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The original was posted on /r/pathfinder2e by /u/Prints-Of-Darkness on 2023-10-06 10:24:44.

While I tend to play exclusively in a homebrew setting, I will occasionally sprinkle in a short published adventure into the world (with its plot adapted). Generally these published adventures have been fun, though I can’t say I’ve been totally blown away by them.

My experience with published adventures (especially from other systems) is limited, only playing a sixth of Curse of the Crimson Throne and half of Out of the Abyss before, so I’m not coming from a particularly informed place of reference in relation to comparisons.

I mention this because I did feel incredibly impressed with Curse of the Crimson Throne (PF1). We didn’t play much of it, but it felt very natural with a well structured plot and pacing, and a variety of encounters.

I’ve GM’d Crown of the Kobold King and Night of the Grey Death to completion, and I’ve played through all of Abomination Vaults. I’ve found the level of detail in these adventures good (especially as a GM), but all of them had tonnes of combat in, with some combats feeling as if they were just there to pad XP. In addition to this, a lot of the combats weren’t really mechanically interesting, with some just being “fight this single monster in a room”. As a GM, I removed quite a few combats, but it was a shame that the books didn’t give me much to replace them with.

While you could certainly say “Abomination Vaults is a dungeon crawl by design, it’s meant to be this way”, and that’d be fair enough, I don’t think that’s the case for Crown of the Kobold King or Night of the Grey Death. And I’d argue even in AV, they had a few too many encounters, but I think it mainly stood out in CotKK where it felt like 90% of the content was a dungeon, with minimal traps (quite unusual for Kobolds).

My issues can be summed up as follows:

  • Combat was the overwhelming majority of content, even in Night of the Grey Death. There were very few ‘social’ systems or challenges to take part in that weren’t just rolling a skill check. Often times it seemed like a room would say “the enemy will speak to the players but will attack at the nearest opportunity”, as if to force combat when it didn’t need to be there. I guess it became quite a formulaic “open door to room, murder the inhabitant(s)”.
  • While there were traps, in both CotKK and AV, they felt a bit thin on the ground. I’d have like to have seen more traps within combat rooms as they were cool when they came up
  • The encounters often felt uninteresting. While there were a few environmental hazards in CotKK, which were great, most encounters were just a room with X number of enemies in. I felt this more strongly in AV and NotGD
  • The encounters didn’t always feel balanced. This is mostly about one encounter in AV (which I think may have been errata’d) and the hardest encounter I’ve ever seen in NotGD that was labelled “Moderate” (if you know, you know).
  • It felt as if you could pretty much ignore the settlements. You’d go there for a brief moment to get a quest or find a bit of info before being thrust into a separate dungeon. While you could interact with the towns (and they are well fleshed out), players often didn’t feel the need to and so were less invested (though this did change in CotKK after I made the Kreeds very antagonistic to the party by adding my own parts to the story). The GM can fix this, but the AP leaves it fully up to them.

I should state that I have liked a lot about the APs, including the NPCs, little bits of detail about the environment and its history, and the stories are pretty good (and relatively easily adaptable too!). I can also imagine you may get the impression that I/my group dislikes combat and wants to play a social game; this isn’t true, we very much enjoy combat, we just found there was too much of it, and too many times it felt like inconsequential combat for the sake of it.

It may well seem that I’ve just come here to complain, and certainly the amount of complaining in this post is proportional to the amount of dungeon crawling in CotKK, but my main aim is to see if this is the standard in published adventures or if I just picked up more combat oriented adventures (of course, AV is).

Most of the comments I’ve seen on this sub have been, understandably, very positive about official adventures - and don’t get me wrong, there was a lot to like in the ones I played. I however felt underwhelmed compared to the first 1/6th of Curse of the Crimson Throne. I was wondering if my opinions were applicable to other published adventures, or if I’ve just chosen some very combat oriented adventures?

TL;DR

I’ve played a few PF2 adventures and while generally good, they feel underwhelming compared to one PF1 adventure. I don’t have the best frame of reference so I’m asking the wider community if I’ve just been unlucky in the comparison.