|
My history with Adventure Paths is somewhat limited:
- Played the first five volumes of Wrath of the Righteous before the group kinda fell apart.
- Actually played all of Age of Ashes a few years ago.
- Will (hopefully) be completing 'Return of the Runelords' in the next month or two.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Well, Wrath of the Righteons and Return of the Runelords were 1e APs. High level play in 1e ended up some combination of "tedious" and "degenerate" (i.e. "whoseover shall win initiative shall win.")
2nd Edition is actually pretty playable at high levels, but Age of Ashes was largely written before the rules were finalized. But like in the last volume of the last 6-part AP, you spend fully 1/3 of the final adventure at 20th level (1/3 at 19th, and 1/3 at 18th.) Which is probably the best way to do it.
After all, once you reach the apex of your potential power, you lose all the appeal of advancement. You just want to showcase "this person is truly impressive" enough to feel satisfying, and then finish the story.
I'm just kinda curious why six part APs don't have you hit 20 at the end of Volume 5 and let you play the entire last volume at max level? PF2 has level 20 feats and PF1 has capstones for single-class characters, but APs just don't seem to give you much of a chance to actually use either of them...
When I ran Rise of the Runelords, the PCs finished the adventure path at 17th level and then I continued with The Wtichwar Legacy module to reach 18th level. I homebrewed more content to 20th level, mostly based on loose ends from Rise of the Runelords, and finally had one adventure at 20th level.
I am currently running Ironfang Invasion converted to PF2 rules. The levels in those six modules are:
Trail of the Hunted levels 1, 2, 3, and 4.
Fangs of War levels 5, 6, and 7.
Assault on Longshadow levels 8, 9, and 10
Siege of Stone levels 11, 12, and 13
Prisoners of the Blight levels 14 and 15
Vault of the Onyx Citadel levels 16 and 17, rewarded with unplayed 18th level at the end.
But my players took control of the narrative away from the written modules. In Fangs of War they jumped ahead to the village of Radya's Hollow from Assault on Longshadow and saved it from conquest rather than rescuing a few survivors as intended. And facing a fresh full Ironfang army was worth more xp than the post-conquest encounter as written. Later they achieved the maximum xp from Great Victory against the Ironfang assault on Longshadow and ended that module at 12th level rather than 11th level, so they had an extra level for Siege of Stone. I stepped up the encounters in Siege of Stone and Prisoners of the Blight so that they still kept earning XP at a high rate. They began Vault of the Onyx Citadel at 17th level just short of 18th level, and are currently at 18th level.
Earning XP at that pace is grueling. To earn a 1000 xp for a new level requires 5 Moderate-Threat encounters and 5 Severe Threat encounters. Severe-Threat encounters have a small risk of a Total Party Kill! I softened that to around 3 Low-Threat encounters, 5 Moderate-Threat encounters, 2 Severe-Threat encounters, and 180 xp in Story Awards for resolving key plot goals such as rescuing towns. That is still a lot of work for each level. In the past, I finished an adventure path in 2.5 years. This adventure path has taken 3.5 years so far and will finish in 3 more months (though part of the slowdown is that I am running it with 7 players so combat takes longer).
To reach 20th level at the end of the 5th module would require 4 levels per module. And if the players like that pace, they will be disappointed that the entire 6th module is stuck at 20th level with no level-ups. PossibleCabbage's suggestion of levels 18, 19, and 20 in equal parts in the 6th module is more reasonable. That would require 4 levels in two of the modules and 3 levels in the other four modules.
At two Severe-Threat encounters per level, that is still 6 or 8 Severe-Threat encounters per module. My players can handle that, because they play tactically. Many players cannot handle that. Splitting a Severe-Threat encounter into two Low-Threat encounters for the same XP would require more pages in the module and those modules have a fixed page count.
Creative Director
|
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
The primary reason we've generally limited the 20th level play for our Adventure Paths is because once you hit 20th level, you're at the end of the progression; there's no more need to gain Experience Points, and no "next level" to look forward to. As such, having an entire adventure where the element of anticipating the next level of play is absent doesn't seem particularly exciting to me. That said it's also just as important to make sure that when we do a high-level Adventure Path that we do include a robust, chapter-length section where players get to revel in those 20th level glories.
There was another reason back in 1st edition we didn't do this much, and that had to do with the rules we inherited from the 3.5 D&D SRD. With those rules, the amount of pages that was needed to gain levels simply meant that a six part Adventure Path never had the space to do that many encounters; we ran out of room before ever going much above 17th level. There were three exceptions, and they were very much exceptions:
1) Wrath of the Righteous went all the way to 20th level because of the inclusion of mythic content; this let us put particularly harrowing encounters in the adventures, which meant that the PCs gained a LOT more experience points than normal, and thus we were able to race through the levels much faster.
2) Return of the Runelords was a non-mythic Adventure Path I very much wanted to go all the way to 20th level, but that meant that every one of the 6 adventures in that campaign had to be extra long. That meant not only fewer articles in the back (so we could scrap up the extra 8 to 10 pages we needed), but it also meant that I had to start many months earlier since it takes longer to develop longer adventures. So it was kind of a scheduling nightmare.
3) When we updated Rise of the Runelords and Curse of the Crimson Throne, we were able to add several dozen new pages of content to allow for play to reach 20th level, something we simply can't do without significant exception to a monthly Adventure Path product.
One of 2nd edition's primary goals was that we wanted to build a game where the pace of gaining levels was something that could be covered easily in the scope of a 6-part Adventure Path. We did several of these for 2nd edition, but feedback from customers supported by sales figures suggested that shorter Adventure Paths were simply more viable; they sell better, and most of our customers seem to appreciate the shorter adventures, and it allows us to tell up to twice as many Adventure Path stories in a year than before.
The fact that lower level adventures sell better than higher level ones has unfortunately prevented us from being able to do an even split of 1st to 10th level 3-part Adventure paths with 11th to 20th level ones. We've got our 2nd one finally starting up very soon with "Stolen Fate," but after that it'll be several months before we get back to another high level one. My eventual hope is to get into a more balanced presentation for these, but it won't happen this year.
TL;DR Takes lots of work and time and effort to publish adventures that reach 20th level, and they don't sell as well. Good reviews and good sales for high-level adventures are the best way to convince us to publish more.
1) Wrath of the Righteous went all the way to 20th level because of the inclusion of mythic content; this let us put particularly harrowing encounters in the adventures,
Citation needed on that. :p
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Ah, so it's the cold hard invisible hand of the free market: Sad, but understandable.
That's not what he said.
The primary reason we've generally limited the 20th level play for our Adventure Paths is because once you hit 20th level, you're at the end of the progression; there's no more need to gain Experience Points, and no "next level" to look forward to.
|
Creative Director
|
1) Wrath of the Righteous went all the way to 20th level because of the inclusion of mythic content; this let us put particularly harrowing encounters in the adventures,Citation needed on that. :p
Whether or not I did a good job at it doesn't change the fact that this is one of only two 1st edition Adventure Paths we did that had support for 1st to 20th level play. Also... point made regarding the development and creation of Wrath of the Righteous. You win. ;-)
Maybe check out Owlcat's version? I had a lot of fun playing that one!
|
Creative Director
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Ah, so it's the cold hard invisible hand of the free market: Sad, but understandable.
Thank you for the explanation!
Said cold invisible hand is one of the reasons we don't publish as many high level adventures, but as mentioned by Leon Aquilla, this is NOT the reason we don't do entire adventures at 20th level.
That reason is solely because there's no more levels to chase and thus no more advancement opportunity so for most folks, it's not as compelling. I could be wrong though. If folks DO think an entire adventure set at 20th level without any leveling up involved the whole time sounds interesting... please let us know! It sounds like an interesting experiment to try out...
...but then the cold hard invisible hand does come back because that means something like that would compete against other high-level content, and the opportunities for us to publish that stuff are so sparse that it's more unlikely.
|
Creative Director
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
That being said, an adventure where a reasonable chunk is at 20th level sounds awesome. Start at 18th and break the story into rough acts, with a level up kicking off each act.
This is exactly how we structure all of our Adventure Paths that end a high-level arc (and how we'd structure a high-level standalone, for that matter). Folks looking for something like this should really check out one of those volumes; they ARE part of longer stories, but converting any single volume of an Adventure Path into a standalone adventure is certainly something a GM can do.
1) Wrath of the Righteous went all the way to 20th level because of the inclusion of mythic content; this let us put particularly harrowing encounters in the adventures,Citation needed on that. :pWhether or not I did a good job at it doesn't change the fact that this is one of only two 1st edition Adventure Paths we did that had support for 1st to 20th level play. Also... point made regarding the development and creation of Wrath of the Righteous. You win. ;-)
Maybe check out Owlcat's version? I had a lot of fun playing that one!
My group did Wrath to 20 and while we were able to complete the main goal we failed at the end fight (but lived to escape).
To be fair we looked over the mythic rules - cut a few feats (power attack - I think was the big one) and limited the amount of mythic points you could spend to 1 per turn unless the ability explicitly had a higher cost but most didn't.
Honestly that worked fine - the mythic stuff only got wild at the very end and ... well at that point it was fine.
Hey James - I loved Owlcat's version - I really wish we could look forward to all the AP's working out like that frankly. Wrath is the first game that really took over BG2 on my 'best ever' list.
|
|
Ah, so it's the cold hard invisible hand of the free market: Sad, but understandable.
Thank you for the explanation!
Said cold invisible hand is one of the reasons we don't publish as many high level adventures, but as mentioned by Leon Aquilla, this is NOT the reason we don't do entire adventures at 20th level.
That reason is solely because there's no more levels to chase and thus no more advancement opportunity so for most folks, it's not as compelling. I could be wrong though. If folks DO think an entire adventure set at 20th level without any leveling up involved the whole time sounds interesting... please let us know! It sounds like an interesting experiment to try out...
...but then the cold hard invisible hand does come back because that means something like that would compete against other high-level content, and the opportunities for us to publish that stuff are so sparse that it's more unlikely.
While the feeling of advancement is important (see D&D5e for a game that largely sacrificed this), I'd think one full adventure without level advancement would be fine as the culmination of a 20 level AP: The players should already be invested in the storyline at this point and if that's not enough to carry them through the climatic and probably world-saving conclusion, then the leveling is probably the least of that AP's issues...
Certainly for 3.5/PF1, top-level play is extremely intensive and requries a lot of work.
I HAVE run all the way into Epic in 3.5 (low epic, no more than maybe 21-23-ish, I forget), but that was crazy work. With six PCs.
My (six-strong) party completed Rise of the Runelords at 18th (in my 3.5/PF1 hybrid) and they were probably stronger and it was horrendous! (Fun, but wow, crazy. Even with my boss monsters with multiple maximum hit-blocks and being able to burn away bad status effects.)
Karzoug himself lasted about one session and maybe two or three rounds? (Admittedly, becauase I did hand them a benefit so that they didn't all instantly die when his first prepared spell, (10th Mass Flesh to Stone...) didn't bork the whole group immediately, but...)
It was never a surprise that Paizo didn't go all the way up there most of the time, it's just so intensive and requires so much space. (Karzoug's adjusted stat block ran to one-and-half-pages of calibri-size-ten font, and my stat blocks are more compact that late 3.5/Pathfinder standard. As for the Vampire Skulk Lurks, dear frag, that was a lot of paper...)
I mean, some of us are stupid enough to consider doing things like coverting massive modules to high level (the Epic party? Finished on Dragon Mountain (the AD&D module full of kobolds) punted to 16th to Epic) and I have seriously considered doing a direct sequel to Rise of the Runelords using Return of the Runelords at 18th to Epic... But first I want to do some other stuff I really want to do (Osirion mega-campaign, Iron Gods).
(As you can gather, I am not a fan of a fixed level cap. 3.5 Epic is... Not great in a lot of ways, but some of the core ideas work, like, fixing saves and attack bonuses to a slower progression and a big jump in XP to basically a soft cap where Epic is more or less extra time. Epic spells... Not so much.)
Maybe check out Owlcat's version? I had a lot of fun playing that one!
I'm stil playing through it, 315 hours in (making it I think the longest single RPG play through I can log...)
Since I'm DM forever, I also took the opportunity to mod-out the level cap so I can play Epic Pathfinder, which is going to be as close to me playing that as I'm ever going to get, since PF1 has only had those two glorious games...
Having run a Pf1 group at 20th for several years now, more high level adventures is appealing. I'm fine with making my own stuff or converting and adapting from other editions, but I like to have something to work with as a starting point. I turned my game into Epic 20, i.e. every so often you get a new feat or special ability without increasing things like BAB, HP, CL or saves. This was not strictly speaking necessary for the enjoyment of the game, but it helped mitigate the odd feeling that there was nothing left to learn, especially when the campaign is about specifically about learning new stuff to become more powerful.
Huh. You know, I'd never considered Epic 20... That's not a terrible idea at all. Hrm... I might be more inclined to go Epic 30 myself, BUT that's still an approach I'd not considered, so as/when my group ACTUALLY get to Epic again, that's something to remember...
(First, I need to finish re-writing mythic a bit, to make it fall somewhere beteen tabletop and Owlcat's version, which I like as a little bit more as a side grade....!)
(First, I need to finish re-writing mythic a bit, to make it fall somewhere beteen tabletop and Owlcat's version, which I like as a little bit more as a side grade....!)
IIRC - get rid of mythic power attack - mythic vital strike - and limit mythic power to 1 point per turn (or min points to activate ability - there are a few that take more).
That cleaned up about 90% of the crazy for us - it only started to run away at the very end - and it is possible to still kick the players around - but takes a ton of prep to do so... so caveat emptor.
That was really the biggest issue with high level PF1 - the number of feats and abilities and rules you had to handle as a GM and prep work if you wanted to have a tough fight .... it was a ton of work, the 'easy' way to do it is of course just keep upping the CR of the bad guy - but that leads to rocket tag - it is possible to challenge a level 18 tier 3 mythic party with lower level stuff - but it is rough.
Whether or not I did a good job at it doesn't change the fact that this is one of only two 1st edition Adventure Paths we did that had support for 1st to 20th level play. Also... point made regarding the development and creation of Wrath of the Righteous. You win. ;-)
Sorry, I was in a teasing mood that day. :) I'll be running Return of the Runelords as my next AP (in a year or two, since somebody was kind enough to run Strange Aeons for us), so I'll be looking forward to seeing how the level 18 - 20 stuff works out. It's been a while since I GM'ed those levels without mythic getting in the mix.
Maybe check out Owlcat's version? I had a lot of fun playing that one!
Oh, it's a great game. I did 1 1/2 runs with it before getting distracted and have about 220 hours put in. A friend of mine is currently doing his second run on Unfair / The Last Azlanti, which is waaay above my paygrade. ^^
Of course it helps very much that there is no GM who can exasperated running all those encounters. ^^
(First, I need to finish re-writing mythic a bit, to make it fall somewhere beteen tabletop and Owlcat's version, which I like as a little bit more as a side grade....!)IIRC - get rid of mythic power attack - mythic vital strike - and limit mythic power to 1 point per turn (or min points to activate ability - there are a few that take more).
That cleaned up about 90% of the crazy for us - it only started to run away at the very end - and it is possible to still kick the players around - but takes a ton of prep to do so... so caveat emptor.
That was really the biggest issue with high level PF1 - the number of feats and abilities and rules you had to handle as a GM and prep work if you wanted to have a tough fight .... it was a ton of work, the 'easy' way to do it is of course just keep upping the CR of the bad guy - but that leads to rocket tag - it is possible to challenge a level 18 tier 3 mythic party with lower level stuff - but it is rough.
Actually, those are in (at least, in the form they are in Owlcat!WotR), it was more things like "PCs all get effectively Evasion/Mettle verses non-mythic" that I saw as instantly off-putting. PCs doing 700 damage per round at 18th-level non-mythic is something I'm already dealing with, and while the extra damage is more, it's dimishingly returns more by that point anyway. (And it's MUCH easier for me to counter high damage by just having, like enemies with more hit point tanks.)
As Owlcat's mythic doesn't HAVE mythic power usages, I'm sharply limiting uses anyway; and there basically won't be mythic spells at all[1]; instead, Owlcat's +4 spells of each level per day and 24-hour buffs are the replacements; that won't make the PCs WORSE, it'll just mean maybe an hour-adventuring day instead of fifteen minutes. But I will take note of your points regardless on said daily uses.
[1]Didn't like the concept to start with, and I was not going through all the 3.5 and homebrew spells to add mythic versions so that it wasn't just a subsystem bolted-on (which was the entire poit of writing a proper hybrid to properly intergrate 3.5 and PF1 content).
Like most things at high level - the biggest abuses of mythic come when you can 'go nova' - limiting the amount of things you can combine into a single round to 'one' was a huge thing.
I do recall we made the exception for things that required more than a single point just 'to do' as long as it was one action - to which I ended up using on my wizard to baleful polymorph all the insects in (I forgot the name of the place - but it the walls were covered in swarms IIRC) the place we were at within the range of like... 2 miles?
To butterflies.
That was kind of a cool moment that isn't possible without mythic support really.