Are Mega-Adventures / APs Bad?

[jmucchiello]

I found that there was only so much that could be done. After Chapter A, the players would be ready to charge into the big scary plot of Chapter B (or worse, to Chapter C). I tried to add sidequests and smaller adventures during my running of Shackled City, and it turned out that we were spending more time playing them than the actual Adventure Path.

I used to be big on the AP approach (before they were even coined Adventure Paths). I kept trying to ram a big, epic agenda down on the players. Sure, it worked to a certain extent, but players can be easily fatigued with a single objective.

Perhaps the "simple" solution is to run two APs at the same time. Kyuss is coming to Cauldron! Big epic agendas? Check. Can't be bored by single objective? Check. Leveling up too fast now? Skip some chapters or better yet, figure out how to combine some. And, you get some campaign protection where if one AP is fully derailed you can drop it without losing the whole campaign. Of course the savage tide would be hard to mix-in with one of the other Dungeon Mag APs.

 

[Herobizkit]

Just to add my own experiences, A friend of mine solo'd me through the now infamous Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. I played two characters, and we collectively controlled three NPC cohorts.


Spoilers ahead...















Once you get into the guts of the adventure, there are 15 or 16 levels of pure dungeon crawl as you delve deeper and deeper into a series of mines. My DM and I found this absolutely tedious beyond belief. So, in lieu of exploring each and every nook and cranny to level, he was more than happy to allow me to leave and explore his own plot that he had on the go while we were inside the dungeon.

The funniest way we dealt with the situation was when we encountered some kind of scorpion-demon (?) who was all hell-bent on revenge against some guy on the lower levels. Like good heroes, we, um... let him go. Through the rest of the dungeon. Killing everything in its path. And what's more, because of 3.0's damage reduction rules, nothing on the lower levels could conceivably kill it on their own.

Mind you, these are the same heroes who ate the apple on the dark altar and survived the soul-sucking of another one after activating it with the four elemental items... and got a +4 holy falchion as a reward for the deaths of the random NPCs and monsters around...

 

[KingCrab]

Two ideas:

1. Up the percentage of wandering monster encounters (or add wandering monster encounters if there are none). It doesn't really distract from the big mission since it feels like part of the adventure.

2. Offer a BIG experience point award after completing each chapter. You decide based on how much you think they need to advance. Seems cheap, but they might not mind. This also avoids taking them out of the adventure path.

 

[Celebrim]

I wouldn't say that they are bad. In fact, they are quite good with high standards of quality and plenty to entertain.

What they are is enormously more complex to run than one shots and shorter adventures. They take more DM skill and preparation than a single 32 page adventure.

What you describe to me is one of the bigger problems with published adventures in general. They give the illusion of being ready to play out of the box. This is never true. Any published module requires DM time investment in preparation, tweaking to fit the particular group, expanding on details that couldn't be fit into the limited space of the published document, and so forth if its to live up to its full potential.

And this is especially true of campaign length modules. I've time and time again heard the same set of complaints about campaign length modules, say the DL modules ('They are too railroady'). To which I can only respond, "You are the DM, not the book you are reading." The book is there to help you DM. It isn't there to replace you. The people that write campaign length modules are constrained by the space that they have to work with (and the time required to develop it). So, working within these constraints, all modules of this sort will seem railroady. It's up to you to handle what happens when the PC's want to go off the rails for a while gracefully, and not hammer them with the text from a book.

It's just that this is still only a fraction of the work that is involved in doing it all yourself, to say nothing of the fact that many of these writers are better than most the rest of us.

 

[roguerouge]

When we played Shackled City, this is what our DM did. We didn't really like it. We are there to play. So what if we spend a few weeks doing something unrelated, it adds verisimilitude. Give the guys a break. Maybe they go visit a relative who's in trouble and "whackiness" ensues. Maybe they go and handle the relative's trouble no problem, but it is the trip home which goes awry.

Hope that helps.
Thaumaturge.

Amen. Learn from TV. There's your episodes that advance the overall arc of the season, and your episodes with fun combat challenges or character-building exercises. Too much of one or the other gets you cancelled.

 

[Man in the Funny Hat]

For me, the only way to run big adventures is to intersperse them with smaller side adventures to change up the mood and give everyone a break. I'm also a firm believer that no adventure should be run "as is" without taking the eccentricities of a given party into account. As you said, multiple TPKs aren't fun for me.

I think they're great, though, for showcasing how to run a campaign-long plot that takes a group from start to finish. People needed to see examples of that.

I would only disagree with that last part - that they are great examples of how to run such a campaign. IMO such a campaign does, indeed, need those side adventures and personlizations. They aren't presented as CAMPAIGNS so much as still presented as just ADVENTURES, which to me suggests that they should be but one part of the campaign, not the bulk of it, much less the entirety of it.

 

[jdrakeh]

For me, the only way to run big adventures is to intersperse them with smaller side adventures to change up the mood and give everyone a break.

Good advice. I'm gearing up to run SCAP and plan to intersperse it with some of the old 3.0 adventures from Guildhouse games, as well as ToH. I suspect that the follow-up (with different characters descended from the original lot) will be RttToH.

 

[Treebore]

I'm currently taking a break from D&D and running a GURPS space campaign. I'm just one session into the GURPS campaign, but I'm already seeing what a massive amount of work it's going to be, and already I'm longing for the relative simplicity of D&D 3.5.

In hindsight, I think what had soured my group's experience with D&D was my running BIG adventures and Adventure Paths, with disasterous results. It seemed that all of the modules were written such that by the time you reach Chapter X you should be Y level; if you're not, everyone in the group will die.

I had this experience with the Shackled City AP and Cormyr: Tearing of the Weave. It seemed that our best gaming memories in 3.x came from the short 32 pagers that WotC released early on (like Sunken Citadel, Forge of Fury, etc.), Dungeon Magazine adventures, and the little AEG pamphlets.

Has anyone else run into trouble trying to run BIG adventures?

Retreater

There are many reasons not to commit to a "mega adventure" or AP. So I would approach it the same way I do every campaign I hope to have go the distance. The modules are my guideline/outline and I fill it in or delete things out however I have to in order to make it work with what the group does.

 

[kenobi65]

It seemed that our best gaming memories in 3.x came from the short 32 pagers that WotC released early on (like Sunken Citadel, Forge of Fury, etc.), Dungeon Magazine adventures, and the little AEG pamphlets.

One bit of irony is that Sunless Citadel, Forge of Fury, etc. were a proto-Adventure Path in and of themselves; they were created so you could use them (and, in theory, just them) and take a party of PCs from 1st level to 20th. It's just that, compared to the Dungeon Adventure Paths, the interconnections between the modules were not particularly strong (making them stand alone more easily), and there wasn't much of a metaplot (if any).

Even running those for one of my groups, I had to occasionally put in a "side trek" adventure to nudge their levels up to the recommended "entry level" for the next module.

 

[JustinA]

In hindsight, I think what had soured my group's experience with D&D was my running BIG adventures and Adventure Paths, with disasterous results. It seemed that all of the modules were written such that by the time you reach Chapter X you should be Y level; if you're not, everyone in the group will die.

You're not a computer. An AP is not a computer program.

If you get to Chapter X, which requires level Y, and you see that your players are not yet level Y, you have three options:

(1) Run it and (most likely) kill them.
(2) Adjust the chapter.
(3) Insert a side-trek or sub-plot to give them the XP needed to get to level Y.

Of those three options, why would you ever pick option 1?