War for the Crown

The antepenultimate first edition Pathfinder adventure path (and therefore my antepenultime Pathfinder adventure path) is a political-themed campaign - the ruler of Taldor dies leaving no clear heir, and the PCs must play a big part in bringing one of the claimants to the throne.

I have to be honest, I didn't care for this path.

There actually was a great deal that I liked about "War for the Crown". I liked the basic storyline, I liked the choice of villains, and I liked the twist. I especially liked the "triumphs" subsystem, which worked really well for allowing magic items to grow alongside the PCs who use them (to the extent that I would probably adopt that system for a D&D campaign I designed in future).

However, my issue with the path was pretty fundamental - the political aspects of the game are built very heavily on Pathfinder's new and detailed social duelling rules. Unfortunately, my impression of those is that they've created a detailed and complex system for something that not only could, but really needs, to be light and simple. Perhaps it's just that I'm getting old, but my interest in long slugfest combats of attrition is almost non-existent, and adding a correspondingly complex slugfest system for social conflict just has no appeal whatsoever.

This is a shame - this was a path I'd been really looking forward to, and so for it to turn out to be such a let down is especially disappointing.

And now there are two to go.