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

Quests are going to be one of the more interesting things to do in town or on a level when playing in this game. Not to say that the others won’t be interesting or important, but quests are going to delve into the story of the game and the world more than other things might. I do want to tie story into as many elements as possible, but quests are an obvious area to do it.

So, first thing that we need to consider is how do you find a quest?

There are a few ways that you can do this, but I want them to be something you have to “find” by doing other actions. If you go shopping a weapon crafter might have a quest for a rare metal or crystal, same with an armorer or an apothecary. If you talk to an NPC, they might have a quest for you, if you talk to a PC, they might have a quest that they can’t do but that they know about if you want to try your hand at it. Or it might be a level event that triggers that you can do as a quest. Some of the quests might even have multiple ways to get to them, a PC and an NPC might give you the same information, but it might branch slightly depending on who you got it from.

Now, with having to “find” quests, does that mean that the first time frame or potentially multiple ones on a level there won’t be any quests available to go on? No, there will always be a level quest. Something that will give you a more generic thing, mainly money and XP. Those can be great because if you are getting an interesting skill or weapon, that’s going to be the bigger reward, and you might get some money along the way, and you will for sure get XP, but it won’t be as much money and might not be as much XP. Of course, that won’t always be the case, it might be possible that the level quest will branch and you might find something unexpected at the end, so you can’t always just pass on that quest, or send guild members to do it. Again, as I’ve said so many times, I want every choice in the game to be hard and meaningful in an interesting way.

So, how will quests work?

So quests, are going to generally be multiple part things, though, some might be pretty simple. They can also be evolving or chaining things. For example, rescue the farmer’s daughter could be a very simple quest that will then find out about a troll invasion that is going to happen and will unlock that quest from an earlier point that it would have if you hadn’t done the rescue the farmer’s daughter quest.

But that’s again pretty general as to how these will work. I’ve talked about it a bit before with the modifier cards, but each part of the quest is going to be a little bit of story, something will happen, it could be that you need to track the trolls through the forest, or avoid an ambush while looking for the trolls. I’m thinking that this’ll almost be a Near and Far like thing where in that you are trying to reach a certain threshold but you can go higher and hit a second threshold. So let’s take the farmer’s daughter quest, tracking the trolls should be pretty easy for a PC in the game, so that’s just a check of a five, as the player you know that you’ll pass that, but you’ll also know that there is a higher mark you can try and make it to, but the PC won’t know what that means, so the player shouldn’t know what that means either. So if they spend, now they are paying enough attention to spot the ambush up ahead as well as the tracks, that’ll give them a branching path for the next part of the quest where they can either spring the ambush and fight, or go around it. That’s what that player would then be doing on the next time period on that level.

Now, let’s quickly talk about skills. I’ve talked about them a lot as of late. Just a refresher, on some quests you’ll be able to get a skill. That skill will modify the end challenge for that quest. To also talk about weapons or armor, if it makes sense, so an example of when it wouldn’t, a dragon isn’t going to wield a sword, those will be attached and modify as well. When thinking about loot drops, why would something that drops a legendary or an interesting item, weapon, armor, or otherwise, not be using it themselves? So I want those to attach and modify for a monster as well.

And finally, what happens once you complete a quest or part of a quest?

So if you’ve done part of it, you’ll have the option to continue in the next time period. Any XP you’ve gained can cause you to level up and you can allocate the points you get for your character from that.

If you reach the end of the quest, you are going to get more of an XP bump, plus any rewards at that point in time and you’ll be transported back to the town. I’m not a fan of games where you have to fight your way into the dungeon and then run back through the whole cleared out dungeon to get back to the closest fast travel point to then go to the town and turn it in. Screw that noise, you get teleported to the town and to the person who gave you the quest. The next time period, you can, if you want, complete that quest at that location as well as do whatever action is attributed to that location. The player doing the quest will have already spent a lot of time on that potentially.

How long could a quest be? I mentioned it above, but I think it’s worth mentioning again. Quests will vary in length. If something sounds like a short quest, it probably is, it might chain another quest, but the first will be done. To go back to what I just said above, a chained quest, you’ll have the option to continue into that quest immediately instead of getting teleported back. If you do, you’ll still get the reward at that point in time from the one that you’ve just completed so that you don’t miss out on it. But back to my question, a single quest might be as long as 6-7 time units, which would be most of what one player does on the floor. Most won’t last that long, but each part of the quest will have one challenge decision point, might be conversation that wouldn’t require a card, and quests might vary in length depending on choices. To go back to my example of rescuing the farmers daughter, if you sneak around the troll ambush you’ll miss out on some XP, but that’ll make the whole quest faster, so you’ll have time to do more. I want it to be fairly logical like that where you can guess when it’d be faster.

So what do you think of quests, does it start to make sense as to how they are going to work?

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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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Back with some D&D streaming, this is because I have a D&D game coming up this weekend, so I’m getting ready to generate some characters.

This time, I’m looking at the rest of the character sheet, the spell and background pages, but also the traits, alignment, weapons, and everything else that comes along with being a character with a class in Dungeons and Dragons.

Today, at 7:30 (November 21st, 2019), I’m going to be streaming that character creation to show how different race as class combos can create an interesting character. You can find that on http://twitch.com/maltsandmeeples. The time is central time for those wondering. If you want to get alerted to when I’m streaming, you can follow me on twitch, or to watch as your own leisure, subscribe to Malts and Meeples over on Youtube.

My drink last night was just one of my favorites, Fresh Squeezed by Deschutes. It’s a good crisp and nice IPA, even though it’s getting cold outside, I don’t mind drinking a good IPA.

Bottoms up!