Encounter vs. Story
I will be taking a break from running a completely homebrew game for awhile and switching to a vendor published storyline. This made me choose between companies putting out adventure paths, I looked at two, Wizards of the Coast’s (Wotc) Scales of War, being published currently in Dungeon, and the Paizo Pathfinder Adventure Paths. I will be using D&D 4e to run, but that really didn’t factor into my choice as conversion is pretty easy for me.
Scales of War is pretty good stuff. It is set in the Points of Light semi-Generic setting that Wotc uses as base for 4e. The flavor is pretty much straight up D&D, classic classes, pseudo European based land with lots of big hairy monsters around. It is meant to take characters from level 1 to 30, covering the Herioc, Paragon and Epic tiers of 4e D&D.
Paizo has four adventure paths out as of this writing. The first was Rise of the Runlords, I read about half of that one and really thought it was a good story. The second was Curse of the Crimson Throne, I haven’t read any of this line, but it gets good reviews in general. The third was Second Darkness, which has a very cool overstory, but the sections I read seemed oddly disjointed, each was individually good, but the connections seemed off to me. The newest isn’t complete yet, Legacy of Fire is set in a Arabian Knights sort of setting. All the adventure paths are meant to take the characters from level 1 to 15, which is plenty of time to fill out a story.
Looking at the Adventure Paths from Wotc and Paizo you can really see the different company focuses. Wotc focuses more on excellent encounters and set pieces, Paizo focuses more on the over all story. Each fight in Scales of War is carefully crafted, challenging and designed to show off the 4e engine to its full potential. Paizo on the other hand has some excellent encounters, but clearly the focus is on the overall story. Neither is terrible, Scales of War has an interesting storyline, it just isn’t a knock out, while Paizo’s lines have some really interesting encounters, but they are not as well done as Wotc’s. I find the contrast really interesting, Wotc is clearly still showing off their new engine and they do it very well, Paizo on the other hand is in a harder place, no new engine to show as yet so they are making sure the story really sings.
In the end I went with story, picking the Legacy of Fire from Paizo. It has exotic flavor and my players aren’t super tacticians so the story matters more to us, but I could have gone either way quite easily. It will be interesting to see how this changes over time. Paizo has their Pathfinder rules coming out in August, they might want to have a path that shows off what the new system can do. Wotc on the other hand is getting more comfortable in their 4e skin, will they shift from an encounter to a story mindset as they proceed? It will be fun to watch either way and as long as both companies keep producing great lines of adventures I will be reading from both!
I havent played the scales of war yet.
As to Paizo, we played the rise of the runelords for a bit before it pushed us into 4E.
I mean no snark or foul, it is the simple truth. The encounters were beautiful, inspired, and absolutely lethal. DMing it, I can claim 3 TPK’s in the first three chapters (one each).
These were experienced gamers who were slaughtered by encounters that were just meatgrinders. If you have any experience with the Age of Worms AP, same problem – beautiful and inspired story…built with LETHAL encounters.
Currently in chapter 8 of AoW, with 9 total PC kills…it’s just not so much fun anymore.
Do you stick strictly to what is in the module? I have to admit I will adjust to player level. I will kill players and I do want a challenging game, but if they are clearly out matched I will adjust encounters.
Our GM is very by the book when it comes to running combat encounters (no fudging!), and we only had one guy die throughout the entire Rise of the Runelords AP (in 3.5e), though we had one likely TPK we fled from (Xanesha). None so far in Crimson Throne, and we’re running that with a small party of 3 PCs (in Pathfinder). Nothing in them has seemed more deadly than anything else we’ve run through.
Now of course in the APs the “story” isn’t some separate thing from the game – if you go full tactical and don’t bother with the roleplay, you won’t have all the allies and perks, which in turn makes the combats harder. And you have to be OK with fleeing if you are in over your head…
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With the Pathfinder Adventure Paths, they are currently built to fit with the OGL of the d20 system and are meant to be easily converted to whatever system you want, hence the lack of ‘encounter builds’ in the books.
However, with the release of the Pathfinder RPG at GenCon, they will fully put the Adventure Paths in their own rule set. They will still be compatible with other editions, but they are going to focus on showing off their rules with the release of the next AP Council of Thieves, which should be coming out the same time as the Pathfinder RPG.
I find it interesting that you picked the one that’s not complete yet. I’ve read the first installment and it looks like a great start, but I would have thought you’d be more interested in a known quantity rather than pinning your campaign on a series that might do things that don’t click with your crew in the future.
- Brian
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The flavor is what really won me over, most of the others have a more of the same standard D&D feel, this one is still D&D, but with enough spice to be interesting. I admit taking it on faith that the path will finish strong.
I ran the first adventure in the SoW adventure path. I would agree that the encounters are where the adventure shines. My biggest problem was that the encounters are arranged in a way that feels very fake: If you look at the dungeon in RaR, the hostages are spread all over the place to turn it into an easter egg hunt. My players chaffed on running around, picking up a hostage every couple encounters.
The overall story of SoW is okay (at least what I read from #1-#4; I gave up on it after that) but feels a bit disjointed at times – you really need to push the players in certain directions to get the adventure to actually work because parts of it are built on rails.
The PF adventure paths are much more organically written, with a story that’s not nearly as linear but you do have to engineer the encounters differently (e.g., breaking them in to individual encounters to avoid overwhelming encounter-based powers). The Rise of the Runelords is a pretty cool story with lots of potential and very flexible. I just picked up the first two adventures for the Legacy of Fire and am planning on running it – I like what I’ve read so far although I think I like the RotR story line better.
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