Who Actually Has Time for Bloated Adventures?

[FitzTheRuke]

There's long been a nasty rumor that these adventures are really written to be read and not to be played.
And it always feels like there's some truth to it.

It is both, and writers have a masochistic nature, because if they just wrote novels to audience would be larger. lol

Yeah, it's a sad flaw to the fact that a lot of people buy adventures to read them, and not to run them. The end result is: They sell better if they're a good read. SO... adventure writers write them with this in mind.

Whereas, if they wrote them to be easy to run, we'd have much, much better adventures.

I can't help but think (wish) that there is some happy medium. Personally, I want to RUN adventures, not read them. I can't imagine that an adventure written to be run would HAVE to be bad to read. I mean, I don't quite understand why anyone who wants to just read them wouldn't buy a book. I actually think that if they were done really well TO BE RUN, then the reader-types would probably still enjoy them.

 

[Lanefan]

We're playing online, so that's a challenge. It feels like a snail's pace to me.

Online play is IME considerably slower than at-table play, mostly because the tech only allows one person to speak at a time where in a real-life room multiple conversations can happen at once e.g. the DM can be sorting out one character's turn over there while I and another player quietly strategize in-character over here. (chat doesn't work well - people can talk far faster than they can type) Also, any off-topic conversation grinds things to a halt, where at a table things can still happen under the chatter.

Like, if I were to spend an equal amount of time preparing the game as running the game, certainly that should be sufficient? In the case of this AP, it would be double. I would need about 6 hours of prep for each weekly 3 hour game.

I'd be truly surprised if it was that much, but then I don't know the level of detail you like to prep to.

I could see spending a whole day at it once, before play began, sorting through the AP and figuring out how you wanted to run it. But even then, it's all just familiarization with the elements, as no plan you make is ever going to survive contact with the players/PCs.

The factions piece, for example. The module suggests the PCs will want to befriend some of the factions but there's no way of knowing which ones - if any! - they'll choose to befriend. And that's fine, as it leaves those choices in the players'/PC's hands where they should be.

 

[Tonguez]

Youre the GM so you decide whats relevant to the end, and though it might take a bit of adapting you dont have to do all of the encounters. Personally I like sandbox settings that might roll into a long campaign or might just be cherrypicked for shorter adventures - but it does take a bit of work…

 

[Lanefan]

Quality is not restricted to short campaigns.

Sounds like you need to focus on the quality of your prep. I don't start a campaign without at least twenty sessions worth of material ready. That way, a few minutes a week tweaking existing material is all that has to be done. Beyond that, its simple enough to stay ahead of player consumption.

The only problem with this approach (which I generally endorse otherwise) is that when - not if, but when - the players take a complete left turn in session 6 there's 14 sessions of prep gone by the boards and now I'm winging it.

What I do is the same sort of thing only on a more macro scale - I'll build an open-ended flowchart-like storyboard at the adventure level, in terms of what adventure could potentially lead to what as things go along*. That storyboard is always malleable and open to change; the only thing that's ever locked in is the very first adventure, after which they're kind of on their own but with any luck they've picked up on some hooks laid down during/around that first field trip. And if they left-turn I've got the setting nailed down enough that I can wing things wherever they might go and-or whatever they might want to do there.

Having all that in place IME allows a lot of smaller-scale stuff to almost run itself.

* - and often there'll be "homebrew" noted as the adventure that goes in a specific slot, which means I have to write it; but I can usually do that during the campaign before they get to it.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, it's a sad flaw to the fact that a lot of people buy adventures to read them, and not to run them. The end result is: They sell better if they're a good read. SO... adventure writers write them with this in mind.

Whereas, if they wrote them to be easy to run, we'd have much, much better adventures.

I can't help but think (wish) that there is some happy medium. Personally, I want to RUN adventures, not read them. I can't imagine that an adventure written to be run would HAVE to be bad to read. I mean, I don't quite understand why anyone who wants to just read them wouldn't buy a book. I actually think that if they were done really well TO BE RUN, then the reader-types would probably still enjoy them.

Agreed. And yet people complain if an adventure is presented in the classic 1e style of minimal art, lots of text, and little if any filler.

Can't win, really.

 

[Jahydin]

We're playing online, so that's a challenge. It feels like a snail's pace to me.

Oh, haven't done online gaming yet. I would think some of the automation and not fiddling with battlemaps and minis would help at least.

Good luck!

 

[BrokenTwin]

The only problem with this approach (which I generally endorse otherwise) is that when - not if, but when - the players take a complete left turn in session 6 there's 14 sessions of prep gone by the boards and now I'm winging it.

Generally, when running a Paizo AP-style campaign, there's the implicit or explicit understanding that the campaign is generally linear, and the players play along with the plot beats to see the exciting set pieces and epic conclusion. Joining a game in this style just to run it off-track in this manner is a breach of the social contract of the game.

Which makes designing that style of game a lot harder than I think people give credit for. Your plot beats and twists HAVE to make sense, or the players' suspension of disbelief is going to get shattered. I remember when we first tried playing a D&D 5e campaign and our level 1 characters start the adventure outside a city actively being invaded by a massive army backed up by dragons. And the adventure assumes you're going to run into the city despite giving no in-world justification that doing so is anything other than a suicide mission.

 

[UngainlyTitan]

That fine for kill-search-loot campaigns, but rather a bad idea for systems and settings with some depth.

Admittedly, murder hoboes have never gone out of style.

I don't know about modern Paizo campaigns but the 3.x era ones I read were very similar to what WotC put out but with more stuff. A lot more side quests and faction politics but at the heart it was go there collect plot coupon that unlocks the next layer. The main movers and shakers were hidden behind layers of cat's paws and fronts. You could skip a lot and still cover the main plot.

 

[MGibster]

How long does the average campaign last? These days especially, I don't expect a campaign to run more than 6 months at most and I've got a regular group of people I meet with once a week. I hear about campaigns lasting years, but I've never particpated in one of those before.

 

[John Dallman]

Generally, when running a Paizo AP-style campaign, there's the implicit or explicit understanding that the campaign is generally linear, and the players play along with the plot beats to see the exciting set pieces and epic conclusion.

We're currently near the end of part three of the PF1 version of Kingmaker, running it under GURPS Dungeon Fantasy. We're doing it because of the missing people, whom we've now found most of. We haven't found much in the way of plot structure, let along beats or epic finishes, probably because we do things rather out of order.

We're finding that the dungeon where it concludes has a few connectivity and logistical bugs. We got to the point where we'd deduced the existence of corridors that aren't on the map, After failing to find them, we took up creating our own.