Sines314

It's good to know I'm appreciated :D I had actually bought Leiutenant Lem straight up. I didn't have base Lem and wanted to get him for a Valeros / Lem duo team. I had enough gold (I'd be out the gold I needed to get AP6, but I figured I'd make that back in time) to pick him up instead of the base version, so I figured I might as well enjoy getting the two as a package rather than one or the other. But honestly, not sure I'd ever use base Lem. Lt. Lem just seems like an almost straight upgrade. If you're going for an Archer Lem, then the boost to Dexterity is great! If you're going for a Caster Lem, then you're already going to have so much Charisma that the penalty to diplomacy doesn't matter! Throw in that Lem's cards fall into one of three categories (Spells, Deathbane Light Crossbow, Song Fodder), and even if you don't want the armor, it's not a huge loss in exchange for the d10 Dexterity.

I'd be really surprised if there were no further adaptations of the card game. I could be wrong, but once a stable game-framework is in place, adding new Adventures should be relatively easy. The majority of cards, locations and other whatnots can be fit into the game as it is without too much effort, I'd think. The creative development has already been done by Paizo, although there is room for Obsidian to adjust S&S based on user-criticism from the tabletop players since then. Barring a sufficiently large licensing fee from Paizo, it should be easy to turn a reasonably good profit on this. That being said, I suspect it is further down the list. Quest Mode (or some other 'endless' mode alternative) probably warrants a look first. As does the bugfixing and, of course, the PC release. So I don't know about it happening anytime soon, but I'd be surprised if it didn't happen.

Fair enough to have Lini given a weapon instead of giving her a weapon slot. Though I find that a bit more convoluted than I like. Frankly though, with her cycling her animal companions and spells, I find she burns through her deck quickly enough to get to her weapon anyway. Sometimes you get unlucky, sure, but othertimes you get it at the start. And yes, weapons aren't really going to be superior than Holy Light. But I like having the weapon on hand to be able to deal with lesser threats, which might not even need a beast form boost later on. And I think you get enough card feats that sparing one for a weapon isn't so bad. Though I can fully understand how just having another character provide one for her, and how that's much easier. Especially if you've got Amiri, who isn't able to recycle her extra weapons in the same way that Harsk and Valeros can.

I'm running a 5 person party, and I gave her a weapon, and make regular use of it. Divine Attack Spells just aren't all that great, and there aren't that many of them. Furthermore, a Weapon can make room in the deck for more non-attack spells, since a single weapon is re-usable, whereas an individual spell needs to be recycled. With several animal allies, Lini can afford to take a lot of extra turns, as the animals will get recycled back into her hand regularly, and so it's really helpful to have an attack option that stays with you. Throw in that Lini is all but gauranteed to get Weapon Proficiency as her third Power Feat (the alternatives are Light Armor Proficiency, or skipping a quest so you can put 5 points into her Role Card) and you get quite a lot for very little. For reference, Lini is this parties only divine caster, so she's not sharing with anyone. There are just too many good reasons to give her a weapon.

So, some items let you add extra dice to your Perception / Survival / Whatever checks. Not to your Wisdom / Whatever checks, but to those skills specifically. And since rolls for untrained skills default to d4s, this makes those items near worthless. The Wayfinder +2 to perception checks are almost always worthless, because it forces you to use the untrained check. Sajan could roll a d8 for a Wisdom / Perception check... or he could use the Wayfinder and roll 1d4+2, which isn't exactly an upgrade. It can also happen with things like the Archer Ally. The +d4 to RANGED combat checks means that Lt. Lems d10 ranged attack die turns into 2d4, a complete downgrade. Is this the way it's supposed to work? Or should items that let you add a bonus to a certain skill roll allow you to use the stat die, such as Dex when you use a boon to add to ranged checks, and this is just a bug?

A fair amount of it is going to depend on your party. Amiri buries a card to activate her Rage. Scenario 4.3 requires you to bury a card from your hand every time you gain a spell (and there's an extra spell card in every location deck), but this isn't super easy if you're not running mages. If you're willing to get the challenge without playing naturally, then you're best bet is to play a quick solo session with Amiri. Rage every chance you get. You'll probably die before you bury 15 cards, unless you obtain a lot of boons, but you can just run another round. There's probably a better option, but that's the obvious one that comes to mind if you want to just straight up grind it.

Agreed. Such a mechanic isn't going to break the game, especially given that re-speccing isn't going to change the cards in their deck, and thus could potentially weaken the character in the short term. It gives a little bit more satisfaction and control to the players, and opens up another mild revenue stream. All in all, I see it as a win-win.

I'm inclined to get Lieutenant Lem a bit more credit. First off, he gets a free feat, something only Harsk gets (although Harsk gets a much better one). He's also the only alt to get a new feat options in Heavy Armor. Now, the loss of Diplomacy and gain of Dexterity is a bit of a wash. Personally, I'd call this a net gain, as his Charisma is likely to be high enough on it's own to take care of many problems, whereas his Dexterity needs more help. So the stat changes are about even, if not slightly advantageous. However, then we get to armor. -1 Ally for +1 Armor and Light Armor Proficiency. Now, Lem doesn't have armor cards naturally. And while Armor isn't super useful, a single armor card is nice to have in hand, especially for a character who isn't super great at combat checks. So a single armor card in the deck, and the proficiency to use it, is a pretty good addition. Does it compare to the -1 Ally? Well, Lem tends to be better in smaller games, where burning allies for extra turns isn't as important. This is especially the case given that his generally mediocre stats means you're not going to want to burn allies for extra turns anyway. Even with Solo Performance, you can only recharge so many cards to help out your own fights. Furthermore, the armor card isn't really going to be dead weight in the deck. If you're not recharging cards with Bardic Performance, then you're not really using Lem properly anyway. If you get the armor in hand, and you won't need it, you can just Recharge it to fuel Bardic Performance. Sure, the ally you lost would do that just as well, but it's nice to have a single card in your deck that can do something no other card can do, so that you can choose to keep it around just in case. It's not going to clog your hand up if you don't want it to. This all gets a little better once you start getting enchant armor with non-damage reduction effects. To be fair, you could just carry around a damage prevention item, but now that you're not doing that, you're trading an Ally card for an Item card, a somewhat better trade. I'd say that Lt. Lem is actually a small upgrade. You gain a fair bit without losing too much.

Fair enough, although armor only blocking specific damage types is part of the problem. Make a reflex save or take acid damage isn't going to give incentive for armor, if it just so happens you weren't packing an acid-resistant armor card. Do later sets also make energy resistant armor more common and versatile?

I think this game is prone to making the player think they've got bad luck more than other games. There is pretty much no reason to care about rolling high. With a few exceptions, meeting the DC, and exceeding it by 20 have exactly the same results. As such, we never really 'log' the really high rolls, because they don't matter. Likewise, if a roll needs something like an 8 on a d8, we're not likely to remember that roll either, as if it were important enough for us to care a lot about succeeding, we'd be spending some blessings or other buffs on it. Contrast with, for example, XCOM. For every important 90% shot you miss, you're going to score that 10% critical on a key target, or make a 50/50 shot and roll max damage. In Pathfinder Adventures, there are simply far fewer situations where the game swings on a very lucky roll, than on a very unlucky roll. So we're even more inclined than usual to count the losses more than the hits. At the very least, that's my experience playing a larger party. Perhaps smaller parties with fewer blessings and skills to go around are more likely to gamble on low probability actions. But even then, there's still the fact that a high damage roll will almost always be forgotten, since it doesn't matter.

Ah, didn't know about what the infrastructure was already capable of. I should have remembered this was a Unity game. However, it does seem likely that there will be some bug fixing to be done before the Steam release. She is a fickle mistress, and while the bugs aren't too bothersome (at least, not that I've encoutered), you only get one fresh Steam release to impress with, so it's worth the extra effort.

Oh I quite like them. Some characters aren't hard to build, but it's nice to get inspiration with what to do with them, and how they might fit into a party. Definitely do all the characters, especially if you can fit in some extra notes on their alts.

No confirmation on that, I believe. I've also heard tentative concerns about cross-platforming, like they think there is at least some possibility it won't happen. I know it's a problem with PS4 games, though I haven't heard of any such problems with iOS / Android. Given that it's a small division of the company, I don't think they'll do Steam and Cross-Platforming at the same time. Unless other parts of Obsidian loans them the man-power for cross-platform setup, it's probably just too much work to put off the Steam release, and the influx of cash that'll offer. If they do anything else before / alongside of the Steam release, it'll be multiplayer. Unfortunately, people like us have already paid into the system, and may still do so through the platform we presently have. Without borrowing some employees from another department, cross-platform is probably just too much work for the potential income right now, especially since that means that some impatient players might buy content twice. Not happy about that, but I'd likely make the same choices in their position, so I can't be too upset. If I had to bet, I'd say priorities are as such... 1. Steam 2. Multiplayer 3. Tie between Quest Mode and Cross-Platform Quest Mode offers some slight disincentive to play Story Mode and thus buy the adventures, but it might also attract players who didn't want to have to choose between playing new adventures and getting new characters. Cross-Platform falls under 'things you have to do', but I don't think it offers much in return. Now of course, I hope I'm wrong and Steam launches with cross-platform, so I'm not stuck playing on a cell-phone screen. And while I discussed things in cold-hearted monetary terms, I don't believe the Pathfinder staff are heartless bureaucrats. I'll never forget Obsidians work on New Vegas, wherein several characters, with lengthy backstories, existed solely to provide context and flavor to a minor side-quest of another minor side-quest (Look up the NCR 1st Recon). That's not the kind of thing people just trying to cash a paycheck do. Still, that kind of thinking does enter the mind at some-point, and things like Quest Mode, Steam release and Multiplayer are going to make a lot more people happy than cross-platform will. And this whole post is predicated on the devs not being able to say anything they can commit to just yet, so watch all my speculation being rendered pointless by a schedule from a dev in the very next post :D

There was a period in my life where I had such terrible dice rolls, I asked the DM if I could treat all my d20 rolls as being equal to 21 - the face value, so that a roll of 6 was a 15. This did, quite strangely, work. I had much better rolls for a while. I've since dropped it and things seem back to normal. I'm not a superstitious man, and I'm still using the same dice, so I have no idea what happened there. But hey, I figured that there was no harm in doing that, as that method would result in exactly the same spread on a fair die anyway :D And as far as this game goes, I seem to be having about the right amount of luck. Rolling 1s on two or more dice at once is painful and memorable, but I don't think it happens more often than it should. Still, it's also possible the OP isn't imagining it. For every player with an amazing streak of luck, there's going to be some poor guy who has constant bad rolls. You could legitimately be rolling regularly low simply because the dice gods have decreed it. The good news is that the dice gods are by nature capricious, and that this could turn around at any moment. Either that, or program a mod to flip the dice rolls, in order to emulate my solution ^_^

I fully understand this logic, and it does make sense, however this is one of those weird cases where the customer would actually be happy with less. If you had just sold the alts at their current price, without the base champion, people might complain about how expensive they were, but they wouldn't feel punished for purchasing the alt after they bought the base champion. Now, if you were to remove the base champion without lowering the price, people would feel like you were selling less for the same price, even though they would have been (relatively) happy with the price as it was if that's how you released it. So now you should probably start selling 'un-bundled' alts for ~1000 gold less to make people happy, whereas if you sold them at their current 6/7k prices without the base character originally, people would be about as happy. As a further consideration, offering only the 'bundle' can result in people buying neither. If it weren't for the 'always bundled' alts, I probably would have purchased a couple more champions and started a second team already. However, now I'm wondering if I shouldn't wait for the full deal instead. Given how much more the alts cost, this desire to get everything could delay me from purchasing the characters indefinitely. However, if the alts cost their current price without the extra champion bundled, then I'd buy up the base ones right now, and maybe even consider spending money on the alts (more buying specials and gold, rather than the 2 alt-bundles themselves). But right now, I'm kind of in a decision limbo. Again, somewhat ironically, it doesn't help the situation that I believe you guys when you say you're taking on our advice. Sure, I could purchase the New Years bundle and get Seoni and Harsk (who are the most interesting alts I don't have the base character of), but maybe I'd be better off waiting until I see some turn-around on this? Perhaps there will be an option to buy several alts (without the base character) for $10? I know this information isn't super helpful, and that it can make it seem like a bad idea to listen to us, because then it sets up expectations that themselves cause problems. It's a bit of a catch-22. However, I guess the one lesson to learn on something like this is to not leave things hanging for too long. Don't rush to a decision, but don't let players await better deals for so long they just stop playing. "Take your time, but hurry it up" as my grandfather used to say. Right now, I'm still finishing up my first run. If the alt situation were a bit more clean cut (without expensive bundles), I'd probably already be running a second part right now. However, I've decided to just finish up the first run itself, and then figure out what I'll want to do for a second party, and whether or not I want to buy alts. If there is still some kind of special (like the New Years offer) out when I get to that point, I'll likely pick it up to get some alts, even if the price isn't great. However, if that special offer is off the table, then there is a good chance that I'll just put down the game for a while and keep an eye out for a more equitable deal, and not only not buy something now, but be unavailable for making impulse purchases later. As always, when criticizing a games financial model, I like to clarify that I enjoy the game, and fully respect your need to make a living. I just want to ensure as good a relationship as possible between business and customer, and ensure the product does well and that the business gets a good lifetime and ROI for the good work put into the product. As I said before, I still get depressed when I think about AErena, a fabulous game whose financial model failed it. I don't think this game is quite at risk as that one, as it's not a PvP title, but still. There's a lot of potential for Obsidian to build off of here, and I'd like to see that potential fulfilled, even if it leaves my wallet a little less fulfilled :D