Player's Guides

[Staffan Johansson]

It might be just me, but I feel that the Player's Guides for the various APs have become less and less useful over time.

For example, take the Serpent's Skull AP. First, it's 12 pages long. There's one page that has an overview of Sargava and why one might be traveling there, and then it moves on to two pages on how various races fit in and 4½ pages about various classes. The class section has things like "For a sorcerer, these bloodlines will be particularly thematic" or "Clerics of these deities will have particularly interesting experiences at certain points" or "Remember that a paladin's mount might have significant troubles traveling through jungles." Finally, you had a few campaign traits that explained why you had found yourself on a ship heading for Sargava.

Jade Regent was a whopping 28 pages. It had pretty much the same stuff as Serpent's Skull, but the campaign traits were all connected to one of four NPCs that were also presented in the guide. There was a system for exploring your connection to these NPCs, and finally a significant portion of the book was dedicated to a system for managing caravans.

Fast forward to Extinction Curse. It clocks in at a mere 8 pages - 2/3 of the Serpent's Skull PG and 2/7 of Jade Regent (even less if you don't count the cover and back matter pages). There's one page of general info, and another that covers both ancestries, classes, languages, and skills. What's more, the advice presented on ancestries and classes is so generic as to be nearly useless – it basically boils down to "eh, whatever is fine." Backgrounds fill the same role as campaign traits, and take up roughly as much space, maybe a little more, and then there's a very high-level overview of the Starstone Isles.

Age of Ashes is pretty similar to Extinction Curse, though it is slightly larger on account of Breachhill being given more room than the Starstone Isles.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I miss the tips and hints from older PGs. They provided a tiny taste of things to come, and ensured that players didn't make uninformed choices that turned out to be dumb. Some might say that the information in the old PGs were too spoilery, but I see it more as a way of ensuring people have a good time. For example, if I was homebrewing a campaign with a Desna cleric in it, I would probably include some poignant moments connected to their faith, and if someone was playing a giant-instinct barbarian I'd be sure to have some occasions where they get physically challenged to keep up. But in a pre-made campaign those sorts of things are largely decided already, so it makes sense to adapt the PCs to the coming campaign instead.

[YourNewShoe]

Ironically, Jade Regent is from after Serpent's Skull, so as a pair those data points would suggest a growing size of Player's Guides, followed by a shrinking later on. But I decided to go through them all and check. Were the older Player's Guides longer than the newer ones?

Checking PDFs (these page counts include front and back covers, map pages, and all that, so may be slightly off from a count done differently):
- Rise of the Runelords: 20
- Curse of the Crimson Throne: 20
- Second Darkness: 36
- Legacy of Fire: 36
- Council of Thieves: 42
- Kingmaker: 16 (!)
- Serpent's Skull: 12
- Carrion Crown: 15
- Jade Regent: 28
- Skull&Shackles: 30
- Shattered Star: 12
- Reign of Winter: 14
- Wrath of the Righteous: 14
- Mummy's Mask: 14
- Iron Gods: 12
- Giantslayer: 17
- Hell's Rebels: 34
- Hell's Vengeance: 20
- Strange Aeons: 12
- Ironfang Invasion: 12
- Ruins of Azlant: 16
- War for the Crown: 18
- Return of the Runelords: 14
- Tyrant's Grasp: 9
- Age of Ashes: 11
- Extinction Curse: 8
- Agents of Edgewatch: 14

The average length is actually 18.7 pages per Player's Guide.

Based on these numbers, it seems like there isn't much of a Golden Age / downward trend divide; there were some APs which were clumped together and had longer Player's Guides, but unless you count everything from Kingmaker on to be a departure from the norm or an exception to the trend, it seems more like it's fluctuated up and down throughout the years. Which makes sense, as it seems to me like PGs will vary based on the availability of time/energy to put into them, the necessity of the sort of information one would put into it, and so on.

[Haldrick]

Just a personal opinion, but I have certainly found them less and less useful.
They frequently have sub systems (some of which work, but most don't) and an overview of a town you start in, which are helpful. But the character advice has become increasingly generic.

[Staffan Johansson]

The list should probably be differentiated between ones with extensive sub-systems (caravans, kingdom-building, etc.) and ones without.

Looking a little closer at the actual guides, it seems Jade Regent is the last one with race- and class-specific advice. Jade Regent was released at about the same time as Ultimate Combat, so at that point there were classes from the core book, Advanced Player's Guide, and Ultimate Magic and Combat. The next major player option expansion was Advanced Race Guide, and my guess is that that made Paizo go "OK, there's no way we can write useful advice for all these races, and there are more classes on the way as well, so let's just stop doing class-specific advice and instead give some really generic advice. That's a bit sad, and in the PF2 Player's Guides they don't even go that far. I mean, this is the sum total of class advice in the Extinction Curse Player's Guide:

Quote:

Members of any class will have plenty of moments to shine in the Extinction Curse Adventure Path, but keep in mind that at least some of the heroes – and perhaps all of them — make their living by performing exciting or dangerous spectacles in a traveling circus. Bards and rogues fit into this lifestyle, but the showy wonders that alchemists, sorcerers, and wizards provide are truly magical. Barbarians, fighters, and monks display athletic prowess sure to please a crowd. Many circuses include animal acts, and the Circus of Wayward Wonders is no exception; classes such as druids and rangers are therefore a natural fit. Such characters also fit well into one of this Adventure Path’s themes: inexorable environmental deterioration. The heroes will learn that Abberton isn’t the only community suffering from ecological decline. Considering that the heroes will take on the dangers of being adventurers as well as circus performers, they are likely to need the valuable aid that champions and clerics can provide.

This paragraph could essentially be replaced with "Eh, anything is cool, I guess."

Another thing I've noticed is that a bunch of player-facing options are put in the AP books themselves, when they might have been better off in the player's guide. I'm thinking things like the Staff Acrobat and Juggler archetypes and the circus weapons. That's fair if they are things that become "unlocked" at later points in the AP, but those examples (and the Animal Trainer archetype from Legacy of the Lost God) seem like things that should be available in any circus.