Pathfinder 1E Have you played or run Paizo's Adventure Paths?

[WampusCat43]

Ran AoW all the way up to the epic next-to-last confrontation with Dragotha, who wiped them out in a battle that lasted approximately 30 rounds. Everyone decided that, after losing around 15 characters total, no one had the desire to continue playing at such a high level, including me.

 

[Mortellan]

Wampus I had the opposite effect. The PCs basically TPK'd Dragotha's whole issue without a fatality. These characters built quite severely were only munchkined up more due to my fault by the buffs added in the mod's subplots. I enjoyed many of the mid level episodes of AoW, especially Prince of Redhand which was a nice roleplaying interlude. The high level mods are over the top and nearing jump the shark. I am about to start Dawn of a New Age and my high level campaign fatigue just wants it to be over with which I'm trying to suck up so its at least not anti-climatic. I think my complaint right now is 12 issues is too long for an AP. Paizo must have recognized that in Pathfinder by going to 6 issue arcs and a few 3 issue arcs when they still did Dungeon.

 

[The_Gneech]

I have not yet, but I hope to. I'm guessing Pathfinder.

-The Gneech

 

[DwarvenDog]

I'm running Age of Worms right now, and I'm planning on taking it all the way through. Currently the PC's are 2/3 of the way through Three Faces of Evil, and we've been playing for a little over a year. (30 or so 3-4 hour sessions). Here are my thoughts:

- Age of Worms revitalized my DM'ing. I also run a high-level game once a month and it had been getting very tedious. Deciding to run this campaign from the beginning flooded me with new ideas, new thoughts on how to do things better, and generally got me more involved in BOTH games.

- The setting indeed starts out with great atmosphere. All my players love to hate the town, and have immersed themselves into the setting in a way that suprised me. I find adapting it to my homebrew to be absurdly easy, and I can plug-and-play just about any sidequests or ideas into the setting and have them work.

- Three Faces of Evil is a ridiculously difficult adventure. At least for my group, and we've got 7 PC's. IMO, you can see a lot of Mike Mearls' 4E design philosophy in this adventure. Encounters that spread across multiple areas of the dungeon. Terrain that is integral to running the encounter properly. Division of NPC roles... battlefield controller, striker, "mook..." It's very interesting to see the ideas that would be shaping 4E in earlier products.

- The 9:05 AM bedtime seems to always be in full effect. It's irritating but manageable. I've been running sprawling, resource-draining encounters all along in 3E, so this is not new. But I'm noticing it more in these lower levels of play.

 

[Rystil Arden]

Shackled City
I managed to run the first 3 adventures before my players decided that having jobs or studying was more important than role-playing - thankfully, in a couple more months we'll be back running it again. This was done using the hardcover. Of the three APs, this is the one I dislike. There's some strong ideas in it, but...

...I don't like the setting much
...the plot is weak.

My biggest problem with the first 3 adventures in the series - well, more Drakthar's Way and Flood Season than Life's Bazaar - is that the dungeons are too big. They really feel like "oh, the PCs need to gain 2 levels, so we need this many encounters, so here you go"... and given the time limitations on the quests, it makes no sense whatsoever to have the PCs go in, fight a few battles, then retreat. It makes even less sense in Flood Season given the location of the major dungeon. When the PCs rest for the first time, why don't the villains escape?

Just one note: when you need a reactive dungeon, I prefer if the text notes what the likely actions will be.

Cheers!

Interestingly, I have played exactly the same 3 adventures you ran in SCAP, Merric, and our group liked them a lot.

For Flood Season, we cleared that last dungeon without resting (actually we cleared every dungeon section in the AP without resting, so for instance the Malachite Hold we took on after resting from Jzadirune, but we didn't rest while doing either of them, and the same for all the others), and we did it just barely in some places. If we had time to rest (or infinite healing, or auto-refresh per-encounter abilities), it would have been substantially less fun to play. Before you ask, our party was not particularly optimised, and we only have 5 characters--

A Human Ranger who we force to be our tank because he has full BAB (we often Enlarge him and force him to two-hand his longsword when he'd rather be TWFing too).

A Halfling Mountebank (basically worse than having a Rogue, but it's a fun character even if it isn't as effective)

A Human Cleric (none of the cheese in Complete Divine either--he may be a Cleric, but he has 10 Strength and takes feats like Negotiator, so he is not combat capable. When he put a copper in the mouth in Jzadirune, we nicknamed him 'Clumsy the Cleric' for the rest of the adventure. He spends more time hitting on all the red-haired NPCs than fighting)

A Gnome Illusionist (Colour Spray was a godsend, but being barred from having all the useful Evocation and Enchantment spells hurts sometimes, and he has managed to give himself -1 caster level to Transmutation and Conjuration as well somehow, so he gets those spells at even levels only. Basically, if Illusions don't solve the problem, he throws more Illusions at them

And me, a Hallfing Archivist (I buff things. Many many times. And every once in a while when the GM actively combines four encounters worth of spiders and a Wizard into one room, I pull out some crazy Overrun on my Riding Dog and heal with a wand)

 

[Wombat]

Haven't played in or run any of them; there is a vague chance that I might play in one someday, but none that I would run one.

I simply do not run pre-gen adventures; they never fit my worlds.

 

[Zaister]

I DM for three groups. My oldest group is currently playing "The Shackled City" (from the hardcover). We had a TPK in "Zenith Trajectory" against the Kuo-Toas due to uncannily bad dice rolling on the players' side. After that, we continued with a new group and are now close to finishing "Lords of Oblivion". We plan on playing "Savage Tide" here when we are done with "The Shackled City"

Another group I started on "The Shackled City" (even before the first group, first form the magazines, later from the hardcover). We had a TPK there too, against the assassins at the start of "Secrets of the Soul Pillars", here due to bad player strategy. After that we played "Red Hand of Doom", and then started with "Age of Worms", currently finishing "Encounter at Blackwall Keep".

My third group played "Age of Worms" at fist, and we got close to finishing "Encounter at Blackwall Keep". However du to lack of time of several players and the arrival of two babies with different players we had to change the composition of the group and decided to shelve the "Age of Worms" campaign. Two weeks ago I started "Rise of the Runelords" with them.

 

[billd91]

I've played a little Age of Worms and Savage Tide via play-by-post but since the DM for both has gone missing, we haven't played in a while with no prognosis of moving on.

But I'm running Shackled City in a table-top game. The players have been really enjoying it. They've just started invading Bhal-Hamatugn in Zenith Trajectory. One of the players in particular, probably the most into gaming in general, has really liked the dungeon designs.

They cleared out Jzadirune thoroughly, resting a couple times, before even tackling the Malachite Fortress, which they then cleared out fairly quickly.
They had a little trouble in Drakthar's Way because they tried to pursue the gaseous Drakthar in too chaotic a manner and two PCs ended up getting killed.
Flood Season, however, went fairly quickly. They stomped through the dungeon there fairly fast, clearing out most of the human enemies. When they retreated to rest, the remaining few lackeys did flee and cut the cable to the cage as well. That still, however, left several of the undead minions to deal with so not much in the way of XP/treasure/challenge was lost.

As I see it, Zenith Trajectory is where the challenge is really starting to ramp up on them. I think they can take it though, seeing how their exploration is starting to develop. They're usually pretty careful. It's only when they haven't been that they lose a PC.

 

[Voadam]

I've played in low level games of AoW and ST in pbps here. Both had great parties full of interesting characters.

 

[Bagpuss]

Our group is playing both AoW and ST, with me running ST and another GM doing AoW.

Currently we have just returned from Greyhawk to do the second Whispering Caern exploration in AoW.

In Savage Tide the party have just landed at the Isle of Dread.

It is generally agreed by all that AoW is better than Shackled City (I never got to play or run that) due to it's stronger plot, and that Savage Tide is better than AoW due to an even better plot, less dungeon crawls, and better individual adventures.

AoW has had some real stinkers of dungeon adventures with really bad design elements, that seem just to punish players for the sake of it. The return to the Whispering Caern being a prime example, we haven't found this to be the case with Savage Tide.

I would talk more but can't really without specific examples and that means spoilers.