As far as appealing to collectors who are willing to spend absurd amounts of money on their gaming hobby to obtain limited edition items, I suspect the Life-Sized Goblin is an attempt to gauge how big that market is.
Not terribly useful at the gaming table though.
|
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
As far as appealing to collectors who are willing to spend absurd amounts of money on their gaming hobby to obtain limited edition items, I suspect the Life-Sized Goblin is an attempt to gauge how big that market is.Not terribly useful at the gaming table though.
Make the goblin hold the table.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'm confused about "making sense" part though? Like it kinda does come across that your table might have narrower standards for that part because I haven't felt like "most aps don't make sense" (plus usually in my case tables are willing to have leniency and follow breadcrumbs for what ap provides because they want to play the ap)
My groups are really into investigation and puzzle-solving. This requires that puzzles have solutions and that the solutions make sense, and that's where we get in trouble.
small parts of multiple APs:
In Rise of the Runelords, you are in Magnimar when you hear that Fort Rannick has fallen. It's 10 days minimum for you to get there; but when you get there, you find the fort apparently fell no more than a few hours ago, a day at most. This caused my players to (reasonably) conclude that the initial message was a trap meant to get them out there...but it wasn't.
In Second Darkness, a whole episode is devoted to you infiltrating a drow House. But it is the wrong House, and there is little to no answer to "why would we do that and not tackle the one we actually want to know about?"
In Tyrant's Grasp, the PCs are alive and apparently in their bodies, but their bodies have also been animated as juju zombies. Which would be a cool mystery--if only it had a solution! But there's no hint of one.
Also in Tyrant's Grasp, there's a group whose backstory is that they are so sneaky and subtle, they were able to infiltrate a heavily guarded city. These guys wear spiky black armor with skulls all over it *and a design that makes it clear they want to break the Seal.* (Not just an art problem: the text agrees. At least this one is easy to fix.)
In Ironfang Invasion there are some really serious problems with travel times--people show up to respond to problems long before news could even have reached them, let alone give them time to arrive. You have to assume all the response forces are accidents.
Episode 6 of Ironfang also seems to assume that the PCs won't have invisibility or fly, let alone anything higher level. Besides making it too easy, this was really bad for my player's suspension of disbelief. *This* is the tactical genius who conquered half a nation? Someone who's apparently unaware of simple, common 2nd level spells? (Also, good luck with the map for this one.)
Ruins of Azlant tends to forget that sahuagin don't breathe air. I had to hand out amulets of air breathing like candy, and it ended up being a lot more treasure than the module was prepared for.
If your table doesn't sweat this kind of thing, great! A lot more of the published material will work, and it will be a lot easier to run. But this is where our fun is, so we have to pay attention to logic and consistency or it stops being fun for us. I therefore, selfish as it may be, would like to see APs that avoid stuff like the above as much as possible.
|
I'm confused about "making sense" part though? Like it kinda does come across that your table might have narrower standards for that part because I haven't felt like "most aps don't make sense" (plus usually in my case tables are willing to have leniency and follow breadcrumbs for what ap provides because they want to play the ap)My groups are really into investigation and puzzle-solving. This requires that puzzles have solutions and that the solutions make sense, and that's where we get in trouble.
SPOILERS for small parts of multiple APs:
In Rise of the Runelords, you are in Magnimar when you hear that Fort Rannick has fallen. It's 10 days minimum for you to get there; but when you get there, you find the fort apparently fell no more than a few hours ago, a day at most. This caused my players to (reasonably) conclude that the initial message was a trap meant to get them out there...but it wasn't.
In Tyrant's Grasp, the PCs are alive and apparently in their bodies, but their bodies have also been animated as juju zombies. Which would be a cool mystery--if only it had a solution! But there's no hint of one.
Also in Tyrant's Grasp, there's a group whose backstory is that they are so sneaky and subtle, they were able to infiltrate a heavily guarded city. These guys wear spiky black armor with skulls all over it *and a design that makes it clear they want to break the Seal.* (Not just an art problem: the text agrees. At least this one is easy to fix.)
Ruins of Azlant tends to forget that sahuagin don't breathe air. I had to hand out amulets of air breathing like candy, and it ended up being a lot more treasure than the module was prepared for.
These are only ones I'm able to comment on x'D
Well to be fair, the letter says "should be in our hand by time you receive this letter" so that does give bit of leniency. But I do agree that lot of APs have really flexible understanding of travel times x'D Like how canonically Wrath of the Righteous takes five years, but AP as written seems to presume each book starts quickly after each other meaning it would easily take less than half a year. I definitely believe that its kinda silly how rare it is for APs to presume downtime between books.
On addition to that, I think assumption RotR DOES make is that Fort Rannick has been overrun for days already rather than "few hours", just that news hasn't come down to town yet... Which is still implausible since I don't think there are mentions of rotten corpses and such but uh yeah. I think disconnect is mostly in that book does assume that Fort Rannick has been overrun for longer time, but situation doesn't seem like it would have taken that long on closer examination. My players didn't notice that discrepancy, but I can see some groups noticing that.
Tyrant's Grasp is in general pretty vague of how players surviving the thing works. My guess is that their soul selves on boneyard basically became living corporeal bodies meaning they left behind their original body back on material world.
On those guys, maybe they started wearing their own armor once they had finished with infiltrating? Cultists really like to wear their allegiances once they are in x'D But yeah pretty silly.
Ah I had actually missed sahuagin breathing only underwater as well... Though I don't actually recall sahuagin attacking beach or surface at all in ruins of azlant so my memory might be rusty ^^;
But yeah thanks for answering, its always fascinating for me to get read on other perspectives!
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The sahuagin thing actually looks the other way around and that the AP is correct. Their lore writeups describes them as engaging in activity on land and as far as I can tell most incarnations of the species across various editions do have an amphibious quality (including in PF2 version).
It looks like when they were written into the PF bestiary someone took away their water dependent trait but never gave them the amphibious subtype and that just got carried through the whole edition.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I tried to run Fort Rannick as having fallen more than 10 days ago, but the material pushes back at every turn. It's really clear that the person who wrote it thought it had happened within the last day or so. The guys trapped on the bridge--for ten days--are particularly tough to explain.
My player also had a really bad time with the control chambers for the dam, which are Thassilonian--it's a cool image, but requires no one to have monkeyed around in there for *ten thousand years* which he found completely implausible.
In general, time scales are a problem. I can buy that some things were magically preserved, but when you get a description of "the room is full of rotting fabric and sodden paper" it doesn't sound like magical preservation, it sounds like something that happened within the last year or so. (Happens over and over in both RotRL and Azlant.)
I've seen what happens if I don't carefully correct the logic problems. My player stops caring, stops paying attention, stops trying to solve mysteries, and the game becomes a dull exercise in tactics. It's just not optional for us. (I am the exact same way as a player, so we're a good fit.)
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
The sahuagin thing actually looks the other way around and that the AP is correct. Their lore writeups describes them as engaging in activity on land and as far as I can tell most incarnations of the species across various editions do have an amphibious quality (including in PF2 version).
It looks like when they were written into the PF bestiary someone took away their water dependent trait but never gave them the amphibious subtype and that just got carried through the whole edition.
Good to know, thanks. If I had realized the problem earlier this would have been a much better solution. It's still a pain when the Bestiary and the AP disagree on something significant like this. (We had a lot more sahuagin in Azlant than the written AP, because I always have to add a ton of fleshing-out material: the PCs investigated where the sahuagin who attack in #4 were coming from and eventually I had three conflicting sahuagin kingdoms....)
SPOILERS for small parts of multiple APs:In Rise of the Runelords, you are in Magnimar when you hear that Fort Rannick has fallen. It's 10 days minimum for you to get there; but when you get there, you find the fort apparently fell no more than a few hours ago, a day at most. This caused my players to (reasonably) conclude that the initial message was a trap meant to get them out there...but it wasn't.
Huh, it’s been a long time but I do remember us being particularly confused about that. But I think the GM just gave us a passable excuse and that was that? My arcanist rolled a relevant knowledge skill, passed the DC, and yeah. I think it had something to do with ogre physiology or culture or something like that. Was it not on the book? Fake it until you make it, I guess. lol
In Second Darkness, a whole episode is devoted to you infiltrating a drow House. But it is the wrong House, and there is little to no answer to "why would we do that and not tackle the one we actually want to know about?"
Honestly, I’m obviously not a writer nor have I any experience in the industry, buuut, as a consumer, my observations is that the most favorite modules for my players are the ones that don’t drag too much — or, better said, tend towards being dynamic, are evocative of the theme of the adventure, and etc. Particularly, I’d say that APs could really do with more twists. They don’t even need to be big, but they’re an excellent way to end a session and provoke the players into going all “Ooooh nooo c’mon, not now!”.
To answer the thread’s question, I think that the best stories are those that are focused. I can only extrapolate, of course, but I do feel like 6-part APs tend to have more diverging books here and there because, well, it’s just a lot of content to fill for a single story. But this ends up with an AP whose premise is about, I don’t know… Say, intrigue, with a book merely intrigue-flavored, with a lot of combat. And those tend are the ones that tend to feel very dragging, and usually become the player’s least favorites. I’ve heard great things about Abomination Vaults: I wonder if the fact that it’s a 3-part AP doesn’t easy it to become a better experience.
Expanding a little more on focused stories bits: I’d say that ideally, for me and the player’s that I’ve met throughout the years, a story that flirts with being railroady but doesn’t feel like it because the premise doesn’t quite allow for players to go out of that make for the richest experiences. An adventure whose main hook is being about “a band of crooks and misfits on a crime-ridden town” doesn’t really transition well to “a group of heroes trying to save the world from a catalytic event despite the people that they are trying to help are pretty douchey to them. Oh, plus they are doing all of this from their heroic hearts. Or because they don’t wanna die. Although don’t think about trying to get some extra money from those people because they aren’t really that filthy rich”
I feel like The Slithering was maybe an attempt to gauge this sort of direction, with the no-human shtick, as it is with Strength of Thousands. I hope they consider doing something more specific, but maybe a little more exploitative of Golarion’s exclusive qualities or elements, like in SoT. I’d super love a 3-part AP where players are actual Hellknights, for example. Lawful only, Free Archetype: Hellknight Armiger, and suddenly their so circumstantial abilities become pretty useful. We already know that even the worst orders might not all be composed by complete villains, as we were shown by a particular popular NPC in this edition’s AP that was on his way to become part of the Order of the Nail. And you could do something very similar
Also: Earlier introductions of the BBEG, pleaaaase!
I tried to run Fort Rannick as having fallen more than 10 days ago, but the material pushes back at every turn. It's really clear that the person who wrote it thought it had happened within the last day or so. The guys trapped on the bridge--for ten days--are particularly tough to explain.
What bridge is this? Are you referring to the 3.5 version of the adventure? There doesn't seem to be anyone stuck on a bridge in the anniversary edition of the adventure, so it may have been fixed.
My player also had a really bad time with the control chambers for the dam, which are Thassilonian--it's a cool image, but requires no one to have monkeyed around in there for *ten thousand years* which he found completely implausible.
The skull ripper being there is explanation enough for me. People probably have gone down there but ended up getting beheaded. Maybe Grazuul ate the corpses.