James Jacobs
Adventurer
Ummm...not to pick nits, but weren't Chris Youngs and Dave N. (pre-axing natch) folks who worked on the Shackled City....in fact, wasn't Chris Youngs (aka Chris Thommason {sp?} )the editor of Dungeon at the time of the Shackled City AP?
This speaks to me volumes about whether they knew in advance what the issues/concerns of a vast undertaking like an AP are, i.e. attempts to fob this off as beginner's mistortune are somewhat off base...Chris Youngs in particular
should darned well have known what he was getting into.
Cheers,
Colin
The idea of doing a series of linked adventures was indeed Chris's idea, and Shackled City did indeed launch while he was in charge of Dungeon. I'd go as far as to say that single idea saved Dungeon from going out of print before it hit issue #100, in fact. And Dave Noonan did indeed write adventures for that first Adventure Path. But the majority of developing and editing and work on evolving the Adventure Path concept was handled by Erik Mona and myself (we took over Dungeon at approximately the 3rd adventure in Shackled City's schedule, and I'd been involved in the process from the start, having written the 2nd adventure). What we learned from Shackled City was pretty enormous—and its looking like the current Scales of War AP is going through the same growing pains we went through with Shackled City.
And as far as I can tell, a LOT of folks are indeed running APs. The Adventure Path messageboards at Paizo are consistently among the busiest and largest on our site, and feedback at conventions and via reader mail/email supports the fact that a lot of folk are playing them.
A lot of folk DO only read them or mine them for ideas. And that's fine as well... in fact, one of my philosophies is to make adventures as much fun to read as they are to play.