Monday, November 21, 2011

What If ..... Paizo released old-tyme versions of their products?

By that I mean what if Paizo released some of their Pathfinder material, such as adventures and bestiaries, in a Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC version?

I think I'd buy some of their adventures to use as sandbox material, and I'd definitely get the bestiaries. I guess the layout would be an issue, the artwork to text ratio would be considerable, and I'd prefer it they had less intense graphic design and layout, although that's even more unlikely than Paizo Swords & Wizardry material.

You could probably fit all three bestiaries in one S&W book.

One issue I have with their adventures, from looking at them, is that they contain soooo muuuuuch exposition, etc. that I find it hard to find the what I consider the juicy "meat" of the adventures. What & Where. Imagine one of their adventure path installments trimmed down to a slim TSR eighties-tween module, that I would buy.

8 comments:

  1. Their adventures are too large for me. Not something I could easily slot into a campaign, and yeah, usually with too much exposition. But I do have a friend who is adapting some of them for his own use, and since his campaign is very far from the D&D standards, it speaks well of their moddability.

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  2. Skip all that source material, cut right to the adventure locale (map and key), and make stapled 24 page pamphlets out of those glossy, unwieldy 100++ page monsters.

    Either that, or a whole Adventure Path in one softcover book of around the same pagecount as one Pathfinder instalment.

    I'd buy that in a heartbeat.

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  3. Aren't some Frog God adventures exactly this, repurposed 3rd edition material? Things like what, Fane of the Fallen and Strange Bedfellows and such are perhaps the worst things published under one of the OSR labels, I think. The very structure of an adventure that presumes that the adventuring party will not only certainly face certain encounters, but will also surely win them, and then listen to a mile of exposition about some ill-written fantasy soap opera, all this makes this type of adventure useless for my fresh and exciting hardcore sandbox campaign. A total rewrite would be necessary to make something like that compatible with the type of adventures I've found most useful in our recent play.

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  4. It's my strong opinion that rules influence not just the presentation of an adventure but also its content. So, any attempt to produce an "old-tyme" version of a modern adventure would require a lot of conversion work before it'd be usable with an older set of rules. Given how little return there'd be on such an investment, why would Paizo (or anyone else) bother?

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  5. I've played a lot of pathfinder modules and the railroading is -unreal-. 3-5 unavoidable battles and a story that doesn't branch.

    I dont think they'd translate at all. I guess the few that have dungeons in the could be partially salvaged.

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  6. Myself, I'd rather they kept it all and just coveted stat blocks. It's the flabor text that I want, that's the "hard stuff" that I want have generated for me. I've actually been thinking about buying one or two and seeing how they convert.

    Perhaps this is the Grognard in me, but I'm used to picking up a module and either sitting down and coverting stuff out beforehand or just doing it on the fly - I know what a goblin is like in AD&D so I don't care what the "fiddly bits" in the text say a goblin does, I can convert that pretty quickly. I did that back in the day with everything from Tunnels and Trolls to Stormbringer to Middle-Earth Role-Playing - why would I stop now?

    I have the same sort of wonder when it comes to the idea of "railroading modules" - you mean like Tomb of Horrors? Or the D-Series? But even if we ignore "railroading" in the context of old TSR stuff - why in the heck would you let that stop you (as the DM) from changing the module whenever or however you like? I kind of want to buy one of these now and really see how "railroady" it actually is.

    D.

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  7. For the love of god don't pay for it.

    "We Be Goblins!" is one of their best and a free download; it's the one they put out for free RPG day.

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