nondeskript's page

I'll throw out there that Balazar shouldn't have had a hand wipe unless you spent all of his cards helping others with their checks, since Abyssal Armies are barriers and don't deal any damage to my recollection.

We were lucky and scouted out two of them early on and spent the rest of the game getting our hands set to kill the two armies and heading over to the Sanctum with Leyrn with as many explores as possible. We got lucky and wrapped it up in one go. Only having to fight two armies and knowing where the villain was made that much easier, but armies are a bear and I won't miss them if they aren't there in the next set.

I was ok with the original 3-month delay, but slowing down to one full set a year is even better. I love PACG, but my group needs to play other games every now and again to not get burned out. With 1.75 to 2 sets a year, I don't know if we would have time to play other games and keep up with the PACG release schedule since we only play 2-3 times a month, and I suspect we are fairly average in our pace.

Plus, I expect Apocrypha to eat up a nice chunk of my time as well.

I assumed the organizer would need to light the card on fire. Very disappointed by this ruling.

/s

The mention of Servitor demons reminded me of my two favorite changes in WotR that I hope to see more of in future sets:

1. Cohorts. This will obviously continue to some degree, as characters like Balazaar require a cohort to be functional. I'd love seeing more 'important NPC' style cohorts as well.

2. Servitor Demons. The ability to create a Skeletal Horde-type barrier that is not just harder Veteran-style but actually has different powers in future scenarios is brilliant.

A man goes to the doctor and says "Doctor, it hurts when I do this", and raises his arm. "Well, don't do it then", says the doctor.

There would likely be a lot of repetition between different class upgrade packs (SotS Oracle and SotS Cleric would have similar spells for example). Also I think once there are 30+ class decks, my completionist streak will break my bank account :)

I'd go for 110 card Season Upgrade Packs, with a few cards of each type (10 Arcane spells, 10 Divine Spells, 10 Melee Weapons, etc etc), though.

And Cutpurse is a Rouge Archetype.

But I wouldn't necessarily put it past them to surprise us and dip into non-standard classes, especially considering the reports that they have a history of breaking patters. They gave us the featured iconic for each adventure path. Until they didn't with Merisiel in WotR. They gave us only 11 characters with each adventure path. Until they added an unlockable character in WotR. They gave us only iconic characters with each adventure path. Until (if the reports are accurate) they don't with Mummy's Mask. So I wouldn't put it past the folks at Paizo and LSG to put out a Class Deck that represents a non-standard class once they've got a few of the standards out.

Before Rage, the understanding was that you could only play cards that directly affected the check. This just rolls it back to that. So anything that was permitted before rage is still permitted. Anything that would have been "probably not" pre-Rage is "definitely not" now (like Balazar discarding or casting cure on Seelah to give her a card to discard for her bonus). I don't see how this could really go any other way. If you start allowing Balazar to discard spells or casting Rage (as written) it is the start of a slippery slope to things like Merchanting a bow to another character to use on your check or such. It was widely understood (and accepted) that Phantasmal Minion and Call Weapon were not usable during an encounter, but Rage broke that understanding and degenerated to people trying to figure out 3 or 4 power/card chains that only affected the actual check at the very end and that was clearly never supposed to happen.

I do agree that Rage should be permissible in an encounter, but as written it can't be. Unless, I suppose, the rule included some exception specifically for cards that grant a power that will be used (i.e. not cards that fuel an existing power, but add a new power that the character would not have had without the card). That would, I think, only apply to Rage currently, but I haven't read all of the cards so I could be wrong... Feels like re-writing Rage to explicitly override the rule is the easier solution.

Colonel Mustard: Wadsworth, am I right in thinking you don't know what the other promos are?
Wadsworth: Um... no.
Colonel Mustard: Then you do know what the other promos are?
Wadsworth: Sorry, I said "no" meaning "yes."
Colonel Mustard: "No" meaning "yes?" Look, I want a straight answer, do you know what the other promos are, or don't you, yes, or no?
Wadsworth: No.
Colonel Mustard: No you do, or no you don't?
Wadsworth: Yes.
Mrs. White: [shatters glass] PLEASE!

Am I the only one who thought the "Blood of Eustoyriax" could be renamed "Temptation of Orbis"?

nondeskript wrote:

I would lean towards leaving it as is. RotR is legal for OP & S&S but not necessarily optimal. When the next season of OP starts and we are using the WotR set, S&S Lem will have several feats that are probably going to be useless as well (the Sea Singer feats for Aquatic enemies and Plunder rolls, for example.)

I'd think a lot of S&S characters will have useless feats when it comes to WotR. You want to pick a previous set character, take them "as is".

Agreed... My general advice for OP is you are probably going to have an easier time picking one of the characters from the deck. They are designed to be less tied to a specific base set and to work with the specific cards included in the class deck. Of course during Season 0, the 3 legal characters from S&S (+ Jirelle) will probably work well since the banes you're encountering are from the same set. And some characters from RotR are incredibly general so they should work fairly well with any set as well (Valeros for example). But, yeah, there's no guarantee that every character will work well with every set or in OP. Just that they will work.

I was wondering where you were :) I'm replaying RotR now with Ezren & Len (standard location count) to try out whether or not a suitably motivated player can break the game with Ezren like you can with Radillo. I forgot how much more time you get with only two players. We only got through half of the blessing deck once in the first 6 scenarios, and that was just due to some bad luck on some closing checks. With 6 characters we almost always were on the last round when we finished any scenario, even with a holy candle.

And, btw, I don't think we have to worry about the meaning of combat. If you evade the encounter, then combat does not happen and the power of the location does not happen.

The issue is less evasion and more to do with multiple combat checks and non-combat checks. If a monster can be defeated with a non-combat check, is that combat? If you fail the check you are still dealt combat damage, right? And if a monster has more than one combat check, do you have to make a Dex/Acro check before each combat check?

Combat could mean:
1. Encounter a monster.
2. Encounter a monster with a combat check to defeat.
3. Attempt any check to defeat a monster.
4. Attempt any combat check to defeat a monster.
5. Attempt a combat check for any reason. (I don't remember anything that could trigger a combat check other than encountering a monster, but I include this for completeness)

Each of these interpretations could be valid as "combat" isn't clearly defined (unlike "combat check") and each would lead to different numbers of Dex/Acro rolls.

I don't remember exactly what my group did when we encountered it, but I suspect we just sent Merisiel there alone so it didn't matter. And if we had to roll we would have just done one per monster encounter, regardless of type or number of checks.

I've got 5 Erastil's, 4 of all other non-BotG Blessings and 32 BotG. 69 total blessings. Not sure if that is correct or not...

Card count by type (in my box):

21 character cards (1 character, token & role per character)
7 adventure cards (1 Adventure Path, 1 Adventure, 5 Scenario)
28 location cards
7 support cards (6xship, 1xfleet)
34 monster cards
5 villain cards
36 henchman cards
18 barrier cards
52 weapon cards
33 spell cards
22 armor cards
37 item cards
32 ally cards
69 blessing cards
------------
401 cards
110* Adventure Deck 1 cards
--------------
511 total cards in box

* I haven't opened AD1 so I can't verify that there is that number of cards there, but there should be.

So, in my case, it seems like I have 1 extra card, but I can't find an exact number of cards that are supposed to be in the box, just "More than 500". 511 could be correct.

There are 39 legal characters for OP. Plus 78 roles. Starter decks for all of them is not reasonable.

It's simple. If you don't have a deck, you have 7 options for quick pick up and play. If you want to play something else, get there early and buy a deck and put it together. Of course there will probably be user generated starter decks for all 39 characters in forums soon after OP starts.

I've been reading the class deck character sheets and while I really like Flenta from a flavor perspective and want to play her outside of OP I am thinking she'll have some serious issues in higher levels of OP. Maybe I'm wrong, but here is what I'm seeing:

After you play a spell that has the arcane trait for its power, draw a random spell from the box that does not have an adventure deck number and has the Arcane trait and recharge it.

Ok, I dig this. She's got an unlimited supply of scrolls but as you use them you'll get weaker ones. Plus:

For your combat check that has the Attack trait, you may use the skill Arcane: Intelligence +2

So, once you take that power, when she's casting acid arrow or whatever she's starting with a d8 +2, up to a +5 with skill feats. Still not Wizard power levels but totally usable. And if you go Arcane Pretender:

You may recharge a spell (...) to add 1 plus its adventure deck number, if any, to your combat (...) check

So without casting you can score a +1 - +7 just by recharging. Cool. But here is my problem with all this:

After upgrading your deck, when rebuilding the rest of your character deck, choose extra cards, if needed, from your Class Deck. First, choose cards with the Basic trait and the B set indicator; then choose cards without the Basic trait with the B set indicator, if you don't have enough Basic cards.

And the only B spells in her deck are Call Weapon and Strength. So that is what you are starting with. And even if you get a better spell as a reward, if you ever cast it you're dropping back to those spells in the next adventure. Assuming Call Weapon isn't an Attack spell, this negated a lot of the usefulness of two of her powers, since you won't get the arcane die until you've burned off your starting spells and even then it's luck of the draw and since they don't have a deck number the Arcane Pretender power is just a +1 which rarely ever was enough in ROTR to matter.

In regular games, the wizard/sorcerer/bard/etc can pass better spells to her between adventures which makes her powers more useful. But once your in decks 5 and 6 of OP, I can't imagine these powers making any real difference...

On a related note, she can get up to 5 spells. Are there 5 B spells in her deck? I wouldn't think there are but I won't have the Class Decks till next month. There are no rules for what to do if there aren't enough B cards, but I assume we can just move up to the 1s or 2s, which improves her outlook slightly.

Looking forward to somebody telling me how I'm wrong here :-)