R S 516's page

Looks like you're going to be limited to light armour, very limited ranged support, and potentially no spellbooks (depending whether it rules that you have to pay for it or that you start with one free).

In that situation, I'd be inclined towards something along the lines of Barbarian, Ranger, Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, Summoner.

Pretty sure you get the spellbook free, and based on the fluff I'm ruling that Heirloom Weapon lets you buy a weapon over 10gp, but that doesn't help the armour side of things.

I was originally thinking of something like that, only with a paladin instead of the ranger, and a pair of blaster sorcerers to keep the paperwork down. I think I'll just have to have a look at some of the encounters and see how often range really matters.

I'd go for 3 or 4 gestalt characters, just to minimize the pains of managing 6 PCs at the same time.

I did consider that, but I want to give the designer the benefit of the doubt to begin with.

1 ranger

And that's why I posted here, because for some reason I always forget this class exists. I'm not sure how useful scouting will be, but the rest is a good package.

A third party recently released a set of rules (Avalon Quests) for a solo version of Pathfinder. It looks pretty interesting - it has wilderness crawling, quests, combat, all that fun stuff. I'd like to try it, but I'd appreciate some suggestions on what might be an interesting mix, with an eye towards playability.

The first big deal is that it's aimed at a party of six characters. You start at level 1, but that's still a party of six almost-fully armed and operational Pathfinder characters being managed by a single player.

The second less big deal is that at the start of the module the rules come with you're apparently new adventurers gearing up and setting out in a village which can't sell you anything costing over 10gp - I think you can travel to a town with a 100gp limit later on, but I haven't read much of it because reading the whole module in advance is rude. You get normal starting wealth.

The third big deal is that it's solitaire. This means juggling six characters is going to be a pain, but on the other hand, no-one but the player suffers if a party of six summoners fill the battlefield each turn. It also means there's an emphasis on skill checks over roleplaying, so having a lot of skills covered is a plus.

I'm not going to ask the boards to BUILD ME CHARACTERS, but I'm interested to see what you'd do for this, as party dynamics change a lot in single player games. A couple of straightforward "full attack full attack full attack" bruisers, a healbot, and a skillmonkey that would be boring to play as your only character, combined with one or two more interesting ones? Cleric/Druid/Magus/Oracle/Summoner/Wizard? Just use the beginner box pregens?

You will have noticed that with the base set that less than half are Basic cards. That's not many to remove after adding deck 1, 2 and 3.

Also notice the size of the spaces in the box. There's going to be a lot more henchmen yet.

I just want to check, quickly - is there any reason not to break all the henchmen, villains and locations out of their adventure decks ASAP? There aren't any "draw a random H/V/L" effects, right?

I ask because that giant empty henchmen space is bugging me, and I'd rather keep it filled even if I'm not playing the new adventure from a new deck immediately.