On Wed, 14 Mar 2007, Mary K. Kuhner wrote:
> I know some people on this newsgroup have done Adventure Path games
> before. How did you deal with the pacing? Did you introduce lots of
> side material in between the main arcs? Just accept that the PCs'
> relation****p with NPCs and the world changes with dizzying speed?
> Something else? Are there character personalities which
> should/shouldn't be preferred in such a game?
We played the Shackled City Adventure Path (SCAP), and did the following.
* De-emphasised the passage of time in the game. There wasn't a whole lot
of "we're doing this today, then that tomorrow" in the game, so time was
always "fuzzy". Also, nobody kept a detailed record of events, so there
wasn't any way of quantifying the passage of time in game once we'd been
playing for more than a month or two.
* Had downtime between adventures. Most of our magic items got upgraded
between adventures, which means it took more than a trip to Capital City
to buy the item - it also took days (and then weeks) for our
weapons/armour/stat boosters to be upgraded.
* Did side-journeys for reasons unrelated to SCAP. For example, when the
elven wizard reached 5th level, the player wanted him to go home and get
promoted from journeyman wizard to master wizard, and the other characters
went with him, met his family, squabbled with each other over
misunderstandings caused by the complexity of elven culture, and so on. We
also decided that the dwarven cleric's family mine was between Cauldron
and the elven kingdom, so the characters detoured there, got to see the
signs of the massacre that killed the dwarf's family, the family tombs
with the inscriptions carved by the then 30 year old dwarf (~10 years old
in human terms), and so on.
* Did one additional adventure when the op****tunity presented itself. The
dwarven cleric cast dismissal on the human swashbuckler while on Occipitus
(a hellplane) so that the swashbuckler wouldn't go through with her offer
to sacrifice herself for the good of all. Because dismissal sends you to a
random place on your home plane, the swashbuckler wound up in a cold and
gloomy country, with conifer forests instead of jungles, snow instead of
monsoonal rain, and villagers hiding in their cellars from their undead
lord. When the others got back to the prime material plane, they scried,
tele****ted, reconciled with the swashbuckler, and then did a stand-alone
Dungeon adventure that the DM liked but couldn't otherwise have used.
* The elven wizard's PC had the most problems with the passage of game
time, because he got promoted too quickly (she had developed titles - and
hats/cloaks - that arcane spellcasters were awarded at 5th, 9th, 13th and
17th level). She made up a cultural assumption that elves who went
travelling among the shorter-lived races lived life at a much faster rate
than those who stayed at home, went on adventures more often, and
therefore were forced to master stuff they were already learning more
quickly than if they'd been in their sedate, "nothing happens in a hurry
here" Elven home.
* My character's story arcs were about stuff that didn't need specific
amounts of time to accomplish. For example, the dwarf (my PC) wanted
revenge on the half-orc who killed her family 30 years ago - it didn't
matter to her whether it took 30 years or 35 years to find and kill him.
At my request, the DM picked one of the villains from the second adventure
to be the person who killed her family, because I wanted the
characterisation to be more about adjusting to life after fulfilling the
oath of vengeance than about being vengeful and obsessive. Once she killed
the half-orc, her goal was to one day be favoured enough by St Cuthbert to
true resurrect her family - again, it didn't matter to her whether it took
a year or a century to get that powerful.
Hope this helps,
Gary Johnson
--
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