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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9354583" data-attributes="member: 4937">My biggest problem with most adventure paths, especially in the 3e era where 1-20 AP became a thing, was the highly variable quality of the adventures that made up the path.   It's really hard to write one good adventure.  Then if you commit yourself to writing like 6-7 adventures you're really pushing your luck to have them all be good scenarios.   Like even if 90% of your content was good, less than half of them would make good campaigns, but the reality is usually that closer to 90% of the content is bad and so if you kind of try to force it into one long story it's just a problem.  I have definitely repurposed chapters of AP's or encounters from them for my own stuff, but my attempts to play those big APs have all fizzled because even the GMs often admit that the story has gone into a really dull place.  I think one of the bigger problems was trying to force the game to go all the way from 1-20 in one go.  That's really not necessary and it's an artificial constraint on the campaign/story design that makes the task even harder.  Add to the problem issues of having to meet deadlines and page counts and coordinating large writing teams, and it's no wonder that overall the AP isn't that good.  I personally feel the same thing happened with the original "adventure path", TSR's GDQ where the ending of that series just fails to land because "Queen of the Demonweb Pits" is just so badly written even for its era.  (Not that I think the other entries are particularly brilliant, but they are really first attempts at communicating the idea of an adventure to someone else.)   And to a lesser extent, the same thing happens with the "Desert of Desolation" AP, as the final module there is a bit of a letdown as well.   And for that matter, the same thing happens with the "Saltmarsh" trilogy, as both U2 and U3 are fundamentally flawed adventures IMO.On the other hand, I feel the original DL modules are genius, "Curse of Strahd" starts with the highly sound I6 and does a vastly better treatment of the setting than I10, and the "Beyond the Witchlight" campaign is just brilliant and I really want to run that so bad.   The later two are wonderful things to put in the hand of a relatively novice GM.</blockquote>

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