Pathfinder Adventures—Maybe the Coolest Collection of Ones and Zeros Ever

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Last week on Reddit, I alluded to our Pathfinder Adventure Card Game design team helping Obsidian Entertainment with its upcoming Pathfinder Adventures game. If you haven't heard, it's a digital port of PACG, but with a whole lot of new bells and whistles.

So, let me give you an idea of what it's like to work on this awesome thing. First, the crew. Chad, Vic, and I have been trading emails and phone calls with project lead Nathan Davis, designer Dave Williams, user interface designer Andre Nguyen, and artist Lindsey Laney for something like a year and a half now. They are freakin' sorcerers. They see everything we've tried to create in paper form and manipulate it to be even better in the digital world.

Gone is all the setup and teardown time, the limitations on numbers of cards in the box, the trips to Ikea for new Kallaxes to fit the awkward thing in your game room. In are variable boons, dynamically changing banes, and Andre's amazing animations. Rise of the Runelords feels brand new again.

Here are some screenshots you'll like. Below is the map for the Adventure Path. The star with the checkmark just south of Sandpoint shows that I've completed the B scenarios, and the bright star to the north indicates that I can take on adventure 1 in Sandpoint itself.

Follow the teal arrows. It's totally safe.

In each scenario, you'll also see a local map with all of the locations you'll need to visit, like the Brigandoom! map below. And when you get to some of those places, you'll see new art by Lindsey. For example, this is what the City Gate looks like.

Last one in, close the portcullis!

Designing for the Digital World

Because the digital world sometimes has different needs than the tabletop, we've been revisiting a lot of things in the game. For example, here's Sajan's Drunken Master role.

Among the rejected power names: "Buy Selinker a Mai Tai."

You will note that Sajan has named powers with the familiar checkboxes. I've explained before that we don't do that in the physical card game because it would create legacy presumptions on the players' parts, and it would also take up more precious space on what are already our most text-laden cards. But Obsidian needs to be able to refer to those powers in shorthand during the game. So Tanis brainstormed a whole bunch of names for these powers, Vic and the RPG team played around with them, and then voila, all the Runelords powers—every little checkbox—got a name.

Sometimes, they come to us with a hard challenge that we need to resolve. For example, last week we spent a bunch of time trying to figure out—again—how daggers and daggerlikes work. For the minutiae-uninitiated, the card Dagger has this text: "When playing another weapon, you may discard this card to add 1d4 to your combat check." For us, that's simple. You play a Greatsword, discard the Dagger, bingo-bango, +1d4.

For Obsidian, it's not so simple. For them the question comes when your first weapon is also a Dagger. Because then you can:

• Reveal the first Dagger
• Discard the second Dagger
• And since discarding the second is "playing another weapon," you can then discard the first.

Which, y'know, is pretty much fine by me. You wanna toss two cards for +2d4, go to it. That all makes sense because you, the human with the cards, flips the card around and says "I'm playing this Dagger."

But in the Obsidian game, you click on cards to activate or deactivate them. So you click on the first Dagger to reveal it, then you click on the second Dagger to discard it, and then you click on the first Dagger to... wait a second. That first Dagger is already clicked on. So now when you click on it again, you'd be... deactivating the first Dagger? That's no good at all.

So we got out the scalpels. After a dozen false starts, our man Keith came up with this new wording: "When you play another weapon for your combat check, you may discard this card to add 1d4." Note the words "for your combat check" here. There's a step where you play the card that sets the skill for your combat check. That's only ever one card—in this case, the dagger you displayed at the start—so playing the second dagger no longer allows you to play the first again. From Rise of the Runelords through to the upcoming Gunslinger Class Deck, this change would affect almost three dozen cards, so errata-ing them for the physical card game would be both painful and pointless. So in the digital game, they'll work ever so slightly differently. And everything will be fine.

No, check that. Everything will be awesome.

Like This. This is Awesome.

Early in the process, Nathan came to me with a request for a tutorial scenario. I said something like "Dude, I have no idea what that is, so just write one."

See, in a digital game, you don't need to learn the game from a 32-page rulebook. Instead, you can learn how to play the game from the game itself. But for that to work, you need a play sequence that is tuned for the particular digital game. Since I'd empowered Nathan to make his own tutorial, I expected I'd see something like what we created for Brigandoom! or the like. I figured he'd just have Kyra and Merisiel beat up a bandit or three, and we'd be off to the races.

And then these showed up.

Ameiko: "Hold still, Orik, while I mold this shield around your face."

Yes indeed. That's Ameiko Kaijitsu and Orik Vancaskerkin—an ally and a henchman, respectively, in the Runelords set—who are your characters in the tutorial. Orik's got his own special shield and everything. And they're fun to have around. Here's some of Nathan's dialogue from the tutorial.

Orik: Bloody horse demon thing! I hate monster cults!
Ameiko: Huh. More equine than expected!

I'll bet you can guess what they're fighting. In the tutorial. The tutorial. Good luck with that.

Even Maester Grump has concerns!

Anyway, as I think you can see, this is gonna be glorious. But you don't have to take my word for it... Obsidian is running a Pathfinder Adventures Twitch stream this Friday, February 26, at 4 PM Pacific time; check it out for yourself at twitch.tv/obsidian!

And keep an eye out for the game next month. It'll keep your iPad or Android tablet humming for a long time to come.

Mike Selinker
Adventure Card Game Lead Designer