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Hi, all! This is a thread I thought might come in handy. We've all seen the dozens of Rise of the Runelords games that end at Thistletop, the countless Second Darkness PbPs that never make it past the first book.
Obviously, spoilers may abound for basically all the APs here.
I thought it might be useful and enlightening to have a thread to talk about where campaigns tend to stall. Sometimes an AP offers five doors in a row, or a lot of open-ended questions, or haunts, or all the various forms of "the players aren't sure what to do so they go quiet" and "the GM isn't sure how to run this so they disappear".
I can start. I've been running Age of Worms for some time now, and the biggest stalling points I've run into are (in order):
After Player Death. You might literally lose someone in the second fight. Have backup plans. This is not a good AP for a four-person party.
Skeleton Recovery. I remember this being a bit of a swerve for the party—suddenly they're expected to go back to town and search for some kid's dead family? I recommend you keep the Kullen stuff moving. Keep asking them what they do next, offer suggestions if needed. Filge can be even worse, combining the "what do we do next?" with the "who opens the door?" challenge many times over. Don't waste their time on the doors into empty rooms.
Downtime. This is always a risk in PbPs, but Age of Worms is especially tricky because there's so much to potentially explore in Diamond Lake (and later, the Free City). Make sure you know where they're going next.
Entering the Mines. Again, give them a nice, simple, linear path here. This is not the most interesting part of the adventure. Don't turn it into one.
Hextor's Ambush. PCs like to wait next to doors. Theldrick will rally all his forces to the main room if he has time. This is a bad combination. Don't coddle them unless you want a lower-stakes game (which is fine), but do make sure they have some sense that the Hextorians are not going to wait idly in their assigned rooms.
The Vecnan Maze. Spend a good amount of time prepping the two maps—one for the players, one for you. Keep the party moving. This will be a challenging portion, but PbP is the perfect zone for it.
Map/Stats Confusion in 3FoE. This installment was rushed. Just double-check stuff and be sure you understand the Erythnul map. Seriously.
My memory's getting muddled from that point, but...
Blackwall Keep. All I'm gonna say is, the lizardfolk dragged. Try to cut back on the mindless slaughter if you realize the PCs aren't being challenged—it makes this installment a little less retroactively depressing, anyways. Let Hiska intervene and start a dialogue when things start to slow down.
Midnight's Muddle. In the Free City, the PCs are encouraged to inhabit a pleasant little neighborhood called Midnight's Muddle. It's a bit of a muddle. If you want to play with it, we had a lot of fun with characters like the nudist wizard Ph'rexis and the helpful druid Anlathi (I encourage you to make her a druid capable of reincarnate just so you can put a name and face to the PCs' chief source of revival for the next few levels). The Festering One stuff was challenging, and required a lot of prep to make it flow. It sort of dragged in places because mysteries are hard to improvise.
Hall of Harsh Reflections. This is a perfect format for this adventure. Make sure (ideally when you launch the PbP) that players are okay with its little "gimmick" potentially happening at some point. Be clear about what you expect in terms of respecting spoilers. The doppelganger's base has a lot of "doors", not to mention potential for deaths/retreats. The bit with the captives in Zyrxog's base really slowed them down, too, because suddenly they had to decide what to do with these people. Appoint a "leader" NPC so the PCs have one person to talk to.
Champion's Belt. The infiltration of Zahol's Kyuss shrine dragged a little, as did the introduction, but this installment generally appeals quite well to PC ego, so I didn't have much trouble that I recall.
Gathering Winds. Hoo boy. My players... well, they didn't really like this installment. It takes them out of the action in a big way just when they felt the stakes rising. Consider replacing it, or modifying it so it feels more relevant (I foreshadowed the "Vaati/Order of Storms" connections heavily). Flycatcher can be seriously annoying to them (especially since he might force a side-sidequest that lasts several weeks-months of irl time!) so be careful if you don't want them to immediately take Moreto's side. Also, on the positive side, consider offering some roleplay encounters in addition! My players got the chance to make deals with the Countess of Coalchester and the kolyarut (the latter only after he saw them withstand the Wind Duke's blessing in the cairn, though), and they got two fun recurring NPCs out of it. Which maybe made up for how they let Moreto go. That was probably a bad idea.
Spire of Long Shadows. Be careful. This is a rough installment, and PCs will probably die. In particular, be very, very careful around what the PCs do outside the Spire. I added a few friendly looters (who were actually working for Zyrxog, but that's another story) and an encounter with a hullathoin that sort of dragged because I didn't have a lot prepped for them. Emphasize that the area is deadly, but beware of turning SoLS into two installments. Also, be careful buffing the lich, but do consider buffing that encounter a little. My PCs actually had to flee and come back, and it was a very close, very exciting fight. Also, make sure that the PCs feel like they learned useful things from this installment. Otherwise, it might feel frustrating to them.
The Prince of Redhand. Beware the pre-Banquet period. Give the PCs time to do stuff, and make it clear that they won't have much downtime after this installment, but move it along to the Banquet quickly. Don't make huge encounters out of shopping for clothes unless the players are on-board with it. It can be fun, but the banquet itself is challenging to run, and you don't want the installment to take two years like I did. Pick a couple fun downtime encounters and don't go overboard.
Library of Last Resort. Okay, so... I'm running this one now, and since I'm not using xp, I basically replaced the fight with the orcs (which I let them easily talk their way out of) with a big conversation with the storm circling the island. As a sidenote, I'm trying to emphasize a theme of "the druids tried to delay the Age of Worms, but failed to actually stop it, and their choice of a slow decay versus a risky final battle is one the PCs have to atone for to some degree". Make sure the PCs choose a route through the menhirs promptly, and keep prompting them for where they go next as they proceed.
That's all I got! I'm a little foggy on some of the mid-installments, but I'm pretty sure all that holds up fairly well.
We don't have to spoiler talk about APs, but I'm spoilering the above simply because it's very long. :P
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There are a couple of things I can add from my own experiences running Jade Regent and a few other campaigns that ultimately sputtered out:
Don't be afraid to cut meaningless combat encounters.
Admittedly, I say this because I (generally) run campaigns using milestones instead of XP to keep track of character levels, but I still feel that this bit of advice is pertinent to keep in mind--especially when you're running an AP that has heavy emphasis on dungeon crawling *COUGH*Shattered Star*COUGH*.
...excuse me.
Second: Don't be afraid to put challenges or encounters in your dungeon crawls that can be solved with social skills.
It'll give those players who invested more into the social side of character building a chance to participate more in said dungeon crawl, and perhaps even re-ignite their interest in completing it if it's gone out. Players will remember a mid-dungeon encounter with a lonely, shapeshifting librarian who's happy to show them their book collection more than a bog-standard encounter with a bunch of skeletons that's barely distinct at all from the other mobs the dungeon contains.
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The advice to cut combat encounters can also be applied to some (sort of) meaningful ones...Battle of Bloodmarch Hill (Giantslayer Pt. 1), I'm looking at you. Running the big fight in PbP, unless you have a small party that can do multiple posts per day, is going to drag. When I ran it, I ended up abstracting a few of the middle encounters and essentially trading healing for the items and xp from the fights.
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The number one piece of advice I can think of for PbPs is to always recruit at least one, and preferably two, "pushers".
These are the people that are going to make decisions when other players won't, keep the game moving when otherwise it would stall.
Because if you don't, that weight will fall on the GM 100% of the time. And past a certain point, having to pull actions and decisions out of players like stubborn teeth is going to burn you out; it's the reason every single one of my PbP games has been ended, save one (which ended because I just couldn't figure out how to keep a heist/crime game set primarily in a single city running past level 8 or 9).
This can crop up even in games which otherwise were running fine. I ran my Skull and Shackles game for about 6 years. Eventually, it seemed like everybody lost interest because the premise of the campaign essentially did a 180, but not only that, the game presented a lot of open ended questions; in book 5 there are like 3 different dungeon type areas you can go to in basically any order. We'd lost our main pusher due to attrition years back, and the ones who'd stepped up to fill that gap became less involved due to IRL circumstances.
Don't be afraid to re-recruit a new pusher, if possible. Someone you KNOW is capable of it is usually the best fit.
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Another bit of advice: If you find an AP uses a subsystem that you believe is too cumbersome to be worth the effort (Caravans is a particularly grievous offender here), then don't be afraid to abstract it out altogether. Some people like keeping track of exactly what numbers are being crunched in their tabletop game, others would rather skip all that and either get to the story, the combat or the socializing with other players.
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This next post is going to contain spoilers for Second Darkness, so be warned.
Something just occurred to me regarding how many Second Darkness PbPs fizzle out attempting to complete the first book, Shadow in the Sky. Looking back, it's not a book that's really conducive to the Play-by-Post format: the main thrust for most of the book is the day-to-day operation of the Gold Goblin Casino, with a few events sprinkled in to give the adventure some more structure before it ends with the main climax and the group moves on to Book Two.
Considering that the party is never required by the storyline to return to Riddleport after completing Book One (much less run the Gold Goblin), I feel like it's a very disappointing misuse of the city of Riddleport; the GM is even given a fairly comprehensive gazetteer of the pirate city and very little of it is even used in the adventure itself.
Why? Well, here's the reason I discovered why: Riddleport is a proto-Zirnakaynin.
The multiple crime lords making up the city's government are all jockeying for power, setting up a wealth of opportunities for intrigue, adventure and troublemaking--just like Zirnakaynin.
The PCs are given what amounts to meaningless busywork and skill checks in the course of gameplay instead of actual quests or missions that flesh out the city and its major players while advancing the plot--just like Zirnakaynin.
The GM is given a great deal of information about Riddleport in Book One, and the content of Book One as written makes very little use of it--just like Zirnakaynin.
So, how can we fix this? I've thought about this, and after searching around, I believe I have come up with at least one interesting solution:
Replace most of Shadow in the Sky with The Cyphermage Dilemma. The opening premise of the AP will certainly be different--with the PCs being members of the Pathfinder Society and being tasked with resolving the events of that module, I feel that it would be a more effective way of introducing a party and giving them all a reason to stick together.
Of course, that still leaves us with the question of how to make Book Four of Second Darkness more interesting. The answer to that is simple:
Use the gazetteer provided for Zirnakaynin to its fullest extent!
Perhaps in the wake of arriving in Zirnakaynin, the PCs are given a couple of small jobs for House Vonnarc as a test of their competence and reliability--little things like 'this mage from a rival house is harassing our workers, go kill him and bring us back his head' or something like that. And once those jobs are done, someone higher up in House Vonnarc takes notice of the party and takes them into their personal employ, using them as agents to do all manner of things as they investigate House Azrinae, such as:
--Sabotaging House Azrinae's alliances with other noble houses.
--Building alliances with other noble houses.
--Gathering information on House Azrinae's defences so the Matron of Vonnarc can better plan for an assault.
--Ferreting out spies in House Vonnarc's forces (oh, the irony in this one...)
--Anything else you can come up with!
Honestly, rolling skill checks for in-game weeks on end may be fine for a tabletop session, but doing the same in a Play-by-Post campaign is a sure-fire way to smother that spark of creativity. There's only so many ways a GM can describe someone rolling the same Profession (gambler) check over and over and over again.