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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aenghus" data-source="post: 6711886" data-attributes="member: 2656">I've run adventure paths before, and have some opinions on how to do so effectively.First, you need players willing to play through an adventure path, and PCs who suit the genre and themes of that path. Adventure paths often assume more or less heroic protagonists and may have insufficient motivation for more mercenary or vicious parties. Super proactive players who like burning down settings may not work for adventure path play. Conversely, adventure paths for mercenary types might not suit more heroic parties. The adventures in adventure paths may vary in quality, genre and usefulness a lot, due to different authors, bad writing, time constraints etc. The last few adventures in an adventure path often suffer from such problems, being high level and poorly playtested if at all, authors being aware that players often won't get to the last few adventures and not for some time after the module is published. I often highly modify adventures or harvest individual adventures for parts.I try and pick an adventure path that will suit existing PCs, or arrange PC creating to suit the path. Even so I customise the individual adventures to suit the PC's individual and group goals, and the setting I use.Adventure paths need reasonable PC continuity, either due to a low casualty rate or the PCs all being associated with some institution(s), group(s) or faction(s) that will provide replacement PCs and archive campaign lore. A TPK or even a casualty or two can derail an adventure path, if the party loses vital information, or  the players fail a morale check.  Early casualties don't matter as much, as the party haven't accumulated history, the parties paranoia will be at a low level and replacements are easy to justify. Further on in the adventure path, it can be more difficult as people miss the old PC, lose some of his or her personal plotlines, and trusting a new PC can be difficult to justify. Further, the replacement PC is likely a new class, possibly creating capability gaps in the party and new vulnerabilities.There's no guarantee that the adventure path will be played to the end. Nowadays I'm very suspicious of any game making the players/PCs suffer now with the promise held over their heads that things will be great later in the campaign. There may never be a later, and a referee who can't run a fun game now may not be able to do it later either. Don't postpone the fun, make as much as possible fun right now for the players, based on their feedback and interests. If everyone is having fun they are less likely to try and run away from the adventure, and will be easier to get back on track when they do. Flexibility is important. Try and anticipate the capabilities of the PCs and actions of the players and even when the players do something that will derail things to a greater or lesser extent, try and roll with the punches. You can always rewrite, add more bad guys, a second boss behind the first. This is where system mastery helps, for games that use mechanics as a primary resolution method. High level adventures often have gaping plot holes though the author not understanding the possibilities of high level magic, or capabilities of high level adventurers. The referee has to patch these as best he can, or throw the flawed adventure out.Depending on time constraints, enemy bosses can be tweaked to fit the backstories of some of the PCs. Sometimes you might need to nudge a player or players in certain directions, and this won't work for those players who immediately head in the opposite direction (barring reverse psychology, which is risky). Active cooperation from players is generally better than an old school adversarial game IMO - I imagine the latter is possible but may be more episodic.I generally do pare down player decision trees for the big decisions to those supported by the adventure path. By this I mean if the path assumes, for instance, the players will go left or right at a certain point, I ask the players if they go left or right, not "what do you do?". A certain amount of closed question, directed/railroaded GMing may be necessary sometimes - avoid this when possible but accept the necessity when it arises. Players need to buy into this. I hope this helps.</blockquote>

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