[ACG][OutPost I]Hawkmoon269's Season of Plundered Tombs Table 3 (Inactive)

Game Master Hawkmoon269

This is where discussion will happen.

One more thing we need to do is decide on a turn order. You are free to discuss and choose a strategic order if you feel there is one. Otherwise going by timezone or typical "active" hours might be best. Is everyone could share their timezone and when they are typically active, I'll compile a list based on that. Then as a table you can decide to adjust it as you see best.

For the record, I'm Eastern Standard Time. I can typically check in weekdays during the work day, except Wednesday. I'm also able to check in the evenings after 8:30 or so. Weekends are a bit more variable with juggling activities for 4 kids. But my timezone won't matter near as much as yours.

I'm on CST, but my posting times are erratic (especially on weekends)due to working in retail. This is one of two tables for my first play of ACG, and I'm a bit overwhelmed by things going into this.

Please bear with me.

CST 2-10PM is my most active. I can post once before work in the morning if needed though.

Thanks for stepping in Hawkmoon!

I'm also Central US, and I'm also not sure what my posting schedule will turn out to be, as this is also my first experience with PACG PbP.

Just checking in, I'm only seeing three of the players having checked in here. Looks like we're missing... Yewstance and Ogseamus. I'll send PMs to them today to remind them that the table has moved.

I’ve never played with the Mummy’s Mask set before. Does anyone have any input re turn order?
(Honestly when I play PACG offline, it’s usually just decided randomly, so not sure I have much to contribute for that strategizing.)

I would recommend you guys do turn order based on time zone, to maximize turns per day.

Okay, got my Deck Handler here, how do draw cards and pick spot?

Ah shoot, I only JUST found the 'Discussion' tab of the now-inactive thread for this table run by LucianC. I suspect some other players whom haven't checked in are not aware yet.

Furthermore, I just saw that I'd been sent private messages.. they have not been forwarded to my email in any way, and even as I log into Paizo there's no indicator to suggest I have unread messages until I manually go to look at them now that there's been the redesign. I'm sorry for being so late!

Okay, my timezone is AEST (UTC+10), but I'm going to be most active from 5-8am and 12-1pm that time. Make of that what you will.

I need to re-read everything that's been said, read the private messages I've got, and get my Deck Handler sorted. Sorry again for the lateness, but I honestly didn't get any notice through the channels I expected to hear from.

Alright, I think I've got almost everything sorted.

I've got my Deck Handler sorted.

Question/Issue 1: Now that I have my Deck Handler, I'm not sure how to apply it to my posts like I've seen with other players (instructions didn't cover that, as far as I could see).

Question/Issue 2: I have not played Mummy's Mask before, so let me know anything I need to know for Traders when they come up, please. I couldn't find anything in the Adventure Card Guild Guide regarding traders, bazaars or anything specific for the Season of Plundered Tombs, despite the instructions, as quoted below.

If you’re playing Season of Plundered Tombs or Season of Faction’s Favor, you’ll also want to choose the trader you’re visiting… if you don’t know what this means, go back and check out the PACGuild Guide for more details.

Question 3: Following the instructions in the guild guide, I am correct in assessing that I can use a set B non-basic boon if there are not enough basic boons? I'm using a non-basic Blessing as there are only 2 Blessings of the Gods.

Question 4: Could I get the stats on the henchman Giant Sand Eel, since it is required to temporarily close one location?

Otherwise, I'm good to begin, and I'll post my starting location now. Oh, and since I didn't mention; I can post much more frequently on weekends, just keep in mind that for a lot of the english-speaking world (USA), I appear to be one day 'ahead' of you in AEST.

EDIT: Gronk, just post in the Gameplay tab of this table to choose your starting location. We haven't quite worked out turn order yet, and I believe we all should pick our starting spot before drawing our opening hands, technically. But with that said, the ACG during Outpost doc I'm working from explains how to draw your starting hand.

RE: Turn order.

My personal opinion is that characters with more off-turn ways of emptying their hand tend to be better towards the end of the turn order, because it maximizes how much value/draws they get out of resetting their hand after the first round of turns. After that, if players have evade/scouting effects that only work on their own turn, they're slightly better towards the start of a round, because it slightly increases the odds of getting information that will affect how other people will choose to play.

It shouldn't matter much, especially for our first scenario, though! I'm happy to go first, if there's no other preferences. Qualzar has a built-in evade, so that may also make him a decent candidate.

Answer 1: all you need to do is scroll down below where you have entered your hand in the sheet, and you'll see a big block of generated text. Make sure that you get your character skills and powers all updated, then you can just copy all of those cells and paste them right into the paizo forums text submission box.

Question 2: traders will only come into play when you've earned them from the scenario rewards. I believe at the end of this first scenario you'll earn a trader, which means at the start of the next scenario you'll be able to visit that trader according to the rules that hawkmoon posted.

Answer 3: you're current that you get to use a non basic blessing. This is actually because the sign of the pack was supposed to be Basic, but the trait was left off, and they decided it wasn't a big enough deal to FAQ.

Answer 4: I'm sure Hawkmoon will post the giant sand eel text very soon.

Great to see that this table is all ready to go!

Wait, I thought copying and pasting those cells just made my 'hand' and details appear like in play-by-forums I'd seen. I'm referring to the tiny little link to the Deck Handler above the avatars of (almost) every other player in this thread. Did I misunderstand what the cells/spoilers were doing, or did I ask the wrong question?

EDIT: I've put 2 and 2 together. This is about setting up an alias, huh? Hm. It's late; I'll look into it tomorrow morning.

Just thought of another question- what is the scenario number for this adventure? Is it 0 or 1?

Giant Sand Eel is in the campaign header now.

This is adventure 1.

Still waiting to hear from Ogseamus. Hopefully that happens today.

Thanks for the Giant Sand Eel info.

I've got an alias, but I'm still clearly missing a few things that everyone else already knows, because I'm not seeing a way to set up a link to my Deck Handler (or set anything besides an avatar and name for my alias, for that matter). As an aside, there's no avatar for the iconic Estra, so this'll have to do.

@EmpTyger It's set B, so it should be 0.

EDIT: I'm wrong. Missed the finer points of OP standards.

Organized play starts with adventure 1.

Yewstance:
Under "Alias", under the "Profile" tab, there's an "Edit My Profile" button. From my own trial-and-error, it seems that only the "Race", "Classes/Levels", and "Gender" fields are what gets auto-populated in a post. So one of those 3 has to include a link to the Deck Handler. That link should be in the form "(url=http....)Deck Handler(/url)", but change the parentheses to square brackets, and supply the correct web address for your Estra's google spreadsheet.

If someone knows better, please correct or elaborate! I only learned a couple days ago and I'm not 100% myself.

Thank you EmpTyger for the help! That seemed... complex. I didn't realise there was my own profile page for my alias, which wasn't accessible from my normal account page. Rather confusing, but apparently fixed up now.

We need to set a turn order. Only 2 of you had regular times of the day you felt you would be active. The other 2 were erratic. So, timezone might not help too much. In the interest of getting things going, since Yewstance isn't likely to be available for 5 more hours, I'm going to slot Estra 4th and randomly roll for the other 3.

In order of posting in this thread.
1=Gronk
2=Skizza
3=Qualzar
Order: 1d3 ⇒ 1

Gronk is first.

So, then Skizza or Qualzar.
And then...: 1d2 ⇒ 2
Qualzar it is.

If anyone has any questions about playing, please let me know. I know it was a bit of a rush getting this setup at the last minute. Thanks for being flexible.

If you haven't responded to my PM yet about Google Hangouts, please do so soon. Thanks.

It will probably NOT be a good idea for me to take the first turn, unless we really want to dissect how to play as I have no idea what I'm doing and it'd probably take a week of back and forth without an example to take my turn.

I am still following the thread, but going on delay (if that's a thing in ACG?) until I see how a couple of other turns go at least?

Ok. Let's make you 4th then. And we'll start with Qualzar.

Ok. I made that change. Here is an example of another table that is playing that you can look at to see how to play.

If you have questions about how to play in general, I'd be happy to help answer anything.

I’m having a little trouble updating the deck tracker on my phone. Will try again in about an hour. But Skizza can go int the meantime.

Missed my chance to post this morning, and about to head to work. Will post in 3-4 hours from this message, most likely, if everything's set up. I have managed to quickly draw my starting hand, so feel free to see if there's anything you feel you really need to use.

Assuming we're not using Google Hangouts (which is a better place for it, if so), I'm planning on actively updating my deck handler with notes for blessings/effects you can feel free to use during your turn, so you don't have to wait up for me.

Agent Eclipse:
A much better first turn than I had! Well done.
Qualzar is going to need to conserve his cards from here on out.

Yewstance:
As I told Hawkmoon, I'm okay with using hangouts for things like simple turn alerts, but personally I'd vote for our strategizing to be done on the forums. (I'm an ex-lurker, and I decided to delurk because of what I was able to read publicly, so I'd like to "pay it forward", if you will, for any other lurkers out there.)

Thanks. It was interesting typing it all out and working within PbP. I was a little worried but Skizza is who I play in my home games when I get a chance to play. He is a neat little mouse.

I can be on either one and check my notifications here quite often.

That was fun! And super lucky with the Dowsing Rod finding the villain, and super unlucky with my initial Dexterity 5 check. According to AnyDice, the odds of getting 4 (the only result that wouldn't have passed with 1d4+2d6+1) were 0.69%. Or in other words, I had a 99.31% chance of success there.

So the good news is that in just 3 turns, we've closed a location and we've identified exactly where the villain is, so we're blazing through this. I'd recommend people look at the boons available from the location decks and make requests as to which deck not to close, if they want to dig up boons to replace. I could certainly use a better spell from my class deck, personally, so I'll probably stick around at the Windswept Chasm until I find the spell that I know is here (the villain's on the bottom, so no risk of that being an issue).

Incidentally, I'm going to be reasonably frequently burying cards to get my extra explorations, so I'd kind of like to share a location with someone at some point so that can hand me off extra boons they don't want, so I don't run myself out of cards. I have plenty of ways of self-healing, so I won't kill myself, but still.

(As an aside; I was going to cure myself those 2 cards just for the sake of it, especially since if I fail the recharge roll I can use Honaire to cycle my cure back in and so on... but I realised that would shuffle my deck, and potentially throw Honaire much lower in and he's kind of essential for half the checks I may have to make. Not worth risking shuffling my deck unless Honaire's safely in my hand already.)

I also have a question; if a Blessing of the Gods copies a blessing on top of the discard pile, like Blessing of the Ancients, can't it recharge itself to use its effects? You're treating Blessing of the Gods as if it had the same powers as Blessing of the Ancients, which includes being able to recharge itself if the top card of the blessings deck is Basic (such as Blessing of the Ancients). Or is this one of those messy "Powers vs Other Text on a card" issues that occasionally plagues the Rules forum?

Whether or not that's the case; Skizza, I feel you should've spent your Blessing of Ancients for your second exploration, not your Blessing of the Gods. That way you would've been able to recharge it and save yourself a discard, unless you're worried about Triggering something...

...which, to be fair, would've made all the difference, since you wouldn't have beat the gnoll with your rolls if he'd been Triggered. So I guess it certainly worked out! Nice work on the closing.

I think I was holding on to the Ancients just because it was new and I wanted to see about using it later opposed to the Basic one. I will note it in the future though. It is a lot to take in for sure.

A location I could find something useful is Brickworks for sure. Three weapons being there. I don't mind sharing if necessary. The spells seem a bit spread out for you though.

Oh. I also fixed Skizzas hand from the 1 Closing damage earlier, Hawkmoon.

Hand: Alchemical Cartridges, Pistol, Matchlock Hackbut, Powder Horn, Blessing of The Ancients,

Displayed:
Deck: 7 Discard: 2 Buried: 1
Notes:
Sideboard cards:

Powers: Each power is presented as a complete paragraph. Powers allow you to perform a specified action to cause an effect, such as discarding the boon to add to a check. (Common actions include revealing, displaying, discarding, recharging, burying, and banishing, but other actions may be specified.) When you perform an action with the card to cause an effect, you are playing it for its power. (See Playing Cards, p. 8).

If a paragraph on a boon doesn’t require you to perform an action with that boon to cause an effect, that paragraph is not a power; do what it says at the appropriate time. For example, if a paragraph says “After you play this card, if you have the Divine skill, recharge it instead of discarding it,” and you have the Divine skill, you must recharge the card after you play it. If a card says “If proficient with light armors, you may recharge this card when you reset your hand,” and you are proficient with light armors, then when you reset your hand, you may recharge that card. When you are required to do something with the card as part of the effect (rather than to cause an effect), that does not count as playing it. So in either of the previous examples, recharging the card does not count as playing it.

If a card tells you that you may treat it as if it has the same powers as another boon, do not include paragraphs that are not powers.

So...

Discard this card to add 1 die to any check.<This is a power.

Discard this card to examine the top card of your location, then you may explore your location.<This is a power.
After you play this card, if the top card of the blessings discard pile has the Basic trait, recharge this card instead of discarding it.<This is NOT a power.

The 3rd paragraph doesn't require you to perform an action with the boon to cause an effect. That means it isn't a power. Because of that last bold sentence from the rules Blessing of the Gods doesn't get treated as if it had the 3rd paragraph from Blessing of the Ancients. Likewise, if the top of the blessings discard pile was Blessing of Abadar...

Discard this card to add 1 die to any check.<This is a power.

Discard this card to add 2 dice to any check to defeat a barrier.<This is a power.
Discard this card to explore your location.<This is a power.
After you play this card, if it matches the top card of the blessings discard pile, recharge this card instead of discarding it.<This is a power.

So, Blessing of the Gods doesn't get treated like it has the 4th paragraph, because that isn't a power (it doesn't require you to perform an action with the boon to cause an effect).

And if you want to tweak which card you played because you didn't understand something. I'm fine with that.

Also, you all are doing great.

I'm not feeling especially picky right now about boons. Seems like anything will be an improvement.

Yewstance:
If you're offering, I wouldn't mind a cure for Qualzar. I could come over and help you dig up the Windswept Chasm on my next turn. (Assuming that a henchman doesn't shuffle it in the meantime.)

Hawkmoon:
Thanks for the rules lesson!

Indeed, thank you to Hawkmoon for that rules clarification! I feel like I've sought exactly that explanation by forum-digging before, but I never had it explained so well. (And I missed that part of the most recent rulebook. Whoops.)

And no, it doesn't affect the choices I made in any way, don't worry.

EmpTyger:
Seems like a solid plan. You can come over and we'll dig through the place for boons, making sure not to encounter the villain at the end. If we're both still there at the start of your third turn, I'd appreciate you handing off a weak boon to me if you have one in your hand at that point; as I said, I'm a little wary of how I may end up aggressively burying cards.

At any point during your turn, feel free to use my Cure spell once you're at my location. Probably would be worth using your blessing for an exploration or dice to increase the quality of cards I'll likely get to heal back. That way your end-of-turn reset will be better, most likely.

Actually, I'd better ask right now. Question for the GM: Is it acceptable for players to use cards from different players' hands with their advance permission? In the case of EmpTyger using my Cure spell, if that's fine, would he be expected to make the Recharge check/roll, or should I do that myself as soon as I can next access the forums?

At some point we should get into the habit of keeping track of who can offer blessings for important checks, too.

It is totally acceptable to use other characters cards and powers as long as they've said you can. That is something you should call out when you past your hand. But I'd just leave the recharge to the person who "owns" the card.

Check out this example. Poog says anyone can use his Find Traps spell. Reta uses it shortly after. And then after that, Poog attempts to recharge it (and fails).

I think my turn is done. Was it okay?

From what I saw, looked fine to me! As I noted in the gameplay thread (though here is more appropriate); be careful of taking acid damage when you get to close your location, since that will give you the Curse of Vulnerability in this scenario.

Personally, I think we're all doing great. :D Thanks again to Hawkmoon for his GMing and coaching us through things (I also note that the bottom card of the Chasm is helpfully marked now that it's been examined. Thanks!). This marks it as EmpTyger/Qualzar's turn again.

That went much better than my first turn. Thanks again for the cure Yewstance!

Geez! I went to the Chasm since I was most adept at picking up blessings, and there you go and clear almost the entire deck in a single turn!

Nice turn indeed, and finished with few more good boons in your deck. And no worries. I even recharged the cure.

I am beginning to consider my next turn, though. With my character power or my blessing, I can clear out the last two cards before the villain, just so we're ready to fight him at a moment's notice... but they're two banes, so they're unlikely to be worth anything to us. And there's a very small risk of a card that would force me to encounter the villain anyway.

Besides, the deck may have another henchmen thrown into it in the future, likely shuffling the villain higher, so spending a turn here probably isn't worth my time. As much as I'd like to get a boon handed off to me, it seems best that I move to explore somewhere else.

-I could go to the Sulfur Pits, where my Acid Jet spell would be stronger and I'd share that spot with Gronk for boon-trading purposes or my supporting spells.
-Or I could go to the Brickworks, since I'm the only person besides Gronk who could feasibly pass the closing check (my puny d4 strength belies the +1d6+1 I get from Honaire). The only way anyone could get better odds than me there is if Gronk spends 2 cards on his first power.

Any suggestions? We still need to see what Skizza does, of course.

Oh; feel free to use my blessing of the gods in hand, Skizza, if you feel you need it for a check. I'm happy to dig into my deck a bit, and I wouldn't have played a Divine caster if I wasn't willing to act as a supporting character.

Hey, I did a quick turn on the laptop at work to not hold us up for another 4 hours. I figured I really would like a 1 Weapon so went for it. My deck is sadly at the house so I was scrambling to find pictures of them online. Is there a PRD like resource for PACG? (Coworkers look at me funny with a deckbox on the desk, lol.)

Currently there is not an official listing of the cards and their powers. Thanks for the extra effort in posting your turn.

Finished my turn. I had hoped that using Honaire to heal would've brought more than 2 cards back into my deck, honestly, and I'd hoped the shuffle would have helped me re-draw Cure. In retrospect, I feel it may have been smarter to hold onto Honaire for his consistent powers, but too late now. Still learning this character.

Picked up a couple of things. Largely uninteresting Deck B cards for the most part, but in the short term both very practical for the Sulfur Pits, so I'll likely remain here until it's closed.

I've no support for other players at the moment.

Gronk; I'd happily take your Amulet of Mighty Fists off your hand if you want to hand it off at the start of your turn. That way you get to redraw something better at the end of your turn - right now, it doesn't help you unless you end up losing your quarterstaff, which is just a better card for you at the moment. I can use any extra cards I have for explorations and stat boosts, which is pretty powerful.

If you'd like to hang onto it, perhaps for use with your own power, that's fine too, though.

Agent Eclipse:
What I did was create a new column on my deck tracker, manually typing in the card text so that I might know what Qualzar could do while I'm out of my apartment away from the physical cards. Not that that helps with knowing what others' cards can do. (I'm a little curious what this mystical Honaire is doing for Estra!)
But in any case, don't feel guilty about making us wait because you have a job in real life! :) 4 hours is well under the 24-hour expectation.

Yeah, I think I think I will just take a quick snapshot of them on my phone so they are available. I can fit them all in one picture to reference when necessary. I was interested in Honaire too so I had to pull out the deck to sate my curiosity once I got home. Its a very interesting mechanic.

I don't have my deck immediately to hand at the moment, but I'll describe Honaire's text here for reference's sake. It is likely important that the team is aware of what it does, as it's a card that is mandatory to be in my deck for the entire adventure path, and it will always start in my hand and rarely leave it for long. It also clearly makes up for my generally weak skillset for Estra (no d12, core combat skill is Divine with only d10+2, two d4s and only 3 trained skills).

If Honaire is a better use for it, Explore Report Cooperate go go go

Still deworking here

Just to clarify; Honaire doesn't have anything to do with my use of extra boons, like the Amulet of Mighty Fists. Just that my start-of-turn power gives me an extra exploration (with bonus rolls) if I bury a card from my hand, which is pretty powerful.

Okay, that was really complicated and I hope I didn't mess any of it up. Please adjust it if I did!