Axoq's page

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?

The second power on this blessing in Core says:

Discard to move to a random location, then explore. This exploration, reroll any dice showing 1 and 2.

Does that reroll power only apply during checks? (If I encounter the monster Elemental, which makes me roll to determine its element type, I don't reroll a 1 in that case, do I?) Also, that last "and" should be "or", yes?

Overall, I did have a good time at PaizoCon this year, but I do feel that I need to share what happened at this event, since it was pretty anomalous and an officially run event. TL;DR: wow, what a clusterfumble -- missing personnel and poor management of the event.

I didn't know a lot about the structure of the Open going in, except to know that there was often team elimination through the days of the event, and the game was time-delimited -- it needed to end when the slot ended.

Because I hadn't been in an official event in the ballroom before, I didn't know there would be a long line of people taking tickets at the door. I arrived at close to Friday at 7:00, so I was delayed getting in. Also earlier that day I had seen a ticket for my team's slot, Team 3, on the pick-up table, but I also looked again later and saw it was gone.

So I get to the table at around 7:10 or 7:15. So far, all of this is my fault.

When I get to the table, I'm alone save for the GM, and I continue to be alone until about 7:25 when I point out there isn't a line of people trying to get in anymore. While four people apparently decided they didn't want to play this, the fact that I'm alone isn't anybody's fault. It's not going to help for what's going forward, but no one is to blame.

At this point, the GM starts the game. There is no team elimination; everyone will play all three days. He tells me, out loud, that I will need to make my own characters. I don't know if this event is going to be run again somewhere, so:

I figure I now have about an hour and a half to get through that and the game, so I get moving. By eight o'clock, I have completed two of the four parts of that task, and I'm most of the way toward completing a third when another player walks up. I'm not going to shame anybody here and I don't know this person's name in any case, but he tells the GM that he has a ticket for this game... at 10 pm for Team 4.

I'm not listening very carefully, because I'm panicking, but the task I've been given would be fair for four people but not really fair for one -- again, not anyone's fault, since it's designed and intended for a team of four. The upshot is that he offers to help, and I believe he's joining my team. He says he's very familiar with, um,

And the new guy carefully. Looks. Through. The cards. It's 8:40 when he's done, but the GM allows me? us? to use the one-hour gap between the games because of the circumstances, which I appreciate. The GM now reveals the details of the scenario. It's not designed to be hellish this year, merely hard, and I'll be playing all three days (though he won't be GMming the other two because of his schedule). However,

Valeros plays first, and the first card turned is the henchman. The GM shuffled all the locations, so this is above-board and very encouraging. Valeros's opening hand has only one weapon, but the combat check isn't that bad, actually, and the closing cost is an even lower combat check, so I elect to shuffle that weapon into my deck for extra dice and save my blessing for the close.

The new guy interrupts me -- am I sure I want to do that? I tell him that Val should have no problem with the check. And he says, "But if he doesn't have a weapon, his Melee goes down to a d4." And a chill runs down my spine.

The GM and I explain the facts of life to him, and this guy is going to return home a hero after he tells whatever people he's been playing with how much less horrible their game is going to be. Reread your rulebooks, New Guy.

But in the here and now, I figure I'm perhaps more alone than I would have been running all four characters, since I have to watch him. He nearly fails a check against a barrier when I have a Blessing of Abadar and the incentive to use it, and I play with my hand on the table so you can see what I have. He just didn't look. Or ask. That kind of thing.

Overall, I? we? close three locations and we've examined the henchman on top of a fourth when three more people roll up to get their 10 o'clock game started. So I'm done.

The New Guy then joins his appointed Team 4, with all the intel from the game he's played, plus his part of that preliminary task completed with extensive use of my time slot.

I debate whether to go back for the next day, given that there's probably no chance I could win. I decide to anyway because I know what I'm getting myself into, and it could be fun. (And New Guy is no longer welcome at my table.)

The setup for the official schedule for this event is that sign-ups are only available for the Friday sessions, and if you're in one of those, you are automatically in for the other two, but no tickets are available (since having any random other person sign up for those days will only cause problems, but on the upside, it might have given me a teammate).

There are lines to get into the main ballroom again. I arrive early this time, but I do not belong in either line. I do not have a ticket to this event -- no such tickets exist -- and I am not hoping to get into the event without a ticket, since I am supposed to be there. So I have to talk my way into the ballroom to avoid being late again. The people at the door have no idea what I'm talking about, but they let me enter.

I find the table with the sheets detailing the next stage of the Open, and the same deck boxes containing the characters I had used the previous day. There is no GM, and there is no table nearby that isn't full of people, and no one told me, J/K, your team of one was eliminated in a game with no team elimination. I wait for 20 minutes, and then I bail and weasel my way into cartmanbeck &Co's game instead.

I don't bother to come back for Sunday's Open event.

I know some people at Lone Shark and otherwise associated with PACG, including the author of the Open scenarios, Jen McTeague. I know people that have seen these scenarios run before. They tell me that I was supposed to be handed the scenario sheet at the beginning so I would know what was coming before I even started that preliminary task, not read aloud small sections from it (so the ten or fifteen minutes I lost waiting for people could have been spent reading that and getting started), and that additionally

This event is billed as a competitive event, and some of us as gamers take the idea of "competitive" seriously. If players are allowed to gain unfair advantages, if the rules aren't going to be enforced as the scenario writers intend, and if Paizo volunteers are not going to show up for their appointed times possibly due to the wobbly, quantum nature of the slots themselves, maybe don't bill them as competitive and let people know what they're getting themselves into.

If I return to PaizoCon at all, right now the main draw is going to be {cartmanbeck et al.}'s next game, which I simply won't be able to play anywhere else, and I'll stay far away from the officially run events, if they're run like this. And that's probably not the conclusion Paizo wants its players to come to.

Hi, all. I could use the advice of more experienced con-goers to help me figure out the lottery system.

I play the Adventure Card Game, and I decided to come down so I could get the new edition in my hot little hands as soon as possible, and to meet other fans.

I have never played an RPG of any description in my life. This event doesn't feel like the place to discover I hate it/I'm no good at it, and I would especially feel bad if I fluked into a lottery-based game to discover this.

It seems there's a number of events based on PACG happening, probably enough to keep me occupied at all hours of each day, but only one that's on the lottery, and it seems to be a three-day event, meaning I should put a 4 on all three days. Beyond that, I see maybe one event (counterprogrammed against the Saturday session, or against the info session at 9 am on Friday) that I'm interested in.

We've been advised not to put just 4s and 0s, and for good reason -- if my name doesn't show up on the list before that event fills, I get nothing, but I'm not sure what else to do here. Help?

Thanks.

Cloak of Winds from the Oracle deck has an Arcane/Intelligence/Wisdom/Divine check to acquire, and an Arcane/Divine check to recharge. Should it have the Arcane trait in addition to the Divine trait?

Sedja from Mummy's Mask (4) says to move any characters from your location together to another location. Do you have to be one of those characters?

Thanks!

Not sure where to post this, but:

The Warpriest Class Deck List available for download here lists "Acidic Greatsword +1" and two other swords as characters, and has two entries for "Blessing of the Lord in Iron". These probably should be fixed.

This card says, "If undefeated, each character at your location is dealt 1d4−1 Combat damage and does not reset their hand." I don't understand when people don't reset their hand.

If Alain encountered it and failed to defeat it, and Enora is at the location, will Alain not reset his hand at the end of that turn, even if he continues to explore? Will Enora need to remember not to reset her hand when her turn comes? Usually when there's a lingering effect there's a duration explicitly mentioned ("Increase the difficulty of all checks by 1 until the end of the turn").

This card has the Item trait. Should that be the Object trait?

I'm restarting this conversation in a more proper place, since I was in danger of taking more than my fair share of space off-topic in another thread.

I thought some boosters in the form of a 110-card add-on deck would be useful for jazzing up old content. I gave some back story to the specific problems I was having planning something for my Pathfinder ACG group to move on to after MM, since there's at least one of us that has done RotR, S&S and WotR. People suggested Ron Lundeen's homebrews (they're most definitely on my radar!), and playing the previous seasons of Organized Play.

Then:

Axoq wrote:

Our group started from Organized Play, so we've also played Season of the Shackles and Season of the Righteous, and after seeing Adventure 6 of the latter and dealing with some of the rules, we, um, stopped doing OP.

It's possible the newer rules that came later are better, and of course we can alter the rules playing at home, but it's probably still going to be a hard sell.

It depends a lot on what things bothered you about said rules. AD6 tends to be higher difficulty in every set, so if it's a difficulty question then it might be fairly universal for AD6. On the other hand, you could play AD1-5 of the other OP seasons cheerfully.

If it's certain mechanics - things like burying your role card, Wrath in particular had some mean mechanics, because of Mythic madness. Different sets will likely avoid many of those problems.

If it's purely a question of the team's actual skill and experience at designing scenarios... that is a trickier proposition. We have had slightly different people on different seasons, and it's true that the designers gain skill over time. That said, I wouldn't expect a vast difference between the design theories of OP and its representative set. For example: I worked on both the Mummy's Mask box set and Season of Plundered Tombs and didn't change much in that time :)

And suddenly we're not talking about class decks anymore, and more about what our deal with OP was, and I think it's worth sharing our side of things. So, the long shaggy dog story of our group:

It started with another player who posted about starting something in the Vancouver area on Board Game Geek. We got in touch with each other, he found a store, and talked to some people who might be interested, and we started getting together on Wednesday nights.

The store told us it wasn't cost-effective to continue staying open late on Wednesdays, so they moved us to Fridays and their usual public game night, and we lost half our people. Every once in a while, someone would quit, either because of some other commitment or they moved to another country (this happened twice, and not to the same country). Sometimes we'd attract a new player and they'd stay a while, but then they'd realize, oh, they expect me to come every Friday, and we never heard from them again.

The only thing that kept us going was that my friends from my more general gaming group heard about what I was doing and started coming in to make up the numbers. When that other guy who found us the store finally left, it was him, and two of my friends playing.

Then there was the day that two of us picked up location decks and put them back in the wrong places. So my non-fighter character wandered into the wrong deck and was killed. It didn't take us long to figure out that we'd misdealt the game, so we didn't report anything about it. Then a couple of weeks later my character died again, but not as the result of a misdeal. We were far enough into the game, and at the time there weren't tiers or anything, that it would have completely messed up the game for me to start a new character and attempt to catch up. So we just stopped reporting and pretended it didn't happen.

The beginning of the end came with Season of the Righteous. My one friend was only willing to buy the Bard deck, so he'd been playing Lem for two seasons now. Another friend decided the bard Siwar looked interesting. Rounding us out were two Paladins and a Monk. So I know better than to lay all of the blame on my group souring on OP on game design, whether that's OP in general or SotRighteous in particular. But still:

The WotR deck has a whole lot of theme. Demons everywhere, and things to deal with demons everywhere else. That's fine if you have those cards in your deck, but you don't because you're exclusively using your class deck. (We were anyway. I read something about digging one and only one card out of the box to add to your deck when you start, I think, in a newer version of OP rules? But that was further up the line, after we bailed.) And of course, the Bard decks were from those first seven with too many characters and too few solid boons for said characters, so they always felt like they were struggling with everything. Again, not the game's fault, but it wasn't just the bards who felt this way.

We did struggle through the first five adventures, however. But 6A nearly killed us, and we decided to maybe do them in some other order so we might possibly get some better cards, but they were all equally impossible looking. That was the week that the Mummy's Mask Base Set hit the stores, so we spent that night playing that and decided where to go from there.

We were long past reporting anything, being in public in the store (to get the Seasons) wasn't getting us anything since anyone who might be slightly interested had been and gone, the rules about upgrading class decks felt restrictive (one card? And not a useful one from the Path we're working on?!), we were eating up one-third of the table space in the store, and we were constantly in danger of having to bail on the game when the store closed... so we formed a weekly group to play the game in disorganized play on those same Friday nights.

We now have 9 + n weeks to find the Next Thing (where n is the number of scenarios we fail). That's looking like Season of the Goblins, and then who knows. We might try the content of some of the later OP seasons, but I doubt any of us will want to play them Officially after our experience with it.

Hello. New Canadian subscriber to the PACG. The first order says it's been shipped but it hasn't arrived, over a month later. No other details to give, really, but I'll provide anything you'd like to know.

Thanks for any assistance you can provide.

Hi, all.

This is probably in the wrong place, and if it turns out something's wrong, I'll be heading to Customer Service next, but:

Are there any Canadian subscribers who can comment on the amount of time it takes a thing to be delivered? I just started the subscription with the third Adventure Deck for Mummy's Mask, and my order says "completed" as of December 11, but over a month later it hasn't arrived. Am I impatient, or is there something tragically wrong? I did choose to ship by regular mail.

Thanks.

Hello, everyone.

I'm tinkering with a homebrew character, and I'd appreciate feedback and ideas on what I have so far. In terms of story driving powers, I'm picturing his life this way: if he's survived this long as a were, he must be pretty good at getting away...

---

VRENNAT (Human Male Lycanthrope Fighter)

SKILLS

STR 1d12 ... +3
_ +2 Melee
DEX 1d6 ... +2
CON 1d8 ... +3
INT 1d4 ... +2
WIS 1d8 ... +4
_ +2 Stealth
_ +3 Survival
CHA 1d4 ... +1

CARDS LIST
WEAPON 4 5 6
SPELL 0 1
ARMOR 2 3 4
ITEM 4 5 6
ALLY 1 2
BLESSING 4 5 6
_ Favored type: WEAPON

POWERS
HAND SIZE 4 5
PROFICIENT WITH [ ] Light Armor ____ [X] Weapons

If the top card of the blessings deck
has the Basic trait, gain the Animal trait.

If you have the Animal trait, for your
Strength die, roll 1d8+1d6. This counts
as rolling 1 die. For your combat check,
you may use your Melee skill +2 ([ ] 4)
plus your Stealth skill and the
Slashing trait.

After your turn ends, recharge 2
cards at random ([ ] or if you didn’t have the
Animal trait this turn, 2 cards of your
choice) to move to another location.

If you don’t have the Animal trait, for your Intelligence die roll 1d10.

Oh, look! The last straw! In another post in this forum, Theryon Stormrune brought back news of the forthcoming Mummy's Mask preview, which featured Estra and her dead husband Honaire. He mentioned that you pronounce the 'e' on the end. He did not mention how. There have been a number of things I've encountered in PACG that I'm not certain how to pronounce. Achaekek. Hshurha. Erastil. Sajan. Now this. I'd like to settle this.

I've compiled a list of the iconics, their companions, and the gods for blessings. It's an incomplete list, since I don't have my own copy of WotR, and haven't played past adventure 4, and did those blessings from memory. Also, it consists exclusively of my wild guesses as to how everything is pronounced. Each name has beneath it, a simplified IPA pronunciation and a more Americanist short-vowel-long-vowel pronunciation, so hopefully everyone who's interested will understand at least one of them. I know only enough IPA to be dangerous, so there may be errors in my intended pronunciations, for which I apologize.

If there's already such a list somewhere, great! Let me know! If not, then maybe we can put a reference together.

I don't intend to try to do pronunciations for every proper name and non-dictionary word on any card in PACG. I don't intend to spill out into the RPG and take on all those names. I'd like to limit this to things are are likely to keep coming up in the card game.

Some people may say that it's an RPG of sorts, you can make the characters your own, that includes how you say them... but no. There are at least intended pronunciations of these things, even if there aren't official ones. I'm really interested in those. I'm not the only one, since someone else thought it was worth noting that "Honaire" had one more syllable than you'd guess. Let's figure this out.

Link in a moment.

I realize there's no one in the offices at the moment, but hopefully this is only a minor thing.

The PDF version of Gronk's character sheet says his progression for Blessings in his deck is 5, 6, 6, which clearly can't be right. Based on the standard 15-card starting deck, it looks like the correction should be 4, 5, 6. (Does anyone have the deck yet and can confirm? Hope the character card itself doesn't have the same error....)