StormbringerGT

There was a ton of discussion about this. It was not a simple choice. As far as two character parties go we needed to go with what would be an easier choice for new players to ease into the game as oppose to vets. Also overwhelming a new player with 4 or 6 characters off the bat might scare them away. Remember that when most people learn to play they are just playing a single character or two. (I have plenty of solo games under my belt on the physical version, but that is not an ideal way to learn to play and turns take forever. I am constantly checking all my characters hands and I forget to activate powers...) Meri helps new players learn that they can run away from a fight or a probe is need be, it helps them learn to manipulate the location deck. It also lets them know you have to stop and fight sometime, or you can run out of time. Kyra can heal and this is another good skill for new players to learn. It can be easy to die in this game at first. You can quickly over help on checks or not provide enough and lose entire hands. She helps ease that a bit and teaches you how to heal and how to make your characters work together. Since we automate a lot of things it is much easier to handle a 4 or 6 character party here than in the physical game, however that is still a lot to remember and a lot to do.

What makes this harder to balance is that we are not just looking at a player's skill. There are a few huge random factors here that can really skew a game one way or another. Deck draw. A skilled player can manipulate their deck a little and hone their deck to a more efficient machine. But a random draw is still a random draw. This is not Magic the Gathering and their is little in the way of finding a specific card in your deck or windmilling. If the only weapon Lem has is on the on the bottom of the deck and you need a weapon, well.... Dice rolls. This is the swingy-est of all factors. You can have two people play with the same exact decks and the same exact cards and the dice rolls will ensure they have two completely different experiences. Bad rolls will stop you dead in your tracks and a good rolls will make you think that perhaps it was too easy. Character Party. Number of characters and who is in your team. Another difficult thing to balance wildcards around. If you play one character and that one character is Ezren we can't stop you, but the game is not balanced properly for a solo Ezren play through That is why the wildcards are fairly simple in their execution. So Dark Souls was a bad comparison. With Dark Souls player skill will eventually see you through the game. Here we have to worry about player skill and dice rolls. Dice Rolls.... sigh... it is why we all love this hobby though right? I mean we could always only play Euros. I know those little wooden cubes and meeples are much more kind to me that plastic shapes with numbers on them. But like a moth to a flame I find myself "rolling dem bones" time and time again.

I'd have to double check but as far as I know there are no limits to how many of each card you can pull from a chest. Also you can salvage cards for gold to help with bloat. Lets say you do have 15 copies of card in your collection that you pulled from a chest, you can salvage some of them so you run into them less often.

I really like the idea of losing 5 blessings right off the bat, but it's something we are considering to moving to later scenarios. It might be too punishing to come across that in earlier scenarios like the base set or AD1.

A couple things to keep in mind. The character you want to hand a check off to have to be at the same location as the person who encountered the card. Multiple check cards will display a check value and have the word THEN between the checks. If they display OR, then you only do one check or the other and as such it is not a multiple check card. We do allow you to hand off a check but it is not well advertised. There is a pink button that appears on the check drop down box. You have to tap that to hand off a check. We don't prompt you or anything (or really call it out for that matter. something that we are working on) so it is very easy to miss.

Are you still seeing any gold you have accumulated until that point?

1000 rejoice!

Have you tried the harder difficulties yet? You should! What do you think of the wildcards? Which ones seemed balanced? Which ones were too hard or punishing? Keep in mind these are supposed to be like Dark Souls hard for Pathfinder. Especially Legendary, this is something you should feel proud of when you beat it. If you are beating everything on Legendary on your first try we probably made it too easy, or you had a pretty good pull on Wildcards. Or you are a pro at Pathfinder. Also ideas! Lets hear some of your ideas on wildcards! Toss some out there and let me judge you and your ideas behind the safety of my computer monitor and lets discuss them!

These don't exist in the physical game. There will be a list of them eventually though.

We want to do more cool things like that :3

You need to google knee jerk reaction because this was not. -1 point.

Gonna break this down a bit to make it easier to understand. If you are a pathfinder vet some things have changed. First of all you don't create saves you create parties. While some people will just swap around characters in one parties other people may want multiple parties going at once. Characters can be shared across parties. So in between games at the scenario select screen you can bench an Ezren who has some feats and cards under his belt. You can switch to another party or start a new one and place that Ezren in that party. If you decided you wanted an Ezren in each party you would have to start a fresh Ezren for the other party that doesn't have vet Ezren. This is why nicknaming characters will be useful and why we filter between New and Experienced characters. This also means that unlocked difficulties should be shared across parties. This is currently not working in Beta 2 build but we know about it and are working on it. And finally how the vault works. To create a character based persistence we need to figure out how the vault should work. We decided a dynamically created vault was the way to go. This does mean with a lot of time, luck and manipulation, yes you can have a Valeros who struts around with 8 daggers. However certain powerful or unique cards will remain as such. The idea being that is you have more than X amount of copies of a "restricted" card when you start a scenario, the restricted card will be changed into another card. This really helps in online play where if 6 people all join in a game and each of their characters have Holy Candle the game isn't an auto win. 5 of those 6 holy candles will be changed into another item card during play (and will revert back after play, were not taking your card away from you.) Once you get to the point in the game where you can cull cards the game will auto cull x amount (what percentage feels good here? 20%? 30%?) of those cards, basic or elite depending on where you are at in the game, before it makes the location decks for the scenarios. While this may seem like you have less control over what is in the box, with added difficulties and multiple parties it was necessary. Also we needed to make this work for online play. So the vault is dynamically created each time you play a scenario. If its time to cull basics it'll random cull some in the box for you, elites same thing. The game will respect card counts when making a box. There will only be one Holy Candle in a box, 2 Acid Arrows etc. Does the party already have a Holy Candle in one of their decks? Then that party will not run across it again. However another party who doesn't have holy candle yet may come across it. So questions, comments, ideas, feedback, knee jerk reactions?

You are currently doing QA work.... just on a volunteer basis.

Who else was in your party? Is this Beta 1 Build or Beta 2? (the first one or the one that was just released a little bit ago)

It is available now (although apple can take some time) and I still have my job. Huzzah!

Fixed in the next build! Huzzah!

On an entirely unrelated note, please inform me of any immediate QA positions you need to have filled... That's cold!

So we are hoping for a new build tonight, just to keep you posted. Please don't fire me Nathan.

As one of our programmers would put it: "Disable Forfeit button on last Scenario of each Campaign."

Hmmm Which scenarios would quitting break?

It is safe to assume that Paizo including Vic and Mike have played our version of the game a lot.

Soon! We are working on one now. I don't want to give a time frame because we are trying to cram all the fixes in we can, and if we miss that time frame I'll feel like a scrub.

Remember changes like that are Paizo approved. Because the game is digital we are able to get a LOT more balance testing in than the physical version. Just not shuffling and setting up by itself means we get see more.

Thanks for reporting this. It is now a known issue that should be fixed.

Can you tap on the "Story" Button at the main menu? Then tap that party to continue. if the issue persists can you delete that party (you shouldn't have to do the tutorial again).