MightyJim's page

I think a lot depends on the AP, group size, party composition.

Different groups will have different play-styles and lose in different ways. Do you time out because players are afraid of using cards to explore, or fail to beat villains because you burned through all your blessings already?

On a completely unrelated note, I know I'm probably getting into wishful thinking / PACg v2.0 territory, but I'm going to throw it out there, in case it can be incorporated:

I'd love to see more made of alignment. It always felt wrong to me to include Blessings of Lamasthu in Kyra's deck, (so I never kept them for her), but I'd like to see more made of it, than just those characters who have power feats relating to specific deities.

- As an example, have a sheet listing character alignments, and cards that you can place with your token to show that alignment.
- Add an alignment to Blessing cards (or again, this could just be a sheet showing the alignment of each deity).

If you play a blessing that matches your alignment, you may increase the size of the dice you roll (i.e. if you would add a d6, add a d8 instead, if you would add a d10, add a d12, etc).

If you play a blessing opposite your alignment (lawful if you are chaotic, evil if you are good) etc, reduce the size of the dice you would roll by 1.

If a blessing is opposite your alignment on both axes, you may not play it - i.e. lawful good characters cannot play chaotic evil blessings.

I know it's a bit clunky as it stands, but with some tweaking, I think it would really help add to the theme - it could even be sold as a separate product - a Lore book about the deities of Golarion, together with the cards needed to add alignment to any PACG game.

I haven't played the digital version of the game since very early on, but if I recall correctly, the "hard" difficulty just added a random effect or two: a deck of these effects would seem like a fairly simple thing to slot into a generic set, and players could opt to draw 1 (or more) at the start of a scenario to up the difficulty.

Done. I'll be quiet for a while now. I promise.

A final thought
Part of me wonders what the ultimate shelf-life of Pathfinder is. Pathfinder RPG can churn out AP after AP with basically the same mechanics, because the rules are there to facilitate a story. Pathfinder ACG leans so much more heavily on the mechanic that the similarities stand out that bit more. Even if it’s the start of a new AP, and I’m still making the point of reading the flavour text on each location before each game (this invariably fades as we re-play scenarios/encounter the same places again), it really doesn’t take long to get into “right, this location needs wisdom to close, so let’s send the cleric there” “this one’s full of monsters, let’s send the fighter” “this one seems fairly inoffensive, let’s send the support character who looked cool, but can’t handle combat until she has at least 3 feats” – ready, set, explore.

I don’t want to be all doom and gloom, but I wonder, if Mike, Vic et al. are trying to come up with a solution that will appeal to people who own 4 APs, appeal to people who own 1 or 2, AND draw in brand-new customers, I wonder whether there really is a solution that fits everyone.
I hope there is. I’d really like it if this game could re-capture my imagination, and I want to still be around for a Far-East-style AP (Jade Regent?) or when somebody finally figures out how to do the Russian AP that wanders off into the World War, but I think we probably need to be mindful that the best solution for Paizo may not be the best solution for the people on these boards.

And more from the mechanic-y side.

I’ll say it again – more story please If I think about one of the reasons I’m more likely to pick up Arkham LCG these days than Pathfinder, the quality of the narrative has a lot to do with it. As someone has already said, the version of the story we get is probably a nice reminder for people who’ve played the AP, but for anyone else, all it’ll really do is to spoil the twists.
Tide in to this, I’ve always found the flavour text on the Adventure cards a bit odd, as it feels like it ought to be read at the start of the Adventure, but sometimes contains spoilers for things that happen in the middle.

I think a scenario booklet is probably the way forward. Aside from allowing better immersion in the theme, it would mean that scenarios could be a bit more involved, without turning into walls of tiny text.

Secondary goals people have talked about this a lot, and it really seems like a good idea – I’m not sure how it would be best handled, but something that allows for variation on the standard “just keep exploring until you get the villain” structure, without feeling contrived, game-y, and dependant on sheer dumb luck like Bizarre Love Triangle or Toll of the Bell.
+1 to the comments people have made about encouraging greater levels of interaction. Unless you’re Lem or Valeros, it feels like everyone just ignores each other until they get damaged and start shouting for a healer. Things to alter that would be good.

Keep going with refinements to terminology. Yes, invokes feels a little odd after 3 APs without it, but is probably the best option – I’ve had players try to argue that an Enchanter can’t damage them after the encounter, because after the encounter the enchanter is gone. I know that’s not right, but having “after you act” instead of “after the encounter” just makes life easier.

Bit late to the party, but here goes.

bit of background: picked up RotR in Mar/Apr time 2014. loved it - played it a lot - had probably been all the way through Runelords 3 or 4 times by the end of the year, and was up to date with Skull & Shackles (don't have precise numbers).
2015 - played 265 games of Pathfinder: finished Skull &Shackles, re-played Runelords, did a complete Season of the Shackles, and took 2 groups through Wrath, although the 6-character group gave up without ever attempting Adv 6.
2016 - played 81 games of Pathfinder (includes the digital version). Haven't even thought about going back to Wrath, but played bits of Runelords and Skull again.
Up until the release of Mummy's Mask, we had every non-promo card made for the game. Only got Mummy's Mask belatedly, and are only an adventure or 2 in. (18 sessions so far in 2017). We plan on playing the whole thing eventually, and will doubtless have caught up by the time of AP5.
So, speaking as a big fan of the game and a heavily invested customer whose enthusiasm has been waning, I'd want to say...
[edit - this got very long, so i've tried to divide it into distribution and game-based thoughts.

1 - boxes
Story Yes! Please! more story! - something like the fan-made guides we've had up until now, but included in the box.

Generic cards It's so depressing to open a new box and discover i own 80-90% of what's in it. I don't need more daggers or short-swords. I get why they have to be included in every class deck, but a system that prevents that for the future is needed.

I'd love to see a Generic box that provided all those cards and could be combined with AP-specific boxes that provided the adventure guide booklet, the non-generic locations/henchmen/characters, and every needed just for that AP. It would be even better if you could make a guide for people who already own a few APs to assemble this base from their existing cards / a drive-thru pack to top up what they'd be missing, but I realise that this may be over-optimistic.

I can see why other people weren't fans, but I'd definitely be in favour of 8 "summon the Henchman" cards in the base box, and 1 copy of each actual henchman card in the AP box.

I liked the idea on an earlier page of a theme-y box - not needed to play an AP, but could be combined with base box+AP box to give a stronger feeler of a particular environment.

If the Afghanistan principle is an issue for this 2-box approach, they could always be bundled - Buy a core box with an AP box inside it (like how Adv 1 comes inside an AP), but also sold separately for people who don't need both. Based on exactly zero game-publishing experience, it feels like this would be doable with no change in card-contents and only minimal change in packaging [an AP box has the same packaging whether it's loose on a shelf, or inside a Core box, Core box just has a big green banner saying "requires an AP" or "AP inside" etc].

Linked to all of these - please, please re-design the box insert. I sleeve my cards, and the insert is worse than useless past about AP 3 or 4 - the spaces aren't big enough, and there's loads of other space wasted. Outside of North America, things like a broken token organiser aren't always options, and i no longer have the time to hand-make my own custom foam-board inserts.

I was reminded in the Pathfinder Adventures app today how these all fail during Scaling Mhar Massif in all those Death Zones.

Ambushed by a Warlord in the Death Zone?

When is Paizo con?

I've been wanting to play Salim ever since I knew he was going to be a real character, but haven't started a new party since then.
I'm also keen to give Yoon a go - I guess we'll round out the party based on whichever skills those two are missing.

If you're playing anything other than Runelords, chances are you'll be losing your armour to cancel damage soon enough. Recharging it (unless you have duplicates in hand) just feels suicidal.

Same with weapons. Obviously there are some times when you need to discard for an extra dice for a really crucial fight, but generally, discarding (or recharging) your only weapon and just hoping to draw another seems like a very daft idea - you're likely to have to either forfeit turns whilst you wait for another, or explore without a weapon, and just hope that there are no monsters around...

Can't wait to see Yoon's deck list. Depending on how many Blessings she has, she could be amazing or terrible.

Does anyone else feel like things have been very quiet on the Mummy’s Mask front? From what I can gather from the various comments on here about order dates and subscribers and the like, we should be barely a month away from the new AP coming out, yet it feels like we’ve had next-to-nothing in terms of what we can expect from this set.

As I’ve said on here in the past, my wife and I were massive fans of Rise of the Runelords, and enjoyed most of Skull & Shackles – we have played literally hundreds of games of Pathfinder over the past 2-3 years.

A lot of things about Wrath though, we really didn’t enjoy, and the game has really fallen off the map for us – just too many other things coming along that felt less like being dragged over broken glass than Wrath Adv 6.

Right now, I’m really on the fence about Mummy’s Mask. I have a lot of belief in the designers of this game, and some of the vague whispers I’ve heard floating around the ether suggest that this AP may be a bit more to our taste – a bit more about sneaking quietly and dealing with traps, and bit less about getting our faces pummelled by hordes of demons. For all that though, I need someone to convince me – to sell me the exciting features of what will make this AP worth shelling out on, rather than just using the Class Decks for a different run at Runelords.

Have I missed something? Are there substantial previews out there that I failed to spot? Or is it really as quiet as I think?

Is anyone else reminded of the time that the Simpsons made fun of Fox News, and almost led to Fox filing a lawsuit against itself.

I hope they do make this an official DriveThru purchase (like OP Season cards). Until then, I'll probably just wait

Is it possible to get the scenario cards printed from drivethru cards? If so, how? I didn't see that option. I already bought the PDF.

+1 to this. Keen to try the scenarios, but not a fan of proxying cards.

It still makes more sense than a cutlass being a "finesse" weapon...

So, now we're speculating on what these new cards might be that punish you for scouting them.

Presumably, that's because actually finding out what they say might cause them to trigger against us...

Ok, now my head hurts.

Pathfinder ACG was probably the most played game in our house in 2014 and 2015. We've played RotR so many times I've actually lost count, Skull and Shackles 3 or 4 times, and Season of the Shackles once.

Wrath was less fun for us. We hated the army banes, and generally found the "everything turned up to 11 all the time" aspect just sapped the enjoyment. You were too busy worrying about dying ALL THE TIME to really enjoy anything, and the mythic paths seemed to skew everything so that lots of ordinary monsters became automatic victories if you could use your mythic stat, and completely impossible if you couldn't.

Armies were a particular pain, along with an overall sense that a lot of scenarios just didn't work with 5 or 6 character groups (not that things were THAT easy with 4). We eventually finished Wrath with our 4 character group (although not the optional extra scenario), and our 6-character group ground to a halt at the end of adventure 5.

I'm not wanting to revisit those discussions here (I'm aware there are many threads on these topics), but want people's opinions - given how we felt about Wrath of the Righteous, are we likely to enjoy Season of the Righteous? or is it basically just more of the same?

Specific concerns - are there lots of Armies to face, how well scaled does the overall experience feel?

To be specific I had the "from the Character Add-on Deck" subscription for S&S, but because of the delays, it got shipped together with Adventure 2, which was how stuff got lumped together.

I don't know how it works if you also have a Class Deck subscription- my guess would be that these would be likely to get combined?

I did it briefly. Trouble was that periodically you'd end up with multiple things in one delivery and suddenly get stung for customs (£10+)

In the end it just wasn't worth it - went back to buying from the FLGS. Missed out on a few promos, but much safer on balance

Banes that necessitate a certain party makeup...

Along that same vein the army ...
encouraged certain parties over others, and the acrobatics check on one of them was baffling. We were fine with them but I can see how some parties might be very boned.

Ugh. I'd successfully repressed the memories of the Abysmal Armies.

That card should just have said "Go back to the start of the campaign, and ensure that your party contains all of the following skills, as boosted by your mythic path (including acrobatics). If you did not randomly choose this, 5 months ago, you lose the game."

Thanks for reminding me of the point when Wrath went from "a bit of slog, but still kind of fun sometimes" to "I never want to play this with my 6-character group again"

Hawkmoon269 wrote:

How do we know she's a witch?

Try to burn her?

build a bridge out of her?

We've definitely had plenty of times where a character has got themselves to 1-card from death, and we've just stopped exploring to let the Blessing Deck run down.

To an extent, I think this can be justified narratively (stuff this, I'm going back to The Rusty Dragon...) but it is an interesting point about there not being a penalty for replaying scenarios.

Part of me thinks that the fact that you've got in that much of a mess, suggests it's hard enough already, although it could just be down to poor luck/decision making.

I've heard talk around here before (can't find the thread right now) of creating physical cards for the "wildcard" effects you get in the digital game - if we ever get to a stage where that's a reality (would love to see it as an official class-deck-style expansion, but Homebrew works just as well), we might try adding an extra Wildcard if playing through a scenario where we previously ran the clock down on purpose. I could see this working well in Runelords where the difficulty is at a sensible level to make tweaks.

I think folks will find Mummy's Mask is a great contrast to Wrath of the Righteous. They both have very different goals and stretch the system in very different directions. :)

Glad to hear this. Wrath virtually killed off Pathfinder in our house - we didn't bother with the optional scenario at the end of Ad6 for the group that did finish, and for our second group of characters (historically we've always run at least 2 groups through an AP when it comes out, because we got through Adventures so much quicker than they were released), we didn't even bother going back to play adventure 6.

We still get the class-decks to go through RotR and S&S now and again, and may pick up Season of the Runelords one day, but unless the pre-release articles gives us a good sense of Mummy's Mask being less brutal and better scaled, I don't know whether we'll bother.

Penny Sleeves (various companies including ultra pro) are an option, but the card will be "loose" inside the sleeve.

also (weirdly) I've found that Penny Sleeves tend to be fractionally wider, so if you've bought a box-insert (Broken Token or similar), they don't tend to fit as well

There are many, many books set in the Pathfinder Universe. For a book "based on the card game" you'd probably need to buy a whole adventure-path for the RPG, which is an expensive way of doing things if you're not going to be role-playing.

The characters in Adventure Paths (so far) are the iconics - there are comics for them, but typically not novels.
Class Decks have a broader scope of characters, but again (mostly) not appearing in the novels.

Personally, I really like Liar's Blade by Tim Pratt, and Death's Heretic by James L Sutter - that one has the added bonus that the lead character is playable with the Inquisitor Class Deck

also, check out the web-fiction - big library of free, online short-stories - http://paizo.com/pathfinder/tales/serial

(edit: Ninja-ed)

Does a Myfly barrier require you to reveal a promo card or bury your hand?

I've noticed on the main site that Paizo seem to be creating a line of iconic Villains for the RPG.

What do we think the odds are of seeing them in the ACG any time soon? I'm guessing it's fairly unlikely that they'll do a full Villain AP, but would a "villain" class deck work? (maybe divided into "Villains fight" and "villains cast" or similar...)

I think anyone who manages to keep her alive long enough to get a role-card deserves to be allowed to exploit any power they like. Just started playing her through S&S and she is super, super squishy

Good to know. We're currently sat at the end of Adventure B, waiting for somewhere to log our skill-point...

Just tried to download the updated version of these, to print off an Alchemist and an Oracle for our latest run-through, but the latest decks appear to be missing.

am I looking in the wrong place? or have these just not been updated? if so, do we have an estimated time-frame?

Based on today's Kickstarter update for Apocrypha, they still don't have a release date, as they're a small company at the mercy of printers.

It would seem unlikely that Paizo are trying to measure their release against an unknown event like this

Apologies for sounding like a grumpy old man. But its like: "Sorry, sir... the filet mignon won't be ready for a while. But in the meantime, you can always go to McDonalds."

I'd say that's pretty offensive to all the people working on Apocrypha.

why not ""Sorry, sir... the filet mignon won't be ready for a while. But in the meantime, you can always try the Châteaubriand"
(Or if you prefer, "We're out of Big Macs, but you can get a Whopper across the road.")

you might not want it, and there's no one forcing you to have it, but there's no need to pour contempt on the whole concept.

I tend to think of AD6 boons as "the cards I'll never actually get to play."

It's sadly true - I keep hoping for an AP that brings Blessings of Nethys in at a suitably low AP number to let Zarlova do repeatable scouting and bonus exploration

MightyJim wrote:

THAT is interesting - although it'd be Knowledge 7 for even a base-set blessing, and you probably want to put at least some points into her wisdom, so it's not a given.

Sure, but with a d8+2 from the start, you're looking at recharging (ALMOST) any blessing just under 50% of the time on average, and you can eventually have d8+5, meaning you'd only fail to recharge a B blessing on a 1. Pretty huge. If you combine it with a reveal-to-boost-Knowledge boon (I know there's at least one book in Wrath of the Righteous that does this, right?) then you're gonna recharge blessings ALL the time.

Good point - I'd forgotten about reveal boosts to knowledge checks. This does look good.

Eliandra Giltessan wrote:

James McKendrew wrote:

Eliandra Giltessan wrote:

So even though this Damiel looks like a minmaxed version of S&S Damiel, I think I have to vote Mother Myrtle as the BEST ALCHEMIST EVER!

RIGHT?!??! She's got that bardic dual-spelling and a way to recharge when she should be banishing. Gads, give her one of those one-shot +10-to-combat-spells and she'll be terrifying.

I mean, I mostly meant that she was a sweet, old, creepy lady, and we can def never have too many of those in the card game. But knowledge to recharge everything is awesome too!

UPDATE: Just realized that with a power feat, she can make a knowledge check to recharge blessings, cuz divine trait.

Wow. That's a huge deal. I think we're gonna see a LOT of Mother Myrtles out there in the wild once this deck comes out.

THAT is interesting - although it'd be Knowledge 7 for even a base-set blessing, and you probably want to put at least some points into her wisdom, so it's not a given.

Is it just me, or does mother Myrtle have very pointy ears for a human?

Rebel Song wrote:

I'm sure Raz would enjoy Puppy's Mask very much. ALL THE PUPPY MOUNTS!

It never occurred to me 'til now how much Raz must loathe and despise goblins.

We took Raz and Ekkie through Runelords. There were some tense moments...

Does Puppy's Mask come with more Dogslicers?

crafty, historical, just a little insane

Is that Mummy's Mask? or Liz?

I was glad when they announced the breather between APs, but I'm ready for some new content now - I know we've got a while until Mummy's Mask arrives, but I look forward to hearing something soon [Hint, Hint]

I wonder whether there are more spellcasters in the area? our Ezren could never recharge spells without a cat...

I've been playing this game for a couple of years now, but suddenly been given cause to doubt myself.

If Merisiel is at the Shrine to Lamashtu, she can evade a blessing, and not take the mental damage, right?

that's how we'd always played it, but recently encountered someone who believed the damage came instantly, before the option to evade.

I really wish those wildcard powers were available for the tabletop game.

It wouldn't take a great deal of work to add them in - just create a deck of cards, or a numbered list, and draw a card/ roll a dice to choose 1 (or 2 etc) at the start of each scenario.

If you're going to be playing the app version, you'll be able to see most of the wildcards over time, and if not, you can make your own up as you go along.

Another "Favourite character" blog comes and goes, and still no Cleric. :(

I heard she gets a Goblin Cohort in this deck.

That would be awesome.

Sadly I'm not sure I believe you (or your source)

We're playing through RotR at the moment with Ekkie, Groot (sorry, Gronk...) Rooboo and Raz- we've mixed in the cards from the Druuid, Monk and Paladin decks, MINUS the ones that are already in there.

It doesn't impact things massively - you don't see the class-deck cards all that often, but it does allow Raz a couple of horse and a Lance (she's really hoping for a rideable dog soon).

we've got upto the start of AD3 this way, and generally it works well, although i'm tempted to remove some of the completely pointless cards like the single Blessing of Pulura...

we also previously did a play-through where characters used only Class-Deck cards, as per the OP rules at the time, with the exception that they could have Loot as and when awarded it in the scenario.

For a combat check, you can only use one card that says "for your combat check reveal/discard this card to use your X skill"

Sometimes you'll be able to use cards to add things - like a spell that adds d4 to a combat, but you can only determine what skill you're using once per check

WotR isn't "bad", it's "hard".

Glad you enjoyed it. Obviously, any review is subjective, and different groups will have different experiences.

for us though, whilst it was "hard" the bigger issue was that it just wasn't fun.

Once you allow for the splitting into multiple groups, it was probably only an average of 2 attempts per group per scenario (although the distribution skews heavily towards the army-based scenarios) there are others which have caused us more difficulty.

Playing only 14 games of Pathfinder in 2 months though, that's unprecedented in the 18 months or so we've owned the game. The type of challenge was more than "difficult" it was miserable - and it left us not wanting to play the game.

Terendelev is much more of an issue for his before-you-act than his actual combat check.

If you get a demonic horde, and you have more than one character at your location, then each character at your location is probably losing multiple mythic charges, and taking multiple lots of cold damage, before you even start thinking about the combat check.

I think we used the champions of Mendev twice- yes we took the skills no-one had first, but you still have to spend a mythic charge to get it, and whilst +5 is good, unless it's on a skill you already happen to be very good/mythic at, you're still going to have a lot of work on your hands to manage to get to 20 on a check. D8 + 7 isn't actually any likelier to roll a 20 than D4 + nothing is.

Obviously with armies, any reduction in player count makes a difference. Maybe the jump from 3 to 2 is more than I'd expect.

Hi all

At long last, the review of Adventure 6 is up on the website.

This was by far the hardest review to write so far. As I've said in the review, it nearly killed Pathfinder for us.

As always thoughts welcome - particularly would like to know whether others shared our experience.