supercali5's page

Next to every power that a player can ever play, on every single card, put two little icons. Because they'd be the size of a letter or number, they wouldn't take up much space. The icons would represent the following:

Y (you) - This power can only be played on your turn.
A (any) - This power can be played on any character's turn.
O (other) - This power can only be played on another character's turn.

1. You can only use this power on yourself.
2. You can only use this power on characters at your location.
3. You can use this power on characters at any location.
4. You can only use this power on a character at another location.

So every power would have two icons next to it....

Or we could just make it even easier and have every single card have a codified written explanation in a consistent format that we can rely on to tell us.

During [W] time frame, do X to make Y happen to Z subject(s). Period. It's consistent, clear and doesn't require new players to go hunting through mountains of rules or icons or whatever. I haven't seen many cards that are running out of space for text, so it just seems to make more sense to be thorough on each card. The less the game forces us to assume trivial knowledge (evade, succeed, defeat, etc...) the easier the game is to play. The more of the rules that are just right on the cards and spelled out in plain english, the more smoothly we play, the fewer stoppages because of rules questions. The few bits of errata that have been created for cards have benefitted greatly from this sort of change. I wrote right on the cards in permanent marker and bam. People look at the cards and we do what it says and move on.

To be blunt...anyone complaining about the errata in this game needs to just calm down. 700 some odd cards in the game and 15 of them need some clarification. Mostly because people are trying to think too far outside the box that they have to be reigned in. There is little to nothing wrong with the rules or the cards. What minor issues that have come up are because of nitpicking of rules and people just trying to break the game [that Hard Shell Crab[sp?] thread couldn't have annoyed me more]. Could have the rules been written a little clearer...maybe. Could there have been more examples....maybe. On the whole through once you get the intent of the game, the rest just makes sense.

I think there are more than a few players who are not trying to break the game who have had no small amount of confusion with the rules and cards, TC. You should make allowances for other people not having either your intellectual capability, familiarity and intuition with card games and/or just getting it more easily than others. Just because people are frustrated in ways that you aren't doesn't make them dumb, nitpicking game breakers. Some people are struggling with some fundamentals that weren't properly explained for us. Mike and the designers have acknowledged that no small number of people who have reasonable frustrations with a lack of clarity. It's not about 15 errata'd cards.

I also find the comment "this wasn't playtested" to be distressing and wrong. It was playtested a ton, and some things got through. Those things are my fault, not the playtesters.

Chalk that up to my misunderstanding of the efficacy of proper, thorough playtesting. It seems, from a lay perspective, that many of these issues would have arisen and been remedied if given to a sufficiently broad group of playtesters of different skillsets and experience levels.

Hindsight is 20/20 certainly and I can guarantee I wouldn't have built an airtight version of such a complicated game. We certainly appreciate your continued efforts and will continue to enjoy the game as changes roll out. I just hope we don't end up with a 2nd edition in 6 months.

One sincere request: I hope we focus on providing clear, concise, simple fixes even if it means errataing every card in the decks rather than creating dense explanatory language or oversimplified thematic changes that some people are still struggling to grok. I would rather spend 20 minutes writing on my cards than hours parsing a paragraph-long explanation that is crystal clear to 50% of players and completely opaque to others.

3. It's your encounter, and no one else can resolve it for you.

Whenever you encounter a card, or make a check, you – and only you – must resolve it. No other character can evade it, defeat it, acquire it, close it, decide what to do with it, or fail at doing any of those things. If Sajan encounters a monster, Merisiel cannot evade it for him. If Harsk encounters a card, Seoni cannot defeat or acquire it for him, unless it requires two checks to do so, in which case Harsk must attempt at least one of them. If Ezren defeats a henchman at the Sandpoint Cathedral, Seelah cannot discard a blessing to close the location. In other words, if you need to wait your turn, wait your turn.

This is the part that has been causing the most confusion in our game thus far. Again, I know this has been rehashed elsewhere. Some cards are very specific about defining when, where and on whom the card's effects can be used. Some are wide open. This is where consistency in the cards is really important. "Your location" "your check"...those two phrases will clear up 90% of the issues. Aside from that, is the rule now "The only time your character can use a card to help another character is when the card explicitly says so."? It might be good to have a clarification on that if there is a broader rule. Again, this would all be unnecessary if all of the cards were consistent and delineated this for us.

Mike,
This is my first Paizo/Pathfinder product. I purchased it for my weekly gaming group and we tried it last week. Some of us are seasoned gamers, some more casual and the lack of clarity in the rules for some people put our normally jovial gaming group into a bit of a funk.

I know much of this has been said before, but it does bear repeating.

We are going to try the game again tonight so I am pretty psyched to have these clarifications. Contrary to some other commenters here, I don't find a lot of these "mindset" rules to be intuitive, nor do other players in my group, so having a much more thorough, clear approach to resolve confusion or (god forbid) disputes about rules, is heartening. If this were not a co-op game, I don't think we would be giving it another shot.

Having spent $50+ on the game, I do feel a little let down that these issues, along with so much on-card and rulebook errata, weren't playtested.

On one hand, I love the game conceptually and much of the mechanics of the game are solid. I will keep pushing through as long as my group allows.

On the other hand, I will not be buying another Paizo product until well after launch due to the number and nature of the issues in this game.

I certainly don't discount the amount of work you have to do to design and produce this game. It's staggering that these games get made at all, in my opinion. That said, we should be able to expect to play the game without having to sit down and write on so many cards and into the rulebook and go through lengthy theoretical discussions about the intent of an unclear phrase during every step of the game.

As you continue on in designing and producing further packs, please go out of your way to create consistent, thorough text on each card. I'm also sure you will have no shortage of play testers to help keep things clear. Use them. It's not fun to beta test a game you've played for. It's somewhat acceptable for a video game because patches become invisible. Patches for card games are an effing mess.

Lastly, I do think that it is reasonable that the gaming community here that has helped with these 1,500 comments and slogged through the gaps in the game design would really appreciate some sort of slight compensation for doing so. Perhaps some of those promo cards that have been slated for conventions could be made available to folks who have purchased the main game? It would be a really nice gesture and would go some distance to reestablish trust and acknowledge that this was a relatively serious series of snafus by the design team at Paizo. Not necessary by the letter of the law, but it would be a really nice thing to do.

If anyone has one or both of those promos I'd be happy to throw some scratch your way for it.