My point was in some cases the information to lead you further along in the AP is contained within one of the nodes a lot of time, and if you ignore or disrupt that node without getting it, you've effectively wandered away from the rest of the AP completely; its hard to see any other actions on the PCs part is going to reconnect with it.
Now, might be that just using the start of the AP as a launch point for entirely different adventures is fine. I'm just noting people writing full length adventure paths are going to rarely supply other routes to continue them, and in some cases the whole premise of the AP makes finding another route from some parts to the others seem unlikely or even illogical. I'm kind of wondering how many people are willing to do the degree of rewrite to get around that--and thinking its not that many for people investing in a full length adventure path in the first place.
I know, and I don't at all disagree. I'm just not sure how else you write that kind of thing to begin with. I tend to design my own adventures as a combination of the 5x5 method and the Fronts method; there's a matrix of things that are expected to happen (mostly NPC instigated) about bunch of different things, and the details are left vague, because I'm never sure what the PCs are going to be most interested in, or of course exactly what they're going to do. A lot of the boxes in the matrix might be borrowed, stolen or at least vaguely resemble something that I read in an Adventure Path once.
I'm not really a fan of
running adventure paths for exactly the reason that you note. But I'm also not clear on any other way to write them. My own preparation to run isn't something that I could clean up and make presentable as a salable product.
You could always do site-based adventuring, I suppose, like in the old days, but that market is well served by the modern OSR scene, and the reason that the mainstream trad scene isn't into that is because they were never really satisfied with that type of adventure in the first place. They
want the game to feel more like a fantasy novel or movie and less like a fantasy-themed exploratory board game or wargame or whatever... but honestly, the trad playstyle has never cracked the code in terms of how you write adventures in a way that doesn't come across as a railroad. So GMs who are trad style but you don't like railroads have to pretty radically alter how they actually
run adventures quite often, or at least be willing to in the event that, as you say, the PCs refuse to do what they're assumed to do for whatever reason.
It's just the risk you always take, I think. Although in my experience, it's not really a very high risk. Most players intuitively understand the social contract of "this is the game I've prepared" so they tend to engage with it.
