As soon as we finish our current Skulls & Shackles Adventure (currently on AP5), my roommate and I are planning to start new characters and play through the adventures and scenarios from organized play. However, we're not interested in going to a store to participate in official organized play. Although we do own several class decks that we've mixed in with the base set, we want to use some characters that don't have class decks (e.g. Ranzak). This means we can't really use the official rules / rewards word-for-word.
Has anyone else gone down this path, or does anyone have suggestions for alternate rules/rewards to accommodate for the lack of class decks? Apologies if this thread was better suited for the Homebrew forum.
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Unofficially, if I were doing this, I would likely pick the closest class deck for a class and use that. For Ranzak, that'd likely be the Rogue class deck.
That said, are you sure you're not interested in using Class Deck characters? There are a bunch to choose from, and so long as you're okay being a month behind people at a store, you can play and report Organized Play games at home just like anyone else can. So if you find yourselves at a gaming convention with Organized Play support, you can bring your characters and jump right in.
Thanks for the advice, I could try using the Rogue deck. But being tied to a single deck as your only options for card upgrades still feels limiting to me.
I own the Wizard, Sorcerer, Bard, and Rogue decks and I'm absolutely interested in using characters from those deck. But I don't want to be restricted to those class decks in terms of loot. I have some promo cards that I'd like a chance at eventually incorporating into my character's deck, for example.
Organized Play is a really cool, neatly segmented way of playing. I would just like an equally neat way of playing a normal home game with the Organized Play scenarios. I bought the PDFs either way, knowing it wasn't designed for what I want, but as this is the initial season where they're looking for feedback, that's my 2 cents.
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If you're not interested in organized play, but just want more scenarios. Go ahead and buy the scenarios and just run them out of the box like you were playing the normal campaign.
How the game wants to deal with loot is a little bit different, but just assign it like normal instead and you should be fine.
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Like Pirate Rob said, you can do what you want. It's your game and it should be fun.
If you're planning on reporting the sessions on Paizo's PFS page, then you'll have to follow the rules with the class decks and characters allowed. But if not, then play Ranzak with the Rogue deck and use the other class decks for the other party members. Enjoy!
I'm planning to do the same thing, start a home game of the OP scenarios as soon as S&S is done with. I've glanced at some of those scenarios and I'm hungry for them, but it's too much box management to keep track of with our two ongoing parties (which we keep within an AP of each other, so we don't have to sorts things around).
My impression from reading the forums and through the cards is in line with yours, Pyro. The decks look just a touuuuch too restrictive. Being able to choose your upgrades sounds great to me, Mr. "We've Didn't Encounter A Shaman Until Our Fourth or Fifth Play Through RoRL," but on the other hand I think other's comments on how specialized some of the decks are seem accurate--at least as far as I can make that judgement with only theorycrafting the cards and characters. Some decks feel more broad than others, but it does seem like a lot of them are going to funnel each character through a fairly specific path, especially coming out of the game.
However, I wanna get at least one run through that adventure path with the actual ruleset. The different character upgrade path really interests me, and I want to get a sense for what I like/dislike about it by sticking through the RAW. So my gut says you should stick to the rules, just to get the purest experience possible your first time through.
But I also recognize that there's only so much time in the day to play Pathfinder, and you may need to make some concessions just to get everything you want out of the game. I'd also like to find space for Ranzak in some game, somewhere! We've played I'd say something like 75% of the RoRL at least part of the way through that AP in different 2 player configurations, but with the faster release schedule of S&S and following sets, I don't think we'll be able to play its characters as comprehensively, so a big part of me wants to do S&S Merisiel, since I'd feel guilty not taking my favorite character for a spin (and I really dislike her class deck version), but it feels almost like a waste to not use actual class deck characters when playing through the game they were made for. And there's a lot to choose from! We did a run of RoRL with Flenta and Radillo, who quickly became two of our favorite characters. I'm sure I could scrounge up a non-Merisiel from the 28-ish characters on offer...
...I just won't be happy about it. :/
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The game shouldn't be broken or anything by using the Card Guild scenarios as if they were normal box-scenarios. In fact, I plan to do the same thing once my buddies and I finish our game (which is probably still going to take a while... we are ALMOST through chapter 2, and chapter 5 deck is already in my box.. LOL)
The biggest problem (and this applies to OP deck-building rules, regardless of the scenarios) seems to be boon dilution.
I have a Fighter, and that fighter has some nice Weapon 2s in their deck, which would be a real plus compared with my current deck.
Trouble is, because I've built my deck out of the class deck (and so has everyone else) the box is absolutely RAMMED with weapon Bs, and Item Bs, and Spell Bs etc.
If I could get a card that was the level of our current adventure, I'd have a much better chance of it being one specific to me, but half the time (unless it's armour) all I'm going to get at more level B cards, which quickly lose the return on the investment.
I just re-read through all the scenarios and it looks like the rewards won't be as much of a problem as I originally thought. Any time the "at the start of each game, characters may temporarily replace..." loot mechanics come up I can just treat it as "gain the loot cards". All the other rewards seem like they'll transfer well, except we might be at a slight disadvantage because of boon dilution, and rewards that say "draw a random card of X type from the box" will more likely be crappy, especially when we don't play with the Organized Play deck upgrade rules.
Ehhh, the more I think about it the more I feel like giving the vanilla playthrough a try, but maybe allowing for promo cards to be added to class decks. I just don't want to give up Mogmurch :(