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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9562630" data-attributes="member: 907">I've gone over this before, and it might be different in the newer APs, but:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">APs are traditionally designed to cover 20 levels in 6 parts. Often lately you instead get 10 levels in 3 parts, but the effect is much the same.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">That means that over the course of a 6-part AP, you get two parts each covering 4 levels and four parts each covering 3 levels. For a 3-parter, that's one and two parts.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">While an AP book is normally 96 pages long, only about 2/3 of that is adventure content and the rest are new monsters, magic items, articles, and so on. Subtract some more for adventure synopsis, table of content, and so on, and you get about 60 pages of adventure content per book. It is not practically feasible to have more adventure content at the rate they are being published. </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">So in a 4-level AP book, you need to put in enough encounters for four levels in about 60 pages, which is 15 pages per level. One level is about 10-12 encounters depending on how difficult they are. You may be able to "cheat" a little with story XP, but apparently some players object to this and say "I paid for enough encounters for X levels and you're only giving me 80% of that!"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">In practice, this often leads to one moderately-sized dungeon (or one level of a dungeon) that gets you through an entire level, and strongly encouraging you to fight/kill every thing within that dungeon (because otherwise you'll be short on XP). Putting in more engaging things will likely eat too much of the Holy Page Count – an encounter where you need to persuade a city official to let you put your circus tent up can eat up a whole page, while an encounter with two Dire Wolves can be simplified to "Dire Wolves (2), 50 hp, see Bestiary page 334"</li> </ul>Also, in D&D and D&D-derived games like Pathfinder (both 1 and 2), adventure design is usually based around attrition. 3e (and thus Pathfinder 1) had the whole thing about an "adventuring day" being 4 encounters that each ate about 20-25% of your nebulous resources (mostly hp and spells) so only the last encounter would really be dangerous on account of you running on fumes. PF2 works on a similar model, though it's not as spelled out (I've seen one of the designers say that casters are intended to use 1, maybe 2, of their top two level spells per serious encounter, and make do with cantrips and focus spells for Moderate and lower – but that's not spelled out in the books). But Savage Worlds doesn't do that kind of attrition. You only have three Wounds before being Incapacitated, and you can lose them all in one attack with a bit of bad luck. A single fight per day is perfectly fine, both because the system doesn't expect attrition and because you don't get XP from fights.</blockquote>

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