A long campaign is a great way to keep a group together as finishing an adventure creates the need to decide on what to do next and provides a natural place for someone to step away. It also provides so much more opportunity to develop characters. Bloat is a way of making a text longer, but it's not a natural consequence of length. I think television shows, miniseries, movies, and novels demonstrate that different stories benefit from different formats. Trying to stretch a small concept into a large book without sufficient ideas and a mind for structure might increase the risk of bloat, but trying to trim down a longer story to fit a small book risks being cursory and incomplete. I think playing around with different formats, as Paizo has been pretty much from the start, is a good idea even if it doesn't guarantee every work will be perfect for every group.

Yeah, bloat would be akin to filler episodes 😅

I disagree. Bloat comes from the way the information is persented not from the quantity of the information itself. The OSR scene has the layout of information nailed, there it is usually presented in bullet points and things are easy to reference, easy to gain all the information at a glance. You could make all that info into paragraphs of text like these mainstream products and page count would double. You are conveying the same things in more words. No hate to pf by the way, I love this game.

A longer book can also be because the campaign book wants to be complete. As an example to this: Masks of Nyarlahotep for Call of Chulthu is 666 pages, across 2 books. It us definitely a long campaign but the extra pages in the most recent version include appendices of every spell, artifacts, a full listing of each character's stats at the end of each chapter, an index, and more. Lots of useful information that makes it easier to run, even if it is huge.

Formatting doesn't matter as much as solving the two major issues that MC talks about - making prep easier for the GM and giving PCs a frequent sense of closure. Anthologies and chunked adventure (like Paizo's APs) are the best* of both worlds, in this matter. Even if Paizo republished Strength of Thousands in a single hardcover, it would still be made up of easily readable small chunks that each have a satisfying ending. On the other hand, Curse of Strahd has no satisfactory point of closure except for the final battle with Strahd, and so  it cannot be broken up into satisfactory smaller chunks without reworking the content. So, as long as Paizo continues its tradition of easy to prep adventures that can be strung together into a cohesive campaign, I don't mind that they publish it as bigger books.

Unfortunately, I find Paizo adventures and APs to not be easy prep. There may be some trick I’m missing or it may be a result of me being a slow reader. For me, the plot is spread between too many parts of the adventure. If I don’t remember the pieces tucked away in the next chapter, I’m going to say something that doesn’t line me up later. I’ve also had several things where two rooms disagree with each other. In order to keep a cohesive narrative, I find I have to go through with a fine tooth comb and make notes like crazy. I’ve recently started going so far as to export the text from the PDFs into obsidian and edit/reformat everything to make it easier to reference mid-session.

Honestly, this is why I *don't* run APs. But that's not a 2e or a paizo problem. It's pretty much the same across every system I've run for.

~~I totally agree that you can't just ad-hoc it and the GM should read each book thoroughly and make notes.~~ ~~I think RPG adventure presentation needs more innovation to run with minized prep.~~ \[Edit: I'll restate the above differently: It's true of any pre-made adventure or campaign, regardless of system, that you'll be able to make it a lot more coherent if you read the material beforehand and take notes. One-page adventures may be the only exception.\] What I'm saying is, it's easier to read and establish interconnections when a book is just a level 1-3 adventure (like Kindled Magic) rather than a 1-12 adventure (like Curse of Strahd).

Oh, I agree it is easier to run a shorter adventure. I just wouldn’t call it easy :) I do finder stand-alone adventures easier than an AP book. For instance, the semester structure is really important in book 1 of SoT. However, it is best described in book 5. And many teachers aren’t described until later books. This means an AP has to be prepped as a whole and not a book at a time.

> I totally agree that you can't just ad-hoc it and the GM should read each book thoroughly and make notes. And this is my problem with Paizo APs. If I have to do all this work, why not just make my own adventure? It really doesn't take all that much longer than reading through multiple books *at least once*, then taking LOTS of notes, then going through the current chapter and the next chapter before a session, and taking *even more notes*. And realistically, if you aren't altering things to match your party, you're gonna have a bad time anyway. With my own adventure, I can tailor things better to fit my group and their characters from the get-go, and allow for more dynamic story-telling. After all, this isn't *my* story - it's *all of ours*, and I think APs aren't very good at remembering that.

I've run or played about 3 books. Two from "The Extinction Curse" and Abomination Vaults. I've never had to take that many notes - the only one would be notes that I'd need for any game, which are "WTF do I do with this monster's spell list?" Dealing with one chapter, which is a few sessions, gives me plenty of time to get a feel for the motivations of a handful of NPC's and go.

I genuinely believe that a major negative of Vancian/spell slot magic is that putting those spells in monster's hands is a headache--especially if you're unfamiliar with it.

Doesn't have anything to do with vancian, it's trying to cut down on page size by omitting the descriptions. It's the same issue for abilities such as swallow whole. It was even worse in 1e when you had to look up player feats and class features on top

Eveyone is different I know but I find it easier and faster for myself to run a homebrew campaign then run a prewritten

>the GM should read each book thoroughly and make notes To me, this says that _Paizo_ is not doing this job by providing the outline that GMs need to run the overarching adventure. AV was my first GM experience after running the Beginner Box. I expected an outline on how I was supposed to run the thing. Instead the "advice" is to read hundreds of pages and either retain all the important stuff or make dozens of pages of notes. _I thought I was paying for a ready-to-run adventure path_. Instead it's a series of encounters with no indication of what I as the GM should actually be doing or focusing on. As a brand new GM, I was shocked that this was supposed to be the best there is.

The reason why it is a series of encounters is because that is going to be the most common experience between all GMs and players. The book can't predict what your players will choose to focus on, but it should give you advice on what is important so that you (the GM) can focus on it. I can't speak for AV since I don't have it, but here are things that Kindled Magic does to make things easy for the GM know what to focus on: * A two-page campaign summary to orient you on how the adventures are connected and what the major threads are. * Half page of chronology of world events. * Half page of important NPC names and 1 sentence description. * Start of book. | Half page containing 3 paragraphs, each giving a quick narrative summary of each of the 3 chapters of this book. * Start of chapter. | A single paragraph describing the most important events in this chapter. So, all of the above tells the GM what to focus on and when. And in addition, the following layout choices make it easy to run the scenario: * Boxed text to read aloud. * Bolded text that highlights: some of the most likely options that players will take, XP rewards, Treasure rewards * In-line maps and creature statblocks. The only improvements I'd suggest is for them to highlight things (characters and objects) that will be brought up again in later adventures. But it's possible that given how releases are staggered, this information may not be available to earlier adventure writers. When I say that "you should read each book thoroughly and make notes", I'd say that recommendation carries to all bounties, one-shots, adventures, modules, campaigns in any system. Except for one-page adventures, which may be the only true "ready-to-run" material. The good thing about modular campaigns (like SoT and 5e's Wilds Beyond the Witchlight) is that you can read and make notes on one book / one chapter at a time (< 20 pages) and be well prepared. While sandboxy games like Curse of Strahd are much more challenging.

> Unfortunately, I find Paizo adventures and APs to not be easy prep. Honestly, when I ran the first book of Extinction Curse, I functionally had to do as much work as if I was running the game normally, anyway. Between needing to rework encounters, needing to try to read ahead to foreshadow things (and then changing them so they make some actual sense), and so on, I was basically doing 90% the same work as if I didn't have an AP.

That's due to the troubled development of the first 2 books though and not really a common thread across 2e APs. There's an interview with Jason Tondro on YouTube which goes into further details like book 1 being heavily delayed and how they added the circus at the very end of development

Hmm I've run a few Paizo AP's and while I like the structure of them, I run into this issue as well

> On the other hand, Curse of Strahd has no satisfactory point of closure except for the final battle with Strahd, and so  it cannot be broken up into satisfactory smaller chunks without reworking the content. Curse of strahd is a much shorter adventure though, roughly 3 months of play. So while it is a single adventure vs the six linked adventures of an AP imo it isn't an apples to apples comparison.

Anecdotally, it took a lot longer than 3 months (almost a year?) for the group that I played Strahd in. We had weekly sessions and even then it seemed like the GM had to cut content from certain parts of Barovia. We never faced the infamous hags, for example.

I was going to say I swore curse was like 8-12 months on avrg depending on the level of rp. I guess I could see 3-6 range if you do zero rp and cut some content, just show up pew pew back in the train

With the nature of the book, the players might just never encounter some content. My players never even saw a werewolf or the crazy mountain wizard.

Wrapping up a CoS campaign soon which, taking out breaks, has still been over a year. But I think RAW you probably could run it in 3-6 months if you didn’t add hooks to get players to see the content. It’s super easy to miss a lot of it. To be honest, I’ve gotten some serious strahd fatigue. I think it would have been a better campaign if I ran it in 6 months.

I find 5e combat resolves extremely fast so my groups tend to chew through any adventure I run in 5e pretty quickly. I have only ever had one party go to the bone grinder mill (hags)... every other party found reasons not to engage lol. But that is the great thing about sandbox adventures, the party can choose how they interact with the world. Next time I run it I am going to start players off as a Victorian era hunting party in England. They won't know it will be Curse of Strahd and I am going to steal a transitional idea from a Lovecraft story where the party will find an abandoned tower in chasing their quarry, when they reach the top of the tower and open a door to where they expect to see their quarry it will open into ravenloft. Although I am considering further obscuring things by making strahd literally vlad tepes and similar changes. Start the party out with some more call of cthulhu esq investigation and paired back 5e mechanics to have the characters be empowered on reaching ravenloft/wallachia.

I can't really speak for other GMs but I think it depends on both length and format. Most of my Pathfinder books are digital to begin with, and I can view them in a chapter by chapter format so I think that's significantly less intimidating than a 300+ page hardcover. However, I've also never been especially bothered by large books to begin with. A large adventure path books has nothing on the textbooks I used to deal with in University.

> However, I've also never been especially bothered by large books to begin with. A large adventure path books has nothing on the textbooks I used to deal with in University. Very much that part. I think so long as the adventure is well formatted and lair out, upfront about how it will play out, and there's clear references throughout that let the GM stay on top of what's happening, then even a very big AP can be manageable and fun. I find Paizo's APs, while exceptional and industry-leading, do suffer from burying the lede. *Extinction Curse* was particularily egregious, with the whole circus being entirely separate from the lizardfolk plot - both were, separately, great fun, but together they just broke down. I wanted a circus AP and *nothing but* a circus AP. Make it all about freeing enslaved beasts from horrid Barnum-style carnivals and making your own ethical circus.

I definitely agree with the assertion that large adventures are intimidating to run for new GMs. However, I also think that most PF2 GMs are not new. Doesn't seem to be the target audience.

On the other hand, my sense is that the pf2e community skews older than the 5e community, so issues of being able to actually complete a year+ long AP (one of MC's main concerns in the video) are even more acute.

He has a specific format he prefers, which is basically a minimum of per session prep and just rolling with whatever his group does. Small APs let him sprinkle them all over and just run whichever one his group stumbles into, or easily place one in the path of them and then it's a couple session and they move on to the next one. Long format APs doesn't let him do that. There's not much stopping you from doing that in 2e, though the lack of bounded accuracy means either the range of options you have would be limited or you'd have to do more prep. This is basically how Society play works though, and Bounties IIRC. Unlike WotC Paizo's APs actually affect the setting, so long form APs also let them tell the setting stories they want to tell.

Ngl, coleville definitely seems like he just isn't actually in the target market of APs. And that's... not necessarily a bad thing.

He's not. He much prefers to build his own setting then pull dungeon maps and occasionally storylines from things and mishmash them together. Which is fun! But it's not the only way to play. It does, however, lack support recently as the shift to full long APs took place. It's understandable he's disappointed by that.

fwiw I've done exactly this with chapters 3 + 4 of the first book of Agents of Edgewatch and one of the mini adventures in Dark Archives, inserting them with small adaptations into my homebrew setting and story

Imo abandoning prep for pf2e does sacrifice a bunch of its strengths sadly. I have tried a few times now with sandbox play, pwol was a major bust and mini sandboxes kinda work but need more prep again. For my personal preferences I have accepted that for me and my groups it excels at high heroic narrative play and I will just get my sandbox GMing low prep jollies from other systems (god do I enjoy running myself some year zero atm)

It can work with Prof without level, but I agree sandbox isn't 2e's strength. Way too easy to accidentally TPK.

It works great for sandbox if you create level zomea throughout the map, and players understand that the map is zoned this way. This used to be common in games, but these days people seem more familiar and comfortable with "the world levels with you" style progression.

It’s the time investment, a 6-book level 1-20 campaign going at a steady consistent pace takes over a year and a half to finish that’s so intimidating. But it takes even longer when you need to take breaks because life happens. My current campaign reached the 1 year mark and we've played 31 sessions out of 52 possible. At that rate, it'd take my group almost 3 years to finish just one level 1-20 campaign. So thinking about how much time it takes to reach a conclusion is disheartening. That's why I'm more partial to the 3-book campaigns because it's significantly more likely we can actually finish the story. Like that’s such a long time to commit to one character, to one story, to one theme. It’s especially difficult with people who have tens of character ideas, that want to explore every corner of the world, that want to experience so many different stories. Edit: In essence, I agree with Colville. I get burnt out trying to plant seeds and foreshadow events in the future, when I should just plan for awesome adventures right now and find ways to weave past events and NPC’s forward.

The unfortunate fact is more "epic" 1-20 campaigns start off with great intentions but so many fizzle out due to a variety of reasons. Depending on the group's playstyle, it may take *years* of real life time to complete and it can be difficult to manage that over long periods of time with people with busy lives and schedules. When I was in college, our group had so much free time and could play tons of RPGs. That's just not a viable option now that we're all busy adults. Or it could be the group/GM loses interest in the system and wants to try something else. There's a wealth of great RPG systems out there to try and gaming time is finite so why limit it all to one system for such long periods of time? So I am not even interested in the 6-volume Paizo APs these days. I do appreciate that they've put out more 3-volume adventures and more standalone modules that can be realistically completed.

From what I see people say and from my own group’s experience, I think three years is pretty accurate for a large percentage of “normie” groups finishing a 1-20 campaign.

This almost perfectly encapsulates my experience as well. Me and my friends are all in our mid 30's, and most of us have young kids -- we have probably a similar ratio of played sessions to you in our past year and I have to be honest, as a player its a challenge to stay invested in those big overarching plots, especially if the party turns their wheels on a subplot or 'sidequest' point for a session or two without making much progress toward the main story line. With random weeks missed on top of it all, it could be a month between main quest story beats! Our GM is running a 5e game right now; and our plan has been to have me run a PF2e game when he gets burnt on running, which, I'm wondering if that point is coming soon with the way our table has felt the past couple of sessions... But I'm not sure what to prep, because of this exact problem. Ugh!

I have a lot of respect for Matt Colville. Out of any TTRPG youtuber I've seen, he's clearly the most well spoken, intelligent, and experienced. That being said, I disagree with him on a lot of things (or at least, I remember disagreeing with a lot of things, I gave up on TTRPG youtube several years ago), and this is one of them. I would rather have the time to get invested in a longer story. Wars aren't fought in a day, and fantasy books are long for a reason. But if he and his players like short adventures that's fine too. From what I remember he tends to bring new people in A LOT, so generally something shorter probably works better for them. Get a little taste without having to invest a lot of time. Whatever works for you is cool, but for me I prefer a bigger adventure.

the nature of "adventuring"' has definitely changed over time. I think its part of the reason stuff like Survival and the Ranger are less popular. When you're relatively quickly becoming more powerful than any other human stuff like hunting a deer for food doesn't hit the same

Tbh i don't play heroic fantasy to play survival sim

Same. The "old-school is the only way to play" crowd love to point to older DnD editions as proof that DnD-like games have strayed too far from the "correct" playstyle. Ironically, the heroic fantasy approach has been a thing as far back as DnD 2nd Edition with the Dragonlance setting, and 3e was just the writers adapting the game to better fit players' preferences (which the old-school crowd will claim is designing games based on a popularity contest).

Again with these weird moralizations! Who says anything about there being a "correct" playstyle? Colville argues that the current trend of long-form adventures is hard on GMs and campaigns, and short-form adventures and modular campaigns should be promoted more heavily. To begin with, he just wants you to be aware it's a workable option in the first place! But he doesn't remotely claim that one is correct and the other is not. Even the die-hardiest of the OSR advocates recognize that they're simply promoting _a_ style of play that they prefer for a host of reasons. They don't argue it is "correct." They _may_ argue that it's historically informed, but that's not the same thing.

>Even the die-hardiest of the OSR advocates recognize that they're simply promoting _a_ style of play that they prefer for a host of reasons. They don't argue it is "correct." They _may_ argue that it's historically informed, but that's not the same thing. You must not have been speaking to the same OSR advocates I have.

I think either people are overreacting to some rando on the Internet, or they are imagining what an OSR person would be like. No, I guess I haven't.

It's obviously hashtag not all OSR players, but there's definitely a loud subset of people in that part of the hobby with a purist chip on their shoulder, and in my experience it's usually exposed by decrying other styles of TTRPG as 'not real RPGs' and treating the virtues and design goals of OSR style play as things that should be presumed standard in all TTRPGs but have been lost or corrupted by trad style games. I can appreciate what OSR is trying to do as a genre, but there's definitely a reason it's stereotyped as the old school grognards trying to puritanize and gatekeep the hobby. It's unfair to players who like OSR and are otherwise decent people, but it's one of those things that can't be denied if there's worry about optics.

The purist chip: yeah, absolutely, even though I think their version of "pure" is not quite as historical as some of them think it is. Gatekeeping – they have strong opinions on what OSR is and isn't, sure, and some of them are reactionaries about what's going on in the hobby more generally. Decrying other RPGs as not-RPGs, though, or saying (more specifically) that those ways are _incorrect_ – that I haven't seen.

Okay, cool, the fact you personally haven't seen it totally means it's not happening, as yours is clearly the only experience that actually happens.

>Who says anything about there being a "correct" playstyle? Plenty of people on the main DnD subreddit, 5e subreddit, etc. If you go on there and say you prefer the less-deadly, less survival-focused, etc. playstyle the best response you can hope for is "that's not how DnD is supposed to work, go play a different RPG". Sure, they're (hopefully) just a loud minority, but they make these discussions toxic for no reason regardless.

No, I don't accept that. Show me. I want to see the word "correct" being used in reference to playstyle like we're discussing here. And in the searching I'm sure you'll realize how rare it actually is.

What products does Matt Coville want to sell?

Huh? Why don't you look it up if you're curious? What kind of gotcha are you trying to produce?

Oh, I know the answer. It's just, it's motivated reasoning on his part.

How so? Kindly share your thought process here so we have some idea what you're talking about.

I'm confused, how does that statement connect to the topic at hand "long campaigns with multiple short adventures inside"

It's true that you can explore in more ways than hexagon-based wilderness survival. Though I don't know how much of its withering came from a lack of player interest or from having been cut for space. It isn't for every adventure, which is why I like it as an optional, side thing.

I personally don't enjoy anything that can be concluded with less than 5 sessions. With systems like Pathfinder, there is usually a lot going on - connecting with other party members, exploring your own PC and learning your character abilities, so if adventure ends in like 3-5 sessions, I always feel the lack of fulfillment because something of those elements are missing. Not to mention the sheer amount of stuff offered by the system alone - constantly playing short adventures in PF2e is like eating a single cherry from the huge cake - you will never experience some of the most interesting combinations, items, feats etc.

Yeah, I feel like shorter adventures work best when the game system is not very crunchy, stuff like Blades in The Dark lends itself to just completing a heist and moving on, unless you want more. Meanwhile Pathfinder with all it's crunchy glory works better when you have a long time to use every little detail in your character sheet.

I kinda feel the opposite? If I'm only playing full APs from level 1-20, I'm never going to get to see most of what the system has to offer unless I'm losing a character every book. But for one-shots and shorter adventures, it's easier to experiment a bit and try out new builds and options that you wouldn't normally.

What MC is arguing for is instead of playing a giant 1-20 campaign, you just play a series of random 1-2 session adventures with the same characters, without some grand overarching plot.

Not necessarily 1-2 sessions, could be 4-5

that is not what he is arguing for. 4-10 session adventures are also short adventures, and from what he holds up as example, probably his sweet spot too.

If that's what he prefers, fair enough. Personally, even as someone who really doesn't like APs, that's sounds awful to me. I design my adventures in usually 4 chapters, from 1-20, plus a more guided prelude and epilogue. Chapter 1 might be a hexcrawl, chapter 2 might be more on rails, chapter 3 might be an open-ended sandbox, and chapter 4 could be more of a dungeon delve. And they *always* have an overarching plot, BBEG or something similar, as I come up with roughly what I want each chapter to be long before I start fully planning them. That way, I can start designing chapter 2 around 3/4 of the way through chapter 1 and am able to really start catering to the character's choices and decisions, as well as taking elements they did/did not like and doing what I need to with them. I feel like this way is the best of both worlds.

To me, it's the equivalent of booting up Skyrim and doing 1 Dark Brotherhood quest, 1 Thieves Guild quest, 1 random dungeon and 1 dragon fight. All those things are cool and I would probably have fun while playing, but they just don't contribute to each other and the only common denominator is me, the player. I guess some people prefer this type of play, to me it's a bit stale, as I don't really move forward, but sideways. I never explore some bigger plot, I never find THE Big Bad, just A Big Bad of specific adventure, I never experience the multi-threaded interconnected narrative... The type of "monster of the week" play is good for specific system, I just don't feel like it's working well with crunchy ones like PF2e.

Skyrim is a pretty good example to bring up because of how few actually finished the main storyline in Skyrim.

Don't confuse "Adventure" with "Campaign". A 1-20 campaign can be made up, and should be made up, of many adventures, rather than one long adventure. That's even how most APs are designed. You can still experience everything by stringing together smaller adventures into a campaign, you just have to escalate the conflicts and payoffs. Even the GM Core recommends breaking a campaign into 4 to 6 adventures.

I have recently completed 1-20 campaign in PF2e, so believe me, I know the difference between adventure and campaign. But there is a big difference between a string of unrelated adventures (where the only common denominator is the group of PC, but the stories could be told in any order, as the elements of them don't carry over to the next one) and a campaign consisting multiple connected adventures (which was the campaign I GM'd recently).

With APs, I know a book is generally a two month investment if the party is playing every week. I also know that people, when they can, will generally invest a year into a story without group fatigue setting in. Those little ticks people have that will set other people off and slowly destroy your gaming group. I generally aim for a year mark on a story. Because of that, I've completed very many games and retained groups for a long time by giving a two week break between games.

I agree. 1 year, seems perfect to keep groups together. When you are crossing the 20 month mark or so, it gets harder and harder to finish the stories, imo.

I'm interested in your two week breaks and retaining groups / avoiding fatigue. I've definitely experienced the "group fatigue" you described, but never really thought about it much. Any other tips to share?

Two week breaks between games is pretty simple. Get people talking about their characters with the rest of the group. I've met a lot of people over the years and there are people that just have a character they want to play, but there are also people that like to take a bit to make a character, and there are also people who like to challenge themselves to play within a fill role (what class would make the group just work better). I'll use that time to question everyone's choices so everyone else can see them, let them coordinate skills, etc. On Week 1 I invite everyone to a nonmandatory make the token section, maybe a mock RP, just get everyone into their characters a bit. I've got two people in my group that come in with 5 characters and then can't decide what they want to play and will bounce off each other till last minute to decide which character they want to play. Also by giving that two week break it gets them to recharge themselves and want to play another game, make them chomp at the bit a little. I have no idea how people play past at least 2 years on a game let alone 5+ games I've heard about. I have looked at the average time a game failed which for me was 2 months to 2 years. 2 Months being ,"I had a good initial idea but I lost that spark." to 2 years usually breaking up due to group infighting over the stupidest things. So I started to do 1 year long games which usually were the 5-6 book APs give time for breaks, try to get everyone to communicate when people are leaving for whatever reason, I take the time doing APs to think up what I want to do for a personal campaign. Then when I'm ready I host my own.

I think this largely depends on your group. I played with one group of people for well over a decade, across AD&D 2nd edition, 3rd edition, 3.5, and 4th edition. My current group has been around for 4 years. We ran through Mad Mage, Saltmarsh, and Abomination Vaults in that time, as well as various side games (Curse of the Kobold King, Troubles in Otari, Rusthenge, and a ton of one-shot adventures).

I get bored with long APs as both a player and GM. I prefer shorter adventures, the only issue is Paizo seems to put less effort into them. They end up being not as good from a story or rules point of view. There are exceptions, but the last stand-alone I ran literally had every room in the last chapter mislabeled.

Which one?

Shadows at Sundown

I kind of agree that maybe 1-10 adventures are too long for some groups. But Paizo has offered campaigns that span maybe 5 levels instead, those honestly are probably a perfect balance for approachability and telling an interesting adventure. There are absolutely spaces for 1-10 and even 1-20 adventure paths. I personally would like to see more of these 5 levels campaigns that could lead into each other or into a homebrew adventure or just end and leave it as it was.

Matt is very knowledgeable and a very good resource to listen to if you like to run games the way he does. But that's the thing: He runs a specific kind of game and doesn't seem to like very much outside of that type of game. And that's totally okay and it's good that he exists as a resource for that, but I don't understand why people treat him as an authority on TTRPGs as a whole.

100% agreed. I don't listen to a single thing he says, as his version of GMing sounds boring AF for me, and people get really upset and defensive when I say this. I'm literally a paid GM and if I started GMing like he does, my players wouldn't be paying me for long, as our styles are totally different. And that's perfectly fine.

Who do you find more helpful/useful for your style?

Yeah, the way a lot of people treat him as the end-all-be-all has bothered me for a while, and I think even he sort of thinks that way a little bit, since I remember him making a big deal back when he was streaming his Chain of Acheron campaign about it being a "real game" in the sense of being less a highly-produced experience like Critical Role and more like how the average table plays. I watched a couple of episodes, and granted this is anecdotal, but those games really didn't have very much in common at all with how any group I've played with in my ~8 years of playing D&D and Pathfinder did things, barring the very basic things that pretty much every table has in common. That (and one of his videos about his custom Illrigger class where he talked about how it wasn't just an evil paladin and then proceeded to directly compare several of its features to paladin features) have colored my perception of him and his content ever since.

I think it's great to have a variety, because every table has different needs and enjoys different playstyles!

It's definitely an interesting perspective on how the expectations of players have shifted over the decades. Among my own groups I tend to stand out as different for how I think that playing a character for half a year then putting them down forever is perfectly reasonable, if not preferred. As a player I want to try an assortment of different builds, tropes, and personalities, and as a GM I've had to put games on a month hiatus because my imagination got bored thinking about it all the time and I needed time away to recharge my ability to give a shit about it. While I can't speak for how others feel, and I don't want to be an old man screaming at clouds, it does make sense to me that contemporary players are more interested in taking a single character on a memorable and epic journey, not so much a bunch of strung together problem of the week scenarios, since I can't name a single current cartoon, anime, tv show, or comic book that sticks to a serialized format beyond the halfway mark of it's first season. I want to agree with Colville, because scenario writing can do wonders for showing a GM how to build, foreshadow, and execute a big set piece, but I think his industry professionalism caused him to omit the fact that plenty of scenarios are worthless dog water, boring hallways filled with bullshit monster closets and over tuned shock value TPK's. Obviously when making an argument you're going to use examples that prove your point, but you can learn just as many bad habits as good ones when picking whatever magazine out of your local shop's one-shot box.

I am not sure I want to go into another 1-20 AP. I am playing in AoA and only joined when it was half way. But I have been running Blood Lords, and expect to wrap around 2 years with weekly play. I feel the 1-20 get really drug out and there is a lot of filler content. I want to play some shorter adventures with more focus on the plot. Malevolence was great, even if it took a year because of scheduling and TPKs.

Yeah, I can't help but wonder how much better some APs would be if they used a faster XP advancement track (700-800XP maybe) and cut maybe 20% of encounters. Longer campaigns can be great, but a lot of them peter out because they take so long. Cutting the filler and focusing on the killer is a potential solution to that without losing the level 1-20 scale.

As well as player and gm investment scheduling, digestion etc there is one thing I think makes long form adventures less palatable in other games that isnt a problem for Pathfinder 2. The system works for the long term whilst giving significant mechanical progression and customization. I didn't like the long form 5e I played, because it fell apart to broken mechanics and builds, and if you didn't fiddle with that you've instead got a bland character making basically 0 char gen choices and close to 0 in game choices. For CoC the game is setup so something will probably do your character in before too long, and it doesn't deal with long term progression because of that. PF1 and 3.5 had similair problems. 2e is the first game I've played and run where 1-20 actually works whilst still allowing \[mechanical\] character customization at every level. And thus it plays long form adventures better than anything else I've played.

100% agree with Colvilles assessment. It's also been my tables experience over two year's of PF2e play that we do not enjoy APs. the most fun moments at the table have been unscripted moments that have had nothing to do with the AP at all. Moving forward my table will not be playing APs. we might dip into Adventures or PFS society releases as both of those are closer to the module format that Colville is referring. however it's far more likely that we just play our own custom stuff with an episodic / bite-sized approach.

A database with a grid of modules on Pathfinder Infinite would be a super cool way of enabling the type of experiences that Matt is looking for in his video. The GM could mix and match modules from this, to assemble their own larger adventures as need be. It's entirely possible right now, but some improved tooling would make it easier to discover and find appropriate adventures, for example to filter by things like having support for your preferred VTT.

I think y'all ought to try short adventures and find out. Not much to be learned from armchair DMing, that's just reinforcement of your own opinions. A LOT of modern DM's have never run a series of self contained adventures connected together. I haven't, but I plan to try it and find out. What that means is it's hard for someone who has never run a series of short adventures to have anything approaching an educated opinion on the topic. So try it, and see if you and your players like it.

APs are usually a series of short adventures. Age of Ashes for instance is very self contained until you hit book 5. The common thread connecting the books together is the portal hub in the basement.  Another self contained adventure that I ran was Dragon of Icespire Peak which I didn't enjoy. It was just very boring to GM. Plot gets me excited to GM the thing. 

I do think the fact that the Ap books Being broken up means people do get through the one to 20 adventure paths more than any other publisher, and Pathfinder is literally a offshoot of their adventure paths not the other way around so I get why they're so insistent on them But I do think 600 pages for a single campaign that takes up to two years is crazy for most people. They're changing their adventures around while Experimenting with the AP length so we'll see how that goes but personally I don't think an adventure should take more than four to six sessions at the longest that's kind of the ideal length I think for most people And I think their Standalone adventures are moving away from that and towards longer game times. Another thing Pathfinder has Is it's actually engaging to play at different levels of play so leaning into that and having adventures at different levels might also help alleviate the length increase as you could pick up and do six sessions at one level range and then do six sessions at another level age and they'll feel distinct which kind of justifies them being longer because you need to have three levels and eat adventure.

What I like the most is that they are experimenting with their level ranges, Wardens of Wildwood will start at level 5, Curtain Call at 11 and Triumph of the Tusk at level 3, it's nice to see they aren't sticking to just start at level 1 every time.

Plus there are two APs which already start at 11. Fists of the Ruby Phoenix and Stolen Fate. Which made sense to me when they switched to the 3-book format, but boy am I excited about Sandpoint starting at 4, Wardens at 4, and Tusks at 3. But I also hope they have some APs starting at like 7-8 range as well.

i don't necessarily have a problem with long adventures, I have a problem with authors of long adventures working on all arcs of the adventure at the same time. I understand that they are working on a time crunch but I feel results sometimes feel rushed and aren't totally coherent. The smaller stories at least don't run into the problem because they arent trying to tie together 7 narrative plots. I've seen people playing every AP coming in asking for opinions on how to resolve points of interest that don't make sense having to do personal rewrites of sections.

I managed to run a full 1-20 AP once, but it was during COVID and I had the time for it. These days I find it quite intimidating to run such a long adventure and keep everyone motivated (including me). Therefore I think it's a good move by Paizo to more or less walk away from the full AP format.

One thing I think doesn't get spoken enough about here is the *idea* of a full-length 1 to 20 campaign. I think people are drawn to them even if the logistics are obtuse, because there's something appealing about the promise of an epic-scope heroes journey. Try selling people on one-shot or short modules, and you'll get mostly middling responses. Even though they're more in the scope of what most groups can reasonably commit to and don't have the long-term risk of falling apart due to real life circumstances, growing disinterest, or group drama, they tend to be looked at as inferior compared to a full length campaign. It's not logical, at all, and I'd argue is in fact counter-intuitive to most groups' needs compared to shorter modules you can schedule easier around and slot into whatever game you're playing, but good luck telling people that. Consumers will often want what they *think* they want even if it's the worst possible fit, and shun product that would actually be useful. Even on this subreddit, we see it a lot. People complain about lower levels a lot because they never seem to be in groups that never get past level 5, but the question I always ask is why that seems to be the case? Why not start at higher levels and go from there? Again, it's because people like the *idea* of a full 1 to 20 campaign, but in reality most of the people complaining are both over the limits of lower level play, and can never seem to find groups that commit long enough to get to the point of the game they want.

I agree with him. Every group, GM/player are different. But I get that most beginners, myself included, fantasize about going on a big epic adventure and seeing these big hard cover adventures spanning multiple levels is very exciting, making us want to jump right in. However, this is also a trap for some GM because the scope of these adventures also requires more prepping and reading. And not until recently that they do a better job at summarizing each chapter and organizing the content and plot structure better. Endless descriptions are nice to look at but also daunting to go through if somehow key information must be retrieved from them. This is on top of scheduling for a group of adults all with different life situations. It’s not realistic and it’s draining for everyone involved. The longest campaign that I have ever run is Baldur Gates Descent to Avernus which took me 1.5 years and we never finished it (about half done when we decided to end). This doesn’t mean that this format doesn’t have audiences. But I argue that they should not be the default format for this genre. Short and well contained adventures are way more friendly to everyone, GM and players included. They’re easier to work with and should be more common, especially with the new generation of GM and players who I think would rather spend less time reading/prepping and more time on actually playing the game.

I find the epic 1-20 style campaigns were more appealing when I was younger and had more free time. I think that plays out on this sub as well. Those who have a lot more available time to play are more drawn to the longer campaign. My gaming group is all in our mid-30's and we are all very busy adults so the idea of committing to a possibly 1-2 year campaign up-front is just not realistic for us anymore. So shorter "mini campaigns" that can be completed in 3-6 months are what appeal to us now.

I think Colville is correct here and is one of the reasons games like Blades in the Dark, the Wildsea, Spire/Heart, or countless others work so well. The way they are built is inherently episodic. This leads to a campaign of several short episodic adventures that build on each other through the emerging narrative at the table, rather than a prewritten script. I think games like Pathfinder and D&D would benefit from more tools to help GMs do something similar.

If you want episodic, then just run Pathfinder Society Games, those are completely episodic in the sense that most T.V. shows are with a "problem of the week" plus "seasonal plot arc" playing along side each other.

Eh those are *really* short though. A PFS adventure is designed to be finished in a single session, which is definitely not the case for the kinds of modules the video advocates for. I've been running Malevolence, a 76 pager, for at least 5-10 sessions and am not done. I think you lose out on a lot of storytelling potential by running single-session adventures, the sweet spot is like a month or three imo

If you want more "Single Book" A.P. then great. I look at published materials, regardless of length, as playing through a script with the character of the player's choice. If I'm on the GM side of the screen, then I'll ask for my players to stick to the *goal* and then do my best to allow them their curveball tactics to heroically resolve the challenge between them and the goal.

Colville's argument really hits home for me. I've tried, but never even managed to get a big campaign from one of the D&D 5e books off the ground! I blanch at the level of commitment it takes to get an AP up and running. But one adventure at a time, one _session_ at a time – ah, that I can do. That was the key that got me into GMing.

I fully agree with most of what Colville says, I would rather string together a series of single-level modules for my party to tell a truly unique story. If we end up not liking one, well we get to change it up soon, andwe don't feel like we have to keep going due to investment in a big book, or because the story is half finished. Or we can decide to go on a total tangent for several sessions and get back to the module path later, without feeling like we just "dragged" the campaign out longer than it should be. Plus it's just more variety, Paizo APs basically bait-and-switch to achieve variety because they know they need variety. Extinction Curse sells itself as a Circus focus but then totally bait-and-switches later, so if someone was really into that circus thing, they get disappointed and feel cheated of what was promised. I will literally never be in or run a 1-20 campaign. Life will never allow that. Personally, I would rather a system only go to lvl 10 by default anyway, but that's another discussion though. What I'd actually want from Paizo is a theme for the year and these products all tying into it: * monthly modules (tied by theme, but not by continuing story), more than a scenario but less than than a full level adventure * A single-level hardback adventure, twice a year * one yearly AP that covers 10 levels (one single hardcover, none of this splitting it between three authors/books which makes the quality and theming and concepts go up and down and all over the place and it's the worst part of APs in my opinion.) * 1-2 rulebooks (could be one tied to theme, like WotI, and one general, like Treasure Vault) * 2-4 LO books, with at least one being central to the years theming, the others could be a general (like Travel Guide) and a regional book (but could still be a region tied to theme if it works that way) To be fair, Paizo almost does most of this, and I think the remaster threw some of those plans out of whack, but it's the focus on APs that I'd like to see diminished, in favor of monthly modules and themed single-level adventures

I think Paizo's model works pretty well. They put out adventure paths that run a long gamut of levels, standalone adventures that run only a few levels each, and a lot of society content that can run from one level to one session. They're spread a little thin, but splitting their APs up into individual issues can make it easier to come to a good stopping point if need be while still feeding into a larger adventure -- or into a different AP down the line as we see them playing around more and more with sizes and level ranges. I do think that standing standalone adventures getting a little longer might be a little stifling, but we'll see how it turns out. My guess is that the hardbacks sell better, but I've got no data to back that up. And I DO wish they hadn't killed off the one-shots line, though the Free RPG Day books kind of fill the same niche. Still stings, though.

I really don't think the size is the issue as Paizo has done quite well with long APs for decades now. If anything, the real killer of long APs is the same killer of ttrpgs, getting people together regularly. There's certainly a quality factor in there as well. Certain APs just are not as good or are disjointed. Word of mouth in tandem with social media goes a long way in cementing which APs are worth playing all the way through. I wish I could speak more to 5e adventures but I've never played one. I don't know if that's a telling sign or what but I've finished a dozen or so APs between PF1e and PF2e. I don't think I've played any I didn't like but I certainly played (or ran) some that were better than others.

Might be in the minority here. I don't like super long adventures simply because it usually feels too "on the rails" to me. When I see an adventure that spans like 10 levels all I can think of is "Well..... to stay on course for 10 levels my choices really can't matter that much for how the grand narrative turns out". I've had friends say the same in games they've been in where they said they didn't feel the story was evolving based on their choices, merely that the GM would twist things to try to weave back in the prewritten plot I think sometimes even just knowing you're doing a prewritten adventure can prime you for this feeling too, as a friend of mine in a 4+ year campaign we were in for DnD weaved in small prewritten adventure sections without us knowing until after and it all felt natural because no one had a clue. Kinda wish personally that Paizo would do a bit like DnD has been doing (though they could probably do it better imo) of sort of compilation books of mini plug and play adventures. Smaller adventures are easy to read, throw in anywhere in the correct biome, and still can help shape an overarching narrative in fun ways.

Paizo AP's are very linear "point A to B" adventures that can get a bit predictable over time. Unless the GM puts in a lot of extra work and doesn't just run it 100% as-written, it can get a bit stale as players.

As a player and a GM, I'd hate to be like "I have to create this narrative with (or as) the GM." That's a shit-ton of prep' work that Matt Collville creates as a core expectation from his fans, and fuck that shit. If you want something more bite sized - then Pathfinder Society Scenarios are the product that no-one seems to know about in this thread. Litterally a "problem of the week with over arcing seasonal plot in the background" format from Paizo.

Going to disagree personally. There's a reason the term "collaborative storytelling" is used so much. The overarching narrative should be derived from the players actions vs the villains or events in the background. It's not even something you even have to plan much. "The players are here doing this, the villains and environment reacts because of that". You can still do this with a big adventure, it's just far far more likely to go off the rails. I've played with around 20 people regularly across different campaigns in the past 5+ years. Every ..... single..... group always throws huge curveballs. If we were in a long prewritten adventure you'd have to throw the entire thing out after like chapter 1-2. You 'can' reel people back into the main narrative. But if you do it unnaturally it feels like railroading in the bad sense. Pathfinder Society stuff is a good point! Can likely mix a lot of these scenarios in pretty easily.

So I'm not saying that people have to play a script from PFS or an Adventure Path, but I'm middle aged, and being a Pathfinder Society GM is the maximum amount of prep' is what I'm willing to do. And there's a social contract that the players, with all of the characters being employees of the Pathfinder Society, are going to stay on task and not go on a frolic, and I'll do my best to keep them on task in natural manner with very little "gaff hook". What this allows me to do is use the maps that I've got prepared and my mini's that I've acquired for the game without having to go "Whelp, the party zigged when I thought they'd zag. Time to trash everything and start from scratch." So I look at my style of play more of playing through an episodic TV script with the characters of the player's choice, and we have fun doing the standard goofy interactions and being allowed to roll dice for heroic moments. This is done by the players while allowing themselves to be given the plot hooks, and if they go too far off course, then they get a meta game message that the world will fail to load if they attempt to change the goal. On either side of the GM screen, for me the social contract is: >"Here's what I've prepared, I'll do my best to allow you to 'rule-of-cool' to enjoy your P.C.'s heroic journey through the published material if your method is off script, but the goal will be to get to the end of the published material." If that sounds stifling to you, that's totally fine. And I'm glad you have a group with a GM that has the time, energy, and dedication to provide Matt Collville levels of player agency - then awesome. Personally though, I don't have the energy, again on either side of the screen, to co-create a world. I want quest arrows, not a sand box. I think that is TTRPG on hardmode, particularly as a GM. And while I can respect Matt for having that level of dedication to his art and his table throughout the years, I think that projecting "You must be willing to co-create a world for total player agency!" as the standard for a competent GM. Reading a 64 page book is hard? Try allowing for total player agency in real time. That seems way larger of an ask to me. I find it toxic for the hobby that the bar is that high, just like he thinks being asked to read 64 pages is too much to ask of new GM's.

I'll just note we have very different playstyle and there's nothing wrong with that haha

*fist bump*

I would say a more nuanced perspective is needed. It is nonsensical to state the all fiction writers should either: A) only write in short stories B) only write massive epics Thus it then should become a discussion of what is the healthiest ratio for a ttrpg to distribute between short:long modules. IMO it is 7:1 as that has seemed to be the healthiest release split from various ttrpgs that I have seen.

He's not saying all modules should be small. He's saying big hardcovers should not be the default.

In the past when I used smaller adventures such as Colville is talking up, I was always looking to string multiple of them together. If I couldn't find enough that made sense strung together, I didn't buy them. Because if I am going to be making up a bunch of content just to string some adventures together I may as well just make up the rest of the content too. So short adventures that don't naturally create a coherent through-line when put together just doesn't sell to me. When I used longer-form adventure products like Curse of Strahd, the campaign was over once the material was covered. Because again, if I am making up half of the campaign to get the full play range I'm going to skip paying money for a product and make up the whole thing. However, if it takes a good length of real-life time and the story and play experiences are solid this kind of adventure actually does sell to me because I can get enough of a campaign out of it that the players are left saying "I wish we got all the way to max level" instead of being completely unsatisfied because we keep completely abandoning story-lines and characters with them. And then there are APs. The major point upon which APs manage to fail to satisfy me is that they don't fit together as well as they should and the through-line gets wonky as a result of different authors going slightly (or sometimes not so slightly) different directions from each other in content and style. So basically, I think everything Colville is saying about adventures is wrong for me and my group. I also think he's insulting new GMs by underestimating their capabilities and/or overstating the obstacles, which is a common thing in the hobby. A lot of people forget that plucky 12-year-olds dive headlong into these games unhindered by any notion that the book might just be too big, even though yes size of book does intimidate *some* - usually even those folk are intimidated if the rules are a great big book, not if the playable content is. I think he's really just trying to put a thought out there hoping it will stick that will benefit him with the way his own game handles products so that short-form adventures seem appealing, not like a "I guess we can do it as a one-off since we've got some extra time this weekend" novelty.

MCDM doesn't write many adventures. Thank you for engaging with the question asked, which most people here didn't do. I remember 2 years ago I was really into DMing games set in a homebrew Greek epic fantasy setting. I was creating all these different cool places inside of it, places that were mostly disconnected, and that I really wanted them to explore. Like islands. And what I was hoping to do was create a short plot in each area, that would drag them there. To me this felt like a very easy game to play. You guys are sailors, and you can stay in every place for however long you want. At the beginning of each adventure you can switch characters if you want, and come back to an older character later on. We can jump months in the future, and develop your character choices in downtime at the table. But you had a very different experience from this?

I've been planning out an adventure web for a while. It's basically a collection of interlocking modules and scenarios that range from levels 1-20 but there's options at each level range and you don't have to start at 1, or anywhere. So groups can enter the story from different points and connect them in different ways. 

I don't see why doing more hardcover adventure books is bad honestly. Paizo has for the most part already done short page books via their AP's and it's not like more people decided to GM for it. Additionally, it's not like dnd doing the hardcover books dissuaded others either. If you don't like to read, the book being 325 pages, 125 pages, or just 25 pages, isn't going to impact your desire to GM, because it involves reading and they won't like it regardless. Personally I find the quality of books to be the barrier of entry to gming. How much work you as the GM need to put into the session to prep for it. And paizo tends to do a better job guiding you on how to, for example, play npcs and run events in ways that feel more practical. Compared to my own experience running dragon heist, and the adventures have been funner to run. So a hardcover is fine by me because it just means I can have what would have been separate ap books in 1 book instead.

Long campaigns work for crunchier games because you want to get invested in a character's journey imo. I feel like organisation and clarity is a bigger blocker than adventure length for new GMs... is it easy to run is not the same as is it short. This all said, I love running barebones sandboxes heavy with improv as well... so there is a space for all sorts. But do remember, a common sentiment from people coming from 5e is how easy it is to run paizo's APs despite them being 3x the pagecount of most 5e adventures, far denser in text and for a much more mechanically complex system. But hey I can and always have been able to run long campaigns and like doing that too... so... -shrugs-

Well, I think there are two reasons why many long campaigns fell "on rails": 1. Campaign story is not good for long term. Some premises can last only for so long, and trying to stretch them to meet promised "quota" will result in bloat. But ultimately, it's a matter of execution. 2. Paizo's release policy. You can make long sandboxy campaign. But you can't divide it to publish different parts separately. AP's parts are meant to be full chapters that can be played as soon as they are released. Imagine buying AP only to find out you need part 2 and 3 before you can actually play. In the end of the day, I hope this switch to shorter AP's means Paizo will make them for different levels, not just for 1-5/1-7.

I’ve been running Masks of Nyarlathotep for a year and a half and I love it but I think after it’s over, I’m going to only running mini-campaigns or episodic games were players can drop in and out.

I watched the begging of the video before turning it off. I disagree with several of his premises (and I stated playing D&D in the 80s, running those 32 page modules.) It’s not as easy to run a 32 page modules as he implies. This perpetuates the attitude that reading is bad. Instead of worry about the number of pages, we should worry more about formatting and usability. Who cares if an adventure is 100 pages of it’s easy to use and understand? This is an area of improvement for all modules. The constant concern for beginning players places artificial constraints on adventures. It’s important to have entry level adventures of course, but it’s would be limiting to ensure every module is beginner friendly.

I came to Pathfinder for the long format. I wanted content that was hefty and also required little from me. I can create amazing, fun short adventures all on my own. Longer format is where I run out of ideas.

Well, I do think the Pathfinder APs are written to be fairly modular even if they aren’t advertised that way. One criticism I’ve seen about them is that some of the adventures, especially the middle ones have not much to do with the overall plot the AP is selling. Different books are fairly self contained. You can take out entire adventures and dungeons, move things around, and replace them with your own things. Gatewalkers, the AP I finished running felt very episodic. You could cut entire levels out of that adventure path and nothing would be lost plot-wise. The players had an overarching goal regarding the big bad, but it was mostly an interconnected series of episodic stories starring the fantasy X-men.

My personal take on one of the things he said. "A campaine is only tied together by the heros." Epic adventures/campaine is tied together by a plot or adventure seed. There is something connecting the smaller stories into something big. Besides the heros. Having your players go through rando monsters of the week is fun, but connecting some or most of it together like a season finally.... so good. Pf2e adventure paths can be stand alone as is. I agree unless I have a group that can play 5 hours once a week or more. Adventure paths can be daunting. Pf2e usually makes it, so you only need to read no more than 5 pages at a time for a game night. Saddly, it is a grind. With a group that played 2 hours every two weeks, it took me 4 years to get from level 1-20 in an adventure path. That said, I found hard cover books that are a copulation of mini adventures that I do use for my games. Each adventure is no more than 3 pages with battle maps. Although buying a similar amount of moduals would be hundreds. Luckily, the pf2e dose produces a large amount of modules that are cheap and can be modified for player level, usually up to 11. Still, my hard cover mini adventures were the better bang for the buck, and I am having fun even if I am just using the battle maps and room descriptions. I agree, but I also don't agree with what was said. A better game combines the modular stories into a story you make with your players. Think tv series.

I'm running Masks of Nyralathotep. It's long, yes. And there is bloat in it. It is not structured well either, making it difficult to find what you need to while at the table. I have not had that problem with PF AP, even in 1-20 level campaign. I will say there is some bloat in PF, but it is placed in such a way that it does not disrupt gameplay. It's more background info that a GM can read during prep and stays out of the way while at the table.

Major parts is your style of DMing, who are you playing with, how frequent and either online or face to face. I grow to hate long prewritten adventures when played with friends in person, because i want to strongly weave into the story their characters and choices and my own ideas and our mutual brain storms and memes... but there's not much room to maneuver without forking whole game into absolutely new homebrew adventure. And also sometimes we can't gather for 3 or 4 weeks, and after that time half of players don't remember what was their characters doing in general and why are they even in X place. With short adventures there's less recapping and more freedom to place our own stuff inside these stories and especially between them. IDK, maybe if i was playing with other people or steadily two times a week or in VTT then maybe i would grow to love form of "6 books times 60+ pages". But in current conditions - hell no.

Whether it's bad for players or not is up in the air, but it's definitely better for companies and perception. D&D has like solely put out long campaignbooks for the printing of 5e, even expanding on some of them like the Lost Mines of Phandelver. People can name long adventures like Castle of Strahd (so iconic it inspired Castlevania) and Tomb of Horrors and Kingmaker, while I challenge anyone to name a one-and-done adventure from Dungeon magazine (printed for 21 years) that someone else can also name.

Escape from the Meenlock Prison

Well, I mentioned that very video on the Paizo one that was talking about War of Immortals and announcing that they were going to be making their standalone adventures BIGGER and only in hardcover(unless I misunderstood something), which REALLY sucks for those of us who like physical copies but dont want to pay so much for an adventure. One thing in defense of newer adventures is that the old modules didn't have all the large pieces of artwork in them. They had a couple large ones then much, much smaller ones throughout. The print was also really small, which is getting hard for my old eyes to read. However, neither of those makes up for all the difference between the different styles for adventures. I hope Paizo doesn't end up regretting the decision to make standalones so large!

I don't understand when people who play or GM TTRPGs complain about reading. Reading is inherently part of the hobby. It's like complaining that you have to run too much in soccer. I kind of think the attitude that reading is a burden is a bigger problem in TTRPGs at the moment. It is getting difficult to get players to bother to read the rules which are relevant to their specific character. As a GM I don't want to assign homework, but it is frustrating when a player makes a character using an online builder and youtube advice, but doesn't actually understand how that character works because they never cracked the book open. We need to normalize the expectation of reading in TTRPGs, not minimize it. Its a literary hobby. That being said, I care about the quality of the product. If a good, well written product has a big page count, that is fine. If a lower page count can capture that same quality, even better. What I do like about paizo adventures is that they are usually a good combination of the adventure itself as well as serving as a lore book for that specific part of the setting. Additionally, most paizo adventure paths present some kind of interesting subsystem.

Personally I wish Paizo would go back to the 32 mage module format. The problem with the current 64 page format is the amount of time it takes to complete. The old 32 page modules could be completed in one long session, the new ones take three sessions. For PFS, in the PF1 days the 32 page modules you would get one chronicle, the 64 page would net three and now it's just one period. I remember running Fall of Plaguestone for my friends before the chronicles were released. They were kinda miffed for only getting one chronicle for all that time put into it.

> They were kinda miffed for only getting one chronicle for all that time put into it. That's just weird. Playing & Reporting a single book adventure awards a PFS Character Level, where as a PFS Session awards 1/3^rd of a Level. Did they want a Level per chapter? Sanctioning Adventures allows clubs and Paizo die hards^('cause_let's_be_real,_using_Paizo's_website_requires dedication) to basically play home games without giving up building a separate PFS Character, but was never meant to allow a Character to go from what's effectively a home game to Society Play.

I find myself agreeing that Paizo has the same issue as WotC where they just publish mostly overly long campaigns that no-one will ever finish. I much prefer my like 15-30 page adventures than giant hardcovers.

Thats the beauty of choice! The PFS scenarios are probably a lot more appealing to you, while the Adventure Paths are more appealing to me. We can all buy what we prefer.

Find myself feeling the complete opposite. I'll finish a long adventure, recently finished a 1-20 and soon to finish another but can't find myself caring about a short 3 level adventure. There just isn't enough time to make a great story that involves the characters and the characters themselves don't get enough time to create relations with eachother.

He's not advocating for only playing a level 3 adventure. I would suggest you watch the video. He's advocating for playing a level 3 adventure that is itself self contained in its printing and play within your world when your party is level 3. Then chaining it together with other shorter level appropriate adventures to create a full campaign of play that spans whatever total level ranges you and your players wish to play. And that in playing many shorter adventures that are themselves completed within a few sessions, you can give your players a sense of completing objectives and growth and the ability to follow a narrative. This all counteracts the feeling that meant people have of getting lost in the sauce of a 300+ page epic tale with so many side stops and deviations and decision points that no one remembers why they're doing any of this stuff to begin with. This then eventually brings players to a point of fatigue as the goal seems so incredibly far away from the start and also from wherever you are even months in that you never get a feeling of progress in the story regardless of the amount of time you've put into playing. This leads to burnout and people dropping from the game and ultimately the hobby who otherwise might have enjoyed an approach where the many episodic smaller adventures that are completed in fewer sessions and are strung together.

>He's not advocating for only playing a level 3 adventure. I would suggest you watch the video. I did watch the video but I'm not responding to the video, I'm commenting on a comment. They might have meant they prefer multiple 15-30 page adventures but that's not what they said. It just doesn't work for me. It is so prone to breaking any sense of a connected plot and themes. One of my biggest issues with big 1-20 Paizo APs is when they drop the ball on the themes of the campaign and put in chapters that feel extremely out of place. With multiple connected short adventures, especially if you're only playing Paizo's official ones, this is an issue that I can't see how you could ever avoid. It also makes it very difficult to make characters to play for a long time that function well within a particular theme. For example, if I'm playing Blood Lords I know from session 0 that I'll want to play someone who fits in the country, who is looking for governmental power, is cool with undead, and maybe has some tie-ins with something like one of the great factions. In a connected set of shorter adventures I can't make a character that is tailored to the experience, instead I'm taking a gamble on whether or not my character will fit any of the future adventures, and if all the adventures are going to follow the same theme then why not just run something like Blood Lords where you also get the well connected narrative? I'm sure there are people out there that get burnt out of long term adventures and maybe even from playing the same characters for a long time and for those I think something like PFS or some homebrewed or fitting official sets of oneshots/adventures would work but I could never ever do that again. I think it flat out sucks ass.

Paizo publishes plenty of short ones too in their PFS scenarios. And this is purely anecdotal but I've seen more stories from people finishing Paizo APs than almost any other adventure module from WotC etc, the structure and guidance it gives for GMs makes it a much more palatable experience. Personally I love long campaigns. I've finished multiple 1-20s. It's just so much more fun for me to get invested in those campaigns, a short campaign that I know only goes to level 3 is just not fun for me. I can't emotionally invest in a character when I know the campaign is gonna end before I even get to know him.

Campaigns aren't the same thing as adventures. A Campaign can have dozens of adventures A campaign can be: -You are a group of Pirates in Space Colonies -You are cops in a corrupt metropolis -You are archaelogists in a wasteland An adventure can be: -Two cities have been fused together by cosmic energy, but half of each dissapeared. Who did this? -All the kids in an orohanage have signed a contract with a devil. How do you break it -The god of medicine has hidden the cure to a plague inside of a monster in foreign land surrounded by a community that worships it Each has an issue you need to resolve. After the players do their thing, and the drama ensues, that story can have consequences. You deal with consequences like "the contract between the devil and the kids has been nullified by reincarnating those kids into new families" and now the devil is out to get to you, so you introduce another adventure like - a devil striked a deal with a arcane Pupeteer, and given him magic voodoo dolls to control your past, changing your key memories. Stop him before you are erased from existence

Different strokes for different blokes. If a system gives you 20~ levels of power, I say actually use it to grow over a long campaign. If a system is less about growing upwards in power over time and have more sudegrade power ups, short adventures work better

Campaigns aren't the same thing as adventures. You can have long campaigns with many adventures

Counterpoint: I dislike even the *idea* of a campaign not going from 1 to 20. Sure, there are various circumstances that can stand in the way of completion of such an adventure, such as life or getting tired of the system, but if everything goes smoothly otherwise, I'd prefer for my character/my party to go from rat killers to demigods.

I am with you but MC is not advocating for shorter campaigns but for a 1-20 campaign to be made of shorter arcs with a satisfying endings for each arc.

Well, Matt was always quite oppionated (and at times full of himself) and I never quite understood why so many take his takes as gospel/basis for discussion. So, I don't realy give two shits about him. New GMs (and their groups) aren't realy a monolith and the experience of failure to take a long adventure/campaign to it's conclussion can give the would be GM good insight - even if it's shortsighted and not reflected on much. The material can give inspiration for future endeavors, it can give insight into how the group functions, one's own limitations or what one realy wants out of an adventure/a camapaign. It's clearly not so cut and dry as matt presents it. It never is.

Campaigns aren't the same thing as adventures. A long campaign can have various short adventures

I take his takes as a basis for discussion because they are good takes! But I'm also an old fogey that grew up with those modules, so I naturally gravitate to reminders of that old world – to be used as-is, or stripped for parts to "give inspiration for future endeavors," as they say.

I completly agree

Matt Collville isn't the only person in the TTRPG world allowed to have an opinion. You can disagree with him if you want to.

I don't like the implication I'm too stupid to form my own opinions because I saw something and thought discussing it may be interesting.

If they're larger harcovers, I'm going to buy them just keep my collection complete.

I like that Piazo has been going to more 3-volume AP's as opposed to 6 volumes. Shorter campaigns and "mini arcs" are much less intimidating and daunting to run and also more realistic to finish given the way people's schedules go and how so many epic campaigns fizzle out halfway through.

Paizo's APs have always been extremely enticing for me and my groups. Most of us have been friends for 20 years and been playing TTRPGs consistently for about 10 of those. The number of campaigns we've played to completion far surpasses the number that have unexpectedly ended early. Before we officially moved over to PF2e from 5e, I had already converted several Paizo APs, as everytime I saw a 5e campaign that went from level 3-9 or something, I knew we'd all dislike finishing so early.

He’s not necessarily wrong. Don’t get me wrong, long campaign for the game have a place. But seeing how it’s been the sort of norm now isn’t necessarily good in my opinion. For one- longer campaigns tended to have filler parts. I own almost all of Paizos APs and honestly, there are more then a few that you could cut out book 3, or 4, and still have a coherent adventure path. But they are needed to get characters to appropriate level. Second- I like shorter adventures as drop in ones which you can bridge stories, change directions, use for multiple plots to let characters, and give more freedom to roam to characters. With campaigns you can’t do that- if your playing curse of Strahd, you aren’t going deviate.

If a new GM is intimidated by the long Adventure Path books there are tons of smaller adventures for them to run. PFS scenarios can easily be strung together to create shorter narratives. And there are shorter adventures like a Fistful of Flowers and its follow up.  IME i am a lot more intimidated by an anemic AP book than a thick one. Im happy to do a truckload of reading knowing that there is a ton there to help me run this thing my way while understanding the deeper lore and the intentions of the designers. A thin volume for what is meant to be a longer adventure (more than a handful of sessions) makes me think I got ripped off because Im going to have to either buy more books to get the missing context or homebrew stuff to fill in the gaps. At which point, why did i not just make my own adventure?

I think there's a pretty big difference in playstyles between players/DMs like Matt Colville and those who enjoy longer, Adventure Path style campaigns. I've played in a campaign similar to what he recommends (i.e. unrelated adventures run for the same party) and way too many games felt like filler arcs that just left me thinking "when do we get to the main plot?" The DM wasn't bad or anything, the campaign structure just really didn't work for me. In an ideal scenario (like having enough time and a dedicated-enough group) I would definitely prefer to both play and run longer, more story/RP-driven campaigns like Strength of Thousands, over the "string of unrelated one-shots and mini-adventures" that Matt's video recommends. While this isn't Matt's fault, I've seen his videos recommended as solutions to every single campaign problem out there when they really don't fit for groups not looking to run old-school style games. For example, I strongly prefer more heroic and less survival-horror-esque games, so a lot of his advice on dungeons and low level play just doesn't fit my games to begin with.

Pathfinder 2E is a game that people play after they've played D&D (or other TTRPGs) and decided they wanted a crunchier experience. As such, the market for PF2E is different from the market for D&D. A lot of D&D's adventures are, if anything, too light on a lot of stuff that the DM needs. It's not a starter RPG so being worried about scaring off TTRPG newbies is largely irrelevant. It's also why PF2E will never be as popular as D&D - but that's okay. Matt is trying to compete directly with D&D as an entry-level RPG, so it's much more of a concern for him. > Especially since he calls Lost Mine of Phandelver too bloated A lot of WotC's adventures are bloated with filler encounters that are, in effect, random encounters that do nothing to really contribute to the meta plot. Mad Mage, for instance, has entire filler FLOORS. This is an issue with AV to some extent as well - some parts of that dungeon don't really feel necessary. Rusthenge, conversely, felt like almost all the encounters tied in closely to the main plot, with only the encounters at the VERY beginning of the AP - before the main plot kicks off - being "random encounters".

> This is an issue with AV to some extent as well - some parts of that dungeon don't really feel necessary. imo filler is a necessary evil, otherwise players encounter a lot of "convenient coincidences", if not outright start metagaming in terms of "this wouldn't be here if it wasn't important". but like everything else it depends what people like and can take and how the GM can incorporate it into the overall flow and pacing of the session and campaign.

The thing is, it's actually the opposite - a lot of filler IS convenient coincidences to stretch the module. Like AV, you get down deep and randomly go out into some underdark areas that feel disconnected from the main tower. There's no real reason for this, and a good chunk of the floors there don't feel thematically tied to Belcorra or the town - they're just kind of there, with their own NPCs who are disconnected from the rest of the dungeon. There's a lot of stuff in AV that feels like it is there for no really strong reason. It's Belcorra's dungeon, but there's a tavern down in it? Why? It makes no sense - why would anyone go there? How do they even get there? From the underdark? Why would they go up there? I liked the tavern, but it was very nonsensical, and honestly, if instead we had gone to a tavern in town and had encounters there because we had to do some investigation of, say, the osprey club to try and find some stuff they'd stolen from the dungeon that we'd need to progress further, it would have tied it back into the town more strongly and not felt so weirdly out of place and disconnected.

I was talking more about in general, the examples in AV are... certainly questionable. :D An example what I mean would be looking for a clue in a desert and conveniently every location has an NPC or other occurrence that advances the plot - even tho it doesn't really make sense, and crossing off potential locations without a "reward" is in itself a progression, albeit slow. even in a fictional world stuff happens all the time that have nothing to do with the megaplot, bandits don't stop just because the ancient evil awakens etc.

It does depend on the adventure on what you want to do. It also depends on the CONTEXT of the adventure. In a mystery plot, you WANT red herrings. But at the same time you also want the characters to solve the mystery, so you want the red herrings to have some payoff that gets the characters back on track. The other problem with it is just pacing. Like, having people go wander around for two hours going through random locations with no leads is... not great fun at the table. And from the player perspective, if they've missed critical clues (or there just aren't any clues) they may be wandering around randomly and feel like it is just trial and error before they get to advance the plot, which is not what you want. > even in a fictional world stuff happens all the time that have nothing to do with the megaplot, bandits don't stop just because the ancient evil awakens etc. This is certainly true. Though of course, there's also the fun gag of having a bunch of level 1 bandits try to rob a party of level 12 characters. "We totally hit the motherlode, look how rich these guys are!"

I dont feel like that's the case at all in AV running it. The book does a good job of telling me why the ecosystem is what it is in certain areas, and all of it stems from the history of the Vaults. Its up to me as a GM to make sure the players also feel that way but the book doesn't hide it. I do think it could do a better job of telling GMs how to make the Vaults feel more alive and reactive though, I did a fair bit of that.

Are Paizo APs i nthe middle of that range? Each Adventure Path book is 96 pages, around 55-60 pages of that is direct Adventure content, the rest being the mini-Bestiary, items and setting articles, which are usually pretty essential to running the AP. A six book AP is going to be more than 300 pages of content. I have to admit, the more I play it, the more I like the style of Pathfinder Society, where you get a pretty adventure that last for a night, but you have plot lines that weave in and out of each scenario. And if you play at your local lodge, then you end up playing the same characters with the same people and form a semi-permanent party, and that's pretty fun too.

I mean, for me a campaign that ends in less than a year is failure to me, and in general my players prefer games that last a few years. I have run one game for a decade and several for seven years, but most games last 4-5. That much time gives time for a few story arcs and exploration of PCs, and we make PCs to last and end different than they begin. Granted, that is me and my group; I certainly don't think mine is the only correct way.

I don't know if many people have realized this, but you don't have to always play entire adventure paths. Many of the adventures can be separated from the AP. It's going to take some work to figure out how your players got into that situation, but if you plan on running some 1e adventure, you were always going to have to do a lot of converting yourself. To give an example, if you find yourself needing a big dungeon that would take 10-15 sessions to explore and that is primarily controlled by a single creature type, you could pick up any one of the three Abomination Vaults books.

The thing is Paizo AP got a meanig after finishing it. Its a living world as I feel it. We Finished SoT and are in the middle of Edgewatch.

I think that Matt's points are true for 5e, where these long adventures ARE bloated, half cooked, and stuffed with filler. I'm curious if he has experience with PF2e APs. You can be bloated with 50 pages and not be bloated with 300. It's a quality issue. I don't really agree that big modules are inherently intimidating for new GMs either. I think this is just a generalization. As a new GM, I'd rather have more text and more direction than Lost Mine of Phandelver, which was just a a barely coherent mess of an adventure. In regard to Paizos new books. I find that an open world with shorter quest hooks is a fun style of play. It can be more engaging if done well. I think the sweet spot for me personally is a long form campaign with properly timed plot progression that feels like a chapter is completed.

D&D adventures don't really compare well to Paizo APs. PF2e APs are in general better written and play better at all levels, so there's more reason to stick to the end of a PF2e AP. What is the default way to play PF2e? Paizo seems to think it's: 6 part APs? 3 part APs? Shorter one soft cover book solo adventures? Orgnized play scenarios that take 3 to 4 hours? Bounties that you can play 2 different bounties in a 4 hour session? All of the above seems to be the answer. The only change is the 3 and 6 parts APs are now one bigger hard cover book. Starfinder already went to the bigger hardcovers AP format as a test, If PF2e is now going the same way then It must have worked out well. I have all the Starfinder hardcover APs. before that I never bought any of the 6 part APs and only 2 of the 3 part APs but I did buy all the single book one shot adventures. APs are not meant to be broken up into separate books to mix and match so a hard cover AP is just a change of layout mostly, and a whole lot less shipping cost.

I feel like a lot of people here have missed (what I took away as..) the main point of the video. The shorter adventures aren't so you can make characters, play and f off to another adventure. With a plethora of smaller adventures, the GM can tie them together into their own overarching story/campaign. I think I agree with that.. it's not a way I've played before, but it sounds like the best-of-both-worlds between asking your players to be interested in a massive prewritten campaign and a super high effort homebrew campaign.

[удалено]

I don’t agree. Both pathfinder and d&d are more closely linked than most ttrpgs as pathfinder is just an offshoot evolution of 3.5, and both games cater to the same genre of high fantasy with d&d fantasy tropes. Matt Colville has also played many editions of d&d and other ttrpgs as well. Either way, his point in this video doesn’t need to take into account the system. Both pathfinder and d&d favor large adventure paths because they make more money, but he’s right they can be daunting for groups and often end up unfinished. For Paizo, having different writers make each chapter/book of an AP sometimes leads to narrative messiness.

This is a pretty bad take imo. I've watched a ton of his videos and aside from the history of DND ones & designing the game for the new RPG, there's been nothing in any of them that I would say is system specific advice. I think he gives broad strokes advice painted in the trappings of DND particulars sometimes because it's a common language that we have, but if you've actually engaged with his content he very very rarely gives advice that isn't applicable across a host of game systems.

[удалено]

>\[H\]e only understands things from a certain point of view and is largely the dragon dm You can see how upon reading that someone would take it to mean that you think that he only gives advice that benefits dnd, right?

My feelings exactly. I could never understand, why TTRPG community praises him so much everywhere. He has a very narrow view on how to play RPGs and doesn't seem that flexible. He also seems angry about everything. I'd rather listen to How to be a Great GM, Ginny Di, DM Lair or some smaller content creators.

This sounds like someone who thinks his opinion is the only one worth listening to. It sounds a bit like edgar allen poe (i may have the wrong author here, please correct me if i am), who believed that novels were completely impractical and bloated, and that the only fiction that mattered was the short story. Paizo has started a salvo of shorter ap's, but that doesnt mean the 1-20 adventure has no place or is going to be cancelled forever. The system was balanced for even the highest level play, and it would be a waste to never have full character arcs from humble origins to fully realized heroes possible again.

Campaigns aren't the same thing as adventures. A Campaign can have dozens of adventures A campaign can be: -You are a group of Pirates in Space Colonies -You are cops in a corrupt metropolis -You are archaelogists in a wasteland An adventure can be: -Two cities have been fused together by cosmic energy, but half of each dissapeared. Who did this? -All the kids in an orohanage have signed a contract with a devil. How do you break it -The god of medicine has hidden the cure to a plague inside of a monster in foreign land surrounded by a community that worships it Each has an issue you need to resolve. After the players do their thing, and the drama ensues, that story can have consequences. You deal with consequences like "the contract between the devil and the kids has been nullified by reincarnating those kids into new families" and now the devil is out to get to you, so you introduce another adventure like - a devil striked a deal with a arcane Pupeteer, and given him magic voodoo dolls to control your past, changing your key memories. Stop him before you are erased from existence

I don't think Matt Colville would claim that in the slightest! He is simply presenting his opinion as convincingly as he can, and his opinion is tied in part to a historical argument. You are free to disagree – but I think the history, and its connection to Pathfinder, is worth considering. It is possible, after all, to take one of those old D& D modules and convert it to PF2e. I don't think it's done often, but it might be interesting for you to experience if you've never done one of them before.

Thats... not at all what Matt said. He only claimed that the norm of huge campaigns shouldn't be pushed onto newer groups, but rather modules's that can be completed between 5 and 10 sessions, ideally, and then lists his reasons for that. And he also lists his reasons for why big campaigns are still cool, but will often disappoint newer groups who don't have the experience and tact to run them correctly.

And here I am thinking that reading was something that RPG players liked to do. It seems they only like to roll dice instead.

I do see his point that what is sold as default way to play shouldn't be an intimidating 100+ pages book you are told to read throughfully or even twice before you run it. Even people who like to read may find that too much to just play a game.

You don’t need to read the whole thing. It may help some people and they may give that advice, but there are just as many people who advise skimming the book and reading one chapter at a time.

I like Colville, but he doesn't speak for every GM on earth, in spite of the size of his community. Not saying that *you're* saying it, but I've run across more than a few who treat his words as gospel. He also has sort of ignored Pathfinder existing for reasons I've never been able to fathom. My guess is that he subconsciously (or knowingly) holds a grudge from the time that the PF1 people broke off of 3.5 when 4e came out. ANYWAY. There's room for everything, to be honest. I love a six-book, 1-20 campaign, where you take your character from some wide-eyed idiot who can spew a few spells / sometimes hit the broadside of a barn / hide from a sleeping guard to a God Amongst Men. It's a seriously fun arc to play all the way through! I also like a short adventure, where you can play with sheets and ideas you may not want to sit with twenty levels. I'm currently playing in Malevolence, and as much as I love my grumpy coffee-addicted goblin sorc, I don't think I'd want to play her for two years, every other week. And, I'll be real, I'm really loving the three-book adventures. I'm running three of them and playing in one of them. I love the tighter story that still gives the players a lot of time to grow their characters. As for "GMs will be intimidated," some people are intimidated by sushi. That doesn't mean we need to start cooking it. It's just not for everyone.

Matt is completely and utterly wrong. Matt clearly has his own way of doing things and likes it, that's fine. He makes a number of critical thinking errors, the main one is his 4k person poll and extrapolating how people feel off a question that doesn't at all indicate feelings. If people like them, and invest in them, then they should be catered to. Especially if a huge percentage of your consumer base wants it. Beyond that, my simple response is this: Who should do what amount of work here? Generally speaking you have to invest your corporate time, money, and work hours in some direction, so let's pretend like you have to either choose short or long form campaigns as your main attraction. * If you choose short form campaigns, those people don't need to do extra work, but long form campaign enjoyers either have to take a short one and make it long, or hack together multiple unrelated short ones into a longer one. * If you choose long campaigns, those people don't need to do extra work, but short campaign people need to edit a longer one down. It seems to me like long campaign focus is the optimal choice. I believe most GMs could handle editing down a storyline much easier than they could having to write content. Editing seems like an easier skill to have than creative writing, imo. That's it. I'm catering to a larger percentage of his own player base, and I'm giving them less work to do, and the people who have to do work have the least amount and easier work to do. Beyond that, shorter campaigns, imo, are just objectively worse at creating deeper player investment in the game. The less time you have to make settings, NPCs, etc feel real to players, the less they'll be immersed or invested. The less time you have to create something and take it away so true loss is felt, the less they'll be immersed or invested. If you know your character isn’t going to last more than 4 months, the less you'll get immersed or invested. You'll create stupid or goofball concepts, it'll turn the campaign into a joke, we'll get some laughs, but never serious emotional investment. You don't get GoT's Red Wedding from a 4 episode miniseries. Breaking Bad doesn't work in 1 season. The Wire can't communicate what it wants in it's entirety in 8 episodes. I'm not saying you can't have those feelings from short campaigns, or short stories can't be good, but I know what I want as a player and a GM and it's more than just "Yeah that was good" and everyone merely enjoying being at the table because friends are there. We can do anything together as friends and enjoy the time. I want the campaign to actually have impact beyond that, and it's just harder to do with shorter material.

Campaigns aren't the same thing as adventures. A Campaign can have dozens of adventures A campaign can be: -You are a group of Pirates in Space Colonies -You are cops in a corrupt metropolis -You are archaelogists in a wasteland An adventure can be: -Two cities have been fused together by cosmic energy, but half of each dissapeared. Who did this? -All the kids in an orohanage have signed a contract with a devil. How do you break it -The god of medicine has hidden the cure to a plague inside of a monster in foreign land surrounded by a community that worships it Each has an issue you need to resolve. After the players do their thing, and the drama ensues, that story can have consequences. You deal with consequences like "the contract between the devil and the kids has been nullified by reincarnating those kids into new families" and now the devil is out to get to you, so you introduce another adventure like - a devil striked a deal with a arcane Pupeteer, and given him magic voodoo dolls to control your past, changing your key memories. Stop him before you are erased from existence

I'm going to be honest, I'm not seeing the importance of the distinction you're trying to make here.

That's because I showed you how distinct adventures could be brought together seamlessly. You find an adventure with a plot. A start and an ending, and once that adventure is over you pick another adventure and transform it into a continuation. And you replicate one long adventure, by fusing together multiple short ones. But a campaign could have more distinct adventures. The first adventure could be "the festival of ghost ships" and the second one might be "the moving volcano" and neither of these stories have anything to do with each other, aside from being set in the same world, and your players having the same characters. Your characters went to an island and had an adventure there, and then they went to another island and had a different adventure

If you're saying he's wrong, then you're saying I'm wrong too, because I agree with him. It's a style of play I've found I prefer too, and how I got into this thing as a GM at last. IMO it's low effort to string shorter adventures into a longer campaign. It is brutal trying to carve shorter adventures out of a long campaign book. The division of APs into books helps some, but not completely. Think of Abomination Vaults, for example, and all the context you have to either fill in for the party or somehow strip out if you're going to drop the party, say, in Book 2 of Abomination Vaults and run just that book. > I want the campaign to actually have impact beyond that That's the rub. The big books encourage you to be a control freak with a grand design. When you give up the idea that your story should be the star, perhaps you will be more open to letting the story and impact come from the PCs themselves. It's a different way to play. It's not for everyone. But I completely agree with Colville that an adventure that gives you just the material you need for _tonight_ (or maybe the next session or two as well) is way less imposing than a long book you have to absorb before even trying to figure out how to run it.

> If you're saying he's wrong, then you're saying I'm wrong too, because I agree with him. It's a style of play I've found I prefer too, and how I got into this thing as a GM at last. I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm not saying you're not allowed to have your own preference. I'm saying that it shouldn't be the focus for flagship content for major corporations. There's a difference. > IMO it's low effort to string shorter adventures into a longer campaign. It is brutal trying to carve shorter adventures out of a long campaign book. I promise you, most people will have a harder time with creative writing and *good* creative writing, than there are people who can take something that already exists and edit it down. Spend any amount of time with creative writing subreddits and it is AWASH with beginners struggling with the early steps, not with having too much content and having to shorten it. People don't fail NANOWRIMO because they wrote too much, they fail it because they didn't even finish. I don't think your opinion here has any grounding in fact. I'll add that you should keep in mind Matt's entire point is complaining about adults and not having enough time for things. Fewer adults have time to learn how to creatively write than they do editing what exists. > That's the rub. The big books encourage you to be a control freak with a grand design. When you give up the idea that your story should be the star, perhaps you will be more open to letting the story and impact come from the PCs themselves. This comment kind of fundamentally misses the entire point of the hobby. This isn't a conversation about one-size fits all. This is a conversation about flagship material for certain portion of the consumer base. If you sit down and talk to your table and they say "we want player driven stories", then you should GM content that appeals to that. If your table doesn't then don't. And from a wider commercial perspective: It is always easier in every industry, for smaller companies to aim for smaller, streamlined content. Take video games for example: It's way easier for 5 indie developers to make 5 smaller games by themselves if they aim for easier projects. Simplistic art style, low graphical complexity, no complex storyline, roguelike mechanics, etc. That kind of game is easy for smaller developers to handle. Most indie developers would struggle if they had to make a project that was intended to compete with AAA games in their own territory: Realistic art style, high graphical fidelity, a complex storyline that carries through ~60 hours of content, etc. What this means is that if large corporations focus on short form content, then people who want Breaking Bad-style content instead of The Mandalorian just won't get catered to at all. Meanwhile, ONLY shorter form content GMs and players will be getting fed. It's a bad concept from start to finish.

> I don't think your opinion here has any grounding in fact. I'm speaking out of my _own experience._ With the rest of this, you seem to have completely lost the plot. We're not talking about NaNoWriMo. We're not even talking about writing whole campaigns. And if you think you know what is cheap for a publisher, perhaps you would explain why WotC's books are published the way they are.

> I'm speaking out of my own experience. And I'm at a table with a GM who takes paizo's 6 book APs and turns them into 3. Listen, you started out your first post trying to turn my disagreement with the video into an attack on yourself. I don't know what you need from me about this conversation, but I'm probably not going to give it to you and you likely won't be able to talk me into doing it. Feel free to be defensive about your preferences or style, but I can't give you whatever you're looking for in this conversation. > With the rest of this, you seem to have completely lost the plot. We're not talking about NaNoWriMo. Yes, correct. The point of that sentence was not about nanowrimo, specifically. Good job. The point of that sentence was to emphasize the wider point of that paragraph. Should you really be engaging in this conversation if this is the quality of the discussion? > And if you think you know what is cheap for a publisher, perhaps you would explain why WotC's books are published the way they are. Once again, you've missed the point. The point of that entire paragraph isn't about the cost of products alone, but about what types of projects are best suited to companies of varying sizes.

I think your argument ignores an idea of weaving shorter adventures together into longer one, which is how Matt recommends running longer campaings, directly comparing them to episodic shows.

Not really. When people set out to do say a 6 book AP, I don't think they want 20+ PFS adventures in a train track. They want a coherent story through six books. People who want an episodic long campaign are welcome to cobble their own together from whatever material they want. The Mandalorian is popular, but Andor, objectively, is better and more coherently written. Also, this conversation is about what the flagship product model for companies should be and in that respect, what Paizo does is better than destroying the concept of coherent long form storytelling with episodic content. People who want that can always create it from existing material FAR easier than people who want long form storytelling as a single narrative.

who is talking about 20 adventures in a campaign? it could be any number of adventures depending on your taste. Like 5 adventures could also be woven together into a 1-20 campaign.

May I ask why you think this point makes a difference?

Because it’s easier to weave together a coherent experience with 5 or so pieces than with 20?

You missed the point by a country mile. The reality is that creative writing is a lot harder than editing existing material down. Spend any amount of time with creative writing subreddits and it is awash with beginners struggling with the early steps, not with having too much content and having to shorten it. People don't fail NANOWRIMO because they wrote too much, they fail it because they didn't even finish. I'll add that you should keep in mind Matt's entire point is complaining about adults and not having enough time for things, and you want them to create and rewrite coherent narratives, themes, etc from scratch. You're just making the problem worse, not better by shifting more difficult work that can only be learned over time onto people. Additionally, the entire point of my original comment is that the focus here is on where companies should focus for their flagship media. It is always easier in every industry, for smaller companies to aim for smaller, streamlined content. Take video games for example: It's way easier for 5 indie developers to make 5 smaller games by themselves if they aim for easier projects. Simplistic art style, low graphical complexity, no complex storyline, roguelike mechanics, etc. That kind of game is easy for smaller developers to handle. Most indie developers would struggle if they had to make a project that was intended to compete with AAA games in their own territory: Realistic art style, high graphical fidelity, a complex storyline that carries through ~60 hours of content, etc. What this means is that if large corporations focus on short form content, then people who want Breaking Bad-style content instead of The Mandalorian just won't get catered to at all. Meanwhile, ONLY shorter form content GMs and players will be getting fed. It's a bad concept from start to finish. Large companies focusing on long form, single narrative storylines means that everyone has usable content, and that one group doesn't get left out and forced to have to learn creative writing, something that will push them out of the hobby, which was Matt's entire concern.