PACG Dungeon Delve Variant

[Fentum]

I am very much enjoying the game so far. Ran Harsk and Merisiel through the complete set, now running Valeros and Seoni. Good times.

I am more a BGG man than Paizo, and I have never seen such a high volume of queries on a game. Many of which are answered in the rules. Also quite a few comments on thematic alignment vs an RPG. e.g.

how can Harsk shoot (provide ranged support) from the Woods to the Waterfront, but not from one part of the Waterfront to another?

why can't all characters at a location help out vs a monster, beyond buffing with cards?

I am toying with trying out a variant designed to help with these queries. I am no designer, but I have created a couple of simple crawls for my kids using Descent pieces in the past. I'd like to simply share a few ideas here for initial feedback...

Key Concept
Use the cards and basic mechanics of PACG to run 'PACG Dungeon Delves', where the party are more closely tied together and can support each other more directly. Villains, particular locations, particular items/weapons, etc can be the goal of the Delve. There are various mechanics to achieve the goal, usually defeating the villain, finding a particular item, etc.

The Party
Any four characters. Though there could be mechanisms to scale from 1-6

The Map
Choose appropriate location cards as areas of the dungeon. e.g. Deeper Dungeons, Desecrated Vault. Pick X areas for a Dungeon Delve scenario. Stack them in a Dungeon Deck in random order, but place villains, scenario specific locations etc in subsets of the Dungeon Deck.

e.g. the Villain is one of the last 3 cards of an eight card deck.
e.g. the Location that MUST be found is in one of two mini decks, representing a 'fork in the passages'

Play
The party MUST stay together. They enounter a Location each turn, drawing that Location card from the Dungeon Deck.

That location is then SET UP IN FULL. i.e. 4 monsters are played face up, 2 barriers, etc, etc. This is then the challenge at that location. The party must face the complete set of cards to move on from the location.

There would be a sequence to card activation, with characters assigning themselves to the cards that are active in each step of the sequence.

BARRIERS with TRAP, OBSTACLE or SKIRMISH traits
MONSTERS
VILLAINS
ALLIES
BARRIERS with CACHE trait
WEAPONS
ARMOUR
ITEMS
SPELLS
BLESSINGS

A single character takes on each card, but existing abilities for buffs and support can trigger as usual. Importantly, THIS location plus OTHER LOCATIONS all affect the CURRENT location. Thus Valeros and Harsk's abilities can both help.

In addition, a character can forego taking an action in order to give a +1 onto a check roll of another character. Possibly for any roll, or perhaps this is just for combat.

Banes & Boons
Banes are persistent until defeated. There is no running away by the villain, unless specifically part of the scenario e.g. the Villain might be shuffled lower into the Dungeon Deck.

Boons are a 'one time opportunity' to gain. The party would select the character to try, possibly buffed by others.

Pacing
The party would have to deal with all the Location cards using their current hands. There would be a 'rest and reset' phase upon closing a location. It might be that each character could SELECT rather than DRAW starting hands, or do so when resetting between Locations.

Quirks
There are many quirks in how specifc mechanics might translate, but I want to work through a few tries at this to see how it goes. e.g. various abilities that allow a character to 'look ahead' or 'move between locations' would need some sort of ruling.

Just interested to get feedback on this as a concept, plus any executional tips that anyone might have.

[micrex]

Brilliant idea in my opinion. Would love to try it out. Though completing a whole location with 1 hand per person could be rather difficult. Perhaps for pacing the blessing deck could remain, most likely with less cards. Then every time the group agrees on a hand refill a blessing is flipped along with a forced flip on closing.

Well idk keep us updated though.

[StarSlayer]

I was trying to come up with a way to play a dungeon adventure. The rough thought was to decide how many rooms the dungeon would have, and how many hallway encounters it would have (select barriers that would be correct).
If you have 8 rooms and 3 hall encounters. Rooms: deal out x number of monsters(based on # of players), x barriers for rooms, x boons. Deal out one location card for the special problems that room has. Each hall encounter would be a single barrier or monster. Play like a RPG. The party enters a room, encounters the Monster(s), defeat Barriers, then they can find the boon(s). when they move down the hall, the lead character triggers the hallway encounter.
A thought on Boons, Only one attempt to acquire, if the one target fails, that item was not really there or damaged beyond use.

[Fentum]

micrex wrote:

Brilliant idea in my opinion. Would love to try it out. Though completing a whole location with 1 hand per person could be rather difficult. Perhaps for pacing the blessing deck could remain, most likely with less cards. Then every time the group agrees on a hand refill a blessing is flipped along with a forced flip on closing.

Well idk keep us updated though.

That is a good shout.

I was thinking more that the characters could recharge, discard, draw, etc on their turn, but that as they moved deeper into the dungeon, their discard piles would get bigger and cures, etc would be required to keep going. The flipping of each dungeon card is, in a way, a timer of sorts.

Just like in an RPG.

[micrex]

Tried something similar to this. Things that would need to be fixed would be certain cards become useless, ex: detect magic, augury, evade. Its more possible to come across a very difficult barrier that cannot be passed. With the ability of people taking on what they are good on then boon coming out, it becomes too easy to acquire good cards. I agree your deck running out works well enough as pacing so a blessing deck is not needed.

To balance these things I would suggest creating a more randomized encounter format similar to how the game already is. Additionally, rather than following boon from the card perhaps it could be a roll 1d6 to determine type of boon, then 1d4-1 to determine how much.