The Game – Pathfinder Adventure Card Game

Let’s talk this time about some things that I really like in the game. I’ve talked enough about the rule book, and even looked up one thing again with healing because I feel like I’m doing it wrong still. But there is a ton I love about the game.

Firstly, I really like the characters and their skills. Mainly because with a two player game, like I’m playing, I am missing out on things. Some people might get frustrated being deficient at skills are seek to optimize, but I prefer it when I’m weak at some things. It makes planning more of a challenge versus move the one character who is good over to a location to pass the check. It means that my resources matter more.

I also like the variety in stuff. I haven’t dug into the items, weapons, spells, monsters, for stories 2 and 3, but for the first story there’s plenty. Which means I can customize the way I want. I keep on getting weapons that aren’t ideal for Amiri, but when I get a good weapon for her, it allows me to swap stuff out and improve her character. Or with Seoni, to customize if I want to be more offensive or defensive with her spells.

Finally, though this isn’t all, I like the play time of the game. When I get into the swing of it, turns are pretty straightforward as to what to do. I flip that hour and explore. I can quickly tell by looking at a card what I need to know and if I can make it or not. So last nights game was under an hour plus I was chatting. There are a lot of bigger story driven games that take two plus hours a session. Getting through this in 45 minutes or so is nice. It’d likely be longer multiplayer, but probably not a ton.

Upcoming Streams

So, tonight was supposed to be a stream but I’ll be gaming instead. I don’t know for sure, because Stranger Things comes out on Friday, but my hope is to stream for a hour that evening while the toddler is being put to bed. If I can do that, then I’ll be doing Crowdfunding BIG and little. That series is supposed to be tonight, but again, gaming.

As for Monday, it is a holiday. I will not be streaming then. But on Wednesday I will play more Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. I plan on going through the first story and see where I am at with it. I might leave it set-up, as I said, to play myself but switch to streaming a new game. We’ll see in a few weeks most likely.

Would you like to see a different game after I get through the first story? Or do you want all three story parts?

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

Building a Character

So, this really should have more of a graphical component to it than it will. I would love to show some art, but I don’t have that, to give a sense of the design, or a layout of how I think the board is going to work, but we are in the super early phases of this design. What’s really going to happen is that I’m going to move this over to a spreadsheet and create a number of different characters based off of that so that everything is formatted the same.

The Real World Character

Male – Age 26 – Office Drone

A recent graduate with high hopes and now nothing more than an office drone. Changing the world was the dream, and now it’s changing numbers in the spread sheet. Friends moved away and not enough energy after working overtime to make that many more. At least the people he works with are nice enough, and the coffee isn’t bad.

“I’ve been waiting for this game for months, I know some old friends have too, it’ll be just like old times.”

Keywords: Gamer, Business

In Game Character

Stats:

Strength: 5

Agility: 5

Vitality: 5

Allure: 5

Guile: 5

Currency: 100 Gold

Oddly enough, that’s about it for a character when you pull them out of the box. The real nuances to a character are going to come with how you allocate your 10 extra points for the stats.

The Other Stuff

I think it’s important to talk about what else you’ll have right away, even though it might not be pure character creation stuff. Such as what sort of weapons will you be able to find, and what sort of skills can you pick up. You will be dropped into the world without any gear, just normal commoners clothes, and no skills, just basic attacks that you can do, so that’s why you get 100 gold to start. You can save it up, because there is better stuff you can get on level 2, but you might not live that long.

For armor, and this could have really been it’s own section, you’re looking at two types of armor.

Leather – No movement penalty, +2 defense

Chainmail – Minus 1 movement, +4 defense

Something along those lines. the advantage with chainmail is that you are going to be taking considerably less damage. When an attack might only get through on leather armor at 2 to 4 damage, that means chain might mean that you take no damage. But it does mean that the enemy is going to be more apt to focus on you, because you are going to be the closest with that slower speed, so it’s a trade off. Numbers are not final at this point obviously, but for an example.

Weapons then, you’re going to have much more of a choice. You will have two handed swords, short swords, daggers, bow and arrow, axe, crossbow, and maul at least all available at the start of the game to buy.

As for skills, we’re looking at pretty simple ones that would be available. Something like sweeping attack, bash, counter attack, rush, disengage.

Plus there will be items as well, health potions probably being the biggest of those items that the players might want to buy.

Now, with getting items, I could be really nice, I could be really mean, or I could do something between that. What do I mean? If I was really nice, you’d have a catalog of items that you could pick from and purchase without it costing a turn. If I was really mean, I could make those places four separate shops and make players almost have to decide to shop at least 3 times in a row before doing anything else. I’m going to be less mean than that, I don’t want to hand out gear, and players can do other things on their first turn, but on the first level, there is just going to be a bazaar that’s the shopping area, so you can go and shop once and be done with it, unless you decide that you need more and then you can come back again. The first level is going to play a bit differently than others, I think, and I will delve into what I’m thinking when I start building a level, though I probably won’t build the first level.

Character creation, pretty simple, basically all a player would need to do is allocate those points and fill in the player name and the character name. The character boards, for the stats, might be more like a character sheet, and then a side board. Or I might go with dials that keep track of stats, that’s too be determined, with a save sheet so if the dials get bumped it isn’t the end of the world. Or with a save sheet, maybe I’d do a dry erase player board, that’d be pretty cool and useful.

What do you think of character creation, it should be extremely simple. Obviously, the keywords I handed out this time were pretty generic, but I want to create more unique real world people than just what I wrote for this one, someone might run a greenhouse so they’d know about plants, or maybe a chef, give people a ton of different backgrounds.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Quests

In Town Activities

Level Events and Monsters

Boss Battles

So a quick refresher on boss battles, it is going to be one half of the level book that has the battles in it, so when you flip open a page, one part will be the level itself with all of the level actions and artwork, and any restrictions for the level, anything like that. The other side is going to be the map for the boss battle. This map will tell you some about the terrain, but not about the boss whom you’ll be facing, you’ll find that out by talking to information brokers, NPCs, and PCs. When all the players are done taking actions on a level, that’s when the players decide together to jump into battle.

When fighting monsters, it was just going to be a do or don’t you hit sort of thing to defeat them, but bosses are going to be different. Bosses will track hit points like the characters. And bosses are going to have their hit point track split into multiple parts. This is how the boss is going to change up their attack as time goes on. But a boss will attack in a predictable pattern, like video game monsters do.

Let’s do a fake boss fight: Glorglor the Minotaur stands menacingly in the room.

First Attack: Rush Forward, attack everyone directly in front of him and to the front left and right spots on the grid for 10 damage.

Second Attack: Move to the nearest character do a power blow for 15 damage and push them back two.

Third Attack: Attack any enemy adjacent to you for 10 and dodge, add +2 to Minotaur’s defense.

Something along those lines. Those three attacks would repeat 1 through 3 over and over again until one of the health bars is completely empty, then between Two and Three the Minotaur would add in a new attack.

New Attack: Leap 5 spaces, attack all adjacent squares for 10.

This would change up the battle so that you can’t, as players, complete your puzzle and just let it auto play itself out based off of what the monster is doing. The added card is probably going to be a card the players haven’t researched before as part of learning about the boss monster, so it should mess up their plans.

Finally for the boss, they are going to have their standard targeting. It is going to target whomever is the closest to them. If there are two or more heroes close to them, it will target in a way that it can hit the most, if it can only hit one, it’ll target clockwise from the direction it’s facing. There are going to be a few exceptions to this rule, mainly if an attack can hit multiple player characters and there is a grouping like that in range, it will move to attack them. So like the jump ability, say there are three archers off to one side of the board, it’ll jump over to them to hit them all if it can, instead of focusing on the tank in front of it.

So as for the players, what are they doing on their turn?

Players are always going to have two things on their turn that they’ll do, and players can actually go all at once, doesn’t matter turn order. It seems like it might if they are placing a weakness on the boss or a buff on everyone else, but generally those are going to stick around, which means that you don’t get it for that turn, but you’ll get it in upcoming ones. I wanted to create as little downtime for the players as possible. So everyone decides what to do, and then players move and attack/buff/weaken accordingly.

The move is going to be simple, but there is one thing to pay attention to, if a player has a faster speed than someone else and they are both moving to the same spot on the board, ideally, the faster character will get there first. So I guess, when I say everyone is going at once, the movement will be based off of speed. And your speed/movement is also going to determine how far you can move. In this, there is no walking, it is just assumed that everyone is going all out, as you would in a game where you could die, and therefore there won’t be boosts to movement.

The next thing is an attack, buff or weaken, but I’ll start with an attack. An attack is going to be something the players can always do, if they are within range. The players will have a choice though with their attack how to do it. They will always have a basic attack, so a basic long sword might be 4 basic damage, plus strength, plus one modifier flip. But they can also augment an attack with a skill, so maybe they play “Furious Strike” that would have a cool down of one, add 2 to the damage and give another modifier flip. Or maybe they augmented the sword with poison and it’d add in 8 poison damage. The augment would always do it’s extra damage, but the skill would then go into it’s spot on the cool down track and then after the monster goes, everything in the cool down track would shift down one.

Let’s talk a bit more about the cool down track. It would have up to six spots on it, there would be a 5 down to 1, plus a 0 spot. That means that any skill you play, such as Furious Strike, with a cool down of 1, would always be out of your hand for a turn. If it’s at 5, it’s going to be out of your hand for 5 turns. Skills are placed in this track face down, just because of the upcoming mechanic to differentiate.

To build off of that, some skills might use the cool down track in a different way, it would be used as a powering up track. So let’s say I have the skill, I don’t know, let’s call it “Lightning Sword”. That would go face up into spot 3. And I’d draw a modifier card. So why would I draw a modifier card, the example text for Lightning Sword would be something like: Place in Spot 3 on the Cool Down Track face up, draw up to 2 modifier cards per attack action. Threshold: Modifier total less than 6, no damage. 6 to 10 – add 10 damage to basic attack lightning damage, 10+ add 15 lightning damage to basic attack and two modifier flips ignoring cancel attack. Then that card would get flipped and would go back onto the cooldown track. So basically, it’s a skill that is probably going to knock the socks of damage wise which is why you would build up to it. This probably isn’t going to be something that you do early, but when you know that you’re doing, you set it up to try and take down the bad guy in a blow. When using an ability that charges up like this, you can still move, but can’t attack.

With buffs and weakens. These are played instead of an attack and they have to be done at the right range. Almost always these will go onto spot 5 in the cool down track and you will have the whole time that buff or weaken is in the cool down track that it is active. These will go face up like the power up just so you remember that they are active. Buffs and weakens are also going to always just be a plus or a minus to a total. These will take up your attack for the turn you play them.

That’s the vast majority of how combat is going to work. To recap how the modifiers work quickly, there will be modifiers that you can add to your deck or swap in for other modifiers that will allow your fellow players to draw more modifiers. The cool thing with drawing a new modifier is if you draw that additional one via a boost like that, and it’s a cancel the attack, it is just discarded, but you don’t get to draw a new one. If you draw a cancel the attack on your own draw, that will kill the attack. That is going to be a required card that can’t be removed from the deck. But you’ll start out with some pluses, some minuses, and some zeros, and you’ll work on building up your pluses or removing minuses through questing, skills, and stuff like that.

So we have two things left with boss fights, the first is the part your guild plays in a boss battle. Before the boss battle starts, you’ll decide how many guild members you are going to take into the battle with you, they are basically going to keep minions off of you. Minions are meant to be annoying, so if you have 0 guild members with you, a minion will hit you for a small amount of damage, let’s say on level one it’s 1 damage, but they’ll do that every round, and you don’t calculate defense against minions, it just always is pinging you. So you want to bring in guild member. There are going to be a few different levels that you check on the minion card. Let’s do an example minion cards.

“Annoying Kobolds”

< 3 – All guild members brought in die, 2 damage per turn, lose 2 morale

3 to 5 – All guild members brought in die, 1 damage per turn

5 to 7 – 2 guild members die, 0 damage per turn

7 to 9 – No guild members die, 0 damage per turn, gain 1 morale

10 or more – No guild members die, lose 1 morale

This basically is the chart that you’d check the number of guild members you picked against. The last one is probably going to have some questions with it, why would you lose morale if you bring in too many guild members? Well, first you’ll lose morale for every two guild members who die, so it’s better to have too many than too few, or just barely too few, but if you bring too many in, you are putting too many people at risk, and that disheartens them.

So then finally, the most important thing, what do you get for loot? If the boss has a signature weapon, that will be dropped, it might drop some skills or augments as well, and then of course currency. On the bosses main card it will tell what loot pack to open as well as how much currency and XP that you’d get coming out of that fight. I want with the bosses in general and the loot pack for them to be sealed things, so before getting to a level and researching the boss, you won’t know what that boss looks like. As you research you find out more and more. This is an idea that I really like from Oathsworn and am borrowing because of that. I don’t want people to be able to open up the box and see all the bosses. Instead, I want to give them something to explore and discover.

So that’s a lot of information, but hopefully boss fights sound found. I want to give players lots of different options for solving the puzzles of a boss fight.

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The Premise

The Characters

The Bosses

The Guilds

The Levels

The Boards

Cards vs Dice

Character Leveling

Skills, Weapons and More

Skills

Skills will be quicker to run through because I have talked about them some before in the Character Leveling part like I said. But there are some important things to note about skills.

First, skills are going to be tied to a base stat, so strength, agility, vitality, allure, and guile. When a player buys a skill, gets one in battle or as a reward for a quest, they’ll be picking which stats pile they want to draw from. Now, it might seem obvious that you’d go with your highest or best stat for a skill, but it’ll depend on the keywords that you are looking for some as well. This is to make it so that you won’t always want a strength stat if you are strength fighter. I’m also thinking that it’ll make sense to limit how many skills you can have a type based off of your stat level. So if you are getting multiple skills early, maybe for every five points you can hold a skill, so if you only have 10 in agility, you won’t be able to use a third strength skill.

So, how would skills scale? That’s something I’m still working on. But for combat, it’s going to be some sort of bonus based off of the level of the character. It might be a plus based off of the level, like half your level rounded down sort of thing so it scales up every other level. Or it might allow you to add in additional modifier card draws, increasing the chance of comboing and the amount of damage that they are putting out. So say there’s a level cap at 50, same number as levels and bosses in the game. It might be no added bonus for the first ten levels in terms of scaling, but then every ten after that you add in a modifier card, or every 10 you get something new plus the one before it. Hopefully it is something that wouldn’t become overwhelming, so I want it to be laid out in a very understandable way on the skill card.

The other question would be around why you’d want a skill that comes from allure or guile. Those doesn’t seem like they are as combat focused stats. And while it might not be a skill that adds a fixed amount of additional damage or something like that, both allure and guile can be used to distract and confuse the enemy. And I want it to be that those skills do things like that, it might give a bonus pull from a modifier deck to another player, or it could be that you can place a status effect onto a boss by using a non-traditional combat skill. Those skills are also going to be helpful outside of combat. A skill in cooking could distract an enemy, think of it as pulling some tasty treat for the bad out of your inventory. Or it could be that you use it for recruiting members for your guild and you’ll get more because you have better in game food. I want all skills, even if it just gives some static non-changing bonus, to have uses in and outside of combat, some will just be better in one area than another.

Weapons

Weapons are going to be a bit more simple, they are going to give you a base damage value, if you add in a stat, and if you add in a modifier pull. Yes, there will be math in the game, but I want to keep it pretty simple. I don’t want it to be a situation where half damage means that you have to add everything up, divide it by two, round down because they resisted damage and then because you were attacking from the back while someone else attacked from the front you get to multiple by 1.5 to get your actual damage. Nope, I want your weapon to do X damage + X stat + X modifier – X resistance – X defense. It’s all basic math, addition and subtraction, nothing fancier than that. Weapons will not scale up, however, that doesn’t meant hat you won’t maybe stumble across a weapon early on that you’ll use all game. The weapons won’t have nearly as much variety in how wide a range of base damage they do, the skills are going to be more important.

Armor

I want to keep Armor simple as well. I’m not going to do an armor class like a Dungeons and Dragons would do to see if something hits. If the boss monster or a monster in a field swings at you they are doing X amount of damage + X modifier – X defense – X resistance. And your armor is going to give you defense. Now if you have a shield the “X defense” can be broken down into X armor + X shield for your total defense.

Items

These are going to be the small items like a health potion or something that will give you resistance to a damage type. It could also just be a trinket or a bauble or a quest item, but those will go in your limited inventory space.

Augments

Augments are something that I have hinted at before but not really talked about much. I didn’t have a term for them until now. I wanted to create combinations for skills. So by that I mean that if you have a skill that is called “Parry Stab Stab” you’d be able to attach and augment to it that would go with it all the time once it’s attached that would turn it into “Fire Parry Stab Stab”. So your weapon would be on fire and deal fire damage for that attack. But you could augment “Arrows of Death” with fire as well. Or “Smoldering Gaze” with fire. And it’d always do something so you can really make whatever skill you want to be augmented in whatever way you want.

With that said, skills aren’t the only thing that can be augmented. A weapon would be given the status of fire, and now it is always going to deal fire damage in addition to it’s other damage. The downside is that once you’ve given it fire, you can’t take it off. And there’ll be some augments or skills that go on the player as well, versus as on the weapon. An example of this I’m going to rip straight from Sword Art Online. The main character Kirito unlocks an unique skill called Dual Wielding, aka, he can fight with two weapons. Something like that would be a specific quest given augment that could go on a player versus going on a weapon or something like that. It would be an always on ability. Something like that is going to be on certain types of quests, which it might not be obvious that it is on a quest when you start it, it might ask you to draw an augment until you find a character one and add it to the quest or make it an optional item on the quest, like, you can gain access to this if you beat the quest or complete it with this much overkill on the final check.

Money

Final thing to talk about is currency, basically, you’ll get money and you can spend it. The guild, by sending out members to do stuff on the levels will also get your money and spend money for you. So it won’t be like you have no flow of income, but most of your money is going to come from beating quests, fighting monsters, and beating the boss.

What do you think of augments. I think everything else is actually pretty straight forward, with skills being a bit out there, but fairly easy to grasp, but augments are something different. Does that customization sound interesting?

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This is part of a group that we weren’t sure was going to be a great group because we generally all felt like we had more support based characters and without a strong attacking character we wondered how we’d hold up. It took us a little bit to get the characters figured out and really set-up to play them but now the group has become quite powerful.

The Quartermaster has generally become our tank character, though the Sawbones, can be a tank at times. The Quartermaster is the tank because of their ability to manipulate items that they have. So while they might end up having to burn a card or two, as long as they are discarding cards, they generally can keep a full hand. That’s very handy as it allows our group to get going longer and because of that, they don’t always need to be taking long rests and can keep the enemy distracted when other characters might be getting low on cards and need to be taking those rests.

The Quartermaster really shines when it comes to item use. Now, it doesn’t always have to be to get back cards, but by using items at the right time and refreshing the items, the Quartermaster can do a ton of damage. This is probably some of the reason that this character got off to the rough start because without the full compliment of items they can have trouble dealing out that much damage. They aren’t an extremely low damage character, but probably middle level damage character with not many attacks that focus on an area or do other negative effects. Building up that collection of items to make them higher damage or able to hit a larger area makes a big difference, especially as the monsters are a good amount tougher at the higher levels.

Generally, I feel like this character is fairly mobile around the battlefield, which you want for a character who can tank. This is especially the case as they aren’t generally the fastest character in terms of going in initiative. We did originally run into the problem with the group of characters, and with the previous group of characters, that we weren’t always the most mobile around the battlefield. I think with this group we’ve focused more in on that which has been quite useful in some scenarios where you need to make it to multiple points or make it in and then leave or even just maps that are spread out the extra movement from the Quartermaster and the other characters has been helpful.

Overall, this seems like an interesting character to play and eventually when coming back to this game or as we unlock more characters, I could see trying this character to see if you could tweak the build in another way that would still use items but might help the party with items more so than themselves and see if the Quartermaster can be more support character.

Complexity: Medium/High
Combat: Medium/High
Support: Low