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I realize I'm a bit late to this discussion but I figured I'd toss out a few comments for an additional perspective.

1. Difficulty in card games is by nature super swingy. M:tG is pretty much a perfect example. Some number of times out of 10 you're not even going to play a real game because of mana screw/flood. In the same way PFACG can be super hard or super easy depending on what cards flip, when, and what cards are in people's hands. The worst banes by the way are the ones where they say things like "each character randomly chooses a character to summon and defeat". Multiple times a card like that has come up and after making the random selections we've just chosen to punt because we managed to pick a caster with one combat spell in hand 3, 4, or 5 times.

Relatedly, the quantity of AoE damage has a pretty significant impact on available resources and ease or difficulty. I wish AoE damage came in smaller chunks. A lot of it seems to be 0 or 2 or 1d4 up to 1d4+2. 1 fixed damage seems very solid for making players expend resources and make interesting decisions, and 1d2 or 1d3 seems far more palatable for a player without DR (armor or other). The flip side of this is that mist horn was a freaking all star in our play throughs. There were, I'd guess, 3-5 scenarios where we probably would have lost and had to replay without that card because of the quantity of AoE damage that was in the neighborhood of 3-6. This was in spite of one of our members playing the armor focused paladin and us generally trying to stay grouped due to pally/bard/Shardra.

2. I'm in favor of new villains and henchmen. Proxying is a by-product of that opinion, and the core desire for new additional content is greater than any opinion I may have of proxies.

3. There were a lot of really cool cards in WotR that wouldn't have seen any play if I hadn't been playing Shardra and just using cards from the box. Easily my favorite moment for my character was Miracle -> Time Stop -> bless Pally 3 times -> pally uses all his mythic charges and then gives them to me through path power -> Elemental Bombard for ridiculous numbers. I like the presence of class decks for their purpose but I'm done playing with multiple groups. Going forward my plan is to take the base set decks, total up the cards by type, basic/elite/veteran traits, and then with our group pick characters and substitute cards in the set with cards from the class decks that we actually want to see.

I recognize that this isn't really helpful for the "OP" plan where people can play their characters anywhere when they travel. But in the two seasons that we've had I had precisely 1 person visit with the intent to play and none of my players have gone elsewhere. The "OP" side of things is cool, but not super relevant for my playgroup so we're going to experiment with melding the content together in a way I think will be even more fun for us.

I'm going to break this down as I understand it and hopefully someone can point out what I'm missing before I run this adventure an hour and a half from now.

1. When you fail a check to acquire a boon by less than 5, display it next to the scenario, <snip>

2. Before closing a location, you may examine its location deck and set aside any number of boons. On closing, shuffle those boons back into the location deck.

3. If the villain is defeated and the number of boons next to the scenario is less than twice the number of characters then treat all locations as open.

So in order to place a boon next to the scenario card we have to fail the check by no more than 5? (ie. need a 10, get a 5-9, less than 5 and sadface)

We have to do that twice per character, which means once at every location and then a some number of additional times?

I've never tried to fail a check like this but it strikes me as a really narrow range. There are boons it's impossible to fail at acquiring for most of our characters, and a lot of the ones that are possible to fail are going to require giving additional D4's or D6's to make it more likely to get in the correct range, but will run the risk of succeeding or failing by too much anyway.

Has anyone had issues with this, or am I worrying overmuch preemptively because this mechanic is so counter-intuitive?

Shardra Visionary takes "[x] When you attempt a check to defeat a barrier you may use your knowledge skill instead of the listed skill".

Shardra succeeds at the check.

Does this count as succeeding at a knowledge check for the purposes of "When you succeed at a knowledge check..."?

I think this might fall under a similar rule to the "If I'm making a Perception check, and my Perception is based on my Wisdom, do cards that help Wisdom checks help my Perception?" FAQ ruling, but it's slightly different so confirmation of how it works would be helpful

Have retailers been contacted about the free base set program? It has been a few weeks and I just want to make sure we didn't miss the email somewhere.

Just putting it out there, the OP system is an excellent one for encouraging group play, and it's awesome if you're visiting somewhere to be able to drop in and likely play the right scenario for you with a totally new group of people.

But, fun is the primary goal of this kind of experience. If there's something causing the experience to be unpleasant then definitely provide feedback, but also fix it for yourself where possible until the system catches up.

My play group has encountered some similar problems. Here are some of the temporary fixes we used.

1. I usually just have people take feat rewards for scenarios they've missed. Not getting to upgrade their deck is plenty of incentive for them to make up the scenario or show up every week, setting them behind feats is just cruel to them and to the rest of us.

2. We ignored the penalties for missed stuff in 3-D. 4/5 of us has been to every session and we saw zero reason to make our lives substantially harder because 1 person missed a couple weeks, and no reason to exclude a player who wasn't able to show up regularly.

3. The role card... Yeah, I just let people hold a power feat in reserve until we finished Adv 4. I hope this gets moved back to Adv. 3 in the future, there's not much to be done for it beyond that.

I hope your group recovers and enjoys the game. I'm looking forward to the next season and seeing what changes get made. I've been constantly impressed by the PFACG staff's ability to innovate on the basic mechanics and present new and different play experiences within the same framework.

Are you playing OP and officially reporting any of the characters in your group? If so, then you actually do need to play 100% in line with OP rules. Meaning, you couldn't rebuild your deck to take those cards out (outside of the standard upgrade process) and you do need to use the FAQ version of that power. OP play is very reliant on making sure everyone is playing by the same rules.

Sure, your points about OP are good in principle. But I don't "need" to do anything of the sort. I "need" to make sure that everyone at the table has an understanding of what the rules of OP are, agree to a play format that we all enjoy, and have fun. The principles of OP come second to that last point, have fun. I'm a rules lawyer at my core, but the first rule? Have fun. Everything else builds around that, anything less is a failure.

I tend to agree with the notion that the end of adventure 4 is too late to gain access to the role card. I'm sure there are balance decisions that went into it, but I remembered getting the role card after adv 3 in RotR and everyone in my group was a bit disappointed when we found out that wasn't the case for these characters.

FWIW, I have no intention of taking a power feat or requiring any of my group to take a power feat here if they don't want to. I'm sure that I and everyone in my group will enjoy having an extra power feat when we flip our role cards, and fun is the name of the game :)

FWIW... they are basic cards. I would tell a player the same thing about basic cards. Basic cards aren't powerful enough to be really game-breaking in nature, and when you're worrying about basic cards you're also talking about players who may not have enough experience with the game to recognize the value of particular cards. Plus, honestly, it's a low-key fun game. Yes, I want to stay mostly true to the rules, but I also want to have fun.

Example, I didn't bother to look up FAQ stuff until a week ago when I got to a point where I could actually infinite loop Augury with Radillo. Having built the deck with the ability to Augury out of turn and abuse his power, I was disappointed with the way the new wording affected my build. I spoke with the other players in our group and concluded the original wording was preferred but that the infi combo was too much, so I rebuilt by taking Detect Magic and an Augury out of my deck and replacing them with other spell cards. Is my character 100% in the lines of the OP? No. But, I'm having fun, and so is everyone in my group, and that's really what matters.

No frustration at all :) Thrilled to have it well in advance of the event later tonight and glad mentioning it helped identify and draw attention to a hopefully minor issue.

Cheers!

Yep, notices had been very consistent up until this week. I also sent a PM to Tanis. I've got an alternate plan if we don't get the scenario today, but we pushed things a bit to try and make sure we were up to date so we'd just be doing 1 a week like originally scheduled so I'd like to keep to that schedule if possible. I'm also hoping that this doesn't signal future doubling up or a delay in printing.

No, the class decks are completely separate and unnecessary to play the base game.

I do highly recommend them if you enjoy the game significantly, and especially if you intend to play with different groups.

In the regular game you build each character out of cards that come from the base set, character add-on, and adventure decks. Once you have built 4 characters out of a base set you are starting to stretch the capacity of the set to supply cards for both the characters and the adventures themselves.

The advantage of class decks is that each player builds their character out of their class deck cards and no cards are removed from the base set. This means that you can play with an infinite number of players with class decks without having to record decks, break them down, build new decks for different groups etc.

My least favorite experience playing through RotRL was that I played with 3 different groups using only my single base set, so after every session I had to manually record each character's decklist, character card, and later on every card that had been RFG'd for that group. The class decks SIGNIFICANTLY improved my play experience, but only because I play with so many different groups.

It plays remarkably like an MMO actually. You encounter a variety of things, good and bad, with the goal of getting to and defeating the big bad at the end. You acquire stuff to upgrade (loot), and you level periodically with different types of boosts coming as you level (stat upgrades, new powers/feats). There's the opportunity for Role-Playing your character both in what you do and just verbalizing, but you can play the game fully without an ounce of RP.

And I wouldn't call it a deckbuilder at all. There is a component of deck-building, akin to the Mage Knight board game if you have any experience with that, but it's nothing like Dominion or any of that games clones and variants.

As far as cost... $60 for a base set comes with 7 characters and 8 scenarios. Assuming 1 hour per scenario you get about 8 hours of play for your $60 if you only play through once. I typically play any given scenario 4-6 times because I like to play different characters and I have different groups that I enjoy playing with. This generally means I also acquire the character add-on to allow up to 6 players for $20.

Each additional Adventure deck comes with another 5 scenarios typically for $20. So another 5 hours of play for $20 and they are coming out approximately once a month, although given that you haven't played yet you have a backlog of 6 so there should be no shortage of opportunity to play more if you greatly enjoy it.

So, bare minimum to play? $60 for a base set for 8 x # of play-throughs hours of play for up to 4 players. If you expect to play through the base set at least twice then I think it's completely worth the money spent for the kind of experience, any more than that and you're easily out-valuing the vast majority of straight board games. Add $20 to that if you wish to play with 5-6 players.

So... I run a PFACG OP on Thursday evenings and we're currently completely caught up, any chance we're getting the next scenario today?