| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
CoT actually has very little diplomatic stuff, at least with hostile forces. There's a few times you can work with making new friends, but otherwise it's pretty much just beat up the bad guys.
Kingmaker is a definite yes. There's a lot of potential for making alliances with even the most unpredictable sorts - hells, my Kingmaker group has a Worg on their council because they made a strong alliance with him in the first book - and a million different ways that interactions can unfold. However, Kingmaker expects the GM to put in a lot of work, especially if you want the storyline to not hiccup in the middle of various bits; it's a flawed gem, with a lot of potential but a few rough spots that will require some work to buff out with regards to the plot. I highly recommend you spend some time on the Kingmaker forums here if you go that route.
From the ones you did not mention, however, I HAVE to speak up for Curse of the Crimson Throne. Like Kingmaker there's a lot of opportunity here to work with unexpected allies and negotiate for resources and information and other useful things outside of sticking pointy objects in people. It's just as urban campaign as CoT, if not completely so, but one of the parts where you leave town is also one of the biggest diplomatic scenes in the entire plot. It's widely considered to be one of the best APs Paizo has ever done, perhaps even better than Runelords, and is full of amazing and interesting NPCs for the party to interact with. Highly, highly recommended.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
All of what Orthos says is true, I will say just from the first book Hell's Rebels will have plenty of roleplaying opportunities.
:-)
I was avoiding talking about Iron Gods, Giantslayer, or Hell's Rebels due to lack of exposure =)
D'oh!
Didn't mention Iron Gods!
Iron Gods also has lots of fun encounters and roleplaying opportunities, Valley of the Brain Collectors has some crazy roleplaying potential, also one of the best titles :-)
If you don't mind pirates, Skull and Shackles has lots of RP possibilities.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
My players talk to everything, so we get plenty of RP time even in Shattered Star (the dungeon-crawling AP). So take my advice with a grain of salt.
Curse of the Crimson Throne is very good about providing RP opportunities that are better than fighting. It has entire adventures where fighting your way through is the worst option.
Hell's Rebels should be great for this, but I'd wait until the whole thing is out before saying for sure.
Reign of Winter has been pretty good for us, although see my caveat above. The beginning and middle are very RP friendly, although the combat ramps up a bit towards the end.
I'm not actually sure how good Carrion Crown will be for that. Some horror is very personal and some of it is very impersonal. In line with that, parts of the AP are fairly RP light unless your players actually RP with each other.
Cheers!
Landon
Well, I'm very experienced with Carrion Crown, having run it at least twice through. You can PM me with questions about it if you like.
I do know that most of the modules begin with a lot of investigation, and then shift over to combat for the rest of the book. Ashes at Dawn in particular assumes you temporarily ally with some vampires in order to catch a serial killer and find the way to the pack of necromancers you've been chasing.
Hey folks! my group and I petered out on serpents skull on book 3, due to the sheer mass of combat that the thing had. While I as the DM tried my best to insert diplomatic options into things, I didn't correct it quite enough, and now the players kind of want a more social experience. Which AP's might serve that best?
From what I understand of them, the following seem promising:
council of theives: Urban stuff means probably diplomatic stuff?
Orthos is right. There is surprisingly little RPing in this AP.
kingmaker: because I can only hope that while running your own kingdom, diplomacy is an option
More like a requirement.
hell's rebels: seems like there will be plenty of combat, but plenty of rebellion running as well. this one I'm even less sure about then the others.
A successful rebellion against the most powerful army in the world does require a fare amount of alliance building.
Oddly enough shattered can be quite social
I purposefully ran it to a non-good & non-chaos party and they socialised there way through an awful lot
The Pfs lady in mod 1 is non-good and one of the lodge has evil alignment. It worked really well.
John
If Ultimate Intrigue and the related products do well, I would expect a deliberately more social AP one of these days.
Curse of the Crimson Throne has very strong roleplaying elements throughout.
Shattered Star is also pretty strong for the RP element because there are quite a few (sometimes semi-questionable) allies you can get throughout. Jade Regent has a caravan full of people you travel with, which definitely increases the RP possibilities. Council of Thieves had a lot of RP in it in my game (particularly in the second book), but it depends how you run it and how your players react to things.
And though some APs offer more opportunities for social interaction than others, your group will definitely influence that a lot. The groups I usually run with talk to everyone like Landon's, so pretty much any AP we run will be pretty social.
I've found that giving players small bonuses for interacting and building relationships with NPCs (basing them off the relationship system) really encourages that. If your group wants a more social AP, they might not need to be encouraged, but it's always nice to reward things they enjoy.