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Some of us already pointed out it should help with internal consistencyPeople have claimed that, but I am not sure I buy it. How should it help?
ISTM, consistency or lack thereof in APs has more to do with how they are written and edited than how they are published.
Because spreading them out over 6 or 3 months means that the individual chapters are all in various stages of development at any given time. With publishing as a single volume, all individual parts will need to be in roughly the same stage of development so that the lead person can edit the whole thing at once instead of in pieces spread out over time.
-Skeld
Yes, but publishing them over 3 or 6 months does not force them to spread the writing over 3 or 6 months. They could theoretically write it in exactly the same way they will be going forward, and then just hold onto the later parts for longer.
Although admittedly, it is psychologically easier to get something done in a certain time frame if you have a genuine hard deadline. Plus there is the longer period between paying the writer and selling the product, which I had not considered before. So, fair enough.
The editing is the big difference. The authors of the current APs are absolutely writing them simultaneously, we know that to be true. But when it comes time to edit them, they have to be edited as their own separate books. That makes it very easy to do something like miss out on a character name being spelt differently in different books of an AP, or a continuity issue where you/important NPCs start off in a slightly different context than you ended off the last book in, etc. These sorts of issues will be much more straightforward for editors to address when it is a single book that is edited simultaneously.
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One other possibility is that multiple authors could better divide their areas of expertise.
The 5th module of the Ironfang Invasion adventure path had a weird gap in its story. The module began in the dwarven Sky-Citadel of Kraggodan, where the PCs had ended the previous module. Their dwarven ally Karburtin Lightbrand persuades them to run an errand for Kraggodan to go to the Blighted Region deep in the Fangwood in order to discover the fate of the missing goddess Gendowyn, Lady of Fangwood. After 2 pages of establishing this plot hook, the scene jumps 75 miles north to deep in the Fangwood. My players objected to that, because that 75 miles would be heading through territory conquered by the Ironfang Legion and they wanted to fight the legion on the way north. So I wrote new material for that journey.
Perhaps author Amanda Hamon Kunz skipped that journey to reduce the page count. Or maybe she skipped it because she would have had to review the first three modules and the overall invasion plan in order to write material that fits the main theme of the adventure path but would be only a side theme to Prisoners of the Blight.
With multiple authors writing simultaneously on the same book, we could have had one of the earlier authors: Amber E. Scott, Ron Lundeen, Benjamin Bruck, or Thurston Hillman--write the journey through Ironfang territory while Amanda Hamon Kunz would focus on the Blight. The contributions of different authors do not have to be sequential; instead, they could specialize.
And page count would be easier, too. Currently, all three modules in an adventure path have the same length. But with all three in a single book, the length could vary. If the middle 2nd-module section needs to run long to tell its story well, cuts could come out of the 1st module or 3rd module rather than the 2nd module to fit the page count.
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Page count would be easier, too. Currently, all three modules in an adventure path have the same length. But with all three in a single book, the length could vary. If the middle 2nd-module section needs to run long to tell its story well, cuts could come out of the 1st module or 3rd module rather than the 2nd module to fit the page count.
The is a very good point, and one that had not occurred to me.
The more I sit with the AP changes, the more I think they are very much a net positive.
I think the AP change will be great. Having separate books often means that there is summary material at the beginning of each later book that wouldn’t be necessary in one book and sub systems that run between books are less likely to get dropped in later books by authors who might not know how exactly it is supposed to work while they are doing most of their work.
Yes, but publishing them over 3 or 6 months does not force them to spread the writing over 3 or 6 months. They could theoretically write it in exactly the same way they will be going forward, and then just hold onto the later parts for longer.
Books 5 and 6 were often still being written when book 1 was sent to the printers, so...
One other possibility is that multiple authors could better divide their areas of expertise.
-snip-
And page count would be easier, too. Currently, all three modules in an adventure path have the same length. But with all three in a single book, the length could vary. If the middle 2nd-module section needs to run long to tell its story well, cuts could come out of the 1st module or 3rd module rather than the 2nd module to fit the page count.
Two pretty good points, and they can be combined too.