Axoq's page

The way this was announced is so strange. We have a clear indication that Organized Play is ending, phrased as though it's not the first we're hearing of it. Then we have some speculation that the product line itself is ending, without anyone in the know confirming or denying. This is all in a thread where the first post is from a Lone Shark employee.

Could we please have some official, clear word that nothing will follow Curse as a set?

We all feel the same way.

The link is bound to show up soon, but what we've heard is, they launched Core, CotCT and the new stuff for Organized Play all at the same time, and boy are their arms tired. They're taking some time to figure out their next step. (I secretly hope they're going to announce something in May at PaizoCon, but that's completely unsubstantiated guesswork on my part.)

I just bumped a thread on this random scenario structure, but now I wonder if it didn't get attention because it's in the wrong place.

The Reward for all of the random scenarios is to get one new card out of the vault, but the rules of Survive the Siege don't allow you to ever encounter a boon except when something like a Cache barrier grants you one. When Sieges first appeared in Mummy's Mask, the reward was to have access to all the cards you saved, but not in the Core Set? So, we could just let all those boons that we carefully shuffled and arranged into locations drain away until we had one card left somewhere and we guard that card with our lives and the outcome is the same as if we protected them all? That feels pointless now.

Was this the intention?

If you know you're going to play them all, I'd suggest playing all the pre-Core sets before advancing to Core. The change is radical with the move to Core. (Play them in order, and you can see the game evolving before your eyes.)

If you're not a completionist, I might recommend going to Core straight away. I love the changes in the new set.

Yes. I once ended up in an argument with a colleague because I didn't realize that "employed", "unemployed", "not employed" and the less common "not unemployed" were four different things from an economics standpoint, not two.

So it is with checks under 1.0 rules. Just because a bane is not defeated does not imply it is undefeated. (You can evade it, for example. You didn't defeat it, but it is not undefeated.) If you pass on a check to acquire a boon, you didn't fail a check, though you did fail to acquire the boon.

I'm generally a believer that anything and everything you need to know to play a card game should be printed on the cards and so I agree with concerns that the game will get mired in keywords.

You think you mean this. You don't.

What you have said means that you want the sequence of every turn printed on the cards, you want the rule about being able to help with any other player's check but not able to defeat any card on behalf of any other player, about how to handle a villain's being found and closing/blocking locations, and taking blessings from the blessings deck if you fail to defeat the villain and taking them from the box if you don't, remainders about what "a die" means on a card that adds one, the precise meanings of recharge, reveal, discard, bury, banish...

I've made cards on Drive Thru before. That paragraph, which is merely a summary of some of the rules you're talking about putting onto cards, would pretty much fill a card. You haven't left any room for a card to do what it does, in favour of talking about what every card does. That's what the rulebook is for.

"We have to do x because of y."

"How do you know that?"
"It's in the rulebook."
*collective groan from the entire table*

If your players don't feel like learning the rules of the game they're playing, that's on them. The majority of the rest of us are fine, thanks.

For the new Base Set, our current plan is that character decks are the only thing that's ever called a "deck." Location decks are now simply "locations," and the blessing deck is now... something we'll talk about later.

..."the clock"? We've seen it called the hourglass in previews of the new material, but you guys did encourage us to point the cards we deal off that thing at the current player, which means they point outwards and the direction it points moves around in a circle. And it's four letters shorter than "hourglass".

Just sayin'.

Back to the OP: fleas jump.

TL;DR: Banes decks! Encounters!

I've managed to put together a group that plays Pathfinder once a week, and we're working our way through the Mummy's Mask path. We're now about 11 weeks away from finishing assuming we never miss a week (which we haven't yet, with present players taking over characters for absent people) and never blow another scenario. (After an abysmal start, I think we're on a streak that's lasted since the beginning of Adventure 1.) As such, I'm thinking hard about what things we can do next.

There's someone at the table who has now played RotR, S&S and WotR, so I either need to get creative, or some people need to be happy with running over the same ground.

One idea I've had is to take Rise of the Runelords and jazz it up somehow. I could do this by grabbing ideas from the digital game (wild cards, adjacent locations [ * ],... ), or tossing in class decks if people want to play one of those characters, but the banes are going to be the banes.

I could find things on DriveThru, but I frequently find myself looking at a card on there that's kind of interesting, only to find it has an adventure deck number of 7 or 3E, or it's in German, or it requires the eclipsomancy skill to defeat or something equally strange. Maybe there's some fantastic content that uses these cards and others like them, but I can't easily reverse engineer finding those. And maybe there's some terrible content, or unreleased content....

Now, if I had a 110-card City Encounter deck to throw in for those sections of RotR that happen in Magnimar, I could, for those scenarios only, water down Bunyips and so forth in favour of Pickpockets, Crashed Oxcarts, Gangs of Street Thugs, just for variety's sake. Or a Badder Goblins deck for the earlier adventures. Or a Fiendish Traps deck for the later, underground-ier ones. My other plans already have me doing a decent amount of deck management, and it's a small price to pay for even more depth of play from the APs we already have. RotR is pretty vanilla compared to pirates, demons and mummies, and it's before some of the great ideas that followed were conceived. Some different ways to modify the content we already have would be great.

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[ * ] Yes, adjacent locations didn't start with the mobile game. Hush.

b(ANGBAN)g?

Was anyone stabbed with an icicle?

Are the "victims" just goldfish flopping around on the floor?

I've been playing a S&S campaign with three friends and also maintaining a set of "second-stringers" for use in case someone new comes into the group, a character dies, that sort of thing. Alahazra was chosen as a second-stringer because I thought she was an interesting character.

Reading this BCA post, I don't think I've made full potential of her, but I've also managed not to kill her up through Adventure 5, and that's while a couple of the stronger characters have been called up to the main game for various reasons. I've found that she can't be in the thick of the fray -- her attacks seem too few and far between for that -- but there's frequently a location where she can be relatively okay for a while and hand out blessings and Cures for other people's checks. It also didn't hurt that in the early going, she would find and mop up tons of armor she had no business acquiring. She gained proficiency in Light Armors fairly early just because it seemed wasteful not to give it to her.

It feels like a lot of the characters have a style of play, and if you get that style, then you can play the character really well, but if you don't, it's their death sentence. I must come to accept that I will never make any sense of Seoni. (I tried Valendron in our S&S, just as an experiment, and he lasted longer, but well, up came second-stringer Damiel, and RIP Valendron.)