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It's unfortunate they released the Ultimate series of addons right before they put out Core. A lot of the issues with incorporating Core rules and Class decks could be fixed with Ultimate-style addon decks that were designed with Core mechanics changes/card changes in mind. It just screams that there were two teams working on things and not communicating about what was happening.
I can't say I'm particularly surprised. The core set's release was a kick in the teeth to a lot of people. The turmoil surrounding existing boxes, class decks, etc was troubling. The only thing that kept my group interested was the idea that over time, with new content, the rough edges of the "totally not doing ACG 2.0" situation would smooth out and it'd just be a bump. Don't get me wrong, I think the Core set and expansion was a fantastic product on its own, but its theme, card design, and updated rules didn't mesh well with existing content at all. Swapping cards into class decks and juggling mechanics just doesn't make for a fun and relaxing time for a lot of people. I am betting sales were just down because of this. Only one of the 8 or so people in my local group bought Core. The rest were holding out until they saw how it would pan out in the long run. I'm convinced that the Core set wasn't designed with much (if any) thought to incorporating with the existing content. It certainly didn't play like it when it hit the shelves. The way society was handled didn't exactly build confidence either. We can't even blame Covid for the situation either. There should have been content slated for release before it hit. At the least, we should have heard something 6 months after it released. We barely got a Society guide in 6 months. So, to be frank, I think the ACG's been on life support for nearly 2 years. The core set put off a number of invested players and it hurt sales more than a bit. This latest revelation is just finally flipping the switch and turning out the lights on an already dead project. I'll miss it. I've had a lot of fun teaching people how to play and made a number of friends at conventions. Playing at home with family will still exist, but it's not been the same since the Core set dropped and the uneasy feeling never fully went away.
I'm betting we just get an updated Society Guide once we have Core-based Class decks. It'd be pretty quick to update the pdf to include the new build option. Personally, I feel if a person wants to farm Season 1 for OP characters, more power to them. It and Tiers 2-3 of Season 2 are my group's least favorite things. Getting a table together that's willing to suffer through any of it is pretty rare for us so we pretty much skirt around them. I'd rather play one of the other seasons and just have fun.
While I'm thinking about Scenario Guide rules, could we get an official policy for making character changes. There isn't a rule that restricts a player from changing feats around or swapping equivalent tier cards between sessions. The reporting sheets don't worry too heavily with the specifics so it looks like there's nothing wrong with doing so. I only really have to worry about this sort of thing when tearing down and rebuilding characters when I use my class decks for demos and the like, but there have been times when a feat just wasn't what I'd thought it was and it's a waste. It'd be nice if there was something official about it.
That might help mitigate some of the errata/adjustments, but I see an issue. This could lead to trouble with Core sets getting mixed up during cleanup. Players will need to be careful that they reset their decks and put the cards back where they came from. It's not hard to spot class deck and non-class deck cards, but this'll result in situations where multiple copies of a Core card could be in a deck after play, from different boxes. I'm not entirely going to be a Negative Nancy. I like that we can now just toss our Iconic Heroes Promos into class decks. Overall, I'm liking the streamlining of how post-game and leveling is handled. There are some characters that really need to get a power feat to work well (Varril being a good example) and slogging through 2 scenarios for the first feat was a pain.
Well, I've been a Venture Agent for over 3 years now. At least, I've been able to report for that long. I moved from Boise, ID 3 years ago and they have a great group with a VC that's into both sides of things. When I got to Mobile, the VC situation was sketchy and there was no ACG presence whatsoever. Since I could report, I talked with the outgoing VC and the incoming one about starting up ACG. There wasn't much interest from the established Society so I've pretty much been on my own. I ran ACG at Mobicon (last weekend being my 3rd) and established a presence here in the area. We have at least one table of 4-6 players a week of society play and run with scenarios I had from before my move coupled with one of the new players' obsessive collection filling in the newer ones. As far as I know, our VC hasn't gotten much info about the ACG in ages. He did provide me with some ACG boons for the con. I'm not sure how anything else gets disbursed but I'm doubting he's gotten much for ACG or he'd have contacted me about it. It could be fallout from the turmoil I stepped into when I kicked this all off, but I've become far too accustomed to being on my own devices... EDIT: I'm not sure what "dedicated" means. If there's some sort of process to go through, it'd be nice to know what it is so I'm doing things the "right" way. Last I spoke with the VC, being able to report games was pretty much the long and short of being an Agent. If I tried being a Lieutenant, it would come with non-ACG responsibilities I'm really not interested in. (Society RPG just isn't my thing)
Thanks for taking the time to respond but I'm getting mixed signals about what's been going on. According to Mike down in the Plea for New Class Decks thread on Sunday, "We are testing the new Guide elements at PaizoCon and will release it when we decide the testing has produced the results we're looking for." Right after that, he posted that "We are definitely still tinkering with the details (even having some meetings between Paizo and Lone Shark at PaizoCon on the subject), but we will get it all worked out real soon now." Neither of those statements sounds like the guide is complete yet. I don't know anything about the task force, my local VC isn't a card game player so there's actually very little communication we get apart from what little is posted on this site. We've scraped the blogs but that's about all our area's been able to find out and I've players asking me where the guide is that the blogs alluded to last week. All that said, while we're all talking about changes to PACS, is there an effort to separate out the ACG from the RPG on an administrative level? My local situation is that the RPG folks play their games and leave us to ourselves. Our VC picked up the mantle a few years back and isn't particularly interested in learning or playing the ACG. I like him, but the only thing we have in common is a Facebook group and the reporting info on here. We're just different crowds running different things at different times. If there's ACG info coming from him, I don't hear it. I'd be curious to know how many other groups are in a similar situation.
One of the guys in our group got his Core set last Wednesday. We ran an ACG table at Mobicon last weekend (yeah, had a con here same weekend as PaizoCon). Our big takeaway was that the Core set was great as long as we were playing all out of the box. I have nothing against it on its own. My concern is in integrating the old cards. Core is designed to operate with a different player deck dynamic that relies on cards using the new secondary powers that class decks just don't have. Despite all the talk about the one card per type rule, we had no trouble doing the boss fight stomp as long as we were playing Core characters with Core cards in their decks. With all the "free play" exceptions on so many cards, we actually had easier times playing overkill with the new setup. Apart from a select minority of old weapons with Transition rules, none of that was possible using class decks. Some things that came from it: Old cards were really off-putting to new players when compared to Core cards. Tiers 2 and 3 for Season 2 were obnoxious in the past, now they're nightmares. Cards like the Siren became terrifying to encounter to even wisdom characters. Heck, any card that had checks to allow playing cards became a big deal. Barriers had a tendency to become game-derailing/insurmountable for some party compositions (could be bad before, way more so with the new rules). Recovery is easy to forget, especially since it doesn't have its own step in the turn order. I do like aspects of the new rules. I think the hero points system is rock solid. It makes sense and gives players more flexibility as they progress. The change to recovery is nice, gets rid of things like the Radillo juggling act.
So, we've gone from "releasing an update to the Pathfinder Adventure Card Society Guide at PaizoCon 2019 (May 24-27), to coincide with the release of the Core Set" to playtesting the new rules at Paizocon with plans to update Society rules when it works. The one page "Transition" isn't much help and I have serious concerns as to the feasibility of applying new rules to old boxes and scenarios. This just feels like the latest in a long line of frustrations. It's like ACG society has been an afterthought for years. From the website reporting wonkiness to being managed by rpg reps that frequently don't play or even care about ACG, Paizo keeps testing to see how much I'll put up with before giving up and throwing in the towel, going unofficial. I worked hard to build a regular group from nothing and don't need a new rule set getting in the way. I doubt playtest included Class decks at all. Until new ones come out, there isn't a single existing one I'd recommend to a new Society player once the Core becomes the law of the land. Heck, we don't even know if there are going to be new ones. Are we getting 2.0 editions of the old decks?
Dagger is a single corner case card, only usable on the owner's check, whereas I'm talking a large number of ranged cards for Harsk. It's not just him, the same sort of thing could be done with any of the Class deck Fighters supporting a local combat. There are a number of characters that recharge rather than discard weapons and this changes them drastically, I just focused on Harsk because him and the other ranged rechargers are the most versatile since they can do this with any distant combat. Heck, if one of the Class deck fighters is at the location of a player encountering the villain and Harsk is at another location to support, +3d4 is minimum and only goes up from there since both will most likely have a weapon to pitch and Harsk can recharge a second card for his ability (all 3 cards recharging). It only goes up from there, and that's without someone blessing the check. None of this meshes with the rationale for putting the restriction in place from the blogs. Late game, weapon users will just hang onto 2-3 weapons to dump on the final fight rather than hope for a blessing. Is the restriction to prevent overkill or not? The mechanics don't match the intent. I'm not sold on forced drama with the new card restriction. It feels like a ham-fisted change. With how often we've had last turn all or nothing villain combat checks determining win or loss, having everyone go all in to ensure a last minute victory has resulted in no less a collective sigh of relief than we'd get from a risky die roll, and in some cases might not have been possible to achieve in higher tier encounters. Or, being able to have a d4 strength character pull out an unarmed Combat check because everyone at the table pitched in to give her a chance (don't get Mother Myrtle riled up). That's especially so with how hard some of the existing adventures can be with non-optimal groups. Doing Society Adventure 5-1 without stamina/fort managing characters in the new rules is going to go from hard to Season 2-3 levels of unfun. I don't even want to ponder trying to crank out a Season 1 Core run with the card restrictions. It's frustrating that the rpg got copies of playtest rules for so long before actual release. With how brief the Transition page is, I'm nervous about the new Society rules being blind dropped on us with just how confused the Transition is looking to be. It sure would have been nice to have had a month or so to try things out with the old sets before tossing Core in as well.
Add in his ability to recharge a card for d4 on a check and he only needs 4 ranged weapons with that ability, which isn't hard to come by. For example: Longbow, Shock Longbow +1, Light crossbow, and Heavy crossbow are all (B) weapons. Class deck Harsk is going to go all in with ranged weapons as is. He's a frequent new player character in my area so we see him a lot. Unless there's a lot of combat around for him to dump them for weapon assists, like most weapon combatants, he's likely to either discard cards to cycle cards or sit on a hand full of ranged weapons. The better cards tend to have the assist secondary ability so he's going to be able to dump all of his in-hand weapon cards, with his special ability kicker.
I took that to mean a numeric value as opposed to a die value. If it counts for both, then I'm seeing an equally bad issue. It's possible that I missed a more robust definition of "freely" but all I recall seeing is that it nullifies the 1 card per type rule for a check. If that's the entirety of that keyword, it opens the door for certain characters to recharge every card in their hands on a single off-turn check (since a lot of 1.0 weapons include the discard for d4 secondary effect). Class deck Harsk with ranged weapons and the whole Fighter deck for melee. Plus, that's just for one character. Rather than players hording blessings to unload on the final boss combat check, it'll be weapon cards and LOTS more small dice.
This really does a number on some characters' abilities with the new rules... For some reason, I read that all wrong, both in the manual and in the thread. Heck, I've been playing for years and never realized that there's the word "power" on cards other than the character card until today. I'd seen the part on the Transitioning page about boon limits and saw the "Powers that can be played freely do not count toward this limit." and my brain focused on Power feats... Thank goodness that's not the case. I was sweating over how that'd go over with the crew once Society play kicks off.
This really does a number on some characters' abilities with the new rules. The first one to come to mind is Brielle. With the new rules, a player now has to choose to either reveal an item on her combat check or bury a card for d12 on Strength/Charisma. Meligaster is another. By the new rules, she can either discard a card for Arcane + d4 on her combat check or reveal a monster for d4. I've been nervous about how different the Core version is to ACG 1.0 and, having now played the game, it's hard to imagine how a good number of characters are going to work with the new book, much less how the scenarios can even be done. That single page of "Transition" isn't going to be anywhere near sufficient to cover things. Core (ACG 2.0) is a full blown new edition and, while some of the existing material will work, a fair amount of it is going to end up shelved like previous version rpg books. I get the feeling the new edition was designed with little to no thought to ensuring class deck compatibility. Limiting checks to one card of each type for the entire table only makes sense when combined with how cards have been rewritten. New versions of old cards have a lot more versatility, so it's likely that types of cards that seldom influenced checks will become more common rather than the blessing spam from 1.0 games. Attack spells are a prime example. Using a spell to support a combat check in Core edition will become common since attack spells now come with a support secondary ability. To make things even worse, many old cards have become less useful. Ranged weapons are a prime example. For example, if a player uses a weapon on their combat check, another player can't play a longbow for its secondary ability to add d4 since a weapon card has already been played on that check. All in all, if I didn't have thousands of cards accumulated over several years, and was just starting out with Core, I'd be thrilled with it overall. As a new edition of the game, played without older cards in the mix, it's pretty nicely structured. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with Class decks built for old rules, pondering how much of a headache Society play's going to become in a few days. As a side note while I'm muddling through the new rules, unless I missed it somewhere, a player only recovers cards at the end of THEIR turn, before resetting. So, if someone plays a spell to help my check on my turn, they don't get to recover it until the end of their next turn since the rules only mention a player performing recovery at the end of their turn.
Eh, lets not turn this into this sort of conversation. I get that you are feeling ignored and devalued. But we don't know what the bug is, why its happening, or the problems they are having fixing it. I think that the negativity springs from how that other thread was handled. An issue was brought up and little was said about it. Then it was closed and we were sent here with no clarity as to why since the two issues only appear tangentially related. Officially, all we know is that things changed when Starfinder kicked off. It sure would be nice to know if the sessions link issue is actually directly related to the GM reporting, but we've heard no word. This just makes it feel like an issue is being hand waved rather than being actually addressed. While we can't really tell what the root of the problem is, it's not too hard to come up with theories and some semi-educated speculation. From what I can see through our small lens, it looks like something has disconnected between reported scenarios and ACG character records. The issue is only happening to the sessions links with ACG characters (that I've heard of to this point). Looking at the Player Sessions tab shows that all ACG characters are showing up as Character Name NULL. Either the query that's triggered when we click the sessions link needs to be updated for ACG characters or data is recorded different than the query expects it to be and needs to be cleaned up. I've been relatively quiet for the time but it's been nearly 2 months since the issue has been addressed and we've gotten less than no information about the problem.
Well, haven't heard anything new and I just checked, the sessions link for ACG character still reports no sessions. Is there any idea as to the status of this bit? I'm not entirely convinced this is the same issue as GM credits, but Paizo has decided it to be the case...
Hopefully, fixing this will actually address the broken sessions link results for ACG characters. The other thread was closed with that assumption so I've migrated over here to advocate.
It's weird that they bother to retain the whole reporting system if it's not going to be maintained to at least a generally functional/reliable level. Reporting sessions to the database is starting to feel like a tree falling in the forest. I've put a hold on submitting any of the sessions we've run since this happened because it's feeling like a lot of paperwork with no payoff for anyone. Players aren't able to get useful info from it and Paizo doesn't seem to be using the data for anything.
It's a bug some of us have been seeing since mid-last week. RPG characters' links are working for me. Looking at Player Sessions, I can see the ACG reports, so it's not a complete loss of data. I'm thinking that clicking the Sessions link for an ACG character is failing because ACG character names are currently considered NULL (which you can see when you look on the Player Sessions page).
The issue I'm seeing looks like it might be an issue with how the website is querying a record's sessions when the Sessions link is clicked next to an ACG character. Looking at the Player Sessions tab, all ACG Characters are lumped under the character name "NULL". If I were a betting man, my money would be on the theory that the Sessions link's query is getting hung up with that Null value.
One of the players at our regular ACG session just informed me that he's not seeing any sessions for his characters. I jumped on and see that I'm having the same issue. My one rpg character shows his sessions but none of my ACG characters are reporting any. Looking at reported sessions shows that they are in the database. I verified that my own ACG character was listed in the report and it's still there, just doesn't seem to be pulled when the link is clicked next to the character. I've even gone in and edited a session to see if it would trigger it to be displayed. No dice. I also edited the character to see if that would help. It didn't. |
