Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
Regarding XP
Personally, I've found it quite useful for structuring encounters and so on, but I do feel that it is also a mechanic which can be troublesome in different ways based on the group's level of optimization. If Group A needs a fight worth about 500 XP to challenge them, and Group B at the same level, with the same number of PCs, needs 1,500 XP to challenge them, one can run into opposing problems.
Michael Sayre wrote: 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. Where one group has this kind of problem, another can have the opposite one: if the story demands, for instance, a difficult struggle to fight through several rooms of enemies - to establish a group as a legitimate threat, or explain how they could do things they did (like defeat another group of competent fighters), a Group A could end up at the end of that part of the story with 1,500 XP out of the 2,500 XP they need to level. Meanwhile, a Group B has their GM struggling to cram in more challenge for the same XP, in order to only give them 2,500 by the end of it.
Saedar wrote:
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."
I suppose it depends on whether what you and your party want from an AP is more towards "a tight plot to which most things you meet are clearly related" or "a slice through a world in which tons of stuff is happening, some of which is related to your story and most not"; I certainly strongly favour the latter, and have found it to help with verisimilitude for many players. Which is one reason why I like Kingmaker so much and worry at how many people I've seen asking for more focus on the principal plot in the new edition; having the principal villain's machinations be next to invisible from the pit for most of the time, and the sandbox be full of people and entities following their own goals with mostly little or no connection to the plot throughline, is a lot of what makes that AP uniquely good, to my mind. I do see that not every story wants to be like that, and indeed I also love Hell's Rebels with the principal villain showing up onstage in the first scene, but much of what makes Hell's Rebels work for me is having a big city setting with a lot of things to do, most of which contribute to the general goal of building support for the revolution, but relatively few of which, until chapter 4, are directly tied to Barzillai Thrune himself.
A good sidequest can tell your players more about the world. It can give opportunities to develop their characters. To my mind, if players are worrying about what the plot is and where they are relative to it at a meta-level, they're already out of immersion in their characters and their characters' perspective in ways that can lead to problems.
fyrekrest wrote: Kobold Catgirl wrote: I'm not actually sure what "traditional" means here. I get what you mean by "exotic", and I, too, don't really care for planet-hopping/world-spanning stories and would be quite content to see an AP pick a theme and stick with it, but a lot of what you cite as "traditional" seems to not fit that framework too well. What is an example of what you'd like to see them do more of? Hmmm, perhaps "consistent" would be a better way to say it. Like you said, pick a theme and stick with it. Not a new theme, a new idea every page, with so many stitched together that the main idea gets lost easily. Try the Standalone Adventure line. One reason APs can feel inconsistent is because they're epic in scope, and are all 6 adventures written buy different people. I've run two SAs and enjoyed them both.
the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote: have found it to help with verisimilitude for many players Part of it is that, for me, verisimilitude is maybe the least important thing imaginable. I don't care about needing things to fit into their place so much as have things that make me regularly reevaluate the scope of what I understand about the world.
Additionally: I think that sandbox adventures are fantastic for exploring a setting. Most APs, though, aren't sandboxes. For those I really prefer a tighter story.
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Rysky wrote: Also every single adventure has had new monsters in them, every one has a bestiary in the back, going all the way back to the 3.5 adventures even. I do think that many of the new monsters in PF2, particularly those introduced in the backs of AP installments, are getting relatively little flavour text compared to PF1 monsters, and that can make it harder for them to feel integrated into the ecology and locality in the same way. When I look at something like, for example, the giant owlbear lair in the second chapter of Kingmaker, it is straightforward to see how the various creatures there co-exist, in terms of some being clearly opportunistic scavengers, and so on; I find it less so with some broadly similar dungeons in PF2, and that impact on verisimilitude makes it harder for me to present them convincingly to players.
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Pathfinder Adventure Path Subscriber
the nerve-eater of Zur-en-Aarh wrote: A good sidequest can tell your players more about the world. It can give opportunities to develop their characters. To my mind, if players are worrying about what the plot is and where they are relative to it at a meta-level, they're already out of immersion in their characters and their characters' perspective in ways that can lead to problems. I would say that a potential pitfall of sidequest-heavy design is precisely this kind of immersion-break, but from the other direction: you end up with players who say "alright, this is obviously the hook we're meant to follow. I don't know why we're doing this, though", because in their mind the main plot and its most recent developments should be demanding the PCs' attention. The break emerges from the disconnect of knowing that one's character really should be focusing on this more important thing, but gathering from meta context that the GM (either on their own, or via the AP) is expecting the party now go do something else, creating the "why would my character do this? *I* want to go on this adventure, but they have no reason to" issue.
I've personally run into a similar issue, in Hell's Rebels actually, where I do like the idea of building support for an overthrow...but at the same time, some of the things we ended up doing?
Personally, I feel that the best design fuses the positives of plot-centric and sidequest-heavy designs by making "side"quests influence the main plot. Either directly (for instance, if the central theme of the AP is "build a rebellion, overthrow Barzillai" it could be something which targets a pillar of his ability to exert control over the city) or indirectly, simply via the world being interconnected - like a decision to help a nearby village naturally leading to them informing you of plot-events near them, or sending word that some antagonist is in the area.
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I'm a little late to this discussion, but I'm inclined to agree with the original post. My old group has started whispering about trying some online gaming, and I'm really leaning toward PF2e. But when you're coming in new and fresh, too many new ideas feel like a distraction. Like, learning rules takes enough attention without also learning mini-games or trying to keep up with new locations or being told what kind of character you should play (sorry, you're all cops.)
I'd say shaking things up as a circus or all-wizards group is great when you're ready for something new, but we're not there yet.
Fortunately, the Humble Bundle I got came with Abomination Vaults which seems like a good starter AP: it can be picked up from the Beginner Box if we choose to do that, keeps to a single location for RP, and only goes to 10th level so it's not as much of a commitment. I only wish the 11-20 AP weren't on the exact opposite side of Golarion so we could continue if we wanted.
And, as long as I'm here, I'll add my vote to keeping XP. Milestone-based leveling feels even more like the story's pre-determined than playing an AP already does, but at least XP rewards allow for branching out in off-script directions that aren't just kind of pausing advancement until we can get back to the story we *should* be playing.
Fast advancement is an option I appreciate, because it'd let me trim encounters that feel repetitive or like padding.
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Fletch wrote: Fortunately, the Humble Bundle I got came with Abomination Vaults which seems like a good starter AP: it can be picked up from the Beginner Box if we choose to do that, keeps to a single location for RP, and only goes to 10th level so it's not as much of a commitment. I only wish the 11-20 AP weren't on the exact opposite side of Golarion so we could continue if we wanted. If you guys do end up wanting to do that AP you can always use the excuse of the party's growing fame at resolving the previous AP as a springboard. Hao Jin is at least a 20th level character so her offering teleportation or something to get the party where they need to be isn't outside the realm of possibility.
Perpdepog wrote:
If you guys do end up wanting to do that AP you can always use the excuse of the party's growing fame at resolving the previous AP as a springboard.
That's fair. It also occurs to me that someone could just place the Ab-Vault in Minkai, but I know very little about that setting so it'd have to be someone else.
I've the ghost of an idea of continuing with the back half of Extinction Curse (minus the circus part) if we really wanted to continue on Kortos. I mean, I don't actually have any of that AP and it's really overthinking things, but it's an idea.
Fletch wrote: Perpdepog wrote:
If you guys do end up wanting to do that AP you can always use the excuse of the party's growing fame at resolving the previous AP as a springboard.
That's fair. It also occurs to me that someone could just place the Ab-Vault in Minkai, but I know very little about that setting so it'd have to be someone else.
I've the ghost of an idea of continuing with the back half of Extinction Curse (minus the circus part) if we really wanted to continue on Kortos. I mean, I don't actually have any of that AP and it's really overthinking things, but it's an idea.
From what little I know of Extinction Curse that also sounds pretty doable. One thing I keep reading online is how the circus thematic, and circus subsystem, really take a back seat to the rest of the adventure, and it becomes more noticeable the further along it goes.
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