Avalon Quests (PFRPG) PDF

The Bad: As the previous reviewer noted, there are numerous typos and errors in charts, missing indexes and table of contents. One of the booklets doesn't have page numbers. The product provides 3 booklets and some rules are repeated multiple times in different booklets in slightly different form. Things could have been explained more efficiently and more examples of play would have brought the booklets to life a bit more and confirmed the reader's understanding. I know that the product was originally named Autonomous since that reference is still scattered here and there throughout the booklets. I have found several places where headers were missing and one place where the paragraphs below a header were about a completely different subject and the text on the expected subject was nowhere to be found.

There is some rules ambiguity in places - it is often not clear whether the designer intends Take-20 to be possible for some of the more difficult checks or whether he really wants a player roll to be made. He also makes references to critical misses and hits on skill checks which threw me for a while. I am a new Pathfinder player and it took me a while to realize that the designer intended to extend the critical miss/hit system used in Combat attacks to skill checks even though that is non-standard.

In short, the rules could definitely use a rework to make them more readable and more immediately understandable. The Avalon Quests system, at its root is not all that complicated but the rules make it seem as though it is.

The Good: Most issues of the rules can be easily handled with a little investigation, some intuition and some marking up of the text. You can easily make your own index to make finding the key sections quicker as you play. Despite all of this, the system is very playable and provides an experience similar to playing a computer RPG such as Baldur's Gate, which was exactly what I was hoping for.

Quests are interesting and the player usually has a few choices available to him at any given moment allowing for quite a bit of fun planning.

The system provides a very nice system for movement in the world which makes use of a hex map. Simplified rules for supplies make it easy to plan for a longer journey. It is a total blast figuring out how to safely or quickly get from point A to point B in this game. The system allows you to easily keep track of season, month, day hour, which is important because some campaign events are triggered by a date/time.

Random encounters are a total blast and very dynamic. Not all encounters are bad things and very often they can help, rather than hinder the party. But it is always quite suspenseful to see them play out, since the possibility for disaster/surprise is always there.

Outside of combat, it is quite easy for a single player to manage a party of 6 (use a computer tool such as HeroLab to generate characters quickly and maintain them between sessions - the rules alone are a horrible guide to char creation). Combats take a lot longer than they normally would since the player has to keep track of a lot of data, but that's to be expected.

Bottom Line:

Part of me wants to penalize the fact that this was rushed out and released without adequate proofreading, playtesting and editing. But the other part of me wants to reward it for being playable and a lot of fun. My base rating is 3 and I'm going to bump it up to 4 simply because there is nothing else like this available. It blows the typical solo fare (usually adventure for ones driven by a paragraph book) out of the water. This is a great way, though it requires a bit of effort, for a new player to learn Pathfinder.

A party-based solo version of Pathfinder is a great idea. The author obviously has turned it into a labor of love, with some interesting concepts and more tables than you can shake a stick at. However, the game has two enormous problems that kill it for me.

First, while the author acknowledges the difficulty for one player in leading a party of PCs lies mainly in keeping track of all the paperwork, he worsens this problem by basing his system around a party of 6 PCs. Why not just use the normal size of 4?

Second and most important, the writing. OMG is it sloppy. There are typos everywhere, trains of thought just trail off, the internal organization is a mess, there is no index... it goes on and on. This is not a finished product. It's barely a first draft.

I'll give it one star for the idea and another for the effort, but as it stands this should definitely be avoided until the publisher hires an editor and brings out a second edition.