How Character Persistence, Parties and the "Box" works.

[StormbringerGT]

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?
 

 

One quick note: Elite and Basic card culling has no impact when it comes to filling your character deck with cards from the box in the card selection phase.

 

We do have sliding variable scale for doing this to mimic the effect of PACG. This culling method fits roughly between the standard PACG method (player chooses boons culled) and Organized Play method (auto-cull everything). We took a lot of care in this design decision heavily consulting with Paizo and Mike Selinker. If anything, they recommended going further away from the standard PACG method. We felt that maintaining the gradual draw-down of Basics and Elites was important to maintain and was something we could mimic in software quite easily.

 

[KaruiKage]

As a means to counter "cheating", have the Devs considered a persistent "unlock" mechanic?

 

For example, all the cards have a "level" already. B=0, then 1-6. Why not just restrict cards until that character has completed at least one scenario at that level? IE: Seoni can't accept a 1-level card until she's completed the first scenario in Book 1?

 

Granted, I also am not too concerned if players "power-level" characters with a high-level one, so I can really go either way on this.

[StormbringerGT]

Munchkins gonna Munch.

[KaruiKage]

Alternatively, instead of having to do the method right now to "trade" (bring down a higher level character into a lower level party, play a scenario together), wouldn't their be an easier way with a Vault like setup? Have some screen where you can access all cards among all your characters and just allow players to trade cards they've acquired? Or would that make things *too* easy? (or again, is it even a problem?)

 

Maybe make this a feature after you've completed the full game once, like a New Game +?

[Acamp1]

I agree culling cards is necessary for higher adventures to be challenging and that having to do it manually would be a long bore of a time.  So how about a compromise.  Let the game auto cull cards, but notify the player when this happens. Than build in a feature in the vault to allow the player to uncull  certain  boons.