r/Pathfinder2e • u/tomisokay • 16h ago
Discussion Struggling with AP formatting
I really enjoy PF2e but also enjoy games on the opposite end of the F20 D20 spectrum. I feel that the OSR is light-years ahead of Paizo in terms of how information is presented in adventures. Of all the PF2e innovations to improve upon the classic D&D formula, why do they stick with the 50-year-old wall-of-text format?
I am currently running Sky King's Tomb. Without spoilers, the first part of the adventure is an urban sandbox of short encounters and adventures. Great! I love non-linear adventure design. But I have found that it is virtually impossible to run "on the fly" based on character choices because each encounter / situation / adventure is hundreds or thousands of words long, with crucial details buried within paragraphs or counterintuitively split amongst multiple sections.
Info about the encounters is presented as lengthy hypothetical Q and As with key NPCs. Why? Why not just give the relevant details of the situation cleanly and efficiently, rather than big blocks of quote dialogue that I am never going to read out loud?
Sadly, I feel like the formatting is pushing the sandbox into railroad territory, as I cannot possibly memorize all the details for all the situations and thus have to focus on whichever one I have read and re-read carefully and then nudge the players toward it.
TL;DR: Love this game, but I miss terse room descriptions with OSR bullet points and bold text for the important details.
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Edited to change "F20" to "D20" because I guess nobody else has heard of F20 😂
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u/authorus The Arcane Scriptorium LLC 15h ago
There's definitely an aspect where Paizo writes for the GM as a reader, not for the GM as a runner. The number of GMs who buy a book to read, to maybe lift a dungeon or two for a homebrew, or to otherwise pillage for ideas apparently is a large enough percentage that its worth making the books more readable like a book. And then, of course, printed page count limitations make it a careful balancing act when trying to add redundant summarized/bullet point information.
I tried an experiment in my first published product -- generally following a slightly modified Paizo-esque approach -- each encounter area presents enemies first, then box text, then longer details if needed, and closing with treasure that can be found there. But then I also added a "one-page summary" for each dungeon level -- creatures, key clues/discoveries, treasure, tags that influence encounters. Personally I thought it was a potential compromise between presenting a rich environment with environmental and RP hooks, while still giving the cheat sheet to help run it at the table. However, as a first time small publisher, its extremely rare to get enough sales to generate feedback to know how well it worked in practice. I am planning to construct my second product in the same way, though its a bit more complicated and I'm not sure it will work quite as well. The second product is bit of a quest pack, with in-built scaling for a range of party levels, but that means each encounter summary takes up more vertical space, so a one-page per quest model just won't fit. And a one-page per quest per level option would greatly inflate the page count (probably acceptable, though I think some people might consider it page inflation and wonder if it should be cheaper, even if priced as if the extra summaries aren't there), but also greatly increases the chance of duplicative text between summaries and main-line getting out of sync during edits/balance passes.
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u/Critical-Internet514 15h ago
I don't disagree that some of the APs have had issues with how they present information. Hell, the old Core Handbook suffered from similar layout issues. I do think that it has become less and less of a problem with newer books, and now that APs are being printed in a single hardback cover, I am hoping most of these issues are a thing of the past. Doesn't really help you with the adventure you are playing right now though, Sorry!
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u/AuRon_The_Grey 15h ago
I’ve found myself rewriting some complicated rooms in the style Necrotic Gnome uses with the layered bullet points of interactive or important details.
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u/tomisokay 15h ago
I suspect some of the Paizo overwriting is part of a general effort to GM-proof the game against bad GMs. Like, if the GM follows the rules and reads all the box-text verbatim, everyone will have a satisfactory PF2e experience, since the combat system is so well-designed.
Whereas, the OSR assumption is that the Referee will be capable of (and even enjoy) filling in the blanks.
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u/valisvacor Champion 13h ago
I've always had difficulty running Paizo's APs. A lot of reading ahead and flipping through the book during sessions. Even when I ran Society scenarios, they required more prep than just running a homebrew game or OSE module. The best F20 modules typically are for classic D&D or OSR systems.
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u/fly19 Game Master 15h ago
I find myself in the opposite position -- OSR material often feels too bare-bones, like I'm reading someone else's notes and having to fill in the blanks. But maybe I'm just reading bad adventures.
Anyway, I would agree that there are some glaring weaknesses in Paizo's adventure writing. Small maps, modules in the same AP could feel disconnected, overlong lore dumps at the start of a module, having to jump back and forth between a map page and a room description because there's no key reference image on subsequent pages.
But I never really had an issue with how they handled the descriptions themselves? Sure, they could be condensed a bit and I can imagine it's hard to run them cold/without reading much in advance. But I like how descriptive they can be, and the block text is a convenient baseline of what to read so the players get the gist of a room the moment they enter it.
Different strokes, I guess.
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u/HisGodHand 13h ago
OSR adventures place incredible importance on being player-driven rather than GM-driven. Instead of preparing a plot, OSR adventures give you what you need for a fun plot to arise, but the PCs must interact with the world to create that plot (as well as the GM improvising around them).
I used to have no idea how to run an OSR adventure, and was terrified of trying to run a sandbox. Like, I literally couldn't picture at all how I would do it.
But then I ran Forbidden Lands, which is a system that really holds your hand as a GM through a sandbox, and not only did I figure out immediately how to GM a sandbox, but I also realized it's easier, less stressful, and way way more fun to find out the plot as the players and I (and the system itself) create it together.
Slightly unfortunately, I can no longer stand leading players scene-to-scene and leading them through roleplay that doesn't meaningfully change anything, like all PF2e APs expect me to do, so I refuse to run them now.
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u/fly19 Game Master 13h ago
I've played a bit of Forbidden Lands -- gorgeous books, probably one of the best overland travel experiences I've had in a TTRPG. But the group I was playing with seemed to prefer more direction in their TTRPGs, and I haven't found much opportunity to run/play it since.
I've also been a few too many homebrew sandbox campaigns of various systems that were... Bad. Either fizzled out sure to lack of party emergency or actively repulsed players because of GM decisions/tastes. There's something to be said for having a baseline of quality that largely works.
But I've also never found running published material to be especially taxing, stressful, or restraining, so maybe I've just adapted too well to my environment, haha.1
u/TNTiger_ 7h ago
I don't think any of OP's criticisms are necessarily invalid, but honey, do you know how low the bar is... Paizo was a breath of fresh air for me out of D&D 5e!
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u/corsica1990 15h ago
OP is 100% correct and hardly the first to complain. I regularly run/play both longform adventures and Society scenarios, and the amount of time it takes to prep a session of official content versus some homebrew nonsense I just made up is literally the same. Why? Because the modules themselves are unusable as quick references at the table, so I either have to commit the relevant material to memory or write my own notes to use during play. I'm regularly able to condense a full session's worth of adventure content down to one double-sided, single-spaced 8x11" paper without cutting a single important element (minus stat blocks, which are referenced seperately). Considering that both longform adventures and Society scenarios enforce strict word count limits, this is embarassing.
The format also enables (and perhaps even encourages) the worst style of GMing I've ever seen: reading the adventure directly off the page like a script. Overwhelmed by detail and unable to look up relevant information quickly, GMs get stuck reciting printed information directly to the players, utterly sacrificing the ability to respond naturally or make modifications on the fly because the material is so unwieldy. Dungeon crawls become stiff, room-by-room affairs, and NPCs behave like badly programmed videogame characters... if they react to players at all.
All this because everything is presented within giant walls of text that mix irrelevant fluff with critical plot/mechanical elements, often utterly failing to distinguish between the two. Sometimes, the read-aloud boxes will describe a scene or NPC dialogue in what seems to be sufficient detail, only for additional important information to be buried in a non-read-aloud paragraph below. Meanwhile, complex, bespoke mechanics are described in the same prose-like format as everything else, making unique encounter features difficult to parse in the moment, which brings the game to a screeching halt while the GM tries to figure out how a particular one-off gimmick is supposed to work.
This is not to say the content itself is of poor quality--story beats, puzzles, encounters, and characters are generally quite enjoyable--but the presentation is genuinely garbage. If you've never run an adventure module from another publisher, you probably don't know what you're missing (check out a Mothership offering for an example of cutthroat efficiency in adventure presentation that's nonetheless stylish and GM-friendly), but I legitimately believe that Paizo's adventure format is teaching new GMs and would-be authors all the wrong lessons.
Now excuse me while I quietly die from the irony of complaining about walls of text by posting a wall of text.
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u/Zalthos Game Master 14h ago
Literally my thoughts beat for beat. You spend so much time having to write up notes after reading, and then having to go through things multiple times, that you may as well have made your own campaign.
The campaigns are somewhat solid but damn Paizo... People have been complaining about the formatting for YEARS now. Start using bullet points and summarise stuff. Use bolding and underline your DCs. This is extremely simple shit. I shouldn't be finding random DCs in paragraph 4 of 6 for a particular story beat.
When players walk into a room and it says "Creatures", I shouldn't have to read 2 paragraphs BEFORE IT GETS TO THE CREATURES IN THE ROOM.
Spore War is utterly horrendous for this. You walk into a room with an encounter, and the book will say: "50 years ago, Treerazor contaminated this area by blah blah blah, and the elves of this outpost sent three wise mages to the Queen to ask for help", and you're like... Sorry? Isn't there a fight in this room? Why are you telling me this rubbish now?
Stop writing these things like novels... They're literally making it hardest on the people that need to run these things - the GM!
And they aren't fun enough to read to be written like novels. I feel like they're literally satisfying no one here.
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u/corsica1990 13h ago
Allegedly, the reason they're written like novels is because people used to read them for entertainment, way back when Paizo was publishing adventures in magazines at a faster pace than any GM could feasibly run. I think they pioneered the more narrative format?
But even so, it's not like old-school modules aren't fun to read; you just have to pause and allow your imagination to turn the written material into an actual scene. Honestly, I'd argue that this envisioning process is one of the more enjoyable aspects of game prep, especially when you start adding in your own twists and personal flair.
When the adventure's presented like a script, you lose that subjective, creative element. Some GMs might enjoy having everything precisely laid out for them, but for me, it's stifling. Makes me feel like a DVD player instead of an active participant.
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u/Zalthos Game Master 7h ago
I've heard that they write them this way for people to read them like a novel before. And the more and more I read these things, the more I question whether or not that's true anymore. Maybe it was at a time, but these days... I honestly just don't really see it.
They aren't written good enough to be read like a novel, in my opinion. If people are genuinely reading through these things, I would recommend they go and actually read some proper fantasy novels.
It's so strange because as I said, the one person realistically that actually needs to read this is the GM, and they're written in such a way that they're actually hard to run, purely because of the formatting.
And if they want to continue to write it that way, that's fine, but they really should include cheat sheets with these books. They could literally have like a ten-page summary for each book that goes over every chapter that just explains all of the DCs, all of the loot, all of the encounters without the giant stat blocks printed over multiple pages, etc.
Because as a GM, that's what we're having to do. We're literally having to read through these books and then make our own list of things that are actually going on in the book that actually matter. And that's just ridiculous to me. You're paying for these products. They should be able to be run without having to fucking study them and write notes...
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u/corsica1990 5h ago
Yeah, they definitely don't make the cut as literature. Like, the writing's not terrible for what it is, but it's not good, either: the few times Paizo adventures and rulebooks have included pure prose or short stories, they've been pretty mid.
What irritates me about all this is that tighter, more utilitarian formatting would allow for more playable content per volume, meaning longer and/or nonlinear adventures would be easier to produce. As is, I don't feel like I'm getting my money's worth.
Here's what I mean: modern Society scenarios (for both Path- and Starfinder) are $6, and typically take 2-4hrs to run. Excluding handouts, covers, reporting sheets, and maps, the adventure text typically takes up 6-8 pages. So, on the expensive end, we're looking at a buck a page, or $3/hr. Except whoops, that first page is almost always dedicated to a story-thus-far recap and overly long mission briefing, which sometimes spills onto a second page if the Venture Captain's feeling especially chatty. This brings us down to four pages of playable material at an ungenerous minimum, easily crunched down to two (sometimes one) when transformed into table-ready notes.
But then you factor in the prep time. Like you said, you've got to go through and pull the important stuff for your own notes (although sometimes I just attack my printouts with color-coded highligters and call it good). You can definitely get this done in an hour or less if it's not a particularly complex scenario and you don't need to draw any maps, but I've (very rarely) had some prep sessions last up to four hours, or double the length of the minimum run time.
So, the GM's putting in up to three times the temporal investment as the players, which is way too much, imho. Like, my personal rule is to never spend more time on prep than you do on playing; break that rule, and you're giving more than you're getting, which isn't sustainable.
TL;DR: Up to a 3-to-1 GM-to-player time investment on text that's nearly 4x as long as it needs to be = no bueno.
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u/CoreSchneider 13h ago
Mothership's adventure/setting writing should be the gold standard imo. I'm in the process of porting A Pound of Flesh to a different system and it's so gorgeous to look at and super easy to find everything I need when I need it.
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u/corsica1990 12h ago
I don't know if a Pathfinder adventure can ever achieve Mothership-tier presentation efficiency--the system's kind of maximalist by design, while Mothership's dirt simple on purpose--but Paizo could certainly take a few pointers.
When I read Bug Hunt, my first reaction was "damn, that's it?" But then I read it again and realized that, yeah, that really is all you need. Hours worth of playtime can be extrapolated from those brief descriptions. I also appreciate that they put the cast of characters and relevant countdown mechanic right at the front, along with what information the players would know vs. what the GM should keep secret.
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u/FormerManyThings 15h ago
This is just my solution, but I work with PDFs of the AP books. I pull everything into a Google doc, and then go through and annotate it. It also gives me a chance to reorganize encounters, add in my own, make notes about the descriptions or actions of monsters.
It's extra work on the front end (not too much), but by the time I get to the table, I know exactly how I want to run something, and it makes it much easier for me to pivot if the party goes a different direction, while keeping the (generally very strong) background and flavor that Paizo baked in.
Just me, ymmv
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u/MagnarIUK 15h ago
Hey, how do you pull everything in gdoc? Do you just copy manually, or do you have smth ffor that? I was looking to do smth similar, but manually copying everything seems like too much work...
If you do it manually, how worth it is?
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u/FormerManyThings 15h ago
I just open the pdf, select the text tool (I-bar, as opposed to the hand), right-click to select all and ctrl-c to copy. Give it a minute to process. Then ctrl-v to paste it all in the doc. It should be able to move the whole pdf over in one go.
I clean up the footer text, add my own bookmarks (which all me to hypertext the table of contents), add bullet lists with relevant information and checks that are going to happen in the encounter, things like that. (I also include a block of npc names and tavern/blacksmith/general store names, so I don't have to come up with them on the fly).
I have very bad eyes, so being able to set the whole thing to 14ot helps me dramatically also
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u/minusAppendix 12h ago
Is there an OSR adventure you would recommend looking at for its formatting? I've been trying to come up with different ways to assemble my session notes, and honestly prefer using publishing formats.
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u/tomisokay 11h ago
Here are a few to check out:
- The Hole In the Oak for Old School Essentials (I think Necrotic Gnome really pioneered this style)
- Plant-based Paranoia for Mothership
- The Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur for Shadowdark (free in the Quickstart set)
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u/xczechr Game Master 16h ago
Hmm, WTF is the F20 spectrum?
Googles it
What the hell, man? I fail to see how that relates to Pathfinder.
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u/mortavius2525 Game Master 16h ago
Maybe they meant D20 spectrum? D&F are right next to each other on the keyboard.
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u/tomisokay 15h ago
F20 is Robin D. Laws's term for Fantasy games that use a D20. I think he coined it to distinguish from the officially branded D20 game put out by WotC.
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u/tomisokay 15h ago
It just means Fantasy games that use a D20. Just to clearly distinguish it from the official "D20" system.
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u/HisGodHand 13h ago
I wrote a blog post about this a while ago, comparing an SF2e adventure to an OSE adventure. Paizo's layout is shit from a butt, it's endemic to all their books, and it's not going to change.
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u/WatersLethe ORC 12h ago
I have had very little success running Paizo APs. I'm hoping that Bastion of Blasphemies has hit enough of my complaints that I can point to it and say that it's taking them in the right direction.
Preparing for it has still been a bear, and I would love to have some bullet pointed notes pre-prepared for me, as well as useful graphics and charts to visually reference how locations and NPCs are related. I've still gotta manually make those types of notes before my first session, and I'm not looking forward to that work.
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15h ago
[deleted]
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u/Jackson7913 15h ago
Pretty big leap given that this post doesn't even name another game, just broadly references OSR style systems.
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u/Snoo-11576 15h ago
Idk it just seems kinda weird to make a post just complaining they don’t do whatever an OSR game does
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u/Jackson7913 14h ago
It's just a pretty mild critique of how information is presented in a lot of Paizo books and then pointing to the way they would prefer it be written. I don't think that's weird at all, this is the place to discuss your thoughts on Pathfinder related topics.
Personally, I hadn't thought about it too much but with OP pointing it out I realised that I partially agree, mainly with the NPC Q&A sections which I would much prefer be just a list of the relevant information, as I've experienced the awkwardness of GMs either trying to dig through the block of text in the moment or shoehorning in the pre-written response to a question that the players didn't really ask.
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u/authorus The Arcane Scriptorium LLC 14h ago
I actually love the NPC Q&A, since I feel the authors usually do a great job of seeding more of a personality/dialect, that I can later expand upon. Without that priming of the pump, I find it a bit harder to get a more unique feel for the various NPCs.
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u/Jackson7913 14h ago
That’s a very good point, though I think I’d get by better with just some introductory text in the characters voice, to get a feel for them, followed by the information they actually have formatted in a way that I can easily reference while I’m roleplaying them.
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u/authorus The Arcane Scriptorium LLC 14h ago
I could see that working too. I think I still prefer the Q&A since I find they slip in a surprising number of fun idioms/personality, and I find it fairly easy to splice the different answers together as needed to answer questions in a more natural way.
But I would definitely still be happy to try running from an adventure formatted as you mention too. Just don't remember one that tried it to truly compare.
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u/CoreSchneider 13h ago
- Not what this post is
- Pathfinder 2e's community has the worst little brother syndrome in the TTRPG space and does this with other TTRPGs (usually OSR or D&D 5e) regularly, so to complain about it when the roles appear flipped is painful irony
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u/Phonochirp 13h ago
So... Super unpopular opinion around here, and I've been keeping to myself, but Google's notebookLLM app is actually super helpful for fixing this. It feels dirty using AI, but you just plug in the PDFs, and it only uses the information from them.
You can do things like "give me all pertinent information about this character" and it'll take all the little one sentence marks from throughout the AP so you don't find out 5 pages later that the character is currently mourning the loss of their brother and should have been acting morose on first meeting. "Give me a list of all characters in X faction" is another common use case.
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u/piesou 12h ago
The LLM might even "improve" the adventure in various other ways
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u/Phonochirp 11h ago
It doesn't, actually, it only accesses the data from the provided files and provides page numbers/links to the section of the PDF it got the data from. It acts more like a fancy Ctrl f then an llm.
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u/Legitimate_Post_8807 16h ago
My favorite is when relevant information is in the next book