The Problem With Published Pathfinder Modules

I'll start by saying that this is entirely an opinion.  I'll also say that I'm frustrated with one of the published adventure paths right now, so I'm sure it'll make me be tougher on the PF published adventures than I would normally be too.  But I also think there's enough logic behind my stance that I'm going to go forward with writing this blog post anyway.  So if you are interested in my thoughts on the Pathfinder Adventure Paths and PFS Scenarios... continue reading.

To lay a little foundation, I'll give you some of my background in playing Table Top Role-Playing Games.  Like what I imagine everyone else did if they learned to play when they were kids, I was a power-gamer.  I wanted to make the most powerful character with the highest numbers possible.  I didn't care about game balance.  I didn't care if any of it felt like a challenge... I just wanted my character to be outrageously powerful.  What's that?  Character depth and history?  Yeah I didn't care about that either.  At all.

I even ran some campaigns like that... where I was trying to give my players what I wanted.  I just wanted super cool powerful characters, and that's I think when I started to understand that there was more to it than high numbers and making what I thought were "cool" characters.  I was finding that I was having a hard time making things interesting.  I didn't know why at the time.

Years later, I was running another campaign where the characters were too powerful, and I was having a difficult time again with making it interesting or engaging.  I don't remember how I came up with the idea, but I wrote a session that was meant to balance out all their power, and actually give them a challenge.  I got the characters lost in a cave system, and in that cave system was a type of beetle that would burrow into your flesh and eat you from the inside.  Scarabs basically.  Might have been around the time I saw the movie: The Mummy.  I don't remember.

Anyway, they encountered some of the bugs, and a couple of the characters ended up having to dig beetles out of their own skin with knives.  That's pretty terrifying to me.  And it seemed to work on them too.  There were spots with swarms of these beetles chasing them, and their powers could fight a bit, but there was basically an unending supply of more beetles coming.  It became an exercise in escaping the caves to get away from the beetles.  And it was fun.  It was the first truly memorable session I ever ran.  And I think it's where I learned the lesson that characters need to be in some kind of danger (physical, emotional, whatever) for it to be engaging and fun.

So that was the death of my power gaming, but what comes after that?  Well... story.  Story comes after that.  If you start up a first person shooter video games, and play that for a couple hours, does story really matter?  No.  It doesn't.  You're a generic character with some kind of weapon, and you do your best to win against opponents in a game.  It can a lot of fun.  Don't misunderstand and think that I dislike a first person shooter with no character depth.  I'm just trying to help you understand that for me, the Table Top RPG became something different.

If I want some mindless fun for a bit, I might play a game like a first person shooter.  You can stop pretty much whenever you want... there's very little commitment beyond a single match.  But with TTRPGs I'm looking for a HUGE commitment.  To me they are more analogous to novels than video games.  The Game Master creates the setting and most of the people that inhabit that world.  And the Players create the main characters... the people that will be most featured in the story.

Think about the feeling you get when you read a novel you just can't put down.  You lose sleep, lose track of time, and are distracted when you have to do something else other than reading.  That's the goal to me in playing a table top role-playing game.  I want people to get together to share in a story that is engaging.

How do you do that though?  The author for a novel creates all the pieces, and things don't have to be perfectly consistent or balanced to tell the story.  When something needs to happen to serve the story, the author just makes it happen that way.  But in a "game" with multiple people there has to be some consistency for the players to rely on and for them to be able to make decisions for how their character will behave.

For example, if the main character in a book has thus far never been in a situation where they would have to pilot a helicopter, and the author had never mentioned it before... they can still just say that the character's dad was a hobby-kit helicopter pilot, and the character learned from their dad when he was a kid.  A sentence or two of explanation, and suddenly the character is flying everyone to safety from the collapsing island they were just on.

But in a game with other people, a character can't suddenly know something they didn't know before.  It has to have some balance.  All the main characters have to be similar in "power", and all the players have to be given choices for making their characters that allow them the same opportunities as everyone else.  And it would be pretty unfair if the opponent they might be set against always just had whatever he needed to get away... it has to be possible to accomplish goals in the game too.  You need balance.

And that's a pain in the butt for making engaging story.  You need a set of rules for the game to keep things fair, and you need to tell a story at the same time.  I think this is the biggest difficulty faced when trying to make an engaging role-playing experience.

So now back to how to make the story engaging.  The players take on a lot of the burden here.  Each of them is responsible for making one of the main characters of the novel (or series of novels).  The decide what kind of person to make... whether that person is selfish, or altruistic... ill-tempered or calm... charismatic or anti-social... strong or weak, graceful or clumsy, smart or not-so-smart, fast or slow...

And the players create the background for their characters within the setting.  Did they grow up with their parents?  Were they in a rough neighborhood or perhaps in luxury?  What things formed the person into who they are today?  What people from their past might still be important to the story (spouse, children, other family, neighbors, employers, gangs they belonged to, loan-sharks after them, whatever)?  Every bit of background gives the game master something to work with for future gaming sessions.  Maybe that loan shark is going to send a debt collector for you to deal with.  Or maybe the lone survivor of a tribe of orcs has finally caught up with you and will play a part in the story to come.

So anyway, I should probably get back to the purpose of this blog post.  You hopefully have a better understanding of what I look for in a table top role-playing game.  I want story, and I want the characters to matter... to affect the story.

Pathfinder (and d20 in general) is an interesting game system, but in my experience, its design lends itself best to combat.  And again, if that's what you're looking for, it handles it pretty well.  So if you're looking for combat heavy TTRPG... Pathfinder might be the thing for you.

But Paizo went an extra step that for me is unappealing.  I get that its a business, and it's a way to stay in business because you can keep publishing things for people to buy, but the pre-written modules/adventures/scenarios are awful for me.  Think about it a bit compared to what I said I look for.  Sure there's a lot of detail in their setting, and there is a story in there... but how can the character stories affect the stories pre-written by some publisher?  The published story has something about exploring a ruined castle for archaeological finds, and an NPC character tells you what you have to do from the beginning.  Your characters set out... and who cares that Greg Quinn grew up with an abusive father that motivated Greg to escape by joining the military where Greg met some of his best friends, but also where he lead a squad into an enemy stronghold and foiled some war-lord's plans?  Will any of that play into the Pathfinder scenarios?  Of course not.

By necessity the Pathfinder stories are generic.  Any character can fit in, and that character doesn't matter.  No matter how much detail and work you put into the character, the story won't change.

What else works that way?  Video games.  You create a character to play in the video game, and you are sitting back to pay attention to the story they wrote for you.  There's no out-side-the-box thinking.  In fact, there's a very specific inside-the-box thinking.  In both video games and pathfinder stories there's the expectation that after a fight, you search the body of the person you just fought and killed.  And you probably search the area around them too to see if you get some treasure.  Or jump to bop every brick with your head to see if a fire-flower comes out.  It's... It's not what good story is made of.  In Return of the Jedi after Luke defeats his father, and then his father defeats the Emperor... they don't spend time searching the Emperor's throne to see what cool stuff he might have hidden in secret compartments in there.

But to be "good" at playing Pathfinder, you need to think like that.  You need to search the sewage drain that the snake monster came out of to find the healing potions that the author put there for you.  If you don't find them, you're not going to be ready for the next fight the author wrote in.  And that's my big problem with Pathfinder scenarios and adventure paths.  Instead of featuring the characters in a custom made story, you have a story that you play through like a video game to get to the end and win.  It doesn't matter what characters are in the story.  And the story will never change to be engaging... it's just a string of excuses to get the characters from one combat (or skill challenge maybe) to the next one.

If all you're looking for is a shallow video-game-like experience with friends at the table... Pathfinder can be good.  If you want some depth, you'll have to write your own.  You could probably use the Pathfinder system, and even the setting, but you'd have to avoid the Pathfinder Society stuff.  By making a framework for people to be linked that way, they made it even harder to get good role-playing done.  Again... just my opinion.

If you do play Pathfinder published modules, don't forget to make your character search through the excrement filled sewage pipe for those healing potions.  The published adventure design requires that you think that way if you want to win.  And don't bother coming up with deep character story... it won't ever factor in.  Ever.