Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="kenada" data-source="post: 8231857" data-attributes="member: 70468">I’ve run quite a few, though I’ve only played in one.APs I GMed<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Scales of War (4e): I thought it was okay. The adventures were kind of disjoint because they were designed to be used separately outside of the AP. This campaign ended due to group dynamics. I basically hit my limit on dealing with one of the players and canceled the campaign. The group reconstituted (mix of old and new players) and switched to Pathfinder.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Council of Thieves (PF1): I ran the first book. It was my first Pathfinder 1e game and my first exposure to Paizo’s adventures. I wish I had gotten to finish it, but we only got through book 1 before the group fell apart due to poor attendance. This was a side game separate from the regular group.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Kingmaker (PF1): We played this to completion (took ~18 months playing weekly). It’s my group’s favorite AP. I probably gelled with us the most because my group seems to like exploration-based play. I had a lot of fun inserting new scenarios to flesh out life in the kingdom. The final battle was beautifully epic (spoilered below).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Rise of the Runelords (PF1): This one was going pretty well. Even though it was more story-driven, I still found spots to insert new material. We played out the trial and execution of Nualia (which I did to set up later events). My players liked the haunted house. The campaign ended in a TPK at the end of book 2 due to some bad choices by the players (“You didn’t heal up before battle? Do you want to do that? No? Well, okay ….”).</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Shattered Star (PF1): The first two books were pretty good. I was able to use the Tower Girls to play against players’ expectations, and that was fun. While incredibly linear, I loved the trap that turns you into a clone of Sorshen. I was expecting that to be a lot of fun, but the campaign ended in book 3 when we decided to stop because the dungeon was so bad.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Tyranny of Dragons (5e): Hoard of the Dragon Queen was crap, but we finished it (took I dunno). I tried to make the best of it, but we never went on to do Rise of Tiamat. Some of the smaller sections were a fun, but everything was so on the rails. I can’t even remember how we ended it (whether I ended it on a cliffhanger or just let them fly away with their island).</li> </ul>We said we would get back to it Shattered Star, but we never did. After that, I think I ran Dragon’s Demand then we tried some other systems like Dungeon World and Fate. When we came back to Pathfinder 1e and tried Pathfinder 2e, I ran homebrew stuff instead of adventures. I’m currently running a sandbox *crawl in OSE (which started out in 5e then switched to PF2 then switched to OSE).Update: I also want to call out Rise of the Runelords as having the most ridiculous combat I have ever run. It went 40 rounds. The party had gotten into a fight with a goblin druid and lost. They woke up captured, but someone had opened the door to their cell. The players thought it was a trick, so they snuck out of the goblins’ fort and attacked it from the front. They eventually retreated. <img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="😒" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f612.png" title="Unamused face    :unamused:" data-shortname=":unamused:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />APs I Played<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Masks of Nyarlathotep (CoC): We just finished this one up a few months ago (took ~15 months playing every two weeks or so). It went about a year and a half (maybe less). I thought it was okay, but the pacing felt really screwy. I think part of the problem was group dynamics. The group was really risk averse, but that can be paralyzing. It didn’t help that the game was run like a sandbox, but we had things we needed to accomplish (but never got a good sense of just where that ended). It was fun though. In the epilogue, my character was still out there, leading a group against the remaining cultist site to seal it.</li> </ul>[SPOILER="End of Kingmaker"]The final battle in Kingmaker gives Nyrissa a huge list of tactics and things she can do. I ignored it. She wasted way too many actions just putzing around. Instead I did the obvious thing and spammed quickened prismatic spray. The combat lasted three or four rounds, and that was it. However, after the first round, half the party and their followers were either dead, petrified, or on another plane of existence. After a few more rounds, they were down to pretty much one PC, who was the one with Briar. He was down to only a few hit points left, but he had one more turn and dealt the killing blow. There was no fudging. We couldn’t have scripted a better ending to that campaign. (And everyone got raised/restored afterward because death is basically just a status effect at high levels.)[/SPOILER]</blockquote>

Verification