I played PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan last Saturday and PFS #12 – Stay of Execution yesterday. Both were with the same DM and used OpenRPG, so I think I have a decent basis for comparison. About 1/2 the players were the same as well.
PFS #3 – Murder On The Silken Caravan took much, much longer. We started at 9 AM last and finished up a little after 5 PM (without any breaks). One of the players had to drop out a little after noon, because it was taking too long. The last combat was just a number crunching exercise. The big bad would knock a character into negatives, we would heal that person while doing a little bit of damage to him, and then repeat. We also had a new character (a first level druid) who didn’t take any weapons so after his big snake got put down, he wasn’t a whole lot of use, other than for some healing. Despite the length, and the fact that my character can’t seem to make any Will saves, I did have fun with the adventure. I think it was the better of the two overall.
PFS #12 – Stay of Execution went a whole lot faster. We started at 3 PM and were done by about 7 PM. However, it seemed little more than a series of semi-related encounters. While I was playing, the following picture and the words "railroad plot" kept popping into my head:
That isn’t really fair to the DM, though. As I normally do, I bought the module afterwards and any railroading is kind of baked-in. We actually managed to role-play through some of the encounters, despite the module seeming to assume that we would just fight our way through. After reading the module, I was impressed at how flexible the DM had been. My character’s faction missions were laughable. If you had all of the encounters, they would be completed. It was a fun adventure, but that was due more to the role-playing skills of the other players and DM than due to the module design.
In prepping for the adventure, I did learn a bit more about OpenRPG. Some of the plug-ins often some nice features (global variables, et. al.) but I definitely think TTopRPG is a better program.
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