A question for the paizo community: Do you run/create your own campaigns/adventures or do you only run the paizo/pathfinder adventure paths?
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I love homebrewing worlds and campaigns, so I pretty much exclusively do that. I started off with Fall of Plaguestone to help me get used to the rules (inserting it into my own world) and then continued on with the same characters into a homebrew campaign.
I can't see myself ever running an adventure path unless I suddenly have no time to prepare anything for a long period of time. This isn't to knock Paizo's work, I actually love their APs, but I genuinely love the prep process so homebrew works better for me.
Same as the Bag. I enjoy adding on to APs, of course, tossing in encounters that will suit my party (or annihilating other ones - so many junk XP pinata encounters in earlier APs, and they never really stopped that...)
Started with running my own, but currently running published adventures while I get fully adjusted to the new edition + major books coming out (APG!), and while doing some rebuilding of my home setting (along with building tools for PF2). Plan to eventually get back to my own adventures after running a few published adventures.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
With Pathfinder I mostly run APs and other published adventures. I bounce back and forth between a lot of games in my GMing, most of which lack good, numerous, published adventures, so when I get to Pathfinder I'm always tempted by the ease of having such things available. Add in that I really like Golarion and the themes of many of the APs and think running them sounds fun, and I'm hard pressed to do anything else.
I've zero experience with piazo stuff but for D&D I've never ran or been in published adventures that didn't turn into flaming atomic train wrecks within 2 or 3 sessions. So I tend to avoid that stuff. Being nearly an always DM with friends I tend to just make my own stuff up, prep or no and go with it. Working on fleshing out a homebrew world now so I can run any future games I might start.
I'm almost exclusively homebrew, but when I do get to be a player I have played in a few APs.
I think I might actually be super tempted to run Kingmaker when it gets a conversion. It was the one that interested me the most in PF1.
I will occasionally run short homebrew adventures, but I mostly run APs. Honestly the AP line is what keeps me buying Pathfinder.
I do heavily customize most APs, though.
Mostly homebrew campaigns in the past and am generally more comfortable running my own stuff.
That said I have recently inherited a lot of the old APs and started collecting the new ones and I am super impressed with the story so am looking to run some (in Golarian) and adapting and updating others that will work in my long standing homebrew world.
|
I wanted to get into any game I could find, and there was only 1 choice I could find in my city after many months of searching. It is a continuation of a homebrew world and campaign originally played in PF1e, with several of the previous PF1e gaming group returning, and the game now continuing with new characters set in PF2e, but they needed 1 more player, so I joined them.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
In my younger days when I had tons of time, I homebrewed everything. It was my relaxing activity, just sitting around writing and coming up with new hazards or enemies. After getting a full time job, however, APs are my way to be able to run games without devoting my limited free time to prep.
I started off running APs almost exclusive in PF1. As our attention shifted to other systems, I started developing a homebrew setting, and that’s what I’m running now in my PF2 sandbox hexcrawl.
Ignoring the world building stuff, which has involved all new ancestries and a revised champion class, I think I actually spend less time prepping for homebrew stuff than I did pre-written APs and modules. The two killers for me were the time it takes to read over everything and (more importantly) the time it takes to convert the pre-written stuff into a format that’s actually usable at the table.
As far as my setting goes, I did spend a lot of time creating custom stuff to better fit it into PF2. Some of that was due to the setting’s origination in another (less crunchy) system, but some of it was just fundamental things I wanted to change and would have regardless (eliminating humanocentricity and revising champions). Something I like about creating my own setting is I just know it, so I never have to worry remembering correctly something I’d read in a supplement.
Both as a GM and a player I prefer published content. As GM because I'm not that good at world-building. I'm a pretty meticulous prepper but just not creative enough to come up with my own things.
As a player I tend do dislike homebrew campaigns because most of my experience with those is that there's usually something gimmicky about them. Things like low-magic, dwarves running the show, religion being outlawed and so on. That's just not my thing. I want cookie-cutter fantasy where everything is sort of balanced. Golarion and Paizo's published stuff offers me just that.
IMO, this shouldn't be a binary choice. The "best" approach is to do both.
Homebrew campaigns (or one-shots, mini-campaigns/short adventure arcs, "intermittent" campaigns with pauses in between "seasons", etc.) are great for focusing on the PCs' backgrounds and motivation, in-depth exploration of specific themes, experiencing different cosmologies/setting assumptions, tweaking system mechanics to more closely resemble other flavors of fantasy, etc. They do, however, require a lot more work and may have "gaps", as GMs can't prepare for everything.
Adventure paths are a great resource that can be used (mostly) "as is" to run an enjoyable campaign, as long as the players buy into the AP's plot and themes. The GM may need to adjust some parts to mesh with the group's expectations and tastes, or impose some limits on the types of characters that would be "good fits" for the adventures, but the prep-work required is usually a lot less than creating a campaign from scratch. If nothing else, APs can be an "idea bank" for piecemeal use in other campaigns.
A group will probably find more enjoyment out of being able to switch between homebrew and published material. Players can "try out" different characters for different adventures, if the GM switches between campaigns or runs one-shots/short arcs as "breathers" within a long-running campaign. GMs can help stave off burnout and/or use professional material on themes/topic where they may not be as skilled (hold your egos, GMs; you aren't going to be the expert on every single type of fantasy theme and adventure scenario*). The exact balance between homebrew and published material is, of course, something that depends on the group's circumstances, expectations, and tastes.
* or why aren't you publishing adventures instead of Paizo?
|
I stick with the APs, Quests and Scenarios.
I love home brew and did that for years with AD&D, 2E, and 3/3.5.
I changed with the development of organized play in order to play more at hobby shops, conventions, etc.
BTW, I cannot seem to find chronicle sheets for APs. Are they not published yet for PF2E, or am I not looking at the right place.
I have up to this point in time run homebrew exclusively though I don’t mind mining ideas from adventure paths. I wouldn’t be opposed to running an adventure path if it only took minimal adjustments to fit in my world, if my players wanted them to be played in Golarion I would have a harder time as I would have to bone up and learn enough of the world for a better play experience.
Historically, almost entirely homebrew. Though, historically I've been a player more often than not, so most of my GM experience is running a one-shot or a short campaign over a few weeks or maybe months. I think I had a year or so as the longest run. And all of this is in about... maybe 13 years of playing RPGs.
In the last few years though, I've finally dipped my toe into published adventures, and I'm starting to skew further into that side of things.
Currently I'm running Age of Ashes for one group, and with the other group we started with Fall of Plaguestone and are now onto homebrew stuff centered in and around Sandpoint.
In the future, with the Age of Ashes group, when that's done I'm planning on going back to being a player and I anticipate the content to be homebrew. With the Plaguestone/Sandpoint group, I anticipate continuing to GM, and I'm going to pitch them Curse of the Crimson Throne converted to 2E.
My feeling on homebrew: I find it both enjoyable and stressful. I enjoy coming up with interesting situations, customizing the loot, etc. And I like to improvise, so I have free reign to just toss things and go a different direction when I homebrew. But it's stressful because I carry the full burden of making up interesting content, and I know everybody's experience will suffer if I'm in a creative rut.
Where as a published adventure, everybody is locked onto the rails far more (sure I can executively decide that it's OK to get off the rails, but really then I'm just homebrewing after paying for a published adventure so...), but I think that there's a feeling of a safety net. This adventure at very least passed through a handful of competent minds and got the stamp of approval, so it may or may not be amazing, but it is very unlikely to be garbage - and there's always that threat when the adventure only passes through my mind prior to seeing play.