Possibilities for Drive Thru Cards as continuing support for official products

[Brother Tyler]

Like many of you, I lament the discontinuation of support for the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game by Paizo and Lone Shark. PACG is among my top 3 favorite games (counting all APs and the Core Set as a single game) and I can see myself continuing to play it for many years to come. I had hoped to see many more adventure paths and decks (and goblin adventures). Alas, that was not to be. We have seen fans of the game continue to churn out creative products, and those are great. They’re not quite the same as the Real Thing, however. My pipe dream, of course, is that we will see official products and support renewed in the future. That’s beyond my control, however, and it looks very unlikely at this point (sad panda sounds).

So my mind has turned to ways in which PACG might receive a little support from Paizo/Lone Shark to help fans of the game, both current and (more importantly) future, enjoy the game. Money was mentioned as a key factor in the decision to suspend/terminate development of the game (link). Time, too, is a factor. So any potential future support for the game during this [probably permanent] period of non-support has to involve as little of each as possible. That severely limits the scope of what might be done, leaving new adventure paths, characters, etc. to the band of dedicated gamers that continues to create content for the game that they love. I decided that there were several options that were relatively easy (?) to accomplish and which would support both current and future fans of the game, all via Drive Thru Cards. While there may be some level of effort required to develop the cards, the other costs are transferred over to DTC and the consumer. This reduces the logistics demands upon Paizo/Lone Shark. There may even be mechanisms for granting the authority to develop the cards to fans working under the auspices of Paizo, Lone Shark, and the community, further reducing the time/effort requirement for Paizo and Lone Shark.

Errata Sets
While errata sets are available for both printings of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, no such sets exist for any of the succeeding adventure paths, the Core Set, or the various class/character/add-on decks. Having cards instead of substitutes (e.g., printed versions slipped into card sleeves, referring to a spreadsheet/FAQ, etc.) would be appealing for many of us.

Cards for Characters
While official character sheets are available for most of the characters and those that aren’t have been created by fans and are available at the Board Game Geek (e.g., Occult Adventures Character Decks 1 & 2, Hunter Class Deck, Ultimate Equipment Add-On Deck, etc.), those only support the characters. Many of the characters also have cohorts or associated cards that differ between sources (e.g., the versions of Padrig in the Wrath of the Righteous AP and the Summoner CD are different), and many of these aren’t displayed online (preventing fans from printing those for use in their games). This especially affects players of the game that are unable to purchase the class/character/add-on deck that supports a character in which they are interested. So while a player might be able to download the character sheet, they may be unable to use other cards that are necessary for using that character to their fullest (e.g., try playing CD Mavaro without having The Missing Eye). What I would like to see is the ability to purchase all of the necessary cards for a character. For example, CD Oloch would come with the character card, token, role card, and a Greatsword; whereas CD Emil would come with the character card, token, role card, Sawtooth Sabre +2, and a Redemption Card. I could see these being available in two or three options. The first would be per character, the second would be per deck, and the third would be for all of the characters in the Hell’s Vengeance Character Decks (with only 1 Redemption Card).

Note that I’m not including the exclusive cards that were available in the various Pathfinder Battles: Iconic Heroes Sets that were available from Paizo/WizKids/NECA, largely because I don’t know if whatever agreements Paizo/Lone Shark had with WizKids/NECA would allow for the cards to be available outside of those sets. If there was a way to do that, however, that would be nice, too.

Character Tokens
The Token cards were fine for the needs of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path. However, later adventure paths had mechanisms whereby a character token might be placed into a location deck, preventing the character from leaving that location until they recovered their token card. For example, I was playing the Mummy’s Mask AP recently and had my Ahmotep Token card shuffled into the location after failing to defeat the Dry Quicksand barrier. My view is that part of the fun (?) in such instances is that you don’t know where your character’s Token card is in the location, creating suspense. However, since the Token cards are clearly different from the other cards, with images bordered in green and lacking the normal card back, it’s pretty easy to see where a character’s Token card is in the deck. I would love to see new Token cards for all of the characters, with one side featuring the image and background lore for the character and the other featuring the standard card back. The easiest (?) way to do this in my mind is to leave the AP/deck indicators off the cards, and for each of the iconic characters to have only a single card (i.e., only one Valeros card instead of cards for RotR, S&S, and the Fighter CD). This would allow for all characters from the classic APs and various decks to be included in a single set of somewhere around 112 cards, and for the Core characters (Core Set, Curse of the Crimson Throne, and We Be Heroes) to be collected into a separate set (of far fewer cards). Alternately, they could make the cards available by AP/deck using the existing artwork (i.e., with the AP/deck indicators) - this solution is easier for Paizo/Lone Shark, I suppose.

Seasons Sets
Only a few of the Seasons APs had cards released. It would be great for all of the remaining Seasons to similarly have cards released.

Personally, I would purchase each of these if they became available (except for the Cards for Characters, but only because I have all the APs and decks). I have recently turned a new group of players on to the game and their options are limited because of the limited availability of most products. I allow them to use anything that I have, but they are unable to go out on their own and find most of the products. I imagine that there are other players out there that might similarly benefit from such products becoming available.

I’d probably even be willing to do the work necessary to make this happen if Paizo/Lone Shark were willing but unable to support it due to lack of resources (assuming I had the necessary software and images, of course).

I just wanted to get this off my chest.

[Jenceslav]

I would also love to see this game to continue, even just by fans using their time, effort and resources (provided there is some approval from Paizo and/or Long Shark, of course - it's their IP). Drive Thru Cards or whatever printer company with official approval would be great. Disclaimer: I've never used DTC and don't even know if they ship to Europe and at what costs; I have no experience with marketing or bussiness and no game development besides fan-made stuff. But let me add a few comments of mine.

Core versus pre-Core
The wording of Core is a strict improvement over the original one. There is a tremendous difficulty of converting everything from the older wording into the Core one. However, I've done that for all the cards and adventure paths and Seasons in the game. Even though everyone's fallible and my interpretation of some interactions might be wrong, it'd be a great boost if it were used as a basis. Of course, assuming the community would want the Core wording. There might be some who prefer the original, but they can use the older sets if available. If there was an official or just Paizo-approved effort to create sets with Core terminology and the issue is financial cost, I can provide my database free-of-charge (or possibly in exchange for some of the created card sets).

Spoiler:

How it came to be: As an owner of a few sets (S&S, WotR, OA, HV, Ultimate except Combat, PTales, Gunslinger) along with Core and CotC, I wanted to be able to play the older sets with new wording and Core mechanics. It started with MM and S&S, but after I've done those for me and my friend, I wanted to add a few PF Adventures blessings and other cards. As a completitionist, I moved to the sets I wanted to combine with MM, S&S or WotR, then continued with the rest. Now everything is in one monster-excel file ;)
Most sets I have are currently modified with adhesive printed boxes over their powers sections (with Dax font so that they look identical to originals).
Additionally, taking the card texts from PACG wiki was insufficient as there are many errors in there, so I had to check every card against its image. Some of those were not available anywhere I searched, especially the newer sets, but I have low-quality to high-quality images for most of the cards as well.

Season Sets
Most of the Seasons' cards in original form are available within the PDF files of particular adventures, so one can extract them and easily print them as a proxy. Many of them are, however, of poorer resolution so I would wholeheartedly agree that having them available as printed card would be great. I think they can be easily made available by Paizo as they should have the higher-res images of the cards in the production files. ;)
I would love to have official pretty cards available instead of inserting a piece of paper into a sleeve with extra PACG cards just for their back.