Why I am giving up on Scales of War

[Hawke]

I try to get one "adventure" (read: scales of war single-issue adventure) done every 4 sessions. Sometimes I go over and sometimes under, but overall I think we've got some good pacing. I try to keep a lot of the more NPC/rp into email/wave and pick out the most exciting encounters. If there's 4-5 with a certain type of bad guys, I'll usually pick the most exciting one. Overall it works well, but it ends up that i'm ditching a good third or more of the encounters in any given adventure.

 

[Soel]

This is ultimately the same reason I gave up on Pathfinder's first adv path. Add in the fact that Paizo (and WotC) both throw a lot of the same old creatures in subsequent adventures.

Far too much to lock a group into. My ideal path would be at most 3 adventures, that were individually shorter than the typical WotC adventure.

 

[Obergnom]

My ideal path would be at most 3 adventures, that were individually shorter than the typical WotC adventure.

Thats something. I really liked the "trillogy" adventures in Dungeon mag. The new one seems good to (Something about Ion), but "... of the Abyss" (Returns to the Against the Giants Series) and Seeds of Sehan just seemed more special.

 

[WampusCat43]

When I ran Age of Worms, the default assumption was that each of the installments would advance the characters two levels. I simply told the players that would happen no matter what they did, and eliminated XP calculations. That made it easy to chop up each installments - all I had to do was figure when to let them level up the first time of each pair.

I won't go into our experience with high-level 3.5 - let's just say they were glad to adopt my scheme the further along we got.

 

[Jhaelen]

Yep, this is a general problem with adventure paths, no matter which one you choose. Like others, I'd recommend to reduce the number of encounters to the bare minimum required to get the story across and don't calculate xp. Just have the party level up when the story calls for it (and between modules).

My group only meets every 3-4 weeks and there would be absolutely no measurable progress if we played official modules as written and calculated xp properly.