam said, I'd recommend something shorter.
I'm in a few PBPs. Long drawn out affairs. A single combat encounter can, sometimes, take a day or more to complete. I've found social interactions sometimes are faster than combat, despite BLOCKS OF TEXT that sometimes occur.