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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5587105" data-attributes="member: 82106">Eh, yes and no. Have you read the Kingmaker AP? I haven't read all of it, but I did read the first installment.My observations: The writing around character development was stronger. In some cases it was considerably stronger. The BBEG (the Stag Lord IIRC) was fairly well developed. I think he gets about a full half page column detailing his background, personality, and motives. The people running the outpost have a decent sized writeup, and there are easily a dozen other NPCs with at least a paragraph. In fact I think EVERY individual bandit in the main lair, and several other bandits have these writeups. The overall storyline was pretty well thought out. The PCs have a contract (this is a given at the start of the AP, but gaining this could in itself be a whole other adventure). They're supposed to survey/scout/clear an area of wilderness. They also get involved with several NPCs pretty quickly etc that establish a reinforcing parallel storyline. The rest of the adventure is basically a mini-sandbox/hexcrawl but the initial elements give the PCs a pretty good set of motivations and they can then wander around handling different encounter areas in various ways depending on what they feel like doing and how they interpret their goals.The encounters design itself I thought was weak comparatively with what you normally get in 4e, but mostly on a par with older AD&D modules. WotC's modules have more developed encounter areas, encounter maps, etc generally.Overall the thing is the Paizo adventure provides more real incentive to drive the story forward in an organic fashion, and knowing as much as we do about the NPCs unless the players go for total hack-n-slash they're likely to end up interacting with them as more than opponents to slay in a tactical encounter.Frankly I would rather see a bit more attention to the details of encounters in the Paizo product, but I would like to see a LOT more attention to story and character in WotC products like H1 where the motivations of the PCs are relegated to a couple paragraphs of suggested quests that will give XP awards at the start, and I don't recall any of the NPCs being particularly fleshed out beyond a couple sentences. It was enough to quickly frame the adventure as a sequence of combats, but it left all the real motivation and color totally to the DM. I don't know about knightofround's hypothesis. I don't think 4e is at all lacking in 'fluff' overall. Nor do I think that WotC's writers are particularly less skilled or creative than the ones Paizo employs. I just don't think they're all that interested in getting into the business of turning out adventures. So they churned out a minimalist set of them in 2008 and once in a while write another one to support something like the DM's Kit, but it just isn't a priority. This may be a strategic error on their part as I think good adventures in the long run do a lot to drive customer adoption and loyalty to your game system, but I have little doubt they're capable of doing it. They may need a bit of practice but I bet they can put out something as good as anything Paizo has done, except they're just not interested.</blockquote>

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