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This is a thread for discussing Paizo's new card game. The thread for discussing the Pathfinder Role Playing Game System can be found here. Pathfinder the Adventure Card game is a new title from paizo publishing, creators of the role playing game of the same title. The game is a deck building game. It comes with an 500 cards, 7 characters, and a number of adventures for players to play. Players choose a character, make a deck, go on adventures, and levels-up. The game has planned post release support: adventure decks with added characters, items, spells, adventures, etc. are planned to release. The first Adventure deck has already been released. Characters The character, essentially a class, the player chooses decides how many of each type of card they can put in their starting deck. The cards that can put into deck can be categorized as weapon, spell, armor, item, ally or blessing cards.  As you can see, Ezern can put 1 weapon, 8 spells, 3 items, and 3 ally cards in his deck. All of these cards must have B in the upper right corner to be used in a starter deck. Characters also have attribute statistics which are represented by dice. During checks, the appropriate dice are rolled.   As you can see from these cards, attributes can have traits. Valeros will always add 3 to his strength checks and 2 to his Charisma checks. Sometimes these traits can be required to interact with certain cards. Spell cards often can't be used by characters without the Arcane or Divine trait. Other times these traits can enhance a cards effect. Often armor cards can protect against a lot more damage if the character is proficient in certain types of armor. As you can also see from these cards, each character has a list of different powers they can use on a check. Valeros can put a weapon card back into his deck rather than discarding it and Kyra adds 1d8 to checks against Undead. The x-factor for this game are the empty boxes on the cards. Some have called this game a roleplaying without a GM. That's not really true and the game does bill itself as a "cooperative strategy card game," but one could see where one draws this train of thought: characters level up from adventure to adventure. While I wouldn't recommend writing on the cards themselves as Paizo has character sheets available online, boxes are checked off as the player gains feats. These feats can give flat bonuses to checks, increase the max hand size of the character, enhance powers, and increase the number of each type of card a player has in his deck. The last of which is very important as one's deck is their health points. Leveling-up allows players to try the tougher adventures included in the game. Considering the fact a single adventure can take about an hour or so, the intent is for players to come back to the game with their seasoned characters. So that was all characters, but how does one play the game?   Players pick an adventure card. On one side, it will say who the villain of the adventure and what minions he has. It will also say if there are any special rules for the scenario as well as say what the reward for completing the scenario is. On the other side, it will say what location cards are to be used based on the number of players. As you may notice from the above example of Black Fang's Dungeon, this game can be played with one person. If one person were playing black fang's dungeon, he would have to explore the Temple, the desecrated vault, and the shrine to Lamashtu during this scenario. If three players were present, they would also explore the throne room and Thassilonian dungeon. If 6 players were present, they would explore all the listed locations.  Location cards spell out how many of each type of card can be found at the location as well as give special effects that occur when at the location. They also give rules for closing a location. One closes a location to stop the villain from escaping. One closes a location by using fully exploring it and then rolling a check. One can also temporarily close a location if one of their teammates are in a different location fighting the villain. Locations give boons when permanently closed. After creating the location decks, players randomly shuffle up the villain card and a number of henchmen equal to the number of locations. They then add these cards at the random to the location decks and then shuffle the location decks. So that was still all set up, what is the gameplay like? Players take turns exploring locations. They get one free exploration per turn: they flip a card from the location deck. They then have to respond to the flipped card. If its an item, spell, armor, ally, blessing, or weapons (boons), then they check to acquire the card. The difficulty is decided by the card itself. If its a monster or barrier, they check to get past it.   If the monster is the villain of the adventure, then it gets reshuffled into the locations deck after the encounter if he can escape. If you defeat him, you shuffle him into the locations deck with a number of blessing cards (number of open locations minus 1). If you lose to him, then you shuffle him into the locations with a number of blessing cards equal to the number of open locations. If he can't escape because there are no open locations, the players have won. Players can move from location to location on their turn. The players are on a timer. There is a collection of cards known as the blessing deck. Every turn, one card is drawn from the deck and put on the table. If the deck runs out, the adventure has failed. If all players die (run out of cards), the adventure has failed. Players take damage when they fail to defeat a monster. They take damage equal to difference between their roll and the monster's difficulty. When damage is taken, players have to discard a number of cards from their hand equal to the damage. If you don't have enough cards in your hand to take the damage, discard them all and ignore the rest of the damage. Well, the game sounds fun. Anything else I should know? Despite the amount of time I spent explaining the set up, it doesn't take too long to set up. Its not immediate, but its not ridiculous either. I think it took me and my friends about 15 minutes to set up our first game. That's not including the time spent reading the rules for the first time, but you'll probably only do that once. The rules themselves are pretty intuitive and simple in play. Your first few turns might take a little while, but, once you get the feel for the game, it starts picking up pace. When we played a second time, we set up pretty fast and the game moved quickly. Also, as I mentioned earlier, there are character sheets. They're nice to have if you are one of the people who view this as a "roleplaying game without a GM." I don't agree with the notion, but I did find it helpful to keep a list of my advancements and deck configuration. If you're thinking of buying the game, I suggest Amazon. It's twenty dollars cheaper for a new title at the time of this writing. Never hurts to save a little. If you want learn more about the rules, they are available for free download from Paizo's site and I have set them up so you can view without downloading. Covok fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Sep 25, 2013 |
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Sep 25, 2013 16:40
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Winson_Paine posted:How much of an ache in the rear end is the deckbuilding? If like, four of us are brand new how long is it going to take for us to sort through our options? The rulebook comes with a list of recommended starter decks. You're best off starting with those. While I don't know the exact number of cards you can put in your starter deck (has a B in the upper right corner) in comparison to regular cards, there is probably a paralysis of choice if you start off trying to make a freeform deck on your first run through. I don't know for sure since we just used the recommended ones instead of making custom decks, but I imagine so since there are alot of cards. I should mention all characters only start with 15 cards.  The game box is good in keeping everything separated and organized. That does speed things up quite a bit. Every type of card is separated and put in its own slot. The box even comes with open slots to save character decks. Since you're supposed to develop your characters, being able to save your deck as-is is helpful. People who tend be messy with their board games will probably find this game becoming more annoying set up on subsequent playthroughs.  From personal experience, first time we played, it took us about six, seven minutes to pick our character decks (since we just used the pregens) and six minutes to set up the game world itself. It was pretty fast, but it is worth noting that one of us had played the game before at a con. I also imagine the time it takes to set up can go up if more people are playing. We only had three people, but it can go up to six people. Also, talk about day one DLC. I just realized they have characters for their add-on in the rules for their base set. I didn't realize that the first time I read it. Covok fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 02:23
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Meepo posted:I've played this a couple times, first as a playtester and again after it was released. I'd say it's fun, but it doesn't seem to have as much replayability to it as it could. As you level up, your bonuses just become a +1 to this or a +1 more card in your hand or change a d4 to a d6, but none of it really seems like gamechanging abilities like you might get in a RPG. I'd honestly consider it somewhat like a card game version of Diablo, constantly regrinding the same dungeon to get better loot. That's not necessarily a bad thing, per se, but I feel like they could have done more to make each scenario feel different. You playtested the game? Any interesting stories? I remember there being a big hullabaloo over the pathfinder rpg playtest, wondering if the same stuff that pissed people off then happened with this one. I should mention I don't really know why people were pissed at pathfinder rpg playtest. The low level curve helps out with how I plan on using the game. I attend a board gaming club every week. A game that has incentive to come back to -- level-up, get loot -- that new players can play with old players with little disparity seems like a good fit. If nothing else, it would just be nice to have a new game on the club shelf. Even if the game isn't as replayable as it could be, I don't think that will affect our members appetite for the game too much. I swear, every week there is atleast one battlestar galatica game, one cards against humanity game, and every year someone starts a pathfinder game. To anyone who has played the add-on characters, are they broken by any chance? I can't help, but think that the monk (Sajan) is terrible and the Paladin (Seelah) is mad strong.
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Sep 26, 2013 05:15
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omnibobb posted:Combat: You're right that you only have to beat a 12. However, villains escape if the other locations are not closed. If you fail to defeat him, he gets shuffled back into the other location decks with a few of the blessing deck's cards. Since the blessing deck is your timer, you just lost a few turns. That still happens if you defeat him and locations are open, but the cards are taken from the box instead of the blessing's deck and the location he is in is immediately closed without any additional checks. Henchmen, like the ancient skeletons, do not escape. Beating them will also close the location they are in. If there are no open locations when you defeat a villain, he is dead for good. If your allies are in other locations when you're fighting a villain, they can temporarily close the location to stop him from escaping. Covok fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Sep 26, 2013 |
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Sep 26, 2013 16:04
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Angrymog posted:I'd like some blanks for custom characters, monsters and adventures. Custom Characters? That's a pretty cool idea. I mean, I suppose it wouldn't be too hard to make one since you just have to decide how to divide 15 cards among 6 categories of cards, assign 6 dice, and come up with two powers. The hardest thing would be the dice.'
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Sep 27, 2013 20:47
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