Game too easy! Game too hard! How hard is just right?


Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion


Some people complain that RotR is too easy. Some people complain that it's too hard. Some people are always happy. Some people never are...

So, I thought I'd open a thread to stimulate some conversation on this topic. Just how hard do you (think you) want a game like this to be?

In particular:

1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
(a) stop the scenario immediately and restart
(b) instantly resurrect them and continue
(c) keep playing, but resurrect them afterwards (ready for the next scenario)
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

If you'd like to share some stats about how often you've actually timed out the blessings deck or died that would be great to!

I'd really like to understand the different viewpoints on this to round out my understanding of the game and the community. I don't have any real experience in RPGs (I played some infrequently about 20 years ago) and know that the community here is a mix of RPGers, computer game players, board gamers, families, all-of-the-abovers and none-of-the-abovers.

My gut feeling is that different groups would have very different expectations of a game, but look forward to seeing your comments!

As for my own thoughts, see below. I've put them in a spoiler block in case you'd like to answer first without prejudicing your responses with my own thoughts!

Spoiler:
Personally, I like a challenge and don't mind failing some times. I'd rather fail some scenarios than walk through them all without having to think too much. But I'm a middle aged, British, non-RPG, lapsed video gamer with a penchant for logic puzzles and general tricksiness. My answers are:

1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario? ... at least 1 in 5 (i.e. one scenario per adventure pack), but no more than 3 in 5. At least 3 out of 5 should feel like close calls.

My actual 'results' are that I think I've failed (timed out) 1 or 2 scenarios out of about thirty, but Hook Mountain was pleasantly more challenging than the early packs and I hope the challenge continues to mount.

2) How many times (in ten play-throughs) would you expect to see a character die? ... maybe 3 or 4 times (roughly one in 3 play throughs).

Before I started playing I read the rules and actually thought "OK, lets plan ahead for *when* (not if) somebody dies... what will we do?" I then started taking TWO parties through the AP so that I would have some 'spare' to put together the parties if somebody died.

Nobody has died on my watch (yet!).

3) What would you do if a character died? Answer (d) - this seems reasonable to me, since you *could* go through the whole AP-to-date with the new character but I don't have that much time on my hands. Giving them all the feats and a starter deck seems like a reasonable compromise.

Oh, and I would consider the first character 'dead' and have to pick a different one to continue.


1) 1-3 per Adventure.
2) I'd expect 0-2 deaths per AP, though if progression of difficulty continues that may be low. I have just completed Here Comes the Flood.
3) d.

Some hopefully pertinent observations follow.

Does 50 still count as middle-aged? I've a similar profile if so. British ex-pat, computer systems programmer, avidly play cRPGs and other board games too, mostly solo/co-op (Mage Knight Board Game is my White Whale).

I allow myself some latitude in the "accept the consequences of your decisions" metarule in the interests of not having my soul crushed. During HCTF I almost lost Amiri due to poor card selection, so I took an intra-turn mulligan and scraped though. It's supposed to be fun, after all. If the mulligan needed to extend beyond turn in progress, I tell myself I would probably suck it up and start a new character though.

I did bite the bullet and lose Seoni already due to not realising that a failed gamble on the last turn results in a need to reset one's hand from an empty deck, immediately before the blessing deck draw failure triggers game end. Hence also 3) d. above, rather than (rebuilding the entire card set twice while) playing a new character in catch-up mode.

I estimate I time out the blessings deck once every two or three games, mostly as a win (three failures in 21 scenarios so far). It's uncanny how often the cards allow me to pluck victory from the jaws of defeat. There is some major playtesting and math involved in the design it seems, or maybe a +3 Staff of Game Design somewhere in Mike/Vic's backpack. To me that is the true genius and success of the system. With the rich stock of archived APs waiting to be converted, how can one not be thrilled?

Is the game too easy? well I don't find that. Even if the cards favour you and the villain turns up early, there is challenge in optimizing the loot you gain while still cornering and defeating them closer to the end of the game. And when the cards do not favour you, it's certainly not too easy.

The gamer population covers a broad spectrum of interests: some people want to be stretched to the limit every time, but PnP RPGs don't play like that - you just don't want a near-TPK every time out. I feel PACG so far does a good job of being faithful to that philosophy while offering a fun challenge to a range of gamers.

I like the length of play. I can play a scenario and set up for the next one during a weekday evening. That's a big win.

As I noted elsewhere my only complaint at this point is in the prohibitive card management difficulty of playing multiple parties in parallel. Never happy, right? Not really : I'm very happy, and subscribed despite the moderate extra expense of doing so vs buying from retail. I cannot wait an extra day to get the next Adventure.

Finally, I hope to hook my 11-year-old daughter in the next 12 months, and from that POV it's certainly not too easy. I'd trade endless game time w her for a slightly harder game any day.


I would be one of the people that are happy when they win, but only if i contributed something in that win and the game didn´t play itself.
I played my fair share of Rpgs, from D&D-like system over Shadowrun to White Wolf-like stuff (WoD,etc.) (Didn´t get to play Pathfinder but read some rulebooks)
I like it when i have to think and strategize, and i´m able to work against the Rng-Gods, because they really really hate me.

1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario?
1 out of 5 sound right to me. And for me it´s important that you can see where your mistakes where, and can work on them. If thats not the case and you got stomped without knowing why, thats really bad in my opinion (never happend to me with PACG but happened more than once with the LotR LCG, where i got just roflstomped because i didn´t made a deck out of the newest cards of the newest expansion)
I played something about 50 games now and haven´t lost a single one, some where close, but no lose till now. But around 25-30 games of those are with groups with completly selfmade chars, so i don´t really know if that is really accountable here.

2) How many times (in ten play-throughs) would you expect to see a character die? I would say 0. Because i´m from the Rpg-faction, so i know the pain of losing a char. So i would always play in a way to assure my team is alive, and backing out of trouble instead of playing risky.

3) What would you do if a character died? Because of my answer number 2, i don´t think i will ever have to think about it.
But if it should happen option (f), i think i would make a custome-made scenario for the rest of the them, where the only scenario reward is to revive their fallen comrade. If they fail...then he´s gone forever. So failing would be option (d). (But another char and with a basic only deck, hopefully there are any left at that time)


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck?1 out of 10 times. The game takes long enough to setup, if it was too much higher than that, especially multiple failures in a row, I think I'd have a hard time wanting to continue playing.

2) How many times would you expect to see a character die? 2 times max. From what I've seen, death so far is totally avoidable. You can choose to fail instead. I've done that at least twice. And I'm fine with that. I'm fine with the threat of death forcing me to do the minimum on each turn so that I can end the scenario and live to fight another day. If I was the kind of person that would play with a risky deck, then it would be different. So if I added in the times I'd expect to quit to avoid dying, I might say more like 15 to 20 times in 10 plays through. Though that would reduce my failure number as well.

3) What would you do if a character died?a. Total start over. No keeping anything you've acquired. Again, the threat to the "waste" of my time is enough to make this a huge penalty for me. And, as seen above, knowing I won't really die doesn't make me play risky. I would think of this as my characters have a premonition to warn them of their impending doom so that they might change their course of actions and avoid their fate.

FYI: I'm in the same boat as you, h4ppy, in terms of RPGs. 20 years since the limited exposure I had.

For me, having a job, a spouse, 3 kids, and other interests in life, all of which I enjoy spending time with, the bigger threat than simple failure or character death is that waste of the time I can find to play this game. Coming upon an hour of uninterrupted time isn't very easy for me. I tired to do some scenarios this past week and each night had a different kid get sick which ended my adventuring for the evening. So when I do have an hour, I want to know I won't have accomplished nothing with my adventure.


1) I would expect to fail a scenario about once per adventure deck (so one out of 5)
2)How many times would you expect to see a character die... 0-2 times. The way the game is set up if I actually manage to kill my character I was choosing to play risky or I was using modified rules (I use wandering monsters in the blessings deck so doing nothing sometimes is not an option for a character near death)
3)What would I do if a character died - the one time I experienced this I followed the rules - but took the time to have the character go through the previous adventures solo.
I have been playing RPG's for 30+ years now (which only makes me 42!) and currently don't have a connection to the Los Angeles gaming community... partially due to my own hesitance, finding people focused on fun is important to me... and really enjoy PACG with the additions of the modified rule sets I have found to tailor the difficulty to continue to make me think as I continue to develop my understanding of the gam.


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?
30-40% chance of losing each scenario, which increases with every mistake the heroes make (getting greedy and not closing a location when they defeat a henchman, failing checks, wrong hero wrong place wrong time, etc)

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?
0-2 deaths per adventure path

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you

Right now our group has a win/lose ratio of roughly 1:1, every time we lost we could pinpoint where we wen't wrong, so nobody was every upset over the loss. We also all happen to be big Dark Souls fans, so losing because we screwed up somewhere is completely understandable for us


I don't want to side track this thread into discussing this, but I think greed often has a big part to play in failing a scenario. I know it has for me. When I've hit a henchman in the top 3 cards of two locations to start the game, I often say to my wife, "You know what, we are doing great. Lets get some boons. So lets not close this location." This is often later followed by me saying, "Oh crap, how did we get so slow on the blessing deck? We have the find the villain now!"

So maybe a good question to ask would be something that got at that. How often do you elect to not close a location after defeating a henchman? I'm not asking anyone to actually answer that, since this is h4ppy's thread and he didn't ask it. So please don't anyone answer that unless he wants to add it as a question.

Please resume normal operations of this thread now.


I'd expect to fail 1 in 3, without synergistic characters. With Lini and Val (the combo we've played the most of), we've played 10 games and timed out one, which we did due to a choice of going on and dying or waiting for Cures.

The way the game is, I never expect to see a character die. I've got 2 2-player games going, and I'm playing a 3-Cure Lini (with Val) and Kyra (with Seoni). Dying is pretty optional if you're packing enough healing, but if you go into an adventure without a healer you're going to run into a lot more trouble. Does somewhat limit party composition - the wife and myself might start playing 2 characters each at some point.

I'd like to say e on character death, but d is much more respectful of our limited gaming time. In reality, because of what a pain it would be and my rules stickler-ness, we simply don't allow it to happen based on party selection and being more willing to lose an adventure than to lose a character.


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario(time out the blessings deck)?

Not often, but personally I like the challenge of knowing that it can happen. For me this means if games are close and maybe once per 10 adventures one times out, that works for me.

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?

The problem for me with that question is that character death at least so far has been easily avoidable due to just letting the game time out if someone is about to die, or sending them to a closed location, or something like that. So for this game, with the way the rules are written I would say I would hardly ever expect this to happen.

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
(a) stop the scenario immediately and restart
(b) instantly resurrect them and continue
(c) keep playing, but resurrect them afterwards (ready for the next scenario)
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

If playing solo, probably E

If playing with a group it completely depends on the group. For example my brother, honestly, is kind of a bad loser and would likely lose complete interest in the game if he had to remake Valeros, especially if it happened fairly far into the game. So probably A or C if playing with him.

Another thing I'd like to add here, and this comes into play with pen and paper rpgs as well is that the farther you are in the game, the worse character death becomes because you've grown more attached to the character. If a character dies in AP1 or AP2, no big deal but if I played a character all the way up to, say AP4, especially if this was the kind of game where we played a couple of scenarios every week or two, so it took a *long* time, then it would be harder at that point to basically feel like I'd have to start over.

Some sort of semi rebuilding rule for once you'd made it that far would be nice, not sure how that would be done but maybe you can pick *another* character and basically give them gear at a lesser level (but still better than starting) to make up for having spent so much time on your previous character and to represent recruiting a new member to the group.

If you'd like to share some stats about how often you've actually timed out the blessings deck or died that would be great too!

Played 4 groups so far.

Solo Merisel through Perils - one timeout(Brigandoom), no deaths.

6 player (Harsk/Ezren/Kyra/Sajan/Lem/Seoni) through 2nd scenario of AP2 - one timeout(Black Fang), no deaths.

2 player (Valeros/Lini) through 2nd scenario of AP2 - one timeout (the goblin mission near the end of AP1), no deaths

3/4 players (Amiri/Ezren/Seelah/(Harsk joined for one mission)) - no timeouts, no deaths

We did have several timeouts on Brigandoom when I first got the game before we really learned how to play, so not really counting those.

Overall, my personal opinion is the game is pretty well balanced - I've seen posts saying it's too hard and others saying it's too easy. I think the too easy posts mostly come down to there being no real chance of death and very rare timeouts. I'm okay with this as usually you don't have much extra time - the blessings deck is often very low which means I still feel challenged to play carefully to win before running out of time.

I think if the game were made harder it would need some different mechanics for death or coming back from losing a character. As it is right now, coming back after playing a couple times would not be a big deal but if it happened often and, as mentioned above, if it happened after putting a lot of time into a character, I don't think it would go over very well.


For me, the difficulty changes too much depending on the number of characters. I usually play with 2-3 friends, and so far (4th Scenario of second adventure pack) we haven't lost once, even when getting greedy.

However, every single game (4 total) we played with 5-6 Players, we lost. 3 out of those 4 scenarios, we had closed all but one or two locations and the last player was one extra explore short of encountering the villain. Greed/inexperience of our guest appearences does play a part though. Saving a blessing for an explore when you could instead drastically increase the odds of making a closing check is an unnecessary risk, and if the henchman was close to the top of the location deck this will cost too much time.

I also played solo (1 character) with Ezren and Kyra up to the end of AP3. Kyra lost a few scenarios due wasting too much time healing up or failing multiple times on closing checks, but otherwise she has had no problems. Ezren had significantly less than 50% winrate. He does not really lose due to time but rather due to having less than 6(7) cards left in his deck and stopping exploring. Having neither heals nor Blessings does make it extremely difficult. I did start him out with 3 cures, but eventually he was fortunate enough to find new spells and thus unable to replace them. Now, any scenario with either shrine of Lamashtu or a villian with multiple combat checks, he only has a very small chance of succeeding.

I learned my lesson about unnecessary risks with Seoni.

Solo Seoni died when she had 5 cards left in her deck, and only one open location left. She decided to explore instead of surrendering when she had a blessing matching the top of the deck, a Wand of Force Missile, an attack spell, masterwork tools and some other cards irrelevant to the situation in her hand. I encountered the villain who summons a wrathful sinspawn. So I though ok, I'll just blast the summon with the wand, won't matter if I lose a few cards, and then kill the villain. I lost the wisdom check for the sinspawn (not much bad luck there, she didn't really expect to succeed). But then I rolled 3 ones and a two for the wand for a total of 5 out of 10 necessary. So she took 5 damage, had to discard her entire hand and then failed the recharge roll on the wand. She would have survived if I had either played the spell to kill the summon (auto-recharge), or if I had played the blessing (auto-recharge) on the wand or the wisdom check. Somehow I
failed to realize that a bad roll would kill her.


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?
I guess 1 or 2 out of five Scenarios sounds correct for my Solo playstyle, though my numbers vary wildly and I finished many Scenarios on the last one or two Blessings. then again I try to play somewhat carefully and could improve my Numbers on the risk of my characters.

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?
Going from my current experience-point I would expect somewhere between 0 and 5 deaths.
Adding my Games so far having played with 3 different groups I had 5 dead Characters until this point, so I could expect up to 18. On my one character run Seelah died three times on 'Local Heroes'. (thats the Scenario without a Villain/ Henchmen)

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
So far I went two different ways:
- If I feel i can spare the Time I play a new Character (not the same expect for solo Adventures) up to the point where the rest of the Group is. sometimes with the aid of some of the surviving Adveturers.
- They where Quite a lot of Times where a Character died by failing a Check, where only one of his 3+ Dice would have needed to roll higher than a 1 or Success.
In those cases I tend to restart the Scenario with Characters reset to before the Scenario.
- In my Current 6 Char Solo- Playthrough I plan on letting the Group shrink down to 4 Characters bevore thinking about bringing new personel in. Im quite interested, if Ezren or Seoni prove themself to be more long-living.

For my background I am probably straight from the PnP RPG-Camp. I find the competitive Streak of most Bordgames, Videogames and Tabletops increasingliy frustrating (even if i manage to keep a solid rate of wins for myself).
I master a Dnd-Group, with some longer Pauses, once a month for roughly 20 Years now and played in a few other groups with different Systems.
As a DM I believe that difficult Chalanges make a game more interesting and players should have a reason to worry about their Characters lives, but actual death should be something special.
In my current Campaign was no adventure so far, where i didn't knock a Character below zero hp. (which means he/she is probably unconcious and slowly bleeding to death)

For the Question is the difficulty to high or low?
At this point I never had the feeling to breeze through the AP (no thanks to my inability to roll at least average), but ,besides the 1 Character Games, I never came close to thinking that a Challenge might be to hard for my group. Maybe that changes with the Hook Mountain Massacre which I hadn't jet a chance to Start. Some of the Challenges in there seems to bring quite a Jump in Difficulty.
Beside that there are a lot of easy ways to influence the Dufficulty and I enjoyed experimenting with a few Ideas.


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?

Now that we as a group understand the rules better I think we should fail once very 3-4 games. Hopefully less but occasionally more.

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?

I would hope not to have any characters die but I guess in that many play throughs then 2-3 may drop.

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
(a) stop the scenario immediately and restart
(b) instantly resurrect them and continue
(c) keep playing, but resurrect them afterwards (ready for the next scenario)
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

Well, the one time we had a character die in one of our games, we just reset the game (using the record sheets) and considered that game to not happen. Like resetting to a saved file on a video game. We had fun, but Harsk tried a gamble in the final rounds and paid for it. Plus we still would have lost. I know people will think this is going against the "rules" but we went with the have fun over strictly observing the rules theory.

I would like to say though that I think there are way too many factors in this game to say if it is too easy or hard. The right party selection as well as matching the player style to the characters makes a difference. In one game that we are playing a friend of mine is playing Sajan and loves him and does well with him, but I just tried to do a six-character solo game to try some of the other characters out for myself and I would Sajan to be a bad fit. My plan was to play through with Amiri, Sajan, Lem, Meriseil, Ezren and Kyra but I failed on the first scenario. Then I finished on the second try. The second Scenario went well but I wouldn't say it was easy. And then on the third scenario I failed again. Each time Sajan was a big disappointment. So I tried switching him with Harsk and started over. The first scenario went well but I needed a bit of luck at the end. The second one though went nearly perfect (though Ezren had some difficulty closing the appothocary, three tries to finally get it).

Sorry for the length of this but there are many ways this game could go on any given scenario.

BTW, in my opinion the best combo of character is Kyra, Lem, Lini, Merisiel, Seoni, and Valeros. The six-character game I play with my wife has been pretty easy so far with this group. Even most of Hook Mountain went smoothly. We wouldn't want it any other way.

Sovereign Court RPG Superstar 2011 Top 32

h4ppy wrote:
1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?

Based on my experience so far, about 0-1 time per adventure (5 scenarios) seems to be the norm. That seems good to me. More than 2/5 I think would be excessively frustrating.

h4ppy wrote:
2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?

Well so far my girlfriend and I have seen 3 deaths. One TPK in the Black Fang intro scenario, and one death due to a deliberate risk in adventure 2 (needed a pretty easy roll to win, didn't get it, character couldn't refill hand). I chalk up the early deaths to learning curve. We get much more conservative now that we're further along. To me something like a 1-2% death rate is acceptable, given how harsh the official death penalty is. That would amount to about 1 of your 40 characters.

h4ppy wrote:

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?

(a) stop the scenario immediately and restart
(b) instantly resurrect them and continue
(c) keep playing, but resurrect them afterwards (ready for the next scenario)
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

So far we've chosen (e). The first time was our TPK in Perils so we just started over. The second death was my character, so I formed a new deck then replayed solo to catch up. I see a lot of groups houserule d, and honestly once I start up a 5 player game with my friends I'd be tempted to implement that myself. I could see a player quitting if they die in adventure 4 and end up that far behind.

My interpretation, btw, is that while your replacement character doesn't gain feats to catch up, you do get to build with the better card set (starting with adventure 3), and, if you replay earlier scenarios, leave all the higher number cards in so you have a better chance to get good treasure. It's also a decent way to grab a loot the party might have left behind.

Dark Archive

Pathfinder Adventure Path, Lost Omens, Rulebook Subscriber
Quote:
1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?

Once or twice per adventure seems to be the sweet spot for me. A time out should occur in one of 2 scenarios: A character is nearing death and no one is able to heal them, or with characters at every open location and no luck finding the villain.

Quote:
2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?

Very rarely. Maybe once or twice at the most. Once players learn to make sure they have enough cards in their deck to survive a full hand wipe, death should only occur if something like the Goblin Raid or Zombie Horde appeared while a character was waiting for healing

Quote:

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?

(a) stop the scenario immediately and restart
(b) instantly resurrect them and continue
(c) keep playing, but resurrect them afterwards (ready for the next scenario)
(d) kill them off then generate a new character with the right number of feats for your position in the AP to continue on the path with you
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

Slightly modified (d). In addition to the feats, I'd allow the player to get the random cards they would get as a reward for the scenarios.

Quote:
If you'd like to share some stats about how often you've actually timed out the blessings deck or died that would be great to!

No one died so far, though we had a couple of close calls early before learning that you should never adventure when you have fewer cards than your hand size in your deck.


Hey guys, after some craziness I'm back! It's been a while since I played, but let me try to answer real quick....

As far as failing, with my 5 man party it almost never happens now, but I have had a lot of luck with good loot (boons, really), and the characters synergize well. In my 2 man games and 6 player game it happened a lot more, so it's really hard to give an exact number.. about 10 % for experienced players with good boons, 30 % maybe for less experienced players or groups where multiple characters are using a lot of outdated boons.

As far as death, almost never, it's not worth being risky. This ties into the fact that, if it did happen, i think i would go with choice D, due to not being a 15 year old with all the free time in the world anymore to just play games, you know? But I would be a little annoyed that I had to do it, so I play cautiously in order to avoid making it happen. With riskier players.... I could see it happening maybe 20 % of the time, and I would probably go with option D, I see no point in making them start from scratch.

Regarding the blessings deck timing out, if it wasn't for that candle, it would happen to me a LOT, because I do play a bit greedy sometimes. With the candle, I often win with just a turn or two to spare, though there have been a few wins where it wasn't an issue.

Oh, and is it just me, or is option D the most popular for death?


Hi everyone - thanks for the replies so far. Really interesting stuff!

It does seem that (d) is the most popular method for dealing with death so far. To me, it seems like a reasonable thing to do - it's still painful but you can draft in a new, slightly greener, recruit and let the fun continue (after the memorial service).

It also seems that, for most people, failing 15-20% of the scenarios is about where the difficulty should be pitched (about 1 per adventure). But, more importantly, even the successful scenarios should feel like close run things.

How on earth Paizo manage to do this with the ranges of skill levels, greed levels, party sizes and character mixes is beyond me but they seem to be pretty close to this already - at least in the (2) and (3) adventures.

I look forward to seeing more replies!


True that some people are never happy. However, I think that for this game a large majority of the players are happy. Feedback to the development team is what we wish to provide so that the game will improve (there is no such thing as a perfect game) and more importantly the game will survive the initial novelty and be around for many years.

I answer h4ppy's questions further below, but first, Bottom line up front: in my opinion the greatest improvement the game needs is to create a need for more of a role playing atmosphere by increasing the interaction among the players to solve the adventure path's challenge. It is not a matter if simply making bigger more powerful henchmen, but to make it so we must work together and by providing a sense of being in a different world while we do it. I think one of the ways you accomplish this is by adding more dimension to the game play. In other posts I have discussed my ideas for requiring a challenge to travel between locations with the challenge increasing based on how far they have to travel. (Distance matters) Greater distance = greater risk. That is one example of how to add a dimension to the game play. Another example is to add a level of cooperative challenge which gives each player a personal objective which must be accomplished besides the group challenge. For example, must gain two allies, must kill one of the henchmen, you are seeking a certain talisman (which is a card placed in one of the location decks), etc., this individual challenge would have its own reward in addition to the scenario reward. A set of standard individual challenge cards could be added and each player draws one at the start of the scenario. so the added dynamic this provides is that player must diplomatically work with each other to accomplish the group objective and as many of their individual objectives as they can. Alright onto to the answers.

In particular:

1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)? Based on how we solve the scenario, I think this is a very random event. I like the timing effect and it adds tension as we get close to the end. I like this tension. This important effect is more important than whether we actually time out. I suggest this should happen only occasionally. Once per adventure deck. I think the way it is now is about right.

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?
Again, the possibility of death is more important than the actuality. I also think the possibility of death should be less frequent than timing out. Let's say one death per adventure path.

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
(e) stick to the rules: kill them off then generate a brand new character (with no feats) to continue on the path with you

I do wish there were character generation rules. I like the fact they gave us pre-generated characters, but I am ready to try to develop my own.

4) If you'd like to share some stats about how often you've actually timed out the blessings deck or died that would be great to!

I have played through all of the current adventure decks twice. Generally with three characters each time, occasionally we have a fourth show up. We have had one death and timed out three times.


1) How often would you expect to fail a scenario (time out the blessings deck)?
About 5% playing with 2-4 characters. Most common loss is Here Comes The Flood.

2) If you played the entire Adventure Path (packs 1-6) through ten times (just imagine!) with an average of 4 characters per playthrough (i.e. 40 characters in total), how many times would you expect to see a character die?
Don't know, haven't seen AP 4-6 yet. I've lost a couple of characters in maybe 200 scenarios so far. But I'll take some risks with characters to keep the game fun.

3) What would you do if a character died (and was not legitimately resurrected by some game effect)?
Either transfer in another existing character or put the party "on hold" until I play some more characters up to the right level (I am playing a number of parties in parallel and occasionally transfer characters between groups anyway).

Background: Late 40s, live in UK, used to play a lot of RPGs (only occasional now), board games, wargames, CCGs. Before Pathfinder I played a lot of the Lord of the Rings card game, which is far more challenging (the last LotR scenario I played, I failed on the first 5 attempts, even as an experienced player with access to all the in-print cards).

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder Adventure Card Game / Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion / Game too easy! Game too hard! How hard is just right? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Rules Questions and Gameplay Discussion