Two years ago I me and my friends decided to start the Zeitgeist Adventure Path with the goal of playing through all of it. We had a great time in adventure one. In adventure two we had a few difficult moments, but overall it was still quite good. Now in adventure three we are floundering. And when I read the overview of adventure four I'm thinking "we will never be able to play that". It isn't as if the adventures are getting worse, but they do get more complicated, with the "grand conspiracy" becoming more and more evident in each adventure. The number of NPCs is increasing also. I'm counting 42 NPCs listed at the start of adventure four, and I think if I tried to play that, my players would blow up the damn train rather than to do a discrete undercover investigation and interrogate all of those NPCs with their red herrings and side stories to find out the one person they are looking for. Long investigations are not their cup of tea.
I think I underestimated the epicness of Zeitgeist. The 1,500 pages of text should have made me realize that at some point in time I will need to understand all of this and then in one way or another tell it to my players. As we are only playing 4-hour sessions once or twice a month, we tend to forget a lot of details between sessions. Playing in 4th edition, where larger fights can take a complete session doesn't help. So I can't help but notice that my players are disengaging. Maybe it is my fault for not understanding the story well enough or not telling it well enough, but my players raised eyebrows when they were first told to not investigate Macbannin any more, only to have the first encounter of the adventure lead right back to him. Then I needed to gently push them to the Pardwight University, because the place in the adventure where the text says "After confiscating the staff, sword, and amulet of the Ancients, the most logical place to go is Pardwight University" wasn't logical to them at all. And now they are on the way to the ziggurat making remarks how very meta-gaming it is to follow the sign pointing to the next available dungeon, while you wouldn't expect real police that get involved in a case with artifacts from a pyramid to explore that pyramid to find out more. Left to their own devices they would have tried to enter the Bleak Gate and look for what is going on under Cauldron Hill, because from adventure two it is clear that *something* is going on there.
I think I will abbreviate adventure three and end the campaign with it. They will find the golden seal in the ziggurat, find out that it and the staff of the ancients (which they left with Prof. Winter) are needed to control the colossus, and end up in a big finale against several bad guys in the museum. Or something of that sort. And then I'll go and play something simpler, like some 5th edition published campaign. I think Zeitgeist is great material, but it isn't necessarily the perfect adventure for every group. Epic comes at a cost, and not every player or DM is willing to pay that cost.
I think I underestimated the epicness of Zeitgeist. The 1,500 pages of text should have made me realize that at some point in time I will need to understand all of this and then in one way or another tell it to my players. As we are only playing 4-hour sessions once or twice a month, we tend to forget a lot of details between sessions. Playing in 4th edition, where larger fights can take a complete session doesn't help. So I can't help but notice that my players are disengaging. Maybe it is my fault for not understanding the story well enough or not telling it well enough, but my players raised eyebrows when they were first told to not investigate Macbannin any more, only to have the first encounter of the adventure lead right back to him. Then I needed to gently push them to the Pardwight University, because the place in the adventure where the text says "After confiscating the staff, sword, and amulet of the Ancients, the most logical place to go is Pardwight University" wasn't logical to them at all. And now they are on the way to the ziggurat making remarks how very meta-gaming it is to follow the sign pointing to the next available dungeon, while you wouldn't expect real police that get involved in a case with artifacts from a pyramid to explore that pyramid to find out more. Left to their own devices they would have tried to enter the Bleak Gate and look for what is going on under Cauldron Hill, because from adventure two it is clear that *something* is going on there.
I think I will abbreviate adventure three and end the campaign with it. They will find the golden seal in the ziggurat, find out that it and the staff of the ancients (which they left with Prof. Winter) are needed to control the colossus, and end up in a big finale against several bad guys in the museum. Or something of that sort. And then I'll go and play something simpler, like some 5th edition published campaign. I think Zeitgeist is great material, but it isn't necessarily the perfect adventure for every group. Epic comes at a cost, and not every player or DM is willing to pay that cost.
