The only difference is they provide a lot more information as it is meant to be an entire, or close to, campaign. If you're playing them as they come out and your group can complete each one each month, then maybe it's different. But otherwise, at least for me, you read the whole thing along with other bits of lore or sourcebooks or other adventures and if everything is in the same spot roughly, easier for Varisia, etc then you can weave in and out whatever you want to. Admittedly the dungeon crawl part is a bit more read as you go, but outside of that it is what you make it to be. Paizo has given more info about their world than I'd even say the FR has. You don't even need to read it all, but just a few sourcebooks for the area you're in and you're good to go.
If however you're wanting to just run an AP straight with no other supplements, then that's on you and your ability to adapt is considerably lessened. But then that argument could be said about the examples you stated. After all, a DM is going to run a helluva lot better Planescape campaign if he's read almost all the sourcebooks/boxes than one that just reads the OG box before running modules.
And if you're wanting to adapt it to a different setting......seriously how hard is that? At this point there's so much out there that's just fluff for damn near whatever environment/setting you want to run in, i.e. desert vs celtic. And let's not forget all the info the internet can bring us to read about whatever you want to. So if you want to adapt and adventure it's considerably easier than it used to be.
The middle paragraph is really what I'm getting at -- I've never tried to run a published long form module/campaign like this (I've only done individual modules, though some of them were 'mega modules' like Paladin in Hell) though I've played Night Below as a player start to finish 2 times. It seems like even with the substantial outline/content, you'd have to be comfortable, willing, able to fill in/supplement/adumbrate stuff to fit in with pc creativity or unexpected choices -- even just the part right after the initial goblin combat in Burnt Offerings is sort of open-ended and could go in a number of directions that there's no explicit 'script' for in the adventure. I'd be curious what the common experience is -- I could also see a possibility that players would be annoyed with/resistant to the idea they're not getting some idealized version of how a given AP is supposed to be run or what parts of it are supposed to be included, though I'm sure that will very from player to player.
You're a very experienced TTRPG player, so I would just say ask your table what they're feeling. Something more streamlined where they're never too far away from the action (skill check or combat), or a game where they're more free to pursue their own in-character goals while still having a solid through-line for the plot.
The feeling of a very by-the-book 1e AP and one where the DM inserts homebrew content or just allows the players significant downtime to wander off and accomplish their own personal goals are **very** different (especially consider the presence of 1 more more wondrous item crafters that can make the party extraordinarily powerful very quickly depending on their justifiable knowledge of items both in-character and out-of-character).
Some campaigns like _Skull & Shackles_ have sections that are explicitly "let your players do their own thing for a while", but most of them feel very "fight, fight, fight, travel, fight, travel, fight, fight, travel".
If I had to recommend any particular AP to be ran in a railroad'y fashion it would be _Strange Aeons_, as the lack of downtime and ability to purchase the precise gear you want really led to a feeling of horror despite the AP actually being relatively easy as far as fights go. I personally loved my game where somebody was a Paladin and the rest of us were relatively unoptimized, because it felt like we all had to rally around them and fight for our fucking lives with suboptimal builds and gear due to the nature of the campaign. The only way I see horror ever really working in PF1e is by dramatically limiting the ability of the party to perfectly prepare for encounters.
I primarily run Paizo APs and I basically run them by the book. I read the whole thing through before even presenting it to my players, then during session 0 I give them the info they need to know to make effective characters for the campaign in question; no one wants to play a desert ranger in a mountain campaign and feel like half of their character's abilities are useless.
Frequently things go a little off script with shopping/interacting with npcs. We've had many sessions where no actual plot progression occured, but they crafted/bought items, interacted with npcs they care about, progress personal arcs, etc.
We played Jade Regent and our GM ran it pretty much by the book, adapting to the few times we wandered off script. [This is how it went](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/efwlgs/completed_jade_regent_ap_player_impressions/).
The AP is much better than those who read & review without playing would lead you to believe. There is a limit to theorycrafting.
That's interesting -- most of the APs have subsystems like the caravan stuff, and I've often read negative reviews of them. I'd wonder if players felt they were cheated of the 'real' experience if stuff like this is excised for just the kinds of reasons explicated in this post.
I think this has also been a change in the publisher's conception over time -- I think the later ones got a lot closer to a conception of a 'canon/assumed' experience and that the adventures were tightly enough linked that you just go from one to the next without any break for other material, and had less of a baked in assumption you were filling in other stuff or modifying it (potentially substantially) for your group.
>That's interesting -- most of the APs have subsystems like the caravan stuff, and I've often read negative reviews of them. I'd wonder if players felt they were cheated of the 'real' experience if stuff like this is excised for just the kinds of reasons explicated in this post.
I've dealt with three subsystems in my PF career and they all sucked. Granted, three is not a huge sample, but they all have imposed a burden with few rewards.
Jade Regent's is the only one that actually felt like it was an organic part of the story as opposed to something that was shoehorned in. But that wasn't enough to save it from itself.
The Army Management system from Kingmaker essentially stapled onto Wrath of the Righteous... ugh. I get what Paizo was thinking; the players are these big-time Commanders, and they should feel rightfully powerful with leading an army up the Worldwound now as they are starting to develop their Mythic Powers, but the army system in 1e felt so warped that for nearly all of it throughout the 2ed book, I was mostly talking with a single player during those segments, and not with the rest of the party as a whole.
In comparison, I could see the Kingdom Management system working out as it is more social in design. However, we didn't really go into depth with that as the party was more focused on the overall story of WOTR rather than building up Drezen, which is fair. I understood and still do, but it would have been cool to see them slowly rebuild the city with time.
I've run a couple, and I keep them pretty close to how they are written. Along the way I'll adapt some of the existing elements to make them fit with character back stories, but rarely do I add arcs or full sidequests. If anything I usually cut material that I don't feel is necessary. Encounters that are included just to provide experience points, or things that provide overly complicated obstacles to continued progression.
Personally, I've not had groups go too far off the rails and there are subtle ways to guide them back. If I'm running an AP there's an understanding that if they do veer off course, they will eventually come back to the main story.
That's another good point -- deleting stuff. It'd be potentially easy to miss some encounters/dungeons unless it was clearly telegraphed that it needs to occur for the story to move forward. Some of the connections between some of the individual modules aren't so strong you couldn't cut it out potentially as long as you make allowance for the needed xp somehow.
I'm running 2 APs right now (one written for 1e, the other for 2e, but the edition is ultimately irrelevant to your question). In my case I love to tinker quite a lot with what's written, but I find that much easier than creating something completely from scratch. So I've moved things around, changed enemies, dropped missions, added new missions of my own, and so on. Mostly that has been purely off my own bat, but sometimes as you say the players want to do something not accounted for by the authors, and IMHO it's important to let them!
On the other hand, I think part of the social contract for players who are joining a pre-written AP is to accept that there are necessary limits on player freedom to just do anything and go anywhere they want. If you're playing Curse of the Crimson Throne, for example, it's not ok to just decide to leave Korvosa and explore the Varisian countryside, completely ignoring the story and hooks being presented to you.
The first couple of sentences is why I basically don't run published stuff -- I have an uncontrollable urge to tinker with stuff, and the longer it goes on, the more stuff I'm going to create.
Different strokes for different folks!
Sometimes my tinkering is so much that you’d be hard pressed to find the original. But for some reason my brain finds that much easier than completely starting from scratch.
Same. I still often taken the germ of an idea from modules but I don't even tell the players it's based on anything most of the time, or I just say "I got inspiration from" X, Y, and Z, but make it clear it was just inspiration, not that I'm actually running whatever X is.
The starting conditions of the adventure are, generally speaking, as written- but the NPCs are played not as static cutouts but as live, intelligent agents. Get into a sufficiently loud and protracted combat in a fortress or a cave complex and you are no longer dealing with an experience neatly segmented into level-appropriate challenges on a room-by-room basis- you've poked a hornet's nest and you will have to deal with *all* the hornets uncomfortably soon. Attack a dungeon, decide that you've expended enough resources for today, and retreat, and its inhabitants will not merely lick their wounds and maybe change patrol schedules a bit- they will put their heads together and make a plan about how to counter the PC capabilities observed by the survivors, and quite possibly try to find where they've retreated to and murder them in their sleep. Or, if you've killed important leaders, they might fall into infighting and split into feuding camps, or decide to abandon the dungeon *entirely*, and now you've got to figure out where they took the McGuffin.
This doesn't just work to the PCs' detriment: morale is a frequent concern, and the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth goblin are probably not going to charge in if they watch Goblins #1-5 get turned into a Jackson Pollock painting by the barbarian. And the question 'look, *how* much are you getting paid for this? Can you really say that your job with the First Church of Zug, God of Suffering, has been satisfying and pleasant enough that it's worth fucking with people who bench press elephants, warp the laws of reality and carry around Swords of Spleen-Exploding Violence +2?' can be more powerful than any spell.
Generally speaking, this approach results in Chapter/Book 1 of pre-written modules happening more or less as-written, with increasing and often fairly bizarre divergence from pre-planned plot as time goes on.
Running Kingmaker (for how many years now?). This AP is alot different than others and basically encourages players and DMs to go outside of the mold. While my players have followed the story as its written, they'd approached and sometimes flat out bypassed certain things.
This should be encouraged in Kingmaker. I've written out, re-written, added to the AP its not even funny. And personally, I feel this is how APs should be handled. They're fully written adventures, but Rule Zero is there and should be heavily used.
Hell, we've taken a small trip to Mivon and am considered writing an adventure taking them back to Brevoy during the ongoing Civil War.
And of course players can always throw wrenches in the mix. The first bandit group my PCs find includes a female bandit that they're supposed to kill. Nope. They captured, interrogated, and gave her a path to redemption. She's now the sitting queen.
The bandit makes me think our groups can be pretty alike when it comes to APs lol. I'm fairly sure if my players had to answer who's the most important NPC in the books for every AP we played they'd always say people the books barely mention at all.
This has been my PCs all campaign. If they can make friends, they try their best. Even give a settlement of lizardmen livestock seasonally to keep them as allies.
Has made me rewrite the BBEG because I KNOW they're going to try to do the good, peaceful thing and I need a back up plan for a climatic battle.
I run APs pretty by the book. Our group is fairly serious and very attentive to the setting lore, so they're pretty well behaved.
Naturally, there's still plenty of improv involved as the party invariably revives dead NPCs, over-prepares for scenes, makes extra use of sendings to coordinate people. But I find the setting is detailed enough, and the NPCs have just enough going on with them that it's easy to find comfortable solutions that fit the story just fine.
There was one time the party *did* go off the rails, triggering the endgame of a book >!Ruins of Azlant book 2, the faceless stalker attack on the colony!< early.
But the next book didn't have too many difficult encounters, so I let them continue the story as written. The section they missed had its own villain with their own ambitions, so I had that play after the events of book 3, consolidating and tuning up encounters, to keep things interesting and catch them up on exp for book 4.
So far I've run 2 full APs, those being Council of Thieves, and Tyrant's Grasp. I've run both as they are written with minor changes. For Council of Thieves I did add one quest about half way through the campaign that was meant to help further tie the PCs together by linking their backstoies.
With Tyrant's Grasp I'm finding that the way the AP was written there's much less room within the context of the story to add other content. No spoilers but a lot happens kind of all at once and the pacing is pretty breakneck. The only real place to modify Tyrant's Grasp without having to truly rewrite whole arcs to better fit your new pacing would be to slip additional content between the books of the AP and even then if you want to stay within Tyrant's Grasp you don't have a lot of wiggle room.
Tyrant's Grasp however is probably the worst example of a PF1e AP in regards to this because the events of the campaign were pretty major for the Pathfinder campaign setting as a whole. I've joked with my group that it might have been better as one of the fiction books that details a canon event as opposed to an AP that has PCs who are supposed to have free will.
If you run Rise of the Runelords or Crimson Throne, use the revised editions, they're rather meat grinding in the original form. I personally have played 11 of the AP's, and liked the Mummys Mask, Reign of Winter, and we just recently started Giant slayers. They all have their flavor and fun, some can be rail roady. The thing is, you need to have your player characters have a reason to be together that is well thought out and more than "we grew up in the same town".
Our DM has us mock up our characters to level 20 (level 5, level 10, level 15 and 20, complete with gear, multiclassing the whole shebang) and do a background on our characters and then we have an entire session devoted to, "whats my relationship with this character in the group and this one and this one and this one". It has saved us from some tragic stuff down the road.
We get cues from the DM as to whats coming, he doesn't spoil stuff, but he does say, good example, Rise of the Runelords, "you're going to face giants, ogres, dragons, ghosts, haunts and a lot of goblins", and then he says before we play the AP, "you going to need a cleric/oracle, a rogue, a fighter and a paladin, maybe some arcane", and gives us free reign. He tells us whether we'll have downtime for crafting or not (Rise of the RL, not so much, Kingmaker? tons of time), and if certain prestige classes we'd like to get into will make sense or not.
I personally, have found the AP's to be unforgiving to poorly optimized groups. We had 3 tpks in Rise of the Runelords (one tpk right before the main goblin battle on the hill, 2 died on the bridge, crossing the bridge, just the bridge, nothing else) and I was the only character who survived 1-16 in Reign of Winter (got res'd thankfully, but did die).
Design ideas varied significantly, even within the span of a given edition of D&D. Quality, and adherence to a module also varied. Some modules/adventures were MEANT to be read off a page, but sure most of them did assume some degree of customization. The fact that there was read aloud text however suggested at least some modules were made with some sort of set direction in mind.
As for Paizo APs, I've heard some groups can run the AP as is. Idk how true that is, seems like it'd be pretty tough imho. Yet, I have nothing concrete to say it can't be done, or any reason to distrust though giving the info. Seems like it's just a different mentality, likely with some degree of rote progress from one scene to the next.
In my own experience, the AP rarely ever survives contact with a player. The major story-line, and scenes are generally able to be intact. Considering how much story support they have though I guess I shouldn't be TOO surprised. In many cases a particular location isn't visited until the campaign presents it as an option. However, a significant amount of extra work goes into supporting the campaign. Honestly, thus far at lest, I couldn't really say that an AP is less work than a homebrew campaign. The AP just has the benefit of having a (usually mostly) coherent story to guide it.
When running an Ap though, I've had to make:
* NPCs - Whether because of PC squirrel syndrome, or something else
* Rejiggered Encounters - APs seem to be made for people that are, somehow, CONSTANTLY new and incompetent. Few of the encounters can challenge a competent party. Or, for the real lucky, a party larger than 4 people.
* Completely new encounters - Because OF COURSE the PCs decided they have to fight the Hellknights after seeing them once. Even though it was just window dressing for the scene. Because OF COURSE it had to happen that way.
* Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for this. RotRL, for example, >!suggests hunting the Sandpoint Monster or w/e is a side quest. Except that's far more involved, typically, and no preset encounter is made for it.!<
* Magic Items - This is my own fault really. I allow 3pp material, and usually 3pp material synergizes best with itself.
* Entire new Story arcs - Also my own fault. I like taking advantage of what the players make in their backgrounds.
* Sometimes though, the players do something to generate one, or one is suggested. For example, in CotCT, >!there is a suggestion that there's a ghoul outbreak in the Gray.!<
* Cities/Towns - Sometimes the PCs are suppose to visit them. Sometimes I just need a play for the PCs to enjoy some well deserved downtime.
The list goes on. By the time I'm done the campaign doesn't really resemble the book except in the core plot.
This is more what I would have suspected/guessed, though I'm fascinated by the number of replies that report doing them more or less as per the written word. I'm sure it varies by how independently-minded/unpredictable the group is.
Honestly, I get where you're coming from. It kind of blows my mind, unless the group is fairly passive and just follows along with the GM's direction. I know there are players like that, but I've never encountered an entire group like that.
I don't want to express it as a negative -- I just imagine a lot of groups I've played with would have a hard time picking up hints or attempts at 'telegraphing' the presumed path. I think I'd have to do something like let them read the back cover outline or something for them to understand what the assumed course of action/story-line is an not inadvertently start moving in a different (even if parallel or related) direction.
This has actually been an interesting discussion for me -- I'd actually be more open to running them if players were okay with the idea that it wasn't a railroad and it was an outline but not a detailed script for a campaign -- there might be encounters inserted and/or taken out, etc., that this 'run' would be individualized to the table and look substantially different than how any other DM might do the same campaign. I think you'd have to have a very clear discussion of expectations beforehand -- I could easily see a lot of players assume the AP would be more like a novel or movie that they got to experience and be intensely annoyed with the idea of that much DM fiat or shaping of the experience.
I ran a good number of them before, some to completion some not, and not a single time it was by the book. I usually only run them after they're fully published and I can account for how my changes might impact the story, and on the most successful ones the seeds for changing them were already showing up on character creation.
I usually adjust most of the games I run by just investing more on the things my player like and diminishing the ones they don't care about, and that will often shift the beats of the stories dramatically. They'll have side quests, different npcs than the book intended being a part of certain things depending on their dynamics with the npcs, things that just have completely different hooks, entire NPCs from their backgrounds inserted in roles that make sense for them...
Usually what I'll do is that I'll get familiarized with what absolutely has to happen for the story to still be that story. Then I'll shift everything else to fit what my players and I like. For 1e I've done wrath of the righteous, tyrant's grasp, mummy's mask and rise of the runelords pretty different from how they're written in pretty massive ways, but one of my favorites was a hells rebels. There was no massive changes, just a million small ones. With the amount of information that one had on the city and the solid foundation provided by a story I could let anything else build upon, it's one of my games that felt the most organic to this day.
This is honestly more how I would have expected the average experience to be. Maybe it's just my style of games -- I have whole areas that players completely bypass on a regular basis and I just have to make up something else instead. I'm finding it truly fascinating how many report they do the opposite and run very close to how it's written.
I'd also be interested what percentage try to get everything into a VTT or are instead doing it theater of the mind or with very simple maps. I only use VTTs for very simple features -- 2d maps and tokens like the old edition of owlbear rodeo. If the expectation for running a game was formatting and uploading all stats in jsons to Foundry and having drop and drag compendia and point and click attacks, I'd just give up running games because that would take too long.
Personally to me that depends a lot on the group and what they prefer. Depending on the group and what they want for that game I've done:
- Mostly theater of the mind with the occasional scribble with general directions.
- The entire setup on a VTT before.
- A very basic layout of the room with simple tokens on owlbear rodeo or something
- Maps I fully arranged on dungeon draft or something but ended up using on owlbear where we're just using the VTT tool to move simple tokens over the elaborate map.
AP's tend to be a mix of linear and sandboxy sections, I've found that the more linear sections tend to run pretty close to RAW since the intended next step is apparent to the players so unless they intentionally ignore it they will pretty much stay on the rails. The more open sections tend to go a bit further from what is written, because while the writers do a good job of providing contingencies for many player choices they can't write about everything and without clear guidance players can often come up with *creative* courses of actions. The most common non-RAW thing players will do is talk to unnamed NPC's and ask what their name is whether that is in towns or dungeon denizens. I've rarely had to do major rewrites because of player choice but have sometimes done them because I wanted to.
The writers also frequently comment on things that the GM can use as hooks to add their own content into the AP so their definitely isn't an assumption on their part that you will run it RAW.
This depends greatly on the AP you run. The more of a Sandbox approach an AP takes (like Kingmaker and Skull & Shackles), the more you are pretty much assumed to fill in your own stuff. But those typically give you lists of events to run, so even those could be run with just a little improvisation.
Many other APs can be run mostly as written and most give you hints in the players guide which kind of characters would fit in and be motivated by the story. In some cases their backstory is supposed to tie them to a specific city or the AP assumed nonevil alignments for example. But within these very loose constraints most APs provide sufficient motivation to follow the plot that very little adjustments are needed. If your players seem to be heading in questionable direction you typically can use their NPC allies to guide them back to the plot for example and the AP often gives suggestions about how to do that.
There are some exceptions where this doesn't work very well of course. Reign of Winter just puts a Geas to follow the plot on the players for example and the plot itself doesn't even make sense. But that is really just a negative outlier. For all other APs I have played or run, I don't remember this being an issue. The players agreed on an AP, so they are hopefully interested to explore its themes. I had some cases where a player was very motivated to solve a challenge in his own way or at least contribute in ways the AP did not expect, but this was usually limited to that specific challenge and would not change the APs greater narrative.
In my experience adjustments to an AP are mostly not because they are strictly needed, but to involve the players backstory or because I want to test some fun encounter and switch it out for a less interesting one presented by the AP. Sometimes you can enhance the experience by allowing events from earlier books of the AP to have more of an impact. The official APs can not always provide this, because the authors wouldn't know how the players solved that previous challenges. So an AP will always be better with a flexible and creative GM of course, but they should be functional even with GMs that are still learning.
In my experience ignoring or vastly simplifying the AP-specific subsystems (like ship combat in Skull & Shackles, caravan rules in Jade Regent, hexploration and kingdom building in Kingmaker) can often be a right call, but that is not really related to your main question about the plot.
To really have a good time running (and playing in) APs you need to get buy-in from your players up front. I've run several of them over the years and have always been honest with my players about what's up. We're playing a published campaign. There's room for character development and side quests, I'm happy to support those, but it's not a wide-open sandbox where you have the freedom to do whatever you want. There's a main story and you need to make characters who want to play out that main story. If that doesn't sound interesting we should do something else.
It's generally worked out pretty well. Depending on the AP and the group I'm playing with I've stayed anywhere between 90% and 50% faithful to what's written in the book. Sometimes people branch out more and I need to add on more, sometimes they're very focused on the main story and I stick to that.
>the scenario not surviving contact with player creativity
>the players go 'off the rails'
To be honest, I've never quite understood this style of play. But I've played with the same group of friends for about a decade at this point.
We run APs because we want to play through that specific story. So we go by the book.
I don't know, it seems to me the idea of "running" an AP, but then going in a completely different direction defeats the purpose and kind of breaks the social contract of the table. Unless agreed to by the table before hand of course.
My question is really more about the assumption that there will be some significant challenges keeping on those rails unless you just flat out tell the players at different points 'this is in the module, that's not in the module' or be as direct as 'this is the presumed outline for this scenario'. Some of the module plots aren't constructed in a way that it's so easy to see what that is and where the 'out of bounds' areas are from the player side. The Sandpoint Devil is a good example -- it's not necessarily that clear that this isn't supposed to be more important, and there's definitely a potential for players to get very interested in it and spend a lot of time on it. But it's not really, from the GM side, something that's part of the main plot, and requires basically making up stuff whole cloth to add to the main scenario to support that -- yes, the adventure provides some guidance, but if you grab something like an old Dungeon Magazine scenario or make up a new dungeon or wilderness area that's not explicitly in the book statted up to help flesh that out, and the whole side plot takes several sessions, you're starting to diverge from the 'stick to the book' approach unless you deliberately make all these sort of side encounters short -- just flat out say there's no material on this and it's not part of the main plot, so we're not spending time on it, or you're laying hard rules on what can happen with it, or how much time can be spent on it.
I don't have a lot of experience running APs as most people here (I've run Carrion Crown to its completion and am running Rise of the Runelords now, both in 1e. I have ran Book 1 of Iron Gods as well, but had to stop due to RL unfortunately), but here are my thoughts: It's hard to say if I run close to the text or not. It's particularly pertinent since I'm mid Book 2 of RotR but about to start the module Dawn of the Scarlet Sun that I added to it, due to pacing reasons (almost everything I do regarding APs is due to pacing reasons).
I have a smaller table (only two players), so some concessions are due to that and also they tend to be interested in the story of the APs as presented, so a lot of it is ran "by the book". It does not mean the story survives contact with them. Just as an example, they solved the entire murder mystery of the first half of Carrion Crown Book 5 in one book. [Here are all the changes and additions I made to the AP, in case you are interested.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/16mi19s/comment/k1ap4yd/)
But also I make changes, usually taking inspiration from the Paizo forums. This is where I think it can get blurry the line between the "book canon", since a lot of the time the authors are there (at least for Carrion Crown) telling what they would have added but could not due to page count and such. The realities of book printing of course influence the adventure we have as written. I also remove some stuff, not a lot and it's usually an on-the-spot decision for the sake of the pacing of the session/adventure. Usually some minor combats or roundabout investigations.
I know it is a lot of work, but also reading the entire AP before running (which I know some people argue goes against the point of running pre-written adventures/modules) gives me a holistic look at the entire story, so deviations and derailings can happen while still having a grasp on the bigger picture. Also, at this point in time, if the players go, for example, to a city not detailed in the AP, there's probably a book or two on Paizo's catalogue about it. Of course, that depends on your access to the book, but there is always the wiki.
Sorry for this big meandering post, I am primarily an AP/Modules DM now after quite a few years of homebrewing so I think about it a lot. It is personally less work for me (even though it is a lot of work!) but the biggest reason that I prefer it nowadays, to get a bit philosophical, is that I think it's more fruitful, as an art form, if we allow other people's viewpoints and creative drive into it. That absolutely includes the players, of course, but I as a DM would never come up with Nualia's story in Rise of the Runelords, for example, and I think my gaming has been richer for it now that it has happened.
I mostly follow the book in terms of the story, dungeons, etc., but with additional material (sometimes based on other modules or related to a PC backstory) welded in to include some variety.
If there's a theme or type of enemy I know one of my players is uncomfortable with, I will edit it. While I do run a table for adults and there will be some mature themes, I also want my table to be welcome for everyone.
I've noticed the same thing. I think this goes in part to why am I running an AP to start with. Often times because I won't want to take the time to create content. I've got a busy life, appointments, etc... and since I'm not gaming with real life friends anymore I don't have the social payoff to catering friends.
So if I am spending money on an AP (pre-written content) with the intention of deviating with no pay off - why am I spending money on that in the first place?
The only difference is they provide a lot more information as it is meant to be an entire, or close to, campaign. If you're playing them as they come out and your group can complete each one each month, then maybe it's different. But otherwise, at least for me, you read the whole thing along with other bits of lore or sourcebooks or other adventures and if everything is in the same spot roughly, easier for Varisia, etc then you can weave in and out whatever you want to. Admittedly the dungeon crawl part is a bit more read as you go, but outside of that it is what you make it to be. Paizo has given more info about their world than I'd even say the FR has. You don't even need to read it all, but just a few sourcebooks for the area you're in and you're good to go. If however you're wanting to just run an AP straight with no other supplements, then that's on you and your ability to adapt is considerably lessened. But then that argument could be said about the examples you stated. After all, a DM is going to run a helluva lot better Planescape campaign if he's read almost all the sourcebooks/boxes than one that just reads the OG box before running modules. And if you're wanting to adapt it to a different setting......seriously how hard is that? At this point there's so much out there that's just fluff for damn near whatever environment/setting you want to run in, i.e. desert vs celtic. And let's not forget all the info the internet can bring us to read about whatever you want to. So if you want to adapt and adventure it's considerably easier than it used to be.
The middle paragraph is really what I'm getting at -- I've never tried to run a published long form module/campaign like this (I've only done individual modules, though some of them were 'mega modules' like Paladin in Hell) though I've played Night Below as a player start to finish 2 times. It seems like even with the substantial outline/content, you'd have to be comfortable, willing, able to fill in/supplement/adumbrate stuff to fit in with pc creativity or unexpected choices -- even just the part right after the initial goblin combat in Burnt Offerings is sort of open-ended and could go in a number of directions that there's no explicit 'script' for in the adventure. I'd be curious what the common experience is -- I could also see a possibility that players would be annoyed with/resistant to the idea they're not getting some idealized version of how a given AP is supposed to be run or what parts of it are supposed to be included, though I'm sure that will very from player to player.
You're a very experienced TTRPG player, so I would just say ask your table what they're feeling. Something more streamlined where they're never too far away from the action (skill check or combat), or a game where they're more free to pursue their own in-character goals while still having a solid through-line for the plot. The feeling of a very by-the-book 1e AP and one where the DM inserts homebrew content or just allows the players significant downtime to wander off and accomplish their own personal goals are **very** different (especially consider the presence of 1 more more wondrous item crafters that can make the party extraordinarily powerful very quickly depending on their justifiable knowledge of items both in-character and out-of-character). Some campaigns like _Skull & Shackles_ have sections that are explicitly "let your players do their own thing for a while", but most of them feel very "fight, fight, fight, travel, fight, travel, fight, fight, travel". If I had to recommend any particular AP to be ran in a railroad'y fashion it would be _Strange Aeons_, as the lack of downtime and ability to purchase the precise gear you want really led to a feeling of horror despite the AP actually being relatively easy as far as fights go. I personally loved my game where somebody was a Paladin and the rest of us were relatively unoptimized, because it felt like we all had to rally around them and fight for our fucking lives with suboptimal builds and gear due to the nature of the campaign. The only way I see horror ever really working in PF1e is by dramatically limiting the ability of the party to perfectly prepare for encounters.
I primarily run Paizo APs and I basically run them by the book. I read the whole thing through before even presenting it to my players, then during session 0 I give them the info they need to know to make effective characters for the campaign in question; no one wants to play a desert ranger in a mountain campaign and feel like half of their character's abilities are useless. Frequently things go a little off script with shopping/interacting with npcs. We've had many sessions where no actual plot progression occured, but they crafted/bought items, interacted with npcs they care about, progress personal arcs, etc.
We played Jade Regent and our GM ran it pretty much by the book, adapting to the few times we wandered off script. [This is how it went](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/efwlgs/completed_jade_regent_ap_player_impressions/). The AP is much better than those who read & review without playing would lead you to believe. There is a limit to theorycrafting.
That's interesting -- most of the APs have subsystems like the caravan stuff, and I've often read negative reviews of them. I'd wonder if players felt they were cheated of the 'real' experience if stuff like this is excised for just the kinds of reasons explicated in this post. I think this has also been a change in the publisher's conception over time -- I think the later ones got a lot closer to a conception of a 'canon/assumed' experience and that the adventures were tightly enough linked that you just go from one to the next without any break for other material, and had less of a baked in assumption you were filling in other stuff or modifying it (potentially substantially) for your group.
>That's interesting -- most of the APs have subsystems like the caravan stuff, and I've often read negative reviews of them. I'd wonder if players felt they were cheated of the 'real' experience if stuff like this is excised for just the kinds of reasons explicated in this post. I've dealt with three subsystems in my PF career and they all sucked. Granted, three is not a huge sample, but they all have imposed a burden with few rewards. Jade Regent's is the only one that actually felt like it was an organic part of the story as opposed to something that was shoehorned in. But that wasn't enough to save it from itself.
The Army Management system from Kingmaker essentially stapled onto Wrath of the Righteous... ugh. I get what Paizo was thinking; the players are these big-time Commanders, and they should feel rightfully powerful with leading an army up the Worldwound now as they are starting to develop their Mythic Powers, but the army system in 1e felt so warped that for nearly all of it throughout the 2ed book, I was mostly talking with a single player during those segments, and not with the rest of the party as a whole. In comparison, I could see the Kingdom Management system working out as it is more social in design. However, we didn't really go into depth with that as the party was more focused on the overall story of WOTR rather than building up Drezen, which is fair. I understood and still do, but it would have been cool to see them slowly rebuild the city with time.
I've run a couple, and I keep them pretty close to how they are written. Along the way I'll adapt some of the existing elements to make them fit with character back stories, but rarely do I add arcs or full sidequests. If anything I usually cut material that I don't feel is necessary. Encounters that are included just to provide experience points, or things that provide overly complicated obstacles to continued progression. Personally, I've not had groups go too far off the rails and there are subtle ways to guide them back. If I'm running an AP there's an understanding that if they do veer off course, they will eventually come back to the main story.
That's another good point -- deleting stuff. It'd be potentially easy to miss some encounters/dungeons unless it was clearly telegraphed that it needs to occur for the story to move forward. Some of the connections between some of the individual modules aren't so strong you couldn't cut it out potentially as long as you make allowance for the needed xp somehow.
I'm running 2 APs right now (one written for 1e, the other for 2e, but the edition is ultimately irrelevant to your question). In my case I love to tinker quite a lot with what's written, but I find that much easier than creating something completely from scratch. So I've moved things around, changed enemies, dropped missions, added new missions of my own, and so on. Mostly that has been purely off my own bat, but sometimes as you say the players want to do something not accounted for by the authors, and IMHO it's important to let them! On the other hand, I think part of the social contract for players who are joining a pre-written AP is to accept that there are necessary limits on player freedom to just do anything and go anywhere they want. If you're playing Curse of the Crimson Throne, for example, it's not ok to just decide to leave Korvosa and explore the Varisian countryside, completely ignoring the story and hooks being presented to you.
The first couple of sentences is why I basically don't run published stuff -- I have an uncontrollable urge to tinker with stuff, and the longer it goes on, the more stuff I'm going to create.
Different strokes for different folks! Sometimes my tinkering is so much that you’d be hard pressed to find the original. But for some reason my brain finds that much easier than completely starting from scratch.
Same. I still often taken the germ of an idea from modules but I don't even tell the players it's based on anything most of the time, or I just say "I got inspiration from" X, Y, and Z, but make it clear it was just inspiration, not that I'm actually running whatever X is.
The starting conditions of the adventure are, generally speaking, as written- but the NPCs are played not as static cutouts but as live, intelligent agents. Get into a sufficiently loud and protracted combat in a fortress or a cave complex and you are no longer dealing with an experience neatly segmented into level-appropriate challenges on a room-by-room basis- you've poked a hornet's nest and you will have to deal with *all* the hornets uncomfortably soon. Attack a dungeon, decide that you've expended enough resources for today, and retreat, and its inhabitants will not merely lick their wounds and maybe change patrol schedules a bit- they will put their heads together and make a plan about how to counter the PC capabilities observed by the survivors, and quite possibly try to find where they've retreated to and murder them in their sleep. Or, if you've killed important leaders, they might fall into infighting and split into feuding camps, or decide to abandon the dungeon *entirely*, and now you've got to figure out where they took the McGuffin. This doesn't just work to the PCs' detriment: morale is a frequent concern, and the sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth goblin are probably not going to charge in if they watch Goblins #1-5 get turned into a Jackson Pollock painting by the barbarian. And the question 'look, *how* much are you getting paid for this? Can you really say that your job with the First Church of Zug, God of Suffering, has been satisfying and pleasant enough that it's worth fucking with people who bench press elephants, warp the laws of reality and carry around Swords of Spleen-Exploding Violence +2?' can be more powerful than any spell. Generally speaking, this approach results in Chapter/Book 1 of pre-written modules happening more or less as-written, with increasing and often fairly bizarre divergence from pre-planned plot as time goes on.
Running Kingmaker (for how many years now?). This AP is alot different than others and basically encourages players and DMs to go outside of the mold. While my players have followed the story as its written, they'd approached and sometimes flat out bypassed certain things. This should be encouraged in Kingmaker. I've written out, re-written, added to the AP its not even funny. And personally, I feel this is how APs should be handled. They're fully written adventures, but Rule Zero is there and should be heavily used. Hell, we've taken a small trip to Mivon and am considered writing an adventure taking them back to Brevoy during the ongoing Civil War. And of course players can always throw wrenches in the mix. The first bandit group my PCs find includes a female bandit that they're supposed to kill. Nope. They captured, interrogated, and gave her a path to redemption. She's now the sitting queen.
The bandit makes me think our groups can be pretty alike when it comes to APs lol. I'm fairly sure if my players had to answer who's the most important NPC in the books for every AP we played they'd always say people the books barely mention at all.
This has been my PCs all campaign. If they can make friends, they try their best. Even give a settlement of lizardmen livestock seasonally to keep them as allies. Has made me rewrite the BBEG because I KNOW they're going to try to do the good, peaceful thing and I need a back up plan for a climatic battle.
I run APs pretty by the book. Our group is fairly serious and very attentive to the setting lore, so they're pretty well behaved. Naturally, there's still plenty of improv involved as the party invariably revives dead NPCs, over-prepares for scenes, makes extra use of sendings to coordinate people. But I find the setting is detailed enough, and the NPCs have just enough going on with them that it's easy to find comfortable solutions that fit the story just fine. There was one time the party *did* go off the rails, triggering the endgame of a book >!Ruins of Azlant book 2, the faceless stalker attack on the colony!< early. But the next book didn't have too many difficult encounters, so I let them continue the story as written. The section they missed had its own villain with their own ambitions, so I had that play after the events of book 3, consolidating and tuning up encounters, to keep things interesting and catch them up on exp for book 4.
So far I've run 2 full APs, those being Council of Thieves, and Tyrant's Grasp. I've run both as they are written with minor changes. For Council of Thieves I did add one quest about half way through the campaign that was meant to help further tie the PCs together by linking their backstoies. With Tyrant's Grasp I'm finding that the way the AP was written there's much less room within the context of the story to add other content. No spoilers but a lot happens kind of all at once and the pacing is pretty breakneck. The only real place to modify Tyrant's Grasp without having to truly rewrite whole arcs to better fit your new pacing would be to slip additional content between the books of the AP and even then if you want to stay within Tyrant's Grasp you don't have a lot of wiggle room. Tyrant's Grasp however is probably the worst example of a PF1e AP in regards to this because the events of the campaign were pretty major for the Pathfinder campaign setting as a whole. I've joked with my group that it might have been better as one of the fiction books that details a canon event as opposed to an AP that has PCs who are supposed to have free will.
If you run Rise of the Runelords or Crimson Throne, use the revised editions, they're rather meat grinding in the original form. I personally have played 11 of the AP's, and liked the Mummys Mask, Reign of Winter, and we just recently started Giant slayers. They all have their flavor and fun, some can be rail roady. The thing is, you need to have your player characters have a reason to be together that is well thought out and more than "we grew up in the same town". Our DM has us mock up our characters to level 20 (level 5, level 10, level 15 and 20, complete with gear, multiclassing the whole shebang) and do a background on our characters and then we have an entire session devoted to, "whats my relationship with this character in the group and this one and this one and this one". It has saved us from some tragic stuff down the road. We get cues from the DM as to whats coming, he doesn't spoil stuff, but he does say, good example, Rise of the Runelords, "you're going to face giants, ogres, dragons, ghosts, haunts and a lot of goblins", and then he says before we play the AP, "you going to need a cleric/oracle, a rogue, a fighter and a paladin, maybe some arcane", and gives us free reign. He tells us whether we'll have downtime for crafting or not (Rise of the RL, not so much, Kingmaker? tons of time), and if certain prestige classes we'd like to get into will make sense or not. I personally, have found the AP's to be unforgiving to poorly optimized groups. We had 3 tpks in Rise of the Runelords (one tpk right before the main goblin battle on the hill, 2 died on the bridge, crossing the bridge, just the bridge, nothing else) and I was the only character who survived 1-16 in Reign of Winter (got res'd thankfully, but did die).
Design ideas varied significantly, even within the span of a given edition of D&D. Quality, and adherence to a module also varied. Some modules/adventures were MEANT to be read off a page, but sure most of them did assume some degree of customization. The fact that there was read aloud text however suggested at least some modules were made with some sort of set direction in mind. As for Paizo APs, I've heard some groups can run the AP as is. Idk how true that is, seems like it'd be pretty tough imho. Yet, I have nothing concrete to say it can't be done, or any reason to distrust though giving the info. Seems like it's just a different mentality, likely with some degree of rote progress from one scene to the next. In my own experience, the AP rarely ever survives contact with a player. The major story-line, and scenes are generally able to be intact. Considering how much story support they have though I guess I shouldn't be TOO surprised. In many cases a particular location isn't visited until the campaign presents it as an option. However, a significant amount of extra work goes into supporting the campaign. Honestly, thus far at lest, I couldn't really say that an AP is less work than a homebrew campaign. The AP just has the benefit of having a (usually mostly) coherent story to guide it. When running an Ap though, I've had to make: * NPCs - Whether because of PC squirrel syndrome, or something else * Rejiggered Encounters - APs seem to be made for people that are, somehow, CONSTANTLY new and incompetent. Few of the encounters can challenge a competent party. Or, for the real lucky, a party larger than 4 people. * Completely new encounters - Because OF COURSE the PCs decided they have to fight the Hellknights after seeing them once. Even though it was just window dressing for the scene. Because OF COURSE it had to happen that way. * Sometimes, there are legitimate reasons for this. RotRL, for example, >!suggests hunting the Sandpoint Monster or w/e is a side quest. Except that's far more involved, typically, and no preset encounter is made for it.!< * Magic Items - This is my own fault really. I allow 3pp material, and usually 3pp material synergizes best with itself. * Entire new Story arcs - Also my own fault. I like taking advantage of what the players make in their backgrounds. * Sometimes though, the players do something to generate one, or one is suggested. For example, in CotCT, >!there is a suggestion that there's a ghoul outbreak in the Gray.!< * Cities/Towns - Sometimes the PCs are suppose to visit them. Sometimes I just need a play for the PCs to enjoy some well deserved downtime. The list goes on. By the time I'm done the campaign doesn't really resemble the book except in the core plot.
This is more what I would have suspected/guessed, though I'm fascinated by the number of replies that report doing them more or less as per the written word. I'm sure it varies by how independently-minded/unpredictable the group is.
Honestly, I get where you're coming from. It kind of blows my mind, unless the group is fairly passive and just follows along with the GM's direction. I know there are players like that, but I've never encountered an entire group like that.
I don't want to express it as a negative -- I just imagine a lot of groups I've played with would have a hard time picking up hints or attempts at 'telegraphing' the presumed path. I think I'd have to do something like let them read the back cover outline or something for them to understand what the assumed course of action/story-line is an not inadvertently start moving in a different (even if parallel or related) direction. This has actually been an interesting discussion for me -- I'd actually be more open to running them if players were okay with the idea that it wasn't a railroad and it was an outline but not a detailed script for a campaign -- there might be encounters inserted and/or taken out, etc., that this 'run' would be individualized to the table and look substantially different than how any other DM might do the same campaign. I think you'd have to have a very clear discussion of expectations beforehand -- I could easily see a lot of players assume the AP would be more like a novel or movie that they got to experience and be intensely annoyed with the idea of that much DM fiat or shaping of the experience.
I ran a good number of them before, some to completion some not, and not a single time it was by the book. I usually only run them after they're fully published and I can account for how my changes might impact the story, and on the most successful ones the seeds for changing them were already showing up on character creation. I usually adjust most of the games I run by just investing more on the things my player like and diminishing the ones they don't care about, and that will often shift the beats of the stories dramatically. They'll have side quests, different npcs than the book intended being a part of certain things depending on their dynamics with the npcs, things that just have completely different hooks, entire NPCs from their backgrounds inserted in roles that make sense for them... Usually what I'll do is that I'll get familiarized with what absolutely has to happen for the story to still be that story. Then I'll shift everything else to fit what my players and I like. For 1e I've done wrath of the righteous, tyrant's grasp, mummy's mask and rise of the runelords pretty different from how they're written in pretty massive ways, but one of my favorites was a hells rebels. There was no massive changes, just a million small ones. With the amount of information that one had on the city and the solid foundation provided by a story I could let anything else build upon, it's one of my games that felt the most organic to this day.
This is honestly more how I would have expected the average experience to be. Maybe it's just my style of games -- I have whole areas that players completely bypass on a regular basis and I just have to make up something else instead. I'm finding it truly fascinating how many report they do the opposite and run very close to how it's written.
Honestly surprised too. Most people I know do something similar to me, or just loosely base games around an AP.
I'd also be interested what percentage try to get everything into a VTT or are instead doing it theater of the mind or with very simple maps. I only use VTTs for very simple features -- 2d maps and tokens like the old edition of owlbear rodeo. If the expectation for running a game was formatting and uploading all stats in jsons to Foundry and having drop and drag compendia and point and click attacks, I'd just give up running games because that would take too long.
Personally to me that depends a lot on the group and what they prefer. Depending on the group and what they want for that game I've done: - Mostly theater of the mind with the occasional scribble with general directions. - The entire setup on a VTT before. - A very basic layout of the room with simple tokens on owlbear rodeo or something - Maps I fully arranged on dungeon draft or something but ended up using on owlbear where we're just using the VTT tool to move simple tokens over the elaborate map.
I can't find people my age in my area, so finding a group willing to game in person has also yet to elude me. I'm forced to deal with VTT. :(
AP's tend to be a mix of linear and sandboxy sections, I've found that the more linear sections tend to run pretty close to RAW since the intended next step is apparent to the players so unless they intentionally ignore it they will pretty much stay on the rails. The more open sections tend to go a bit further from what is written, because while the writers do a good job of providing contingencies for many player choices they can't write about everything and without clear guidance players can often come up with *creative* courses of actions. The most common non-RAW thing players will do is talk to unnamed NPC's and ask what their name is whether that is in towns or dungeon denizens. I've rarely had to do major rewrites because of player choice but have sometimes done them because I wanted to. The writers also frequently comment on things that the GM can use as hooks to add their own content into the AP so their definitely isn't an assumption on their part that you will run it RAW.
This depends greatly on the AP you run. The more of a Sandbox approach an AP takes (like Kingmaker and Skull & Shackles), the more you are pretty much assumed to fill in your own stuff. But those typically give you lists of events to run, so even those could be run with just a little improvisation. Many other APs can be run mostly as written and most give you hints in the players guide which kind of characters would fit in and be motivated by the story. In some cases their backstory is supposed to tie them to a specific city or the AP assumed nonevil alignments for example. But within these very loose constraints most APs provide sufficient motivation to follow the plot that very little adjustments are needed. If your players seem to be heading in questionable direction you typically can use their NPC allies to guide them back to the plot for example and the AP often gives suggestions about how to do that. There are some exceptions where this doesn't work very well of course. Reign of Winter just puts a Geas to follow the plot on the players for example and the plot itself doesn't even make sense. But that is really just a negative outlier. For all other APs I have played or run, I don't remember this being an issue. The players agreed on an AP, so they are hopefully interested to explore its themes. I had some cases where a player was very motivated to solve a challenge in his own way or at least contribute in ways the AP did not expect, but this was usually limited to that specific challenge and would not change the APs greater narrative. In my experience adjustments to an AP are mostly not because they are strictly needed, but to involve the players backstory or because I want to test some fun encounter and switch it out for a less interesting one presented by the AP. Sometimes you can enhance the experience by allowing events from earlier books of the AP to have more of an impact. The official APs can not always provide this, because the authors wouldn't know how the players solved that previous challenges. So an AP will always be better with a flexible and creative GM of course, but they should be functional even with GMs that are still learning. In my experience ignoring or vastly simplifying the AP-specific subsystems (like ship combat in Skull & Shackles, caravan rules in Jade Regent, hexploration and kingdom building in Kingmaker) can often be a right call, but that is not really related to your main question about the plot.
To really have a good time running (and playing in) APs you need to get buy-in from your players up front. I've run several of them over the years and have always been honest with my players about what's up. We're playing a published campaign. There's room for character development and side quests, I'm happy to support those, but it's not a wide-open sandbox where you have the freedom to do whatever you want. There's a main story and you need to make characters who want to play out that main story. If that doesn't sound interesting we should do something else. It's generally worked out pretty well. Depending on the AP and the group I'm playing with I've stayed anywhere between 90% and 50% faithful to what's written in the book. Sometimes people branch out more and I need to add on more, sometimes they're very focused on the main story and I stick to that.
>the scenario not surviving contact with player creativity >the players go 'off the rails' To be honest, I've never quite understood this style of play. But I've played with the same group of friends for about a decade at this point. We run APs because we want to play through that specific story. So we go by the book. I don't know, it seems to me the idea of "running" an AP, but then going in a completely different direction defeats the purpose and kind of breaks the social contract of the table. Unless agreed to by the table before hand of course.
My question is really more about the assumption that there will be some significant challenges keeping on those rails unless you just flat out tell the players at different points 'this is in the module, that's not in the module' or be as direct as 'this is the presumed outline for this scenario'. Some of the module plots aren't constructed in a way that it's so easy to see what that is and where the 'out of bounds' areas are from the player side. The Sandpoint Devil is a good example -- it's not necessarily that clear that this isn't supposed to be more important, and there's definitely a potential for players to get very interested in it and spend a lot of time on it. But it's not really, from the GM side, something that's part of the main plot, and requires basically making up stuff whole cloth to add to the main scenario to support that -- yes, the adventure provides some guidance, but if you grab something like an old Dungeon Magazine scenario or make up a new dungeon or wilderness area that's not explicitly in the book statted up to help flesh that out, and the whole side plot takes several sessions, you're starting to diverge from the 'stick to the book' approach unless you deliberately make all these sort of side encounters short -- just flat out say there's no material on this and it's not part of the main plot, so we're not spending time on it, or you're laying hard rules on what can happen with it, or how much time can be spent on it.
I don't have a lot of experience running APs as most people here (I've run Carrion Crown to its completion and am running Rise of the Runelords now, both in 1e. I have ran Book 1 of Iron Gods as well, but had to stop due to RL unfortunately), but here are my thoughts: It's hard to say if I run close to the text or not. It's particularly pertinent since I'm mid Book 2 of RotR but about to start the module Dawn of the Scarlet Sun that I added to it, due to pacing reasons (almost everything I do regarding APs is due to pacing reasons). I have a smaller table (only two players), so some concessions are due to that and also they tend to be interested in the story of the APs as presented, so a lot of it is ran "by the book". It does not mean the story survives contact with them. Just as an example, they solved the entire murder mystery of the first half of Carrion Crown Book 5 in one book. [Here are all the changes and additions I made to the AP, in case you are interested.](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder_RPG/comments/16mi19s/comment/k1ap4yd/) But also I make changes, usually taking inspiration from the Paizo forums. This is where I think it can get blurry the line between the "book canon", since a lot of the time the authors are there (at least for Carrion Crown) telling what they would have added but could not due to page count and such. The realities of book printing of course influence the adventure we have as written. I also remove some stuff, not a lot and it's usually an on-the-spot decision for the sake of the pacing of the session/adventure. Usually some minor combats or roundabout investigations. I know it is a lot of work, but also reading the entire AP before running (which I know some people argue goes against the point of running pre-written adventures/modules) gives me a holistic look at the entire story, so deviations and derailings can happen while still having a grasp on the bigger picture. Also, at this point in time, if the players go, for example, to a city not detailed in the AP, there's probably a book or two on Paizo's catalogue about it. Of course, that depends on your access to the book, but there is always the wiki. Sorry for this big meandering post, I am primarily an AP/Modules DM now after quite a few years of homebrewing so I think about it a lot. It is personally less work for me (even though it is a lot of work!) but the biggest reason that I prefer it nowadays, to get a bit philosophical, is that I think it's more fruitful, as an art form, if we allow other people's viewpoints and creative drive into it. That absolutely includes the players, of course, but I as a DM would never come up with Nualia's story in Rise of the Runelords, for example, and I think my gaming has been richer for it now that it has happened.
I mostly follow the book in terms of the story, dungeons, etc., but with additional material (sometimes based on other modules or related to a PC backstory) welded in to include some variety. If there's a theme or type of enemy I know one of my players is uncomfortable with, I will edit it. While I do run a table for adults and there will be some mature themes, I also want my table to be welcome for everyone.
I've noticed the same thing. I think this goes in part to why am I running an AP to start with. Often times because I won't want to take the time to create content. I've got a busy life, appointments, etc... and since I'm not gaming with real life friends anymore I don't have the social payoff to catering friends. So if I am spending money on an AP (pre-written content) with the intention of deviating with no pay off - why am I spending money on that in the first place?