Borissimo

If you're in the closed beta, then this should be very easy to figure out (I'm not in, so I'm afraid I'll have to pass the buck). Here's all you need to do: 1) Create a character in a new save file 2) Give that character the Amulet of Life (a basic item of which there is only one copy) 3) Create a different character in the same save file 4) See whether you can give that character the Amulet of Life 5) If the answer to (4) is "no," then indeed, each save file is like one box 6) If the answer to (4) is "yes," then see whether you can play Bringandoom with a party that has both characters in it 7) If the answer to (6) is "yes," then each save file is NOT like one box I wonder if the game will have a "disassemble" feature that allows you to "return a character's deck to the box," as it were. Then if you try to reassemble the character but unique cards exist in other decks, you get a warning and/or those other decks get disassembled. This will allow players to unlock the difficulty settings with Group A, temporarily "bench" that group to play on heroic/legendary straight with Group B, and then temporarily "bench" Group B when Group A needs to be brought back to unlock the difficulty levels for newly released adventures. This would solve just about everything! ... except Deekow's concern about the basic / elite banishing. Luckily, Obsidian has a while to go before they need to cross that particular bridge.

While it's easy to overlook -- it's just a single paragraph in the rulebook -- this actually isn't a question at all in the physical card game, as the rules spell everything out. From page 19 of the rulebook: If you want to start a new character, you may, but it’s important that you do not keep decks for characters you’re not actively playing; doing so would use up cards that you should be encountering during play. ... If you switch characters for some reason, it’s best to write down the cards in the previous character’s deck and return the cards to the box until you need to use it again. My emphasis, of course. So in the physical game, there is no issue with any of the stuff in this thread, because by the official rules, you can only play one "game" with one box at a time. You can, of course, record the state of Game A, disassemble it, and start Game B, and disassemble and reassemble the game states each time you switch between A and B, but this is horribly tedious -- which is why a digital version of this game is such a beautiful thing.

Thanks as always for taking the time to read and reply, Stormbringer! I will have zero hard feelings regardless of how this difficulty setting business shakes out, because the one thing that already seems entirely clear is that a player can create one save file, have one party in it, and play through the game completely normally on normal difficulty, which is all most of us ever wanted. You guys just really wowed me with the extra difficulty settings, which I wasn't expecting, and I'm excited to see how those will end up working. Thank you!

I think I understand why Obsidian decided to do things this way: it allows for easy swapping in and out of characters. I totally get how frustrated some players would be if they played through Perils with characters A and B, then played through Perils with characters C and D, then thought, "Okay, I'm up for the challenge of playing with 4 characters, let's play AD1 with A B C and D!", and couldn't. They'd be like, "What?! These characters are at the same point, and it's a 1-6 character game; why can't I just combine them?!" Much like I'm sitting here going, "What?! This game has 3 difficulty levels; why can't I just pick the one I want to play on?" I won't begrudge Obsidian if they decide to keep things as they are, but I am very curious to see how they handle the issues that "one save = one box" brings up. Deekow raised a good point about permanent basic and elite banishment that begins in AD3, and I'm wondering how loot will be handled. Certain limited cards pose a challenge as well. For example, a party containing Kyra, Lem, and Lini could very easily use all 3 copies of Augury. Then if you make a new party with Ezren or Seoni, not having access to Augury will feel darn wrong. Only one party in each "box" gets a Holy Candle, Father Zantus, and other beloved general-use singleton boons. Even basics can create a problem: Lini typically takes both copies of Inflict, leaving none for Kyra in another game.

Wow, what an emotional roller coaster this thread has been! First I was concerned there might be a problem, then I was sure there was a problem, then I wasn't sure there wasn't a problem, and now I think that things are even worse than I thought they were when I started. The more I think about it, the more this save file thing is really bugging me. If 1 save = 1 box, then something as simple as playing through the game on Legendary difficulty becomes nearly impossible. Say I want to do the very simple thing of playing Pathfinder Adventures with Kyra and Merisiel on legendary difficulty. I can, of course, beat each scenario on normal and heroic as I go, but that's obviously not the same. So, okay, assuming we get AD1 and AD2 on release day, I buy a season pass, create a save file with Lem and Valeros, and play through AD2 on normal and heroic to unlock legendary difficulty on that file. Now I'm ready to play on legendary difficulty with Merisiel and Kyra, right! Well, no: any cards that Lem and Valeros have, Kyra and Merisiel cannot. So if I were to start with Kyra and Merisiel, the very simple condition of "play Pathfinder Adventures on legendary difficulty" is actually not being met! There are cards missing from the box. To solve this, I could delete Lem and Valeros. Not only does this feel awful and absolutely something I should never have to do, but it also creates an even bigger problem for me when Obsidian releases AD3: who's going to unlock heroic and legendary settings for the AD3 scenarios? I have to make new characters, play all the way up through AD3 on normal and heroic (a pretty serious time investment!), delete them ... and of course, brace myself for having to do the exact same thing when AD's 4, 5, and 6 come out, with the process getting worse each time. All so I can do what should be a very simple thing: "play Pathfinder Adventures on legendary difficulty." There are other issues with the "one save = one box" paradigm. Suppose you want to play the game with characters A and B, and you don't care about anything else. You can create a party of dummy characters on that save and load their decks with Burglars, Darts, Mendings, Short Swords, Bucklers, and whatever other crappy basic cards you never want to see. Then the proportion of quality boons in your real game increases. Of course, this is a sad thing to do, and we could argue "it's a single player game, so who cares if people cheat," but it seems awfully sloppy to allow for such a simple and obvious exploit. At the end of the day, if the process for unlocking difficulty levels is so horrid that playing through the game on legendary difficulty requires prohibitive effort, then I won't be angry or anything -- I'll just play on normal. The extra difficulty levels are, after all, something extra. It would just be strange if the developers spent all this time designing, implementing, and testing a super cool feature but then chose to make the most basic application of this feature impossible to use. Here's me crossing my fingers that they'll change their minds and allow some means of simply and unilaterally unlocking higher difficulty modes, like in Diablo.

Wow, Deekow, those are really good questions. I'm not in the closed beta, so I can't test this, but has anyone tried exploiting this system to produce more instances of certain cards than would be possible in the physical game? For example, say I start playing the game with Merisiel and Kyra and Merisiel finds the much-beloved Deathbane Light Crossbow. I finish the scenario and start a new game with Harsk and Lini. Is the Deathbane Light Crossbow available for Harsk to find? It seems like neither answer is satisfactory: - If "yes," then what happens if I later add Harsk and Merisiel to the same game? Either one of their weapons explodes or I have two copies of a singleton card in the same game. I could even have Merisiel give her undead-slaying crossbow to Harsk so that he has two, which would be a highly illegal (and impossible) situation in the physical game. - If "no," then we avoid breaking the game, but that's not satisfactory either. It basically means that I have to share limited resources across two unrelated games, which feels completely wrong. Lini and Kyra have to share divine attack spells, advanced cures, etc; Harsk and Merisiel have to share ranged weapons, dexterity blessings, etc; and both games will hurt from having only half the loot cards (once those come up). So of course, I could make a new save file for my Harsk and Lini game, but then we're back to the problem of unlocking difficulty levels. Dangit, Deekow, I thought the matter was satisfactorily resolved.

Well, Stormbringer, you are a hero, for not only reading my massive (and silly) wall of text but also taking the time to explain things so that I understand. Thank you -- I can only imagine how busy things are right now, and I really appreciate your time! If we can have multiple instances of the same character in one save file, then that 100% negates all of my concerns and I encourage everybody reading this to completely disregard all the crap I wrote in my last post.

Thanks for the input, Stormbringer! I'm kind of concerned, though, that even with things working as you described, the difficulty system is going to make things incredibly and unnecessarily complicated for YouTubers (and, really, anyone who wants to mess around on higher difficulties with lots of different parties). For example, I want to do a 6-player "dream team" playthrough on legendary difficulty using my absolute favorite party of 6 characters. Then I want to do a 5-player "rejects" playthrough with the remaining 5 characters I didn't pick. If I understand correctly, as things currently stand, this is impossible to achieve without playing through the entire game on normal and heroic twice. Before I can record the legendary 6-character playthrough for my channel, I have to beat the game on normal and heroic with characters I'm not planning to use in the 6-player playthrough. Then I do the 6-character playthrough. But after that, I can't do the 5-player playthrough because at least one of those characters has already leveled up from unlocking legendary difficulty. So now I have to create a new save file, beat the whole game using characters from the "dream team" twice to unlock legendary difficulty, and only then can I begin my "rejects" playthrough. Is that correct? I really hope not. In general, even for people who aren't making YouTube videos, this seems like a huge pain. Suppose I play through AD1 with Ezren and Valeros and I decide that I want to start over on legendary difficulty with those characters. I ... can't! They're already leveled up. So I have to make a new save and beat AD1 with different characters, twice, to "prep" that save file for the characters I actually want to play with. In general, if I'm playing through legendary with characters A, B, and C, and I decide I'd like to start over and try it with characters A, B, and D, I ... can't! I have to "prep" a new save file by, again, beating everything on normal and heroic so that I can start the run with A, B, and D. Is there any chance at all that higher difficulties can simply be unlocked permanently, just like in video games that let you pick "easy" "normal" or "hard" at the start? It seems bizarre to spend the time designing, implementing, an testing these two totally sweet higher difficulty settings but then mandate an annoying grind for them to actually be used.

Thank you so much, Pink! I'm heartened by the possibility that it may be a bug.

I was wondering if someone in the closed beta could clarify how the difficulty unlocking system works. When I unlock legendary difficulty for a given scenario, does that unlock the difficulty for all subsequent parties or just the party that got it? Basically, if I create a new party and want to play Brigandoom on legendary difficulty, do I have to beat Brigandoom with that party on normal and heroic first? Or will I be able to jump straight to legendary difficulty with a new party as long as I had beaten Brigandoom on normal and heroic with an earlier party? I really hope it's the latter, because otherwise it's impossible to play straight through the game on any difficulty besides normal.

With respect, Waruko, your argument doesn't hold up logically. I can tell from the way you're writing that I cannot convince you, so I'm not writing to sway you, but to sway anyone who might be reading this exchange. You accuse me of making assumptions about your feelings, yet your entire position hinges on the assumption that Obsidian's reason for implementing the chests is that they are greedy. How do you know this? You don't -- you simply assume that implementing a certain type of mechanic implies greed. Your entire argument falls apart when we consider the very real possibility that Obsidian has introduced these chests in good faith because they genuinely think that players will enjoy them. If Obsidian is indeed "bad," then everything you said follows logically. But if Obsidian isn't "bad," then there's nothing to be biased against, and the ONLY effect that the treasure chests have upon the universe is the creation of fun for other players. You simply choose not to buy the chests, Obsidian isn't evil, and there's no reason not to play the game. You say that I have made a "false narrative," yet it's only false if Obsidian is "bad," just like your entire position falls apart if Obsidian isn't. You've written a mountain of text explaining what follows from the assumption that Obsidian is "bad," yet you've provided no proof whatsoever that Obsidian's implementation of these treasure chests wasn't done in good faith (and you can't, because you don't have it, because you don't know the developers). At the end of the day, neither of our positions is more inherently false than the other -- we've just made different starting assumptions. And of course, I think mine is way more reasonable than yours. There's been no evidence so far that Obsidian is "bad," and the existence of these chests hardly qualifies. Unlike in other games, where blind packs are integral to the user experience and their existence could thus be called exploitative, they are purely optional here, so in a purely objective sense the only thing they add to our universe is the happiness of the players who choose to indulge in them.

"Lindsey, paint me like one of your French boys."

To contribute some respectful disagreement: While the Burglar's secondary effect should indeed match the physical version, I do not think it's a good idea for the wildcard to discard a blessing from the blessings deck every time you encounter and do not acquire a boon. In a 6-player game, that would be utter insanity -- an increase in difficulty leagues beyond any of the other wildcards we've seen.

Oh Stormbringer, I knew exactly what I was wishing for.

Waruko, I understand where you're coming from, but (speaking as a person in no way connected with Obsidian) I hope you don't pass on this game just because there's going to be an extra thing that other people will buy. The devs have made it clear in this thread that anyone who buys the season pass or purchases adventure decks with gold will receive all of the cards she would have gotten had she bought the physical game, and as far as designer integrity is concerned, that's the only thing that matters. Think of it this way: imagine there are two universes, one in which the treasure chests exist and one in which they don't. If you're a player who does not buy the treasure chests, then your experience with the game will be exactly identical in both universes -- yet you're saying that you'll play the game in one universe but not in the other. Respectfully, that is simply irrational! Assuming the chests make other players happy, do you really begrudge the happiness of other people -- people you haven't met, never heard of, never will meet -- so much that you'd be willing to forfeit your own happiness in silent protest? A protest that, might I add, no one will ever know about, hear about, or care about, and that won't have any effect on anything, especially not the happiness of the people whose happiness you were protesting in the first place? This is a poor return on the sacrifice of your happiness, my friend! When a game developer adds something that not all players can or want to afford, it only harms the game in an objective sense if the game is competitive. Pathfinder Adventures is strictly single-player / cooperative, so Obsidian can add all they want, no matter how little of it I am able or inclined to afford, without violating any moral principles or my enjoyment of the game. The treasure chests could cost 100 dollars each and be filled with literally nothing but Nathan's topless selfies and it still wouldn't matter as long as none of the components of the physical game were held behind a paywall.

As we just learned in this thread, there is at least one core rule that won't be implemented at launch yet whose absence can have a major effect on gameplay. I, too, would like to see which cards get banished on location closing, but as this has absolutely no mechanical effect on gameplay, I unfortunately have to hope that it is literally the last thing on Obsidian's agenda.

Oh hey, good call fastkarate! I now feel ashamed for failing to observe the obvious fact that Nathan's post contained a typo in favor of the uncharitable and eminently unreasonable assumption that Nathan does not know how to read. And regarding the Seoni & Kyra scenario described above: stuff like this is why I initially thought it would be important to have the option to pass on boons from at least adventure deck 3 onwards. It wasn't until I saw the aforementioned wildcard power that I realized it was actually a priority on day 1.

Thanks for clarifying this, Nathan! I'm saddened to hear that this feature won't be available at launch -- my post actually explains why it should be a high priority, not a low one -- but I am heartened to hear that it will be coming later! Edit: I am an idiot for reasons fastkarate notes below. Please disregard this post!

No worries, buddy! I'm just glad we finally laid this axe to rest.

Oh, Hannibal! I love you man, you're a great guy, but dude, here is you, on the Paizo forum, saying the same wrong thing over a month ago: http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5li9h&page=2?Whats-New-With-Obsidians-Adventure-Card-Game#70 And here is me explaining why you're wrong, barely an hour later, with a link to the official Paizo FAQ (!!!) for proof: http://paizo.com/paizo/blog/v5748dyo5li9h&page=2?Whats-New-With-Obsidians-Adventure-Card-Game#72 Did you #micdrop and stop reading that thread after posting? Was being contradicted by an FAQ written by the people who invented the game not sufficient proof for you? Talk to me, man! You've gotta let go of the idea that rolling for boons is mandatory. It isn't. <3 I'd be surprised if Obsidian didn't implement an option not to roll for boons. In the latest preview posted on Paizo's site, we saw a wildcard power with the effect, "When you fail to aquire a boon, discard the top card of the blessings deck." When playing with this wildcard, choosing a bad skill and intentionally failing would trigger the negative effect of the wildcard, whereas passing on the roll entirely would not. So failing and not rolling are not the same thing. The whole point of that wildcard power is to add an element of risk and strategy to otherwise automatic decisions. Say you're rolling a d6 to pick up something with a check of 4. Normally, you'd just pick up your die and roll, because why not? But with this wildcard in effect, you need to actually stop and think whether taking the roll is worth the possible loss of a blessing. Not implementing a core rule in a board game port is always an amateur mistake, but it would be doubly egregious here given the significant interaction the core rule has with another feature (or features, if there are other wildcards that relate to boon acquisition). If anyone wasn't convinced before, the two Twitch streams have proven that the team behind this game is amazing. I just don't see them making a blunderous omission of this magnitude.

The Rise of the Runelords base set debuted in August 2013, nearly 2.5 years ago, and Paizo has been working on the game continuously since then. I'd be shocked if any errors on the magnitude of Amulet of Mighty Fists have gone unnoticed during all that time. It seems like all the major errors with a base set get revealed within 6 months of its release and everything is just fine-tuning the wording of the rules after that.

@Hassifa good question! Indeed, I don't think it was asked in the AMA or on the stream. From the stream, we could tell that at least some errata had been implemented. Detect Magic had a recharge check of 4 rather than the printed cards' hilarious 14, for instance. I'd also be shocked if minor card type errors, such as a Bugbear having the goblin trait or Scorching Ray having the basic trait or the Bastard Sword +1 (but no other bastard sword) missing the 2-handed trait, weren't fixed as well. @LadyKaieta Here's one example of official Paizo errata that I'd be curious to know if it made it into the game: The Amulets of Mighty and Fiery Fists originally said "for your strength or melee check." This was changed to "for your combat check." Pre-errata, Sajan technically couldn't use them when rolling Dexterity for his combat check (though I imagine many players did that anyway at home). Post errata, he can.

So excited for this stream! I don't suppose we'll get to see a peek at the F2P mechanics today?

I asked a shortened version of that question in the AMA and Nathan delighted me with an extremely encouraging response: Yep! We want to do them all...and more!

Thanks for sharing this! I am SO JEALOUS of the person who got to do that preview.