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<blockquote data-quote="Philip Benz" data-source="post: 8393618" data-attributes="member: 6975782">If, for you, APs seem like a staightjacket, that means (IMHO) that you are focusing too much on the railroad, and not enough on the initiatives and goals of the players.For me, any published material is simply a toolbox that I dip into when setting things up and presenting situations to the players. Then, the adventure inevitably goes &quot;off the rails&quot; and, the railroad be damned, I follow the players' intitiatives off the rails and invent other things on the fly, taking things wherever they may lead.Now sure, that's more easily said than done. But I always try to focus on a few plotlines of my own, and the mountain of world lore that has built up around the Golarion setting to make interesting and thought-provoking situations on the margin of any published material I may be using.For instance, I'm currently adapting material from book 4 of Serpent's Skull, a Paizo AP that came out some years ago, in the middle of the PF1 era, to PF2. The AP gives me the bare bones of the groups present in the locale, and some of their motivations and goals, but then I twist it to make something intensely personal and different. This AP is a great toolbox, and my players are always coming up with harebrained ideas that require me, as DM, to think outside the box and move the story foreward, while following the threads the players build, interacting with the situations I've presented them with.PF2 has a lot going for it in terms of managing out-of-combat situations. But inevitably we get into sticky combat situations, and that works fine too. For those familiar with PF2's Building Encounters system, I avoid +3 or +4-level adversaries like the plague, and serve up a greater number of lesser adversaries instead. Most of the time.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Philip Benz, post: 8393618, member: 6975782"] If, for you, APs seem like a staightjacket, that means (IMHO) that you are focusing too much on the railroad, and not enough on the initiatives and goals of the players. For me, any published material is simply a [I]toolbox[/I] that I dip into when setting things up and presenting situations to the players. Then, the adventure inevitably goes "off the rails" and, the railroad be damned, I follow the players' intitiatives off the rails and invent other things on the fly, taking things wherever they may lead. Now sure, that's more easily said than done. But I always try to focus on a few plotlines of my own, and the mountain of world lore that has built up around the Golarion setting to make interesting and thought-provoking situations on the margin of any published material I may be using. For instance, I'm currently adapting material from book 4 of Serpent's Skull, a Paizo AP that came out some years ago, in the middle of the PF1 era, to PF2. The AP gives me the bare bones of the groups present in the locale, and some of their motivations and goals, but then I twist it to make something intensely personal and different. This AP is a great toolbox, and my players are always coming up with harebrained ideas that require me, as DM, to think outside the box and move the story foreward, while following the threads the players build, interacting with the situations I've presented them with. PF2 has a lot going for it in terms of managing out-of-combat situations. But inevitably we get into sticky combat situations, and that works fine too. For those familiar with PF2's Building Encounters system, I avoid +3 or +4-level adversaries like the plague, and serve up a greater number of lesser adversaries instead. Most of the time. [/QUOTE]

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