Pathfinder 2E Looks like I will be running a PF2e game in a few weeks...suggestions?

[Retreater]

You really might want to try designing your own adventures, I get the sense that it would actually be easier for you than these published materials, because the published materials demand you take the time to read them closely, internalize them, and then you have to still present it artfully to your players and improvise when they say or do things no book could expect. Whereas if you're at all like me, a couple of encounters (or better yet a list of appropriate enemy statblocks I took some quick notes of and the encounter tables on the back of the GM screen), and some improvised maps (a little harder over the internet but not intolerably so, easy with some wet erase markers and ye olde chessex maps) and some ideas and you can spin out something much more immersive and less constrained than a partial reading of the text. Its honestly way less time consuming, and really just requires a little know-how (less than any published module) and trusting yourself.

Edit: Which to preempt the obvious, was something that can be learned by a new GM, which I know from first hand experience (and for the same reason, serious issues running published content, i still get nervous when i volunteer for PFS or AL.)

I do write my own adventures. Some have been published or are in the process. Of course that was with 3.5, 5e, and OSR, never for PF2. In this particular case, I wanted to use Abomination Vaults as a way to learn the mechanics and to give the system a second chance after the bad experiences I had with Age of Ashes. Going about trying to write an adventure with a system as complex as PF2 with little actual play experience was something I wasn't keen on doing.
The improvisational form of GMing is something I'm not at all comfortable doing in a new system, with players I don't know, and on a VTT to boot. I'm not even comfortable enough to run "from the book" - I have to put everything on there electronically to calculate attacks and damage, etc.

 

[payn]

Yeah I'll admit most of my GM prep time was mechanically based (putting everything into Roll20, learning rules for a new system, etc). And I guess I'm also more used to running adventures that sort of present the quest in different ways.
Of course, the module's recommendation to just start at the doorstep of the dungeon coupled with running online for a bunch of strangers persuaded me to get the adventure started rather than awkward role-playing.

Yeap, the APs are campaigns unlike your typical module. You get an adventure synopsis, town and NPC write ups, dungeon write ups, NPC gallery, item gallery, and supplemental fiction. (Not necessarily in that order.) So, the beats are not necessarily sequential and are left vague for the GM to present them as they see fit. I really like this because it gets away from a railroad presentation and allows me to put my own touch on it. Like a jazz musician's improv with an old standard.

 

[kenada]

I'm not so sure the plotting on them is as constrained as suggested, especially in this mega dungeon, its a town + a multi floor dungeon with a handful of entrances and secret ways between levels, unless you leave the town to go elsewhere entirely, there's no meaningful way to derail it, the plot is tied completely to descending through the vault.

The Alexandrian discusses some tools for running megadungeons. If Paizo included some of those (like restocking procedures), then there’s a risk the PCs might not ever bother to clear the dungeon. They might spend all their time in and around it doing other things, which would derail the AP (because the PCs would have the desired experiences).

It’s like when I ran Kingmaker. Superficially, it’s a hexcrawl, but it’s not a sandbox. Each region is a wilderness dungeon for the PCs to explore. Events happen when the AP prescribes them and not based on any other criteria. A hexcrawl can be run as a sandbox, but if you used those techniques in Kingmaker, you risk having a very different experience from what the AP intended. It’s fundamentally from something like Hot Springs Island.

 

[Retreater]

Yeap, the APs are campaigns unlike your typical module. You get an adventure synopsis, town and NPC write ups, dungeon write ups, NPC gallery, item gallery, and supplemental fiction. (Not necessarily in that order.) So, the beats are not necessarily sequential and are left vague for the GM to present them as they see fit. I really like this because it gets away from a railroad presentation and allows me to put my own touch on it. Like a jazz musician's improv with an old standard.

So my issue is that I usually skip past the "supplemental fiction" - because I'm just not much of a fiction reader in general, and if I do read it, I don't like it to be gaming-related because I already spend so much time in the hobby. Sometimes this gets me in trouble because that "supplemental fiction" is actually important details to tie the AP together. But my memory for unpronounceable fantasy proper nouns is terrible, so I usually suffer as a DM trying to run games that aren't presented in a logical, clearly delineated way. Paragraphs of text about setting information just reads like nonsense to me. Wish it didn't.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

[doubled]

 

[payn]

So my issue is that I usually skip past the "supplemental fiction" - because I'm just not much of a fiction reader in general, and if I do read it, I don't like it to be gaming-related because I already spend so much time in the hobby. Sometimes this gets me in trouble because that "supplemental fiction" is actually important details to tie the AP together. But my memory for unpronounceable fantasy proper nouns is terrible, so I usually suffer as a DM trying to run games that aren't presented in a logical, clearly delineated way. Paragraphs of text about setting information just reads like nonsense to me. Wish it didn't.

Thats fine, you're running this just as advertised. Learning a new system and adventure material style. Crawl, walk, run.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

[doubled]

Ok the heck, that was odd, I def saw a second copy of my post.

@Retreater I think I'm just feeling like the published adventure might actually be overwhelming in tandem with all of the rules and stuff in the core game, since it needs to be processed in addition to all of the actual game rules.

Like, consider it in terms of pages you have to read, adding another book (the adventure booklet) on top is a whole extra thing on your plate. Whereas the guidelines for creating encounters and adventures are only a few pages each (and you don't really need the adventure guidelines either, the encounter guidelines fit onto the GM screen come to think of it) and you can keep a DC chart handy.

You're a published adventure writer, which is a lot more than I can say! Trust those skills, they still work! At least if you were the one making the adventure, you wouldn't have to read and memorize all that fiction someone else created. A simple dungeon adventure, with a little calibration using the encounter budgets and DCs from pf2e should work just fine.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

The Alexandrian discusses some tools for running megadungeons. If Paizo included some of those (like restocking procedures), then there’s a risk the PCs might not ever bother to clear the dungeon. They might spend all their time in and around it doing other things, which would derail the AP (because the PCs would have the desired experiences).

It’s like when I ran Kingmaker. Superficially, it’s a hexcrawl, but it’s not a sandbox. Each region is a wilderness dungeon for the PCs to explore. Events happen when the AP prescribes them and not based on any other criteria. A hexcrawl can be run as a sandbox, but if you used those techniques in Kingmaker, you risk having a very different experience from what the AP intended. It’s fundamentally from something like Hot Springs Island.

They didn't include those tools, the closest is a side bar about wandering monsters that states:

WANDERING MONSTERS
While this adventure doesn’t present wandering monster tables for Abomination Vaults, the dungeon’s denizens still occasionally leave their homes! You can make the dungeon feel more dynamic by familiarizing yourself with each level’s denizens and then having them react to the party’s progression and presence. For example, if the heroes noisily explore an area, creatures in nearby rooms could come to investigate or perhaps set up an ambush. If the heroes decide to camp out in the dungeon rather than return to the safety of town, nearby creatures might visit or even attack their campsite while they rest. If the heroes clear out the denizens of a level and then return weeks later, they might find that new monsters have moved in. By keeping the inhabitants of the Abomination Vaults active, you can make the location feel all the more dangerous and unpredictable to your players.

There's also sidequests from the people of Otari, which happens to be mentioned in a side bar. Its a Megadungeon in the sense that its a large dungeon that covers 10 levels of progression that the party will likely journey into multiple times, each level is provided with a map and the contents of each room, as well as box text as you'd expect, and a list of all the magic items found on the floor. Then each book of the three part AP has more of the dungeon, the dungeon floors in each book connect to the other ones in that book, and there's a small puzzle to open the way to the depths of the dungeon. Each book (except the last one?) has no scripted end, but there's three key pieces of information that players should learn before they continue.

Each section stays cleared as the party clears it, although the text might mention some specific changes in some of these rooms, I found one example that mentions what happens if the party spares an NPC they find in the dungeon, but it just says how he leaves. It technically even has portal chambers that players can use to reawaken teleportation circles (to conveniently get around?)

So, the party heads into the dungeon and explores it room by room, heading back out to rest periodically to push further than they did last time. There's information to discover in the environment, secret doors, and various routes between the three levels of the dungeon presented in the first book, and sidequests from the people in town. No restocking (besides a GM just doing it as mentioned in the side bar), no hexcrawled exterior, no adversary roster, or any of the other amenities some OSR products use. There's a few areas where the GM is invited to expand if the party pushes in a specific direction too, due to the dungeon connecting to a sea cave in one place.

 

[kenada]

They didn't include those tools, the closest is a side bar about wandering monsters that states:

Thanks for the citation. I’m not surprised they omitted tools like that because they would work against what the adventure is trying to do.

There's also sidequests from the people of Otari, which happens to be mentioned in a side bar. Its a Megadungeon in the sense that its a large dungeon that covers 10 levels of progression that the party will likely journey into multiple times, each level is provided with a map and the contents of each room, as well as box text as you'd expect, and a list of all the magic items found on the floor. Then each book of the three part AP has more of the dungeon, the dungeon floors in each book connect to the other ones in that book, and there's a small puzzle to open the way to the depths of the dungeon. Each book (except the last one?) has no scripted end, but there's three key pieces of information that players should learn before they continue.

That’s interesting and unexpected. They’ve captured the spirit of a Jacquayed megadungeon.

Each section stays cleared as the party clears it, although the text might mention some specific changes in some of these rooms, I found one example that mentions what happens if the party spares an NPC they find in the dungeon, but it just says how he leaves. It technically even has portal chambers that players can use to reawaken teleportation circles (to conveniently get around?)

So, the party heads into the dungeon and explores it room by room, heading back out to rest periodically to push further than they did last time. There's information to discover in the environment, secret doors, and various routes between the three levels of the dungeon presented in the first book, and sidequests from the people in town. No restocking (besides a GM just doing it as mentioned in the side bar), no hexcrawled exterior, no adversary roster, or any of the other amenities some OSR products use. There's a few areas where the GM is invited to expand if the party pushes in a specific direction too, due to the dungeon connecting to a sea cave in one place.

That’s a lot better than the dungeon-themed AP I ran (Shattered Star). There were some cool moments (including one of my favorite traps), but it had some really bad jank, and the dungeons were generally quite linear. We never finished: ran into a dumb part in the funhouse dungeon, and just stopped. Shattered Star ended up being the last AP I ever ran (because running APs is too much work).

 

[Justice and Rule]

Yeah I'll admit most of my GM prep time was mechanically based (putting everything into Roll20, learning rules for a new system, etc). And I guess I'm also more used to running adventures that sort of present the quest in different ways.
Of course, the module's recommendation to just start at the doorstep of the dungeon coupled with running online for a bunch of strangers persuaded me to get the adventure started rather than awkward role-playing.

No, I totally get the prep thing. Using a VTT is one of those double-edged swords: you can do so much useful stuff with them, but they add on a whole new layer to prepping, especially if you want to use them to their fullest.

For me, I can't play an adventure without knowing the ending; if I don't know where I'm going, I feel like I miss all the setup and hints, and that just bothers the naughty word out of me. Different strokes and all.

That system is fine. You could also have the monsters make death saving throws (or whatever one’s system does). I just don’t think the GM needs mechanical permission from one part of the game to engage in another (the hypothetical escape procedure). That kind of simulation is something that 3e really got into, which I think was a mistake (and Gygax arguably at least claimed to reject in 1e). That’s why I use the framing I do: assume the PCs escape and then figure out how that happened. Otherwise, they get hung up on logistics or whether it’s realistic.

For example, when my group had its rout in Old-School Essentials, I had to bluntly say that they will escape. As expected, one of my players started the process of rationalizing how it was actually impossible, and I had to state emphatically it would succeed. Once we got past that hangup, we were able to figure out what they did to make their escape, and they got away with only the death of a retainer. It felt bad for the players, but none of the PCs died, which I viewed as a victory.

I can see that. For me, having that sort of mechanism to give me access to some level of detachment rather than just sort of making the decision. Certainly if I find it interesting or helpful I'll just make the decision, but at the same time it's kind of nice to detach yourself and sort of play along with fate; it kind of helps me feel like a player, too, if I set some limits.

And I find your decision really interesting! I know my two groups would act very differently to that: my group of younger, newer players would probably go along with that idea a bit more. But that sort of thing would lose my grognard group, as I have heard them complain about taking the risk out of the game if they don't feel like they can die. It's one of those generational differences, with the former growing up around late 2E/3E and the latter with Chainmail/OD&D. That's not a judgment on the decision (My older group is, honestly, can be real stick-in-the-mud when it comes to trying new things... though occasionally they really fall for stuff I wouldn't expect, like FFG Star Wars/Genesys), but just interesting to think about trying to do that myself and how it'd go.

I think that’s basically what “trad” is about. I can’t see how you can have that kind of story-driven experience without the curation.

Yeah, definitely. Not sure where exactly I fall on that list: I suppose Neo-Trad? There are some interesting distinctions there.

I’m not a good fit for that kind of game as a player, and it’s too much work to prep as a GM. I really prefer OSR or Story Now.

For me, APs are just too cluttered in general. I like the wilderness, ancient forgotten tombs, and travel. I feel like I'm more of a fantasy explorer/archeologist than anything, maybe because of my love of history. Give me a tomb with only a few enemies but a ton of etchings and lore and I'll be happy as a clam. I'm kind of a really odd player, now that I think about it.