NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="James Jacobs" data-source="post: 5182995" data-attributes="member: 23937">Bloating an adventure with stuff that the PCs will never have a chance to learn is bad adventure design. The worst case example is something like: "This room was once a treasury, and it contained all manner of wondrous items and loot, including a talking robotic parrot who could fly and could recite poetry that granted bonuses to Wisdom-based abilities. Alas, looters have long since taken all of this treasure, and it is now an empty room with no clue to its previous use." There's been plenty of adventures that pull this stunt, and I try to make sure that no Paizo adventure ever tries it.In fact, we try really hard to make sure that if we put in a lot of cool backstory to something that somehow there's a way for the PCs to learn that info. In a lot of cases, PCs will skip that stuff simply because they're not interested, but providing all that info is necessary so that when a player DOES pull a fast one and speaks with dead on a minor NPC villain or puts a huge number of ranks into knowledge skills and always wants to use them or the like, the information is there for the GM to provide.We don't always pull it off. Authors love going on a bit too much about the secret parts of their adventures; I'm certainly no exception! But it's still important to give the GM cues in the text of the adventure as to how the PCs can learn about these things.Most (I belive all, but I could be wrong) of our adventure paths have some sort of encounter or NPC in the last installment that is accompanied by text that says something like "You can use this NPC to answer any lingering questions the PCs have about the Adventure Path before you head into the final encounters."As for things like the goblins and the pickles... there are plenty of ways for PCs to learn about that if they're not just stabbing goblins. They could sneak into the lair and watch the goblins, in which case details like "kill-gull" and the pickle scandal are there for GMs to use as things the PCs learn by spying. They could learn about the theft by charming a goblin or intimidating it or otherwise giving a goblin a hard time; babbling about stolen pickles is a great way for a GM to give a goblin some chatter for the PCs to enjoy. And at the very least, it DOES provide entertaining reading, and if there are parts of our adventures that only the GM ever truly gets to enjoy, I'm actually fine with that. GMs need to have fun too, after all!</blockquote>

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