Ethics Gradient

I just re-confirmed this a couple times on my iPad. Here's one example: -Took 7 combat damage from some goblin henchman -Revealed a Shield of Fire Resistance [5 damage to go] -Tapped on the already-revealed shield, selected Reveal a second time [3 damage to go] -Tapped on the already-revealed shield, selected Reveal a third time [1 damage to go] -Tapped on the already-revealed shield, selected Reveal a fourth time [all good!] No need to drag cards up and down to break or confuse the game. The Reveal option just stays available after it gets used the first time. Fun!

iOS 8+ didn't specifically "break" software like iExplorer, Apple just updated a security feature to no longer allow untrusted access to application data, unless iTunes file sharing or other settings are enabled by the developer. It was part of an ongoing effort to "sandbox" apps and make it really difficult for one app to get at the files of another. Aside from jailbreak options, the only way to get at a saved files is to do an unencrypted backup, and then use some other tool to extract what you're looking for from that backup. It's a pain to do, and the method to reinsert modified files involves a full restoration from backup. Not particularly user friendly...

Just had a similar thing happen with a Shield of Fire Resistance. Took 4 fire damage, revealed the shield, somehow "unrevealed" the shield, and was able to use it again. Not sure of the sequence of events that got that to happen. I was just idly tapping on the screen when thinking about which other cards to discard.

Loot cards do not have a check to acquire, but have the "Check to Acquire" text overlaid where also says "Type Item", etc... iOS 9.3.4/iPad/Pathfinder 1.0.3.8

While not 100% consistent, here's an easier way to understand the relationship between rarity, adventure decks, and relative difficulty: - When your cards are about on par with the scenario (all commons, no treasures), it's balanced so that you win about half the time. - The "rarer" a card is, the more it behaves like a card from a "higher" than it's adventure deck number. - The more rare/epic/legendary cards you have in play, the more you're outgunning the scenario, thus reducing the overall difficulty. I guess my point is that there's generally nothing wrong with Common cards. They aren't "common" in a trading card or Magic: The Gathering sense, they're just the normal cards found in the game. What makes the treasure card add-ons different is that rarer cards might be "half an adventure deck" or "a full adventure deck" more powerful than the number seen on the card, thus giving the player a little extra edge in the game.

The different "compromise" options really depend on what the devs are intending. Is the daily challenge meant for the "pro" Pathfinder player, or is it just a fun way to add more variety to the game by giving you incentives to changeup your play style? Rather framing this as a hardcore vs. casual thing, it's better understood on the developer-side by their figuring how much "free" gold users should be able to get on a daily/weekly basis without shattering their virtual economy. Who knows, maybe they already did that, and figured it was fine to let some users grind for an additional 1000 or so gold per week while denying the casual segment that opportunity. Man, I'm with you on the free time thing. Between kids and stuff, I've got a pretty variable amount of time in a given day. If say, every daily challenge takes an hour to grind out, that may mean I will never have a chance to finish a challenge. If it was more of a "bounty" system, I could accept one challenge at a time and work on it over the next couple days. That way really dedicated players could still knock them out daily, and the "filthy casuals" amongst us could at least have a chance to do a few challenges per week. While I don't believe I should be able to queue up a whole week's worth of challenges and blast thorough them on the weekend, being able to hold onto a challenge until I can complete it might be the difference between finishing up absolutely none of them and doing two or three per week. Anyway, it's a new feature for the game, and as data rolls in, I'd expect something to change as the challenges are tweaked toward whatever completion rate may have been envisioned. Currently, they seem to be more "chores" than "challenges." Even just lowering some of the goals a bit would help everyone.

I agree. I've accumulated an assortment of dice over the years, and I always go back to a mid-90's set from an AD&D starter box, not out of nostalgia, but because they can be easily read across the table (or occasionally under it). Also, I'm not sure if it's done to troll any geologists out there, but the mineral-themed dice don't really match up with their names either. Lapis Lazuli, the mineral component for the bluest pigment known to man for centuries, is a weird opalescent pink. Hematite may look black in pictures, but in person, it usually appears as a polished dark silver. There are a few other examples too. It's the geology equivalent to annoying graphic designers with a t-shirt that says: Helvetica!

It would be nice.... but (and it's a big "but") it would run afoul of Paizo's community use policy. There have been a few discussions over on Reddit about this, but it all boils down to following Paizo's wishes with regard to their games. Putting up a list of cards with an "in your own words" description would likely be fine (such things exist already), but using actual card text or artwork is not allowed. It doesn't mean it can't be done, but the Pathfinder community seems to self-police when it comes to stuff like this. The Pathfinder Adventures card game has been around for years, and the reason wikis are so bare isn't the lack of enthusiasm, but out of respect for the developers. I can't comment about Obsidian's legal agreements with Paizo, but I'm sure they'd also find it pretty uncool if you ripped their assets and tossed it all online. Paizo has a few community packages you can remix about, as long as you give them the appropriate credit.

Well, I'd certainly be in favor of an "Obsidian Lite" skin without the other property references. The embossed black-on-white effect looks a lot classier than the animated elemental dice. So, are there any other easter eggs we should be on the lookout for?

That was fast! All good now, thanks!

[EDIT: Disregard. It looks like I should have waited another couple minutes for a dev to post that the gold is on its way.] Anyway, any news on how to get the Obsidian dice skin? Took me until today to notice that one of the dice posted on the dev blog was not like the others.

Hmmmmm..., that's a fancy-looking dice skin in the example image! Any chance the rest of us can obtain the Obsidian dice, or are you just showing off something that only the devs get to play with?

Ha ha. Commendable effort though! After a demoralizing bug like that, I probably would have calmly put my tablet down and took it as a sign I should go do something else for a while.

You appear to be correct. There are three dozen dice skins in total, which pretty much fall into the usual tiers (uncommon/rare/epic/legendary). Yes. A fun question for someone to answer would be: "You said three dozen, but I only count 35 and there's a blank spot, what gives?"

Lose quest progress on app delete - Yes, it is only stored locally. Lose gold or treasure chests/cards on app delete - No, that's in "the cloud." For some additional App Store troubleshooting, try: - Verify you actually have enough free space on the iPad. Updates can fail or get stuck if the device is full. - Try downloading some other random app. It will at least verify your Apple ID, check your connection to the App Store, and can sometimes get stuck downloads going again. - "The ten taps" : Open the App Store and tap on any one of the icons on the bottom (Featured, Explore, Updates, etc..) ten times. It force-refreshes the App Store and can clear up some app download/install problems. Adobe also has a really nice resource for App Store weirdness. It is one of the better step-by-step guides out there. Good luck!

As far as I recall, Squire could have had an entirely different issue. Taking a trip through the data mines, as recently as 1.0.3.5 [514], the app considered it an uncommon RoTR base card, not an uncommon treasure card. 1.0.3.6.3 [552] now has it grouped with the Treasure cards. I don't have every version archived, so I can't say exactly when the change occurred. That being said... treasure cards are still RNG'd on the server. At any point, it could have been fixed silently by obsidian since data in the app only really affects card usage and presentation (not treasure generation). However, it might follow that the change in the app coincided with some update in the treasure server.

They add a little favor to Quest Mode. Without any real story to follow along with, the grind would feel a lot worse if it didn't periodically gift you something cool and unexpected. However, I'm curious about what the plan is for treasure chests/cards if they ever release other Adventure paths (yes, I know that's a 2.0 problem and the game sometimes feels like it recently broke through "1.0"...). Will my cadre of Blacksmiths follow me around throughout my different adventure paths? Should I keep a strategic reserve of treasure and gold for the next installment? Is there some whole other system in the works that is going to be separate from what we have now?

It's probably a mechanics thing, I haven't seen anything that out-of-whack in my experiences. Sometimes it isn't really obvious what modifiers are active in a scenario. - The number in the gray circle up top is the "adjusted" number to beat in a roll. It includes any added difficulty due to failing a check (like in Bunyip's case), or other scenario modifiers. There's a "subtract one from all dice rolled" mod that periodically comes up. - The number in the red box in the middle of the screen is the player's modifier. Its usually a positive number, but with situations like not having weapons proficiency when a card requires it, it can easily get to -4 or worse. Having 9+ points of modifiers working against you is a little extreme, but could still be possible in certain situations. Usually when this sort of post pops up it is quickly explained away when the poster didn't have weapons proficiency.

Seemed more-or-less instantaneous for me. I force-quit the game, started it back up, and it was there in the gallery as a deck P ally.

You're pretty much on track. Card tables (the box) are the source of various lists (location decks, etc...) which then have actions performed upon them (draw, shuffle, banish, etc..). Most of the mechanics happen in a simple, abstract form that mirror the tabletop rules pretty closely. The hard stuff is getting that all represented in the interface. Quite true. Quest mode and story mode essentially have different card pools to build a game, but the "tables" themselves do not change unless the game updates. They're more of an index of all the cards that should be available during play. That's the root of all the Treasure card shenanigans last month when the game had certain unobtainable cards left in the card table "index" and it needed a fix via update.

In Unity, the UnityEngine.Random functions seed themselves and quickly pop out a handy no-mess random number that is good enough for most purposes. You can seed it if you want, but it takes care of that behind the scenes. Though, since all UnityEngine.Random numbers are part of the same seeded stream, there is an extraordinarily unlikely theoretical possibility that multiple threads could end up with the same result if they were to pull a random number simultaneously. Mostly an academic debate; Pathfinder and other games seem to use the Unity functions due to simplicity. System.Random is a more "classic" RNG. Needs a seed, takes a few more lines to implement, but allows you to have a one or multiple continuous streams of random numbers if that is of importance. Otherwise works the same, and is technically part of the .NET/Mono family, not Unity. RNGCryptoServiceProvider is the bonkers option. Found in Unity via .NET/Mono as part of the System.Security.Cryptography library, it might output the "best" random numbers, but it is the slow option with more overhead. When you consider that the physical game is played with mass-produced plastic dice or whatever cool D&D dice you found from college, maybe there's a point where a cryptographically secure RNG may end up provide a slightly different gaming experience from tabletop. The app is trying to emulate an actual game that actual people play with their actual hands (I apologize to any self-aware robots that may happen to be playing Pathfinder Adventures). Anyway, I suppose figuring out how the game works has been its own mini-game while I'm waiting for AD4. I've mostly been trying to learn the hows and whys of where the Pathfinder app diverges from tabletop play.

I'm not sure what you're looking for. The game seems to use the Unity Engine's Random() and Random.Range() functions. It is quick, automatically seeded, and likely how most every other Unity game handles randomization. Yes, there are more complicated methods using C# System.Random or Crypto libraries, but its debatable if the effort is worth it to simulate dice throws unless you are running an online casino. Now that I'm looking a little harder, shuffling/reordering appears to be handed by a standard algorithm. Other than arguing that Unity's RNG core is flawed, perceived bias is likely a human problem, not a technical issue. As far as I'm concerned, the randomization is still far better than sloppy shuffles and leaning dice you get when playing the physical Pathfinder ACG. Its actually pretty difficult to get a "good" shuffle on all those tiny stacks of cards when you're playing with a group. (especially when the scenario is running late into the night...)

I know it sounds obvious to say, but there's no indication that the game fudges dice rolls in your favor. Everything is pretty clearly defined. For instance, a "d12" is boring old random number from 1 to 12 (inclusive). It would be cool if the game gave you the odds for each check you're attempting. That way, when you feel like you're on a hot streak you'd actually find out the 3d6+4 you're throwing at a Bunyip really has a 95% success rate.

Thanks for the update! I'm thankful for all the progress that's been made in the last couple months. Don't believe all the forum postings, not everyone here has been sharpening their pitchforks since "June"

EDIT: (previous post was probably wrong) There is a shuffle, and it has a classic CS101 vibe to it. If there are any "issues" in shuffling (rather unlikely), it is a Unity Engine or PRNG thing, not necessarily a fault of the game. Unless you played the physical game with precision dice and a mechanical shuffler, things are likely more far random in the digital version.