Why did I ever think running a published Adventure Path would actually be less work then running a homebrew game?

Finally got character histories (mostly) settled for my players and I have all the maps for the encounters I expect them to get through in first season setup in Roll20 for the game tomorrow night, but it's taken about 20 hours of work according to Roll20's playtime counter and it'd probably take another 20 hours to implement everything I'd like to have setup.

I'm also stressing my self trying to remember all the major players in Sandpoint. On one hand, it's nice to have a ready answer, but on the other it's a lot more work then just making up "Lar the tailor" on the fly.

Of course, it's a tossup whether my players will want to spend time chatting up the locals, or if they'll just want to push on to the next adventure.

I feel your pain. The one time I GM'd our BSG, I felt a bit... Well, what you are. And that is cake compared. I'm very grateful for all the hard work BT does to keep our games moving.

I love in the new Acquisitions Incorporated vid- They introduce all the characters and then the GM says, "I'm tired." Been there so many times. I do think it is easier running a campaign from scratch 'cause you can always wing it.

The other issue for me is I don't know Golarion (the default Pathfinder setting) at all, so my players are asking me questions or bouncing character background ideas off me and I have to go scour the interwebs and assorted PDFs trying to find an answer (because I want it to be RIGHT, even if my players probably don't care as long as it makes sense.) whereas with my home world I either know the answer already or I can just make something up and it automatically becomes the answer (provided I remember to write it down for future reference, anyway.)

Oh so true. And I've been running a module and thought I knew the answer then in the next session realized I'd gotten it totally wrong and had to retcon.

Game went pretty well last night. Had to work around some technical glitches with Roll20 (one player needed 3 tries and a reboot to finally be able to see the map. And it decided, for whatever reason, to not let my players see the default goblin token I had picked out. I had to delete and recreate them all on the map with a different token) and my DMing skills are really rusty, but I think everyone had a good time.

I think I figured out my goblin problem (I had the tokens half-linked to the "character sheet" I put all the goblin macros on. I didn't want to fully-link them because I was concerned about changes made to one affecting all of them. But it apparently put them into this weird broken state. Removing the link appears to have fixed it.)

Side note, I sent an email to my players asking for feedback and one of the questions was "What was your favorite part of the session?" The first answer I got was "Worfgar getting hit with a cat."

So apparently I was playing the Pathfinder goblins properly.

That's awesome.

In one of my old notebooks I have the quote, "you could always spit on a spider". I have no idea who said it or why but it must have been hilarious at the time.

One of my favourite quotes, at the end of an adventure we'd just one a battle against the big boss, and it used the trope of having the chamber start to collapse as soon as we'd finished him off, forcing us to run for the exits. One of the players piped up, "Bad luck chaps, that was a load-bearing villain!"

Then there's my own staple prayer to the gods of Greyhawk: "For as it is written, whenever four to six of you are gathered together in my name, roll initiative."

Laga- Yeah, random quotes with the context lost to time are always fun to come across.

BT- We've made cracks about "load-bearing monsters" at our table as well. I used the trope a few times in my early gaming years, then wisely moved away from it.

I did resurrect for one campaign, though. One of players mentioned he missed the cheesy old-school kick-door-in, assemble-the-five-parts-of-the-Mcguffin style games we played when we were kids. So I sat down to try to figure out how to run a game like that with modern sensibilities and came up with the idea of an ancient vampire sorceress who wanted to end her existence, but do so by going out in a blaze of glory.

She crafted a talisman to counteract her powers, broke it into pieces, set each piece in a specially created dungeon with creatures to guard it, then started a war with the kingdom that traditionally had produced the most heroes and sent its king a taunting letter containing clues to where the pieces of the talisman was hidden.

The heroes promptly took the bait, went off to find the pieces of the talisman, and in the process became powerful enough to face her before confronting her in her fortress and putting her down for good.

As she vaporized, a note fell to the floor. It thanked the adventurers for their service and then said that certain rituals needed to be observed in situations such as this, at which point the fortress started collapsing.

Needless to say, the party was a little stunned to discover they'd been used for "suicide by adventurer" but the players still say it was one of the best campaigns I ran. (There were tons of side plots as well involving everyone's character histories as well, so there was still some RP goodness mixed in amongst the dungeon crawls.)

That was also the campaign the party foolishly decided to try to rest in a red dragon's volcano lair and woke up on fire when said dragon ambushed them by swimming through the lava and the person they had on watch blew their Spot check to notice it raising its head out of the pool on the far side of the room.