D&D 5E (2014) Am I the only one that dislikes Adventure Paths?

[Gilladian]

As a player, I don't mind an adventure path once in a while, especially if I know the DM is not a great designer. But as a DM myself, I dislike them because I get BORED!

I want to tinker, add twists and shape the course of fate, respond to my players, etc...

 

[iserith]

With regard to prep time being a barrier to DMing, respectfully, perhaps some of you are prepping too much.

When you're playing a PC, you're improvising all the time, drawing upon only the context of the scene, your established characterization, and your character sheet to decide what to do next. DMing shouldn't be any more work than that.

It can be fun to prep a lot (I call this "lonely fun"), but one doesn't need even a sliver of the prep that an adventure module represents to run a fun, exciting, and memorable game.

 

[Wepwawet]

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but, if you aren't enjoying spending 10 hours a week on a hobby...why are you doing it? It's obviously not fun for you to "convert monsters, develop encounters, plot storylines and brainstorm", so why do it?

That's great if you are in college and can afford to spend all that time preparing a game from scratch.

That's the best thing about AP, you get most of the work done without having to spend the whole weekend developing a whole world. In fact, that's why I bought the monster manual! I don't want to have to make my own monsters

And an AP can't be taken straight out of the book. You have to make it yours and adapt it to fit your world and your players. Otherwise it'll obviously be boring and railroady.

So, answering your question: I do it because i get to live fantasy adventures with my friends, and it's a lot of fun!

 

[Midknightsun]

Currently running HotDQ with my group and they all are having a good time with it. While the AP is a bit messy, its got a lot of great ideas. I also bend with the players to add things about their history and background that ties them to the campaign and AP. For instance, in episode 1 of HotDQ, one of my players accused the Dwarf who heads the city guard of Greenest of allowing these cultists to attack the city. . . so I ran with it. The warlock was right, and the Dwarf disappeared only to try to ambush the group later with some backup for blowing his cover, but the overall AP is still being followed. If they wanted to try something different, though, I'd be okay with that as well.

But anyway, I have no problem with APs as a player or DM and never have. Neither have any of the groups I have played with, but I guess I am lucky. Though I really don't have this 'railroad' phobia that some players seem to have, likely due to some genuinely bad experiences. Not that I haven't also had some DMs who obviously were railroading us, I have. I just think its important, as was stated earlier, to go over expectations with your group and see if they will buy into a full AP or not before starting it. Nor is that to say the group can't decide to abandon the AP if they get bored, though I would expect a good group would give their DM a heads up on that so they can prep for a sudden change in campaign direction or a short term diversion. Otherwise I get to exercise my right as a DM to say, "Well, that's interesting, but I got nothing prepped for that right now, so I guess we are done for today."

I do get the desire to have shorter APs as an option though. I certainly wouldn't mind that myself sometimes.

 

[gweinel]

I run and i have played as a player adventure paths, i can see their merit but is not for me. I find em restricted. I prefer shorter stories, preferably one shot adventures that i can stich together according to my story.

 

[Beleriphon]

I think one of the best APs ever did was the 4E adventures. Quality of the adventures not withstanding, the way they were all clearly individual adventures but all had common threads that seemed to stitch them together was great. The fight with Orcus in the end of the level 30th adventure was pretty clearly setup with Keep on the Shadowfell, although you didn't need to play the KotS to enjoy the rest of the adventures.

 

[pickin_grinnin]

I have never been a fan of pre-written adventures, whether they are individual modules or whole adventure paths. I started playing D&D in the latter half of the 1970s, and always wrote my own adventures for my campaigns. I never use the "official" game worlds (like Forgotten Realms or Golarion), either. I like to have complete control of the way my games run, and usually do them along a sandbox model.

 

[Olaf the Stout]

I don’t mind adventure paths. I’ve run the Shackled City AP start to finish (1st to 20th level), but I did modify it fairly heavily towards the end and added extra stuff to personalise the campaign.

I’ve also run the Age of Worms about 2/3rds of the way through (1st to about 12th level). That was put on hiatus when we had our 3rd child. I’m not sure if we’ll go back to it to finish it off.

The thing I like most about adventure paths is you can foreshadow stuff that will have a payoff later in the campaign. For example, the PC’s encountered a Beholder 3 times in the campaign before finding out near the end, after 3 years of real time gaming that he was one of the BBEG’s (and I’d made him the party patron as well).

Similarly, at the start of the campaign I spread rumours of Hookface, an ancient red dragon that was said to have a lair in the area. More rumours and supposed sightings of the dragon were heard throughout the campaign. Near the end of the campaign when the city was in flames and I plopped a huge red dragon down on the battlemat the players’ eyes went wide and they knew exactly who they were about to face off against.

Being able to foreshadow those events make the actual encounters so much more memorable than a fight with a random beholder or dragon. You can possibly do that sort of thing outside of an adventure path, but there’s no guarantee that your players will head down that path, so your foreshadowing could be wasted.

All that said, if you’re going to run an adventure path, you need player buy-in. I was up front with my group at the start that I wanted to run an AP and that I would need them to “play along” to a certain extent. They were completely fine with that and it worked for our group. However it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.

 

[was]

...I've found that all adventure paths require modification by the DM. They serve well as a general guideline/overview but they need extensive tweaking. They usually work out poorly if you try to run them exactly as written.

 

[machineelf]

Before running any plot-based adventure, it's important to get buy-in from the players that they will endeavor to stick to the plot and will come up with solid justification as to why their characters care to see it to the end. What you don't want to do is tell them it's a sandbox game and all roads lead to the storyline. That's railroading. But if you're upfront with the players and get their buy-in, then concerns about railroading go away because they have agreed to stick to the plot. If that's not your bag, don't run or play in plot-driven adventures.

This is really some fantastic advice.