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SoT’s moment with Akiton isn’t a random curveball - the lore about a portal to Akiton in the Mwangi Expanse is close to a decade old now, as is the story that Jatembe banished his worst rival through it. What you’re interpreting as an unexpected swerve is actually a payoff go a long-standing gem of lore, one that directly ties into the history of the Magaambya and its founder.
I cheered when they announced the title. It’s a story that could only happen in Golarion.
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The adventure line seems to hue a bit closer to classical tropes so far. Which is somewhat ironic; they've said that adventures are a good place for them to experiment with characters and themes as they're so much shorter than APs, but all of the examples we've gotten so far, aside from the no humans rule in the Slithering, have felt pretty standard to me.
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An experiment for that line, sure. But in terms of tropes and themes, it did not feel as outré as Strange Aeons (probably the closest in terms of themes) or Strength of Thousands.
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I think the common critique of Giantslayer is just that it is boring. It does exactly what it says on the tin, isn't executed badly or anything, but it's just an endless stream of fighting giants with very little else, and with roleplaying dying off in the second half of the AP it ends up feeling stale and uninteresting. I've not played it myself, but I like the sound of the more sandbox-y book in it, at least!The last time trads were grumpy that we're not getting a "classic, proper, like God Jesus wanted it to be" APs but instead we're having Rasputin with machinegun or robotz with lasors we got Giantslayer, which was one of the worst Paizo APs ever, so I'd be really careful what you wish for here.I brought that up before, but what was wrong with Giantslayer, exactly?
Not just that, but the second half of AP was also a laughable pushover. The authors were apparently instructed to recreate the Against The Giants experience so that grogs will feel like it's 1982 all over again. Hence, these books contain 50+ regular giants each, with book 5 being the worst offender, rooms with 3d6 giants, rooms with 4d6+2 giants, oh, a giant with 2 levels of Fighter and 2 levels of Rogue, variety!
The problem is, Pathfinder 1e isn't D&D 1e. For a med-to-high level PF1 party, regular giants fail as a challenge. They have nonexistent Ref and Will saves and touch AC, have no special defenses (SR, DR) and to make it worse, these adventures placed those giants in massive rooms with ample distance from PCs. Which combined meant that your average Cave Druid with Vital Strike, Bowladin, Gunslinger 5/Ranger X and Sacred Geometry+Dazing Spell Sorc party would simply breeze through these adventures at a rate that made Wrath of the Righteous look like a challenge.
I've played Giantslayer out of guilty pleasure for a bit. It was an idle RPG with everything dying in 2 rounds and epic battles against giant princes and princesses being pushovers compared to Xanesha or some random seugathi in more memorable APs.
TANGENT: Oh, and our party had one of those utilikilt grogs who got sold on the Against the Giants premise, he had a dworf Paladin with a shield and hammer and feats such "+2 to Perception while standing in running water", did 1d8+8 damage at level 11 and would end up never doing anything because "unoptimized PC in an aggressively minmaxed party" problem PF1 has. This is less of a criticism of the AP itself, but he would end up running around the Internet asking how on earth is his Thuring Willowshield (yes, he was that cliche) supposed to have the advertised grand battle against the mortal enemies of his clan if those teenage punks who don't even have a bust of Gary Gygax in their basement keep winning initative and ending the fight on turn 2.
PS: Yes, he had a bust of Gary Gygax in his basement.
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I mean problem with Extinction Curse is that its not Circus enough, Circus is way too easy to remove from AP since writers didn't really want to commit to it being the "circus AP" <_<
Anyway, I do think "exotic monster" thing is bit confusing, because all traditional D&D monsters are weird. Owlbears, cloakers, ropers, bullettes...
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The one AP I ran had the following creature types for its encounters:
-Plague Wolves
-Drunken Peasants
-Bees
-A Bear
-Guard Dogs
-An Electric Snake
-A Human Rogue
-Angry Bushes
-Plague Wolves (First repeated type)
-Angry Vines
-Orcs + A Menagerie of Mutants
-A Fire Leopard (Not really a fight)
-Orcs + Random Potion Thrower
-Orc Alchemist
-Ooze
-Orcs
-Unique Orc Leader + Minions
-Maybe More Orcs
-Orc Guard Post
-A terrible cook
-Brine Sharks
-Amalgam
-Small Bats + Big Bat
-Jackass Elf + Frakenstein
Gotta' sell those bestiary books!
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I'll have to look, the Mammoth one might fit my desires very well.
Wait, you mean Quest for the Everflame won't have an unnecessary and cumbersome mammoth management sub-system?!
Age of Ashes might work better narratively if you drop books 3 & 4 entirely. Neither seem to add much to the story, as best I can recall without re-reading them. That's gonna' be a pain in the arse if you're trying to run the AP in PF2, but far easier for someone like me, who buys these books exclusively to convert to other systems, which don't lean as heavily on party level/CR to determine difficulty.
EDIT: The more I think about, the more certain I am that this omission would dramatically improve the AP, at least for my table.
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On the encounter variety / dungeon galore section, this is a general problem, and a AP/Module format problem. Lack of space, small maps, and budget xps (i dislike this last one so much).
I posted a question to the Strength of Thousands AP which has gotten no response (I miss the days of a more engaged AP forum discussion..I think we lost something transitioning -disclaimer I am in love with PF2).
"I am wondering how people's groups are holding up after going through:
7 Brutes, 4 Jailers, 1 Priest, 1 Warden, 1 cyclop bbeg, 1 golgopo, 1 great cyclops, 3 cyclop brutes, and a gogieth, in a single connected dungeon."
The potential of running this as written and it ending up alright is unlikely, in a tight, confined space. In this case the monsters are rather similar and they do a good job of making sense in the context they are found. An experienced DM can definitely bring some order to it and make the tunels longer, that sort of thing.
Still beats the 17 unchallenging encounters before 2-3 main ones of PF1 just to get XP-budgets. All the same 2d4 standard enemies repeated for many rooms.
I would prefer dungeons to make more sense, and be less...dungeony. I am just not a fan of dungeons for every AP module. Dungeons are not what I struggle with as a DM, as they are dead easy, and always let me feeling I bought a filler instead of a real adventure. This is however, what I prefer as a DM/player.
Takeaway: Give me an interesting scenario, with 2-3 good fights, well described hazards and interactable environment, motivations and possibilities. Then slap a sidebar with "If you feel you need more enemies here's a list of possibilities and couple suggestions how to plug them in".
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I posted a question to the Strength of Thousands AP which has gotten no response (I miss the days of a more engaged AP forum discussion..I think we lost something transitioning -disclaimer I am in love with PF2).
"I am wondering how people's groups are holding up after going through:
7 Brutes, 4 Jailers, 1 Priest, 1 Warden, 1 cyclop bbeg, 1 golgopo, 1 great cyclops, 3 cyclop brutes, and a gogieth, in a single connected dungeon."
Not to sidetrack this conversation, but this getting a slow response might be due in part to that particular portion being a bit deeper into the AP. I know that I started running SoT when the second book came out and we're still on chapter two of the first book.
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I do think that the APs would be written in a way more similar to how I'd like to run them if XP budgets weren't a thing they had to care about. I don't know how common my preferred playstyle is, but there aren't many pre-published modules I've read anywhere that have the length of dungeons and amount of combat that I'd prefer. It's definitely an issue that I think could be exacerbated by PF2's design encouraging 10-minute rests - definitely not the biggest deal in the world, but I've had times that I've consciously rearranged a dungeon because I knew it'd be very difficult to justify a 10-minute rest otherwise. That being said, most of my experience in actually running the game (as opposed to reading the APs) is using converted PF1 APs, so it may be different when it comes to the new ones :)
... and Extinction Curse could arguably fit the Grand Tour category. I suspect any one AP could tick multiple boxes.
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I do think that the APs would be written in a way more similar to how I'd like to run them if XP budgets weren't a thing they had to care about. I don't know how common my preferred playstyle is, but there aren't many pre-published modules I've read anywhere that have the length of dungeons and amount of combat that I'd prefer. It's definitely an issue that I think could be exacerbated by PF2's design encouraging 10-minute rests - definitely not the biggest deal in the world, but I've had times that I've consciously rearranged a dungeon because I knew it'd be very difficult to justify a 10-minute rest otherwise. That being said, most of my experience in actually running the game (as opposed to reading the APs) is using converted PF1 APs, so it may be different when it comes to the new ones :)
Speaking from my personal perspective as a designer and adventure writer, I really feel like XP is a legacy mechanic that holds the game back, though I also have seen the evidence that too many people are really tied to it for us to completely divorce the core game from it. People use it as ways to manage player engagement, enforce attendance, ensure the players are getting a constant dribble of visible progression, etc., and those (plus the many other reasons people prefer XP over other progression methods) are all legitimate.
That said, I can't tell you how many times I've written an adventure, sat back and thought "This has every encounter that is necessary to make this story complete", and then realized that it needs like 8 more encounters to fit the word count and XP progression. Swapping to milestone leveling and using broader timelines for the storytelling could go a long way, I think, but it's hard to make that big a change to a proven model. I think we'd need to do something pretty experimental, like a three-part AP that explicitly doesn't use XP and uses milestone leveling instead, (and then that thing would need to be very successful on the sales front if Paizo is ever going to get away from the XP model in more than a single product offering). A lot of the "random encounters" in APs come from just making sure the party is the right level at the right time. (I'll note personally, that even though I think APs are a bit overstuffed on the encounter front, I do appreciate that most authors at least take the time to try and explain why given monsters are where they are and we're pretty well past the days of "You fight 2 ogres because that's what rolling a 13 on this table says you fight.")
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For a different take, I strongly feel that after a game session, it's really important for a player to add something to their character sheet. Experience points are a tactile way to "make real" the fact that you just played the game for 4 hours, even if you didn't level up or gain any new items or take any notes. They also help to drive the excitement of anticipation—if I am able to track XP on my sheet, I get a basic idea of when I might be leveling up and the anticipation of when that might happen is enjoyable.
The milestone system robs that from me, and it's frustrating to feel like after every session I have to ask the GM "Do I level up?" Which is a question that kind of ended up being a habit after playing one too many games during which the GM did actually forget that we were supposed to level up at one point and had the party doing encounters that were overtuned for us.
Handing out XP helps keep the players engaged and, yes, it does take a little more work for the GM to do, but it's worth it to me.
Pathfinder's set up so that your table can play the game both ways. Neither one is "RIGHT" but make sure that the choice you choose for your table as a GM is one the table prefers, not just one you prefer as GM.
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For a different take, I strongly feel that after a game session, it's really important for a player to add something to their character sheet. Experience points are a tactile way to "make real" the fact that you just played the game for 4 hours, even if you didn't level up or gain any new items or take any notes. They also help to drive the excitement of anticipation—if I am able to track XP on my sheet, I get a basic idea of when I might be leveling up and the anticipation of when that might happen is enjoyable.
The milestone system robs that from me, and it's frustrating to feel like after every session I have to ask the GM "Do I level up?" Which is a question that kind of ended up being a habit after playing one too many games during which the GM did actually forget that we were supposed to level up at one point and had the party doing encounters that were overtuned for us.
Handing out XP helps keep the players engaged and, yes, it does take a little more work for the GM to do, but it's worth it to me.
Pathfinder's set up so that your table can play the game both ways. Neither one is "RIGHT" but make sure that the choice you choose for your table as a GM is one the table prefers, not just one you prefer as GM.
As the EXP maniac, if none of my players wants to calculate exp, I'll calculate it for them ;D We usually have one player doing care of inventory and exp management for whole party stash and such anyway.
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As one clueless suggestion--why not move the APs to a Milestone focus, and then include a sidebar about suggested added encounters that will bring the PCs right to the correct amount of XP? That way, the adventure can be written in its "ideal form", and the GM still has tips on how to increase the XP to the necessary numbers if they're running with that rule.
Honestly, the current situation isn't that good for XP-users, either. Sometimes you miss an encounter and end up lagging behind! XD
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I've loved the happy middle-ground between exp and milestones where players get exp from encounters and fights as well as a substantial amount from narrative achievements or story awards. Less filler encounters that are just to pad experience and less needing to remind the GM that it's been a while since the last level up.
I think Strength of Thousands did that pretty well compared to the rest, particularly in the first book from what I remember.
That's also a good idea. Just assign story rewards that will tide the PCs over. Sure, that means there's a certain amount of illusion to the whole xp system, but that's purely a GM-side issue.
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I'd certainly contest the idea that the game is built for XP or milestones equally. Adventures are part of the game and they're built to the expectation of XP, not milestones, which inherently affects encounter design (it's directly the reason for the "menagerie" encounters the OP and others took exception to). It impacts everything from player psychology to adventure structure and accounting for it usually requires weird math and retooling CRB guidelines for social and puzzle encounters to allow them to have more impact on character advancement (sometimes this easy, like just ignoring the suggested story rewards and applying combat XP values to story/RP moments, sometimes it's more tricky.)
But the end result is very much that group dynamics are super important. With one group I played with for many years, removing XP solved a whole host of issues beyond just "ogres in the belfry because something needs to be in the belfry" and "9 out of 10 APs have an attic whisperer in the first or second book because we need an undead threat that gives combat XP but breaks up the murder slog with a non-standard resolution method." Murder-hoboism dropped significantly and roleplaying increased dramatically when the PCs really locked into the idea that killing "one more zombie" wasn't going to get them to level 3 any faster and that all methods of conflict resolution were equally viable. Unequivocally, the experience was universally improved for that group.
On the flipside, I've been in the other group where XP is an actively used tool; you don't get XP if you weren't there that session, going above and beyond got you extra XP, etc. For me personally, that group was miserable. Grandpa's sick? Guess I'm going to be leveling one session behind everyone else forever now. Oh, that guy is besties with the GM and showed up for an optional session the rest of us couldn't fit in our schedule? Guess he just levels up two sessions before everyone else from now on. But that was how I felt, and the group was pretty visibly held together by that XP progression providing a visible metric of progression and using the "honey and vinegar" approach to enforcing attendance. It's always important to be able to see whether something is a personal preference, a group preference, or a community inclination and act accordingly. (The final lesson there being that it can be okay to look for the game and group that's right for you; there's no one true way to play and pretty much every truly terrible gaming experience I can think of that wasn't people using roleplay as an excuse to express inner vileness came down to too many people at the table having different expectations of what the game was / should be.)
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Agree 100% that the "You only gain XP if you are at the table, and gain extra XP for doing something that the GM arbitrarially thinks is worthy of an extra reward" method is a sure-fire way to make a game awful.
Which is why I enjoy 2nd Edition Pathfinder's XP method. You essentially are awarding XP to the party, not the individual. I suppose we could/should have been more obvious about that construct in the Core Rules, but as far as I understand it (and as far as I've always structured adventures I work on), the idea is that the party all levels up simultaneously, regardless of who was actually at the game or who did the "best job" in a session.
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As one clueless suggestion--why not move the APs to a Milestone focus, and then include a sidebar about suggested added encounters that will bring the PCs right to the correct amount of XP? That way, the adventure can be written in its "ideal form", and the GM still has tips on how to increase the XP to the necessary numbers if they're running with that rule.
Honestly, the current situation isn't that good for XP-users, either. Sometimes you miss an encounter and end up lagging behind! XD
Never actually seen party lagging behind, my players tend to be "do everything" types so they are always leveling up in advance xD
(also never had party members have differing amount of exp. All of them have same exp even if they joined in middle of session with new character)
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Agree 100% that the "You only gain XP if you are at the table, and gain extra XP for doing something that the GM arbitrarially thinks is worthy of an extra reward" method is a sure-fire way to make a game awful.
Which is why I enjoy 2nd Edition Pathfinder's XP method. You essentially are awarding XP to the party, not the individual. I suppose we could/should have been more obvious about that construct in the Core Rules, but as far as I understand it (and as far as I've always structured adventures I work on), the idea is that the party all levels up simultaneously, regardless of who was actually at the game or who did the "best job" in a session.
Yeah, definitely how it's intended to go, but things like Organized Play and game traditions mean that in practicality, the campaign I'm playing in right now (a 2e conversion of Strange Aeons btw, which I absolutely love! Playing a thaumaturge and it's a perfect fit for what we've been calling "Golarion by Gaslight") is the first one I've ever seen a GM use XP in but apply it equally to the whole group. If you're using a group XP track, then fundamentally you're already halfway to milestones but with a shared progress bar and different psychological paradigms in play.
Serious tangent here, but one of the coolest things for me about Blades in the Dark was that it gives each character a character sheet but then also gives the party a party character sheet that tracks things like their base status, reputation progression, etc. I've felt for awhile now like that's a "missing link" that could definitely raise the cognitive load for at least one person at the table a bit but also provides a whole new avenue for game progression and growth akin to what we do with big AP subsystems like kingdom or caravan building (though I think where those sometimes become too much for some groups is when they languish without active management vs. the party's progression at the personal level inherently advancing the party level metrics.) I also really liked Numenera's revamp (I think Discovery was the one with civilization building?) for similar reasons. Party character sheets are a tricky bit of tech to implement in an already crunchy system, but personally, I think they're really cool and open up a lot of territory that we have a harder time effectively exploiting in our crunchier rule sets. The big trick is that while putting together a rules framework and character sheet for something like that is relatively easy, tailoring one to something like an AP would be brutal and add days or more of work to the adventure dev for something that is still experimental and doesn't have a proven and consistent audience that also likes what we're already doing.
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It feels like there's some balance between xp from encounters and xp from story awards that would be most satisfying, and it probably changes depending on the level of the characters and the types of encounters they've been dealing with. Characters struggling through some tough encounters might feel better about it afterwards if there's a bonus reward for completing the gauntlet.
Xp for saving the town in addition what they got for defeating the necromancer and their followers seems reasonable to players and helps avoid introducing a slog of extra encounters where it would be more satisfying to move onto bigger stakes and new adventures.
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I do think that the APs would be written in a way more similar to how I'd like to run them if XP budgets weren't a thing they had to care about. I don't know how common my preferred playstyle is, but there aren't many pre-published modules I've read anywhere that have the length of dungeons and amount of combat that I'd prefer. It's definitely an issue that I think could be exacerbated by PF2's design encouraging 10-minute rests - definitely not the biggest deal in the world, but I've had times that I've consciously rearranged a dungeon because I knew it'd be very difficult to justify a 10-minute rest otherwise. That being said, most of my experience in actually running the game (as opposed to reading the APs) is using converted PF1 APs, so it may be different when it comes to the new ones :)Speaking from my personal perspective as a designer and adventure writer, I really feel like XP is a legacy mechanic that holds the game back, though I also have seen the evidence that too many people are really tied to it for us to completely divorce the core game from it. People use it as ways to manage player engagement, enforce attendance, ensure the players are getting a constant dribble of visible progression, etc., and those (plus the many other reasons people prefer XP over other progression methods) are all legitimate.
That said, I can't tell you how many times I've written an adventure, sat back and thought "This has every encounter that is necessary to make this story complete", and then realized that it needs like 8 more encounters to fit the word count and XP progression. Swapping to milestone leveling and using broader timelines for the storytelling could go a long way, I think, but it's hard to make that big a change to a proven model. I think we'd need to do something pretty experimental, like a three-part AP that explicitly doesn't use XP and uses milestone leveling instead, (and then that thing would need to be very successful on the sales front if Paizo is ever going to...
I find myself agreeing on basically everything here - comparing the oldest pre-published material to modern-day stuff is light and day for me. I may not personally want to run quite as many combat encounters as XP budgets tend to demand, but in the vast majority of books those encounters still make sense and don't make players groan with "another group of the same enemies in the same situation?". As James says, it's up to the group as to which one works for them (and I will happily do XP when it's something that brings fun to the players, especially with how easy PF2 has made handling XP). I do find myself letting players know when a level up is occurring in milestone levelling when it doesn't spoil anything - when we're in the middle of a dungeon, I'll mention at the end of a session that the end of the dungeon is a level-up. It lets people still have that feeling of knowing roughly when to look forward to, and I haven't found it to bias my players into pushing directly towards that moment when they otherwise wouldn't have.
In terms of it being experimental to design an adventure around milestone levelling, is that something that may be suited to an Adventure? I know they're meant to be more experimental in general, and as a standalone piece of content it seems like a good place to put an adventure with a premise that could benefit from milestone levelling.
Few things kill my mood to play in a game more than the GM saying "we do XP and if you miss a session you get half XP" or something along those lines.
I put time in, I get enjoyment through the session, I may get some big milestone (gear/level) but otherwise perhaps advanced story, character portrayal, or similar. I understand some people need the constant affirmation that they are getting something tangible.
XP is for me, either a hardwired thing that people just got used to, or the sign of someone in a control spectrum that I want nothing to do with. However, I play home games and with people I choose to play with.
As a system for tabula-rasa situations like PFS it is a logical tool, however I'd debate there are better ones like each module awarding so many points depending on module level and then advancing that way.
Overall, it ends up being an imposition rather than a tool, causing the APs devolve in XP packing monsters like a cheap buffet, instead of better garnishing the good parts. Guidelines are fine, but must-fill arbitrary quotas dont make a better result.
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On the newer APs, I have been enjoying much of the setting. The Agents of Edgewatch has 2 modules I really want to rip and put into my game (Casino and the Prison!), I have used several Age of Ashes parts (the travelling to Mwange helped me populate a "escape the jungles" start to a campaign), Strength of Thousands was a welcome change of tonality even if it is for variety.
I miss some gritty, war torn landscapes and real politik NPCs in action that would make me actually believe that these are real nations we deal with rather than a campaign setting (a little bit of Avistan doing the European wars of - war here but not there but sprinkle armed conflict over here and the navy just took that port, guess we'll cede a city in apology-). I think PF1 had slightly more of it but it was very crude, and the writing has in general moved to more aware narratives.
The sudden changes from simple adventuring to high fantasy world hopping are jarring - but on a power curve like Pathfinder's it is bound to happen. I would be much happier playing fewer levels and more to the point APs (3 volumes is great) if they stick with a natural theme.
My biggest concern with APs that neither PF1 nor PF2 solve is that as the stories are told we'll get more "Players cant teleport because this forest is magical" "Players cant use scrying because the magic here is warped" "the Whatever Crystal of Offuscation impedes your meta-plot spells" "Flying is not legal here since the pigeon hit the Drake last year at the airfield".
Teleport, Scry, Fly - the most jarring tools to any story telling - or the most important, are extremely poorly handled with few exceptions, and doing a 1-6 volume adventure will only exarbecate this.
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I used to be a sworn proponent of milestone leveling only back when I played 5e. I felt like the calculation of XP was too much number crunching and it took the control over when the players leveled up out of my hands. But upon switching over to PF2e, I tried XP and my players love it, and now in the game where I’m a player and we use milestone, I’m always annoyed at how I never know how close I am to leveling up.
Granted, I think PF2e makes it easy to control the XP distribution so that players still level up when you want them to. If it feels like we’re having too many meaningless combats, I’ll be a bit more liberal with XP awards for minor/major story achievements and cut out some encounters. Players are still leveling up when the adventure path wants them to, making it no different from milestone in reality, but it helps motivate my players when they see quantifiable progress at the end of a session.
It might be nice for the APs to just work with a "story reward" system, where instead of it being pure "levelup milestones" or "xp for fights", you just gain a certain amount of xp arbitrarily at each milestone. That way, players still get to write a number on their sheets every session, but adventure writers don't have to clutter things with extra encounters that drag down pacing. And GMs can add in extra flavor encounters without messing up the balance!
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Agree 100% that the "You only gain XP if you are at the table, and gain extra XP for doing something that the GM arbitrarially thinks is worthy of an extra reward" method is a sure-fire way to make a game awful.
Which is why I enjoy 2nd Edition Pathfinder's XP method. You essentially are awarding XP to the party, not the individual. I suppose we could/should have been more obvious about that construct in the Core Rules, but as far as I understand it (and as far as I've always structured adventures I work on), the idea is that the party all levels up simultaneously, regardless of who was actually at the game or who did the "best job" in a session.
Yeah, definitely how it's intended to go, but things like Organized Play and game traditions mean that in practicality, the campaign I'm playing in right now (a 2e conversion of Strange Aeons btw, which I absolutely love! Playing a thaumaturge and it's a perfect fit for what we've been calling "Golarion by Gaslight") is the first one I've ever seen a GM use XP in but apply it equally to the whole group. If you're using a group XP track, then fundamentally you're already halfway to milestones but with a shared progress bar and different psychological paradigms in play.
Serious tangent here, but one of the coolest things for me about Blades in the Dark was that it gives each character a character sheet but then also gives the party a party character sheet that tracks things like their base status, reputation progression, etc. I've felt for awhile now like that's a "missing link" that could definitely raise the cognitive load for at least one person at the table a bit but also provides a whole new avenue for game progression and growth akin to what we do with big AP subsystems like kingdom or caravan building (though I think where those sometimes become too much for some groups is when they languish without active management vs. the party's progression at the personal level inherently advancing the party level metrics.) I also...
Really cool to see discussion of Blades in the Dark here! Absolutely love that game. A party character sheet is a lot of fun, and I think it really can add to the collaborative feeling of a game - or in some cases, a character sheet for the local area can help flesh out the area for an antagonistic game like Urban Shadows can be. It's definitely something that'd be difficult to implement into PF2 - a generic version of it would be difficult to get buy-in for, but an adventure-specific version is a lot of work. I've been thinking about it recently in the context of mythic-style games - I think there's an interesting possibility there for a party character sheet defined by their mythic source. It seems to fit the balance of being active enough to keep interest in it, while being a big enough connection to the party that it'd have an interesting impact on the story.
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I think XP is outdated for APs. The balance of the entire adventure depends on the players being at a certain level at any given point. Why take on the hassle of tracking experience when the only desirable outcome is that you're leveling up at the right time anyway? I have seen no pleasure from my players in the prospect of tracking experience in those scenarios, and it just adds minutes of busywork as players go around making sure their math checks out.
For my homebrew games I do milestone leveling when the campaign has a storyline or episodes, because I'm planning out what is going to happen and I need to know how to balance their next encounters.
With sandbox games, however, experience is super useful. It can be a goal in itself, and lets them set the pace and trajectory of their journey.
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I think XP is outdated for APs. The balance of the entire adventure depends on the players being at a certain level at any given point. Why take on the hassle of tracking experience when the only desirable outcome is that you're leveling up at the right time anyway?
Because XP is something that tells the player how close they are to the next level. It's a feeling of progression thing.
Let's picture this, for example. A party is progressing through a dungeon, and does, say, four Low encounters in a session. They don't get any notable treasure (because that's in a stash later in the dungeon), and thus end the session having made no real sense of progress except for the fact that they've done four encounters.
With XP, they know they're 240 xp closer to the next level, a quarter closer than they were before.
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I think XP is outdated for APs. The balance of the entire adventure depends on the players being at a certain level at any given point. Why take on the hassle of tracking experience when the only desirable outcome is that you're leveling up at the right time anyway?Because XP is something that tells the player how close they are to the next level. It's a feeling of progression thing.
Let's picture this, for example. A party is progressing through a dungeon, and does, say, four Low encounters in a session. They don't get any notable treasure (because that's in a stash later in the dungeon), and thus end the session having made no real sense of progress except for the fact that they've done four encounters.
With XP, they know they're 240 xp closer to the next level, a quarter closer than they were before.
I just can't relate to this idea at all. It feels entirely foreign to my play experience.
It's like reading a book and only feeling enjoyment when you check how many pages you've read.
If the only feeling of progress during a story driven game is an increment in XP, to me that's a massive failure of a session and an indication that the story isn't engaging and the challenges were extraneous. It would break my heart if a session ended and my players just shrugged and said "at least I got some XP". I'd throw in extra treasure or some bonus plot info before I let that happen.
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I'm only using XP in Abomination Vaults (and maybe book 1 of Ruby Phoenix?) because it is a sandbox of sorts, and milestone is hard to manage in those specifically. I use Foundry so I just hit a button and award the players their XP; in any other situation, using XP feels like a nightmare.
I do LOVE budget-based encounter building, though. XP works for that, of course. I would definitely prefer for the game as a whole to move towards milestones though - especially since, most of the time, you're levelling at the same point the milestone would have you level up, and generally those points are pretty clear to the players anyway.
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| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I think XP is outdated for APs. The balance of the entire adventure depends on the players being at a certain level at any given point. Why take on the hassle of tracking experience when the only desirable outcome is that you're leveling up at the right time anyway?Because XP is something that tells the player how close they are to the next level. It's a feeling of progression thing.
Let's picture this, for example. A party is progressing through a dungeon, and does, say, four Low encounters in a session. They don't get any notable treasure (because that's in a stash later in the dungeon), and thus end the session having made no real sense of progress except for the fact that they've done four encounters.
With XP, they know they're 240 xp closer to the next level, a quarter closer than they were before.
I just can't relate to this idea at all. It feels entirely foreign to my play experience.
It's like reading a book and only feeling enjoyment when you check how many pages you've read.
If the only feeling of progress during a story driven game is an increment in XP, to me that's a massive failure of a session and an indication that the story isn't engaging and the challenges were extraneous. It would break my heart if a session ended and my players just shrugged and said "at least I got some XP". I'd throw in extra treasure or some bonus plot info before I let that happen.
Let's just say as player in sandbox campaigns, I absolutely hate the feeling that only form of progression is "GM thinks you have done enough to level up" :p
(do also note: I have virtually no problem with what people describe as "filler for exp" encounters. I like encounters in general and hate idea that they can only be main story important :p)
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I use experience points rather than milestones because my players and I alter the adventure paths too much for the milestones to be reliable.
Let me use my current campaign as an example of changes. I am converting the Ironfang Invasion, a PF1 adventure path published in 2017, to PF2. The hobgoblin Ironfang Legion invaded southwestern Nirmathas. The players were in the Nirmathi village of Phaendar when it was invaded and they fled with several villagers to the Fangwood forest.
1. At 4th level in the 1st module, the party decided to scout the village of Polebridge. The module does not contain Polebridge; rather, I had made up that name as the next village to the east off the map. I found a good map for Polebridge and put a garrison of 25 goblins there, a beyond-extreme threat challenge that ought to have scared the PCs away. The players decided to see how many they could kill before retreating. With creative tactics, they defeated the entire garrison.
2. At 5th level in the 2nd module, the party had to break into a castle where korreds were holding a festival. Korreds don't allow non-fey into their festivals. Two party members walked in with permission, because one was a fey-touched gnome who qualified as fey and the other was a draconic-blooded halfling who successfully bluffed that he was a fey, too. They skipped most of the encounters and went directly to their objective.
3. The elf ranger in the party had declared that her home village was Radya's Hollow, a village further north in the Hollow Hills that she picked off a map. Too bad that in the 3rd module the PCs were supposed to reach Radya's Hollow after it was conquered and most of its inhabitants slaughtered. At 6th level in the 2nd module, I realized that the party was not far from Radya's Hollow. I let them get word from refugees that a small hobgoblin army was marching toward Radya's Hollow. They rushed to the village and saved it. As for the army which they were supposed to meet at 8th level as three encounters CR 8, CR 8, and CR 10, I made it five times the size in the module because I knew their tactical mastery could handle it. I wanted it to feel big enough to conquer the village.
4. At 9th level in the 3rd module at the Ironfang Legion's munitions camp, they noticed that the camp had no sleeping nor cooking facilities. This was not a trivial matter, because the party was very intent upon freeing enslaved villagers forced to work for the Ironfang Legion. I improvised and said that those were further north. I made a map of the northern camp out of Paizo Map Packs. There they fought some Hobgoblin Formations (a new 9th-level military unit I wanted to playtest), freed some slaves, burned some trebuchets, and followed a path eastward to another of the module's encounters.
5. After the battle at Longshadow at the end of the 3rd module, the party returned to Phaendar to free the enslaved villagers there. They weren't supposed to do that until the 6th module.
The party will start the 4th module at 12th level rather than 11th level. Since I have to convert the encounters anyway, raising the difficulty of encounters will be routine.
As for comparing PF1 adventure paths and PF2 adventure paths, I have seen plenty of mistakes in PF1 adventure paths. They are not perfect, but they are correctable. I have not yet played any PF2 adventure paths, but I think I can also correct their mistakes. The later PF1 adventure paths ran more smoothly than the earlier ones, which I take as a sign of quality increasing over the years. Even if the rule changes led to a bumpy start for the PF2 adventure paths, Paizo will get the hang of them.
Another discussion was about gimmicks in the adventure path, rather than straight adventure, such as the circus in Extinction Curse. One of my players declared that if they played in Extinction Curse, they would own the circus by the end of the 1st module. The other players agreed. I let my players select the adventure path by reading the one-paragraph blurbs about a few I find to my taste. Those gimmicks are effective hooks to get them interested. They chose Iron Gods previously because the alien technology sounded interesting.
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D&D5e seems to have made the jump to milestone levelling pretty painlessly, and I'd say the system is stronger for it.
Savage Worlds (my forever RPG) generally grants players an Advance (essentially a level up) every two/three game sessions, regardless of what they accomplished, so you always know that you're not far off your next new ability/spell/etc...
One of the most common complaints I see for PF1/2 and it's published AP line is the number of speedbump/filler combats designed to erode party resources and bump XP to where it needs to be. It feels like disengaging from the 'XP to Advance' model could resolve those issues in one swoop.
I could argue that the experience/memories formed playing the game should be reward enough after a session (in addition to any gold, magic items, new allies, etc...), and getting to do additional math to see if I level up is not much of a reward/incentive, at least not for me personally.
It might even help more people complete more adventure paths (which many groups seem not to do) if there are fewer filler combats, especially when combat at higher levels can take hours to resolve. Listening to the Giantslayer podcast on Glass Cannon, it recently took them three weeks (that's 3/4 hours of gameplay, once you factor for the banter) to defeat a specific mob (abyss gigas and some mephits, I think). When you consider that such an encounter (and potentially another 7 like it?!) may have been added reluctantly, by a designer who was trying to hit his word/XP count, it does seem like an awful waste of everyone's time.
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Let's just say as player in sandbox campaigns, I absolutely hate the feeling that only form of progression is "GM thinks you have done enough to level up" :p
(do also note: I have virtually no problem with what people describe as "filler for exp" encounters. I like encounters in general and hate idea that they can only be main story important :p)
I have no problems with exp for sandbox games! I like that it allows players to set their own pace. I wouldn't even know where to give milestone levels in a sandbox.
Advancing in level is one of those skills that develop as you GM. Depending on the camapaign, the Gm and the players. I imagine some people prefer to do the mechanical thing of xp.
But story gives XP. How is that measured? Is it always tied to the creatures/hazards involved? Any way I see it, it is an extremely crude way to measure advancement exactly.
Unless you're playing dungeon simulator. Which, yeah sure, then it works.
Still think PF2 is probably doing it better, from what I've seen the encounters are like. Until the OP didnt bring up the fact that there is perhaps too much variety in enemies, I hadnt thought about that I am not dealing with the usual hordes of low level blandness.
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Count me in with the "not a fan of XP-in-general group". As stated a few times, it works fine in sandboxes but can really drag a narrative.
Related to Extinction Curse specifically: One of my few complaints about EC is how ignorable the circus is. I would've preferred a tighter story that tied in the circus and its members directly, which hasn't happened as much in the latter books.
In Book 4, my group is also dealing with "side quest exhaustion" where there's a lot of neat stuff happening but it is all kind of tangential to what is going on in the plot. Really feels like there was half an AP's worth of content where they were like "well. something needs to go here."