Who Actually Has Time for Bloated Adventures?

[UngainlyTitan]

It's not about memorizing 300 pages of content. It's about learning the gist of where things are expected to go so you can contextualize the earlier adventures you're running. You're the one complaining about knowing what encounters to cut out and figuring out which factions to focus on. The only way you're going to know that is to read ahead.

Cutting stuff is key, keep things simple as much as possible.

 

[Jd Smith1]

For me, I value quality over quantity. My free time is pretty precious, and I don't want to spend considerable amounts of it trying to distill what's important in an Adventure Path I've already purchased.
Like, if I were to spend an equal amount of time preparing the game as running the game, certainly that should be sufficient? In the case of this AP, it would be double. I would need about 6 hours of prep for each weekly 3 hour game.

Quality is not restricted to short campaigns.

Sounds like you need to focus on the quality of your prep. I don't start a campaign without at least twenty sessions worth of material ready. That way, a few minutes a week tweaking existing material is all that has to be done. Beyond that, its simple enough to stay ahead of player consumption.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Cutting stuff is key, keep things simple as much as possible.

That fine for kill-search-loot campaigns, but rather a bad idea for systems and settings with some depth.

Admittedly, murder hoboes have never gone out of style.

 

[Ondath]

Quality is not restricted to short campaigns.

Sounds like you need to focus on the quality of your prep. I don't start a campaign without at least twenty sessions worth of material ready. That way, a few minutes a week tweaking existing material is all that has to be done. Beyond that, its simple enough to stay ahead of player consumption.

TWENTY SESSIONS?

The only thing I can say is that I wish I had time on my real life job, let alone my free time hobby. Can I borrow your Time-Turner sometime?

 

[Jd Smith1]

TWENTY SESSIONS?

The only thing I can say is that I wish I had time on my real life job, let alone my free time hobby. Can I borrow your Time-Turner sometime?

Work smarter, not harder. I usually start serious work on a new campaign about 6-8 months before the current one runs out.

The key, IMO, is knowing where to find material. Movie plot summations and detailed reviews of commercial scenarios are under-utilized. An hour on the Net, cutting and pasting to type-classified documents, will do wonders. Let other people do the heavy work.

 

[BrokenTwin]

When it comes to linear plotted campaigns (which is a perfectly fine style of play), it's hard to beat Paizo's offerings. But man do they get bloated so they can fill the required number of beats to level the characters up. Hell's Rebels is probably my favorite AP, but when I was working on porting it over to another system I had to outright nuke half of the combat encounters and a number of filler plotlines. Their development process makes it almost impossible to know for sure what's going to be relevant from one book to the next.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

So I'm running a PF2e Adventure Path - but this rant holds true even outside the specific system and adventure.
The current chapter of the book has 51 adventure sites. My group investigated 3 this week. At that rate, we're looking at 17 sessions of play to complete one chapter (1/9th) of the Adventure Path. Expanded, that's 153 sessions (or 38 months - just over 3 years) to complete a 1-10th level adventure.
Most of the locations have no bearing on the greater story of the campaign, but it's so hard to parse what is important because there's close to 300 pages and nothing to guide the GM about which of the 8 factions in this chapter alone are worth focusing upon and which have a consistent thread throughout the rest of the Adventure Path.
My wife suggests cutting some of the encounters - but how do I know which ones? Should I just dump all the loot they'd have missed onto their character sheets? How do I know if I'm cutting some vital relationship for the climactic encounter set to take place 3 years from now?
How do you successfully run something like this? Trying to stick to one of these heavily scripted adventures is more stress-inducing than an enjoyable hobby experience.

R Maps

[edit to add]
I haven't read the entire thread yet, others may have suggested.
However, if I was to run one of Paizo's APs, I'd go through and note every NPC, major and minor, and every faction, major and minor, and then create an R Map of the entire campaign - probably in Miro.
If I was feeling feisty, I'd probably add to each NPC and faction a list of encounters and which book and chapter the encounter appeared

Another way I might handle would be to create a spreadsheet with same info, but without the r-map visual linkage. Just the NPC name, Faction they belong to, encounter-chapter-volume

 

[Eyes of Nine]

Yeah, but they release installments monthly, not all in one big go.

This feels sloppy at best and a bad use of a DM's time to not have at least a text box explaining what matters in an AP. This shouldn't be on the fans to figure out.

100% agree on this
(I only buy Paizo APs after they are done, not as they go for this reason... (among other reasons))

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Ive always wished that premade adventures could be written in a more digestible way. Like a flow chart or something. Just easier than dense columns of text. But until writers of adventures are not paid by the word, that is not likely.

The adventures (incursions) in Trophy Gold and Trophy Dark are basically presented as flowcharts, and the writing is very direct and economical. To the extent that they’re not a pleasure to read, unless you’re thinking of them purely as tools, and then they’re often fantastic.

 

[BrokenTwin]

R Maps

[edit to add]
I haven't read the entire thread yet, others may have suggested.
However, if I was to run one of Paizo's APs, I'd go through and note every NPC, major and minor, and every faction, major and minor, and then create an R Map of the entire campaign - probably in Miro.
If I was feeling feisty, I'd probably add to each NPC and faction a list of encounters and which book and chapter the encounter appeared

Another way I might handle would be to create a spreadsheet with same info, but without the r-map visual linkage. Just the NPC name, Faction they belong to, encounter-chapter-volume

I really, really wish Paizo would release offical R Maps for their APs once all the books were finalized. Would make prepping for them as a GM infinitely easier.