Most games for other systems, as far as I can tell, are homebrewed. What's goin' on with PF2 GMs?
I know Paizo pumps out more adventures than anyone else, but beyond Kingmaker, none of them seem that interesting from a cursory look. The only prewritten PF2 stuff I touched was the original playtest adventures.
So I didnt jump over to 2E and cant speak to the quality of those adventure paths, but having adventure paths was like.. the thing that let me start GMing.
For years I had the gaming group everyone wants, yeah? We met up every Sunday for years and would play for about 6-8 hours. I know that's not normal for most folks but it meant we could tear through games. And we would run through Adventure Paths because everyone was working and not having to come up with your story from scratch or figure out any of the monsters was a boon. But more than that it really taught structure to me so I was then ABLE to GM and tell my own stories. It really is something that is great to have training wheels on.
So you can wind up having to choose between- do i spend hours studying the text and preparing encounters and stories for my players in the hopes that we can all gel... or do I run this pre-written thing that will tell a full story and there is a wealth of options so I can let my players pick out something they all find fun.
However, more than that, an Adventure Path is selling you on something. Golarion (pathfinder's setting) is really good about being full of every fantasy action setting you could want. Each country has its own type of pulp fantasy.
Want sword and sorcery with weird technology from crashed spaceships? Got it.
Want an evil country to fight against that worships devils and has fucked up laws? Got it.
Want a whole area set up for pirates and naval combat? Got it.
So going into someone's homebrew campaign? It can be real uneven to what you are going to get, what they are selling you. And I'm sure we have all had those situations where the GM is wanting to be clever and pulls a switcheroo and suddenly you aren't playing the game you thought you were going to. Adventure Paths are great because they tell you, up front, this is what this adventure is. Here are the themes, the goals, the aesthetic trappings. Here is the call to adventure, make someone who works with that and will say yes to it.
More than that a thing I always loved is they would provide traits for the PCs, the Origins in BG3 is a good way to think of these. But a trait would give you a narrative hook and a small mechanical bonus. But they would almost always tie someone into an npc or a plot threat to follow- essentially you get to hand the players this list and let them pick out a personal quest.
As for myself, it was a mark that I was ready to start telling my own stories when I felt confident to branch off from the plotlines in the book. If a player wanted to go off the map and do something I could prepare and do that, I could start to figure things out and start figuring out my own answers instead of always returning to the text.
Another thing I'll add is published adventures, and especially Adventure Paths, are the closest thing to Water Cooler Talk for tabletop games. It's not particularly relevant these days, but there was a time (real or imagined) where folks at a job would get together and shoot-the-shit about something. Usually it gets portrayed as folks congregating around the water cooler and talking about TV, but it applies here with tabletop games.
Published adventures for the most popular systems give common ground to talk about and connect with folks over. If we meet and both play Pathfinder, I can ask "Oh, did you play Rise of the Runelords?" and if they did, we build that connection in a more immediate way than if we swap stories about our respective homebrew campaigns. And APs are frequent enough and have "big" ones that you probably have at least heard about, if not played already yourself.
