Keeping up with solo and multiplayer campaigns (family and non-family)


Pathfinder Adventure Card Game General Discussion


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Approximately one year ago, someone on Boardgamegeek asked a simple question: Are you able to keep up with PACG?

My original response can be found here. At that point, I'd played through all four base sets with my family (2013-2016?) and had started a few non-family PACG campaigns.

Here's my updated response, which I thought might be interesting to share:

My five-player Mummy's Mask campaign is on permanent hiatus. We played through Adventure 2, but it took us 9 months to do so. What hurt us: Being able to get 5 guys together in the same room was a challenge, and only being able to play one game per session made it tough to make significant progress in the campaign. Also, Mummy's Mask was not a good introductory set. We played so infrequently that the new players (everyone but me) kept forgetting the rules, and Mummy's Mask has a *lot* going on. I swear, after 15 games, players still didn't understand "invoke", and most players still didn't fully understand the special powers for their characters. To be honest, based purely on rules frustration, I didn't mind that the campaign ended. Though I'll miss playing Mavaro, who is the oddest and most unique character I've played so far.

(Note: This group had so much rules and cooperation trouble that I put together this post to offer advice to new players.)

My two-player Skull & Shackles campaign - another non-family campaign - is still ongoing. We're going on 6 months, and we play infrequently. We're in the middle of Adventure Pack #3. We will finish eventually, but I'm guessing not for another 6 months.

I purchased the PC version of PACG on Steam last Thanksgiving and played two full Rise of the Runelords campaigns in a single month. These are my only solo plays of Pathfinder. It was good fun, and I upped the challenge the second time by playing with a 6-character party. Warning: Some scenarios are extremely buggy (i.e., they don't work as intended, making them more difficult), and the final campaign scenario is broken in that certain cards (e.g., Scrye, Feathered Quill) cause the scenario to crash. Also, I would avoid the Permadeath option in the electronic version at all costs. It's too easy to accidentally hit the space bar, roll the dice before you're ready, and kill your character. This happened to me at least twice (not on permadeath, thankfully).

I almost forgot that my family and I completed an at-home version of the Seasons of the Runelords organized play campaign in Summer 2017. That was fun, and we even went through a good chunk of Wrath of the Righteous as Adventure 7 (per this article).

And a related product:

The Apocrypha ACG was released, which is a close cousin to PACG, and my regular family group played through the base set (18 scenarios) in approximately 2 months - and we look forward to the upcoming expansion boxes. The only issue is that we broke the game, as one particular character is far too powerful with higher player counts. That character is now banned from the rest of the campaign.

Anyway, the bottom line is that (for me) it's been easy to keep up with multiplayer family campaigns. Non-family campaigns? Not so much. And unsurprisingly solo campaigns are the easiest to maintain and complete.

If nothing else, my summary emphasizes what an enormous time commitment a full campaign can be. So I understand why Paizo might want to have shorter campaigns to meet the needs of people who can't play multiple PACG sessions each week to plow through a campaign.

Also, Paizo still hasn't made an official ruling on Mavaro's powers. What's up with that? :)


Pathfinder Adventure Path, Pathfinder Accessories Subscriber

Thank you for posting. My wife and I JUST bought RotRL and MM this past weekend (during the sale). We are looking to unbox as part of our game night this Friday. I plan to dig into your other posts and share what I learn with my wife. Appreciate this very much.


lacker wrote:
Thank you for posting.

Welcome aboard, good luck, and have fun!

When you're more experienced (e.g., campain #2), you might move to controlling two characters each. But controlling one apiece is a good place to start. Picking two that work well together is up to you. :)

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