Pathfinder 1E Working on my first Pathfinder Adventure. Wondering if I'm doing it right...

[Ixis]

Just spent all day working on the encounters for a dungeon in my first campaign. It's roughly 10 encounters and 8 pages (two columns each.) Should it be taking me this long to make encounters, and how many should I have per-adventure? I've run 3.5 and 4e games before, but I've never really bothered to do much to plan out the adventure as I am now (usually I load up a monster generator or PCGen and just "wing" the details.) What takes up the most time is trying to come up with interesting rooms, traps and transcribing monster stats to wordpress docs.

 

[Stormonu]

If you use the medium experience track, it takes a party of 4 adventurers about 20 encounters of equal CR to go up a level (that's pretty much consistent all the way to 20th - though at 9th, 12th, 14th and 15th, it's a little less).

If you're doing the level of detail you'd find in a published adventure I can easily see it taking several days to put together a single module. The more shorthand you use and the fewer stat blocks you have to write from scratch, the less time it'll take, of course.

Overall, though, unless you're planning to publish this for others I wouldn't worry overmuch about "how many" encounters you set up for an adventure. Worry more about whether you're enjoying the level of work you're putting into this versus the fun you get out of the final product. It doesn't have to be perfect - it just has to be fun.

 

[tylermalan]

As long as you have the basics in mind, planning encounters isn't TOO time consuming unless your PCs are higher level. How long did it take you to construct 10 encounters?

 

[Ixis]

Pretty much all day Friday, from around 10am to 10pm.

 

[tylermalan]

Pretty much all day Friday, from around 10am to 10pm.

....yeeeeeeeah... that's a long time. Unless your encounters are so good that they rival the best published adventures, I would say this is too much time. Why did it take 12 hours to make 10 encounters? Were you planning lots of background information? Was it difficult to find the monsters you needed at the appropriate challenge level?

 

[Azmyth]

This is how my process works, don't know if it'll help you...

I've always taken the story approach to campaign design. I begin by fleshing out one or two main story arcs, a couple smaller ones and at least one red herring. I use a story mapping technique. Take a piece of paper and make a square at the top of the page. Write your main story or idea in the square. Connect it to another idea (square) with lines and arrows. I use circles for NPC's and group them within an arc to show their significance. At the end of these arrow trails you place your conflict and resolutions. Reading from the top down, you have the entire tale(s). With all of your ideas on paper, you now have your Map as the foundation that drives the need to build encounters, instead of the other way around. I also recommend using HeroLab for creating your critter and bad-guy stat-blocks.

My 2 centavos...

 

[Ixis]

....yeeeeeeeah... that's a long time. Unless your encounters are so good that they rival the best published adventures, I would say this is too much time. Why did it take 12 hours to make 10 encounters? Were you planning lots of background information? Was it difficult to find the monsters you needed at the appropriate challenge level?

I used this to determine the CR type, and the Bestiary to pick the monsters. What took the most time was transcribing the statblock shortlists, editing the monsters so they'd work in the campaign (this game takes place in the 1930s) and coming up with background information. Also I wanted most of the challenges to be somewhat interesting (one of them is an automatic car wash that's part water trap part gelatinous cube encounter. The gelatinous cube is kinda soapy and devours any and all organic materials.)

 

[tylermalan]

That sounds pretty awesome. Well, what did you learn from it? Is there anything that you would cut out of the process next time? Maybe transcribing all the statblocks?

Also, have you had the session yet?

 

[Ixis]

Haven't had the session yet, but it's the changing everything and adding guns that takes the most time. What I learned was not to try and use online monster generators and to just do it by hand (typing it out is much faster.)

Also drawing out the map ahead of time and having a rough idea of what you want helps. I plan on posting the game here as I make it. It'd be nice to have a full campaign to give out.

 

[tylermalan]

Ahhhhh, adding guns. It sounds more like you're not just making an encounter, but laying the foundation for an entire campaign. I would be willing to bet that next time you prepare a session, it won't take nearly as long.

As a reference, sometimes I wait until the day before a session to start preparing it (I play once every two weeks) and it isn't TOO uncommon for the preparation to take 4 hours or so. Much longer than this, though, is pretty much unheard of for me.