Pathfinder 1E Prepping for Pathfinder: Kingmaker (spoilers!)

Quick note: We've finished the Kingmaker AP! I'll post the final two reports soon, but the game ended with the BBEG's head being cleaved from its shoulders by the paladin, whilst everyone else in the party was dead. Sort of ridiculous ending which brought out everything I hate about Pathfinder (and D&D in general, high levels suck).

On next to Way of the Wicked!

MerricB said:

Quick note: We've finished the Kingmaker AP! I'll post the final two reports soon, but the game ended with the BBEG's head being cleaved from its shoulders by the paladin, whilst everyone else in the party was dead. Sort of ridiculous ending which brought out everything I hate about Pathfinder (and D&D in general, high levels suck).

On next to Way of the Wicked!

Click to expand...

I know high levels in 3.5E were an absolute bear to prep for as a DM... especially since my BBEGs were all high level clerics and wizards, so I had to pick out dozens of spells for each. And, so it wasn't just Previous Bad Guy with one more level, I had to come up with different PrCs, templates, etc to layer on to them just to give them a different flavor.

MerricB said:

Quick note: We've finished the Kingmaker AP! I'll post the final two reports soon...

Click to expand...

Just found this thread this morning, and am preparing to start KM. I was excited to find a description of the whole path as played by a group. Then I got to the last page, and it was as though the cable TV went out as the detective declared, "And the killer was..."

Any chance of a few details on those last two reports?

One big question I have is how long it actually took to run the entire AP. I've seen different people give numbers of sessions but no indicator of how long the average session was, and I've seen people say that it took a certain amount of real-world calendar months with no indicator of how many sessions they played during that time. With this thread, it does both those: I can see it took about 6 months and about 20 (or so) sessions. That's the closest I've come to an answer of how long it actually takes to play. But do your sessions average 4 hours, or do they tend towards marathons of 10 hours, or someplace in between? How long would you guess your average session is?

I'm planning to play about four hours roughly every other week. From what I've been reading, Kingmaker could be done in six months or it could take as much as a few years. That's a pretty huge variance and I really want to know what I'm committing to here.

Any guesses?

Marshall

Sessions were (mostly) weekly, and in the order of 3-4 hours each. And about 20 sessions was right.

We tend to run sessions a bit faster than most people.

A couple of notes on the final session can be found here:
http://www.enworld.org/forum/entry.php?233588-Thoughts-on-the-Big-Bad-Evil-Guy-in-RPGs

I'll see what else I can remember...