Not so! He's been FAQed to:
"You gain the skills Arcane and Divine equal to your Craft skill while you play or when you would banish a spell that does not have the Attack trait".
In one of our rare bits of luck regarding boons, we found Shapeshift in the first scenario of AP6, and Damiel chucked d12+2s all the way til the end. :D
"In my opinion, and many others', the idea that led to the creation of many great games came from someone being told that some design mechanic or practicality could never ever work."
- Jimmy_Weasel
"Let me get this straight. EVERYONE is a vampire and we're using only D10's? - it'll never work. The system will be impractical and unmanageable. It's just bad design is all I'm saying." And then VTM became an icon in the pantheon of table top rpgs...
Not so! He's been FAQed to:
"You gain the skills Arcane and Divine equal to your Craft skill while you play or when you would banish a spell that does not have the Attack trait".
of course. damn. I was hoping that if we find one (two...) they'd be mine all mine
Maybe... just MAYBE mind you...
I've noticed a lot of the difficulty in WotR comes from the actual Adventure/Scenario cards --
Why doesn't Paizo consider a scaling difficulty adventure card? There's easy/medium/hard/nightmare for *many* other games, and punishing many casual players (and children) with rules that are tearing families apart seems cruel.
If "Side B" of these cards (I realize that can't happen currently cause of the way they're structured) provided at least a "rules suggestion" or alternative rules for the more casual players, that would be nice.
Because like many of the players here, I didn't get to pick the character I WANTED to play. I had to pick the "best" character to play.
And that's just no fun. I should be able to succeed (or at least come CLOSE) if I play well/careful/patiently no matter who it is. And I can't say that's true. There are good groups and there are bad groups.
This was brought up elsewhere - as noted then, it's an idea I really like, and which I think would be good for the game if done well. However, the increased workload for the design team when play-testing would be astronomical.
This was brought up elsewhere - as noted then, it's an idea I really like, and which I think would be good for the game if done well. However, the increased workload for the design team when play-testing would be astronomical.
I'm speaking as a game designer and a computer programmer here... This does not require as much testing as you think. You test one scenario normally, then you give a head nod to the "dumbed down" scenario rules directly thereafter. Should not need to be retested in its entirety.
Such as Elven Entanglement:
Hard: -- We all know the hard variant --
Easy: Roll 1d4 when encountering an Animal. On 1-2, encounter the animal as normal. On 3-4, return the animal to the box and instead summon and encounter Carnivorous Stump.
If the team is having a hard time coming up with a "baby steps" rule for each scenario, I'll start writing them up myself and publishing them in the home rules, because I have to do it almost every time for my wife. =)
One thing that I don't see being mentioned is that giving +1s to your less optimal stats works better in S&S than in either of the other two games due to Stat Gems allowing you to push the check to another die. Oloch takes a +1 on his Int and with a Topaz of Strength gets a d12 +1. In RotRL it would have been a very sub-optimal play, but less so in S&S.
Re: Seoni. Remember that before she makes a combat check, she can discard a card to draw an attack spell from her discard pile. For that reason, you should probably forgo the recharge check on the first combat spell that you play to ensure that you have an attack spell in your discard pile in case of emergencies.
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Wrath was my first base set. Those initial scenarios are so hard it got played a few times but then put away in frustration. Fortunately a friend convinced us to play Runelords and it was a much better introduction to the game. The scenarios let me learn to play effectively rather than mushing me into paste.
A fun campaign followed and S&S subsequently bought... I LOVE SKULL AND SHACKLES. Great campaign.
So 2 weeks ago it was decided it was time for Wrath to get dusted off. I still thing those base scenarios are horrific, but through game experience i know deck one will be a smoother ride. Looking forward to it.
It's just fortunate that my friend showed me Runelords last May though. Wrath would still be sat at the back of a cupboard otherwise.
Well, in our croup the Wrath has got much more love than Runelord, because it is so much harder.
There is always that "Oh my God, we are gonna die!" That we really love in our gaming croup. But we like Ghost stories, Shadowrun Crossfire and other "impossible" co-op games. So it is a matter of taste. But I can see why some people are not so keen on Wrath.
It could useful to have some king of rough difficulty rating in these games in the box.
RoTR easy or beginner
S&S medium or experienced players
Wrath hard or experts
Mummy ?
Everybody knows that if they play Ghost Stories, they are gonna die almost every time, or that Escape from Dol Guldur is killer scenario in LOTR lcg and so on.
The wrath is much easier than any of those games mentioned above!
I really like that there are different kind of adventures in the Pathfinder adventure card game.
If I want to introduce this game to non gamer, the Rune lords it will be! If I know that most of the players are familiar with RPG games, the S&S is a good place to start. And If I know that playing croup is filled with die hard co-op veterans, Wrath will offer that kind of challenge that they are used to.
I hope that also in the future we see pathfinder games at different difficulty levels! Because I know that there are customers to all those difficulty levels. Just let the customer know, what to expect!
I personally am "really bored" most of the time in RoTR, because it is so easy. It is almost impossible to die, if you don't make any fatal errors. But that level is good sometimes, so bring all kinds of adventures also in the future!
I would not mind personally even a little bit more challenging that Wrath is, but the Wrath level is ok for casual games in our gaming croup!
There's the other side of the coin, Hannibal! As much as Runelords was key to teaching me the game I think it's the one I'm least likely to return to because it ended up being a bit on the easy side. I remember by the time we got to deck 5 we were complete stomping beasts, mauling everything.
Such a tough balancing act.
My group recently started up Wrath after finishing Runelords campaign, which other than the horrible Death Zones scenario was pretty easy for us during the last legs. That scenario is too punishing for having a larger party size, in the end we decided we should have split into pairs and done it separately.
We had made an agreement that if we failed any of the base scenarios that we would move on to the next one anyway, due to the rewards all being lackluster and non-basic B cards being only very minor upgrades anyway. We ended up failing on 3 out of the 5, succeeding only on B1 and B3 and even having our very first death out of our entire campaign history on B5.
What was our problem? Mechanics that scale for number of players, just like the problem with the Death Zone scenario from Runelords. We have 6 player, so all these scenarios where you basically have to close everything to win or completely empty locations to close them take way too many turns for us to handle. Also barriers like Demonic Horde and Arboreal Blight hit everyone no matter where they are and with six people you're almost guaranteed for Demonic Horde to hit someone multiple times and someone else never. Half our party had access to curative abilities, but there wasn't enough healing to mitigate the 12 damage an angry tree does to the party automatically and there's no reveal armor to be had during the B adventure, so there's no way to use an armor to block both hits.
What's more there's a location that exists that just shouldn't work the way it works, especially combined with all these summoning barriers. The Abattoir, all banes get +6 difficulty? Our arboreal blights and demonic hordes basically hovered around a difficulty 20 for anyone trying to manage that location, which is an absurd number to hit during B unless it's a villain and we can afford to pool our resources.
We didn't feel challenged in the end, we felt tortured pointlessly. Our play group consists of game designers, statisticians and programmers. We make most of our decisions based on calculated probabilities and risk analysis. When we look back at how we played we don't feel like we made poor decisions and while sometimes we had bad luck, it wasn't any worse luck that we had during B for Runelords. In the end we didn't have fun and we don't regret skipping to the next one whenever we failed.
In the future we are even likely to house rule party size scaling mechanics before giving scenarios a try, specifically because of how B played out. Our trust in a fair battle has been damaged.
True! Big party size can be a huge hinderance in Wrath. So there definitely is a scaling issue.
Just wait till you hit the armies in adventure 2.