What I would want on Pathfinder Adventures

[Cesquis]

Hello Everyone,

These are just some improves and tweaks that I wish were implemented for this game, chances are someone has already posted about these, but I am going to put them down just in case:

 

1.  Change 'Banish' to 'Destroy'

It would be easier for new players to understand what will happen to the card, and this way the word will not be misconstrued as 'Bury' (during my first ten hours of play I kept forgetting the difference between 'Banish' and 'Bury').  

 

2.  Faster Card Movement (Especially After Clearing An Area)

Just something that irritates me a little bit.  After an area is cleared, why does the game remove one card at a time from the location deck when it would be faster (and more realistic) to remove them all at once? Also, I feel like the shuffling and general movement of cards is slower than it needs to be.  Though I eventually grew to tolerate it (i.e. put up with it), when I first started playing this game I honestly felt like the developer was showing no respect for the time I was taking to play it.  

 

3.  Auto-Casting For Certain Character Skills (Especially Lini's Animal Trick)

During the 60+ hours I have played this game, there have been multiple occasions where I would have succeeded in a check, but instead failed because I forgot to cast a certain character skill.  The best example (for me at least) is Lini and her Animal Trick skill; I have yet to encounter a circumstance in which I wouldn't have wanted her to cast it for her checks, and yet there were many times I failed a check simply because I forgot to cast it.  

 

4.  Clarify What Seoni's "Worthy Sacrifice" Skill Does

When I first read the description of the Worthy Sacrifice skill, I realized that there were two ways of interpreting it: 

A.  (The more likely interpretation) ...draws 3 allies FROM HER DECK, or

B.  (The less likely interpretation) ...draws 3 NEW allies (thus making it one of the most useful skills).  

The problem was the description did not have the words ...NEW... or ...FROM HER DECK in it, so it was way to vague for me.  In case you were wondering, my hopes that it would be interpretation B won out over my experience as a gamer which was leaning towards interpretation A; I was disappointed.  

 

5.  Runes

Just a small issue, I had a large number of runes at my disposal, unfortunately I did not realize two things:

A.  Clicking the 'USE' button more than once will overwrite the previous rune, and

B.  The rune being used will not show on the interface until the rune management window is closed, which I learned only after wasting a few runes due to problem A.  

Just fix one or both of these issues please.  

 

6.  Make Buying Treasure Chests Worthwhile

To me, buying treasure chests becomes mostly pointless after reaching scenario 3 or 4 (or even earlier with the Obsidian Edition) in the campaign, since by that point its easier to get the cards you need through regular play.  By that point, the only reason to keep purchasing chests is to hopefully get a rare dice skin, and you can already get most of them through the marketplace anyway. To make the expense of buying treasure chests more worthwhile to players, there needs to be more items (runes, consumables) that can only be found through treasure chests.  Obvious examples would be tonics that allow you to respec a character or give them a power/skill/card feat.  

[Jenceslav]

Hello, some of your ideas are worth considering, but some of them are probably no-go

1) Banish => Destroy change is probably impossible, as the keyword is directly from the card game, so Obsidian may not even have rights to change the core keywords. Maybe it would be great if the Banish buttons were coloured slightly differently, e.g. reddish. But changing name? No way, sorry.

2) Yes, the animation is a bit slow, but I think it is slow because you may be hoping that there is no Villain in that location you just closed. And if it is cleared right away, you may click fast and not notice that there is a Villain. And because it will not mark the deck as examined, you do not have the option to look at that card again. Maybe there could be a new option in settings to enable "fast-shuffle, fast-closing".

3) I often curse a little in such situations (such as Merisiel forgetting to use her SuperBeltOfAlmostUniversalBonuses+2 - Belt of Physical Might), but it is my fault. There ARE some occasions at which I do not want to succeed (Vault of Greed, wildcard: Ally/Blessing > End turn), so auto-revealing is not a good idea. It would create many more bugs to "de-reveal" cards that you do not want to use... It may get a lot repetitive with Lini

4) I had to open the game to check if it is different from the card game, where her power is "At the start of your turn, you may banish an ally to draw 3 cards." (Abyssal Sorcerer) which is very self-explaining. But the wording is the same in computer version. You banish one ally and draw 3 cards - from your deck, obviously.

5) That truly could be improved. Never tried it, but I think the runes should be reinforcing themselves in the time dimension (rune +X for 4 hours used 3 times => 12 hours in duration).

6) Chests become somewhat redundant once you get all cards (I still don't have some uncommon cards ), but unless you have bought Steam version and already have all of them, every chest may supply you with new cards. It also increases the numbers in your Collection, meaning increasing the chances to encounter the cards in play (up to a limit). The Unclaimed section is somewhat counter to the idea of the chest improving your collection. I may not like the feature much as it seems like you are "buying" cards for your heroes and increases the incentive to be "lazy", but I understand and respect this feature. However, 6-th deck weapon in the hands of B-deck hero is brutal. And if you look at chests as buying cards outright, then it may seem to be completely redundant to you. But remember, they also get options for your following play, not a bonus outright and nothing more...

[Ethics Gradient]

Yeah.  I agree entirely with Jenceslav posted above.  Additional thoughts:
 
1. "Banish" as a term is fine, but in the digital game it appears difficult for new players to conceptually understand what happens to the card after it leaves the screen.  If you have experience with the tabletop version, Banish makes sense.  A card that is banished simply returns to the game box.  Whether a boon or bane, cards are neither created nor destroyed, and after a scenario they live either in your characters' decks or in the box.

Instead of the chains and scary noises, it would have been really helpful if the animation conveyed that banished cards just went back to your collection instead of disappearing into the ether.  I'm not a huge fan of Skeuomorphism, but dragging cards into an open game box would really have simplified what's going on.
 
4. I agree that the wording in the game is often confusing, but often the case is reading a little too far into what the text says.  Two of the core rules in the game are: Cards do what they say and Cards don't do what they don't say.  The rulebook also further clarify things in:

Unless a card says otherwise, drawing means taking a card from the specified source and adding it to your hand. If no source is specified, draw it from your character deck.

In Seoni's situation, plainly telling her to "draw three cards" can only be interpreted as drawing cards from her deck.
 
I do agree that Pathfinder ACG occasionally has some technical issues if you don't have a professional Rules Lawyer on-hand to sort things out.  However, RoTR has several years of errata and community FAQs tweaking various bits of wording.  It is generally quite consistent if you stick to the text and infer nothing extra.

 

6.  I'd also love to see some sort of respec potion or mechanism.  Even if it is something cumbersome like: Characters that complete every scenario can respec for 1000G.  The community has been chasing some character respecs for almost a year.  It has been in the dev idea hopper for a long while, and who knows how or if it will ever enter the game.

 

I'm also not entirely sure the future of the treasure chest mechanism.  The Steam editions of the game totally broke the treasure economy.  The primary goal used to be to try and get at least one of everything.  Now that a lot of people are starting out with everything, there is very little drive to grind/buy gold for booster packs.

[zeroth_hour]

Hello Everyone,

These are just some improves and tweaks that I wish were implemented for this game, chances are someone has already posted about these, but I am going to put them down just in case:

 

1.  Change 'Banish' to 'Destroy'

It would be easier for new players to understand what will happen to the card, and this way the word will not be misconstrued as 'Bury' (during my first ten hours of play I kept forgetting the difference between 'Banish' and 'Bury').  

 

 

On top of what other people said, if people have context from Magic the Gathering destroy doesn't make sense either because destroy in that game means to put it into the discard.

 

Everyone's context is slightly different so you can't use your own context as a universal to say that it would be easier for everyone.

[LaSpeakeasi]

Just remove "banish" altogether. It's a stupid idea. You spend hours collecting those cards, why would you want to destroy it? The developer are just begging for people to give up on the game because they feel frustrated.

[LaSpeakeasi]

Yeah.  I agree entirely with Jenceslav posted above.  Additional thoughts:

 

1. "Banish" as a term is fine, but in the digital game it appears difficult for new players to conceptually understand what happens to the card after it leaves the screen.  If you have experience with the tabletop version, Banish makes sense.  A card that is banished simply returns to the game box.  Whether a boon or bane, cards are neither created nor destroyed, and after a scenario they live either in your characters' decks or in the box.

Instead of the chains and scary noises, it would have been really helpful if the animation conveyed that banished cards just went back to your collection instead of disappearing into the ether.  I'm not a huge fan of Skeuomorphism, but dragging cards into an open game box would really have simplified what's going on.

We understand what "banish" is, we just think it's BS. I don't have to follow tabletop rules if I don't like it. If I paid for my card set, and spent hours grinding to find a rare card, I'm not "putting it back in the gamebox" just cuz the rules said so. If you take a survey at tabletop players, you'll find that most people indeed do not follow all the rules if it doesn't make sense to them.

[Hannibal_PJV]

I always follow that rule. So now the statistic is 50/50 with two Person. I have not seen any complains from this in Paizo conserning this so most likely it it 99/1 in reality. Or even smaller.

Mainly because it is the official rule...

 

The game is too easy allready so all rules that makes it harder Are good...

Edited September 12, 2017 by Hannibal_PJV

[Ethics Gradient]

We understand what "banish" is, we just think it's BS. I don't have to follow tabletop rules if I don't like it. If I paid for my card set, and spent hours grinding to find a rare card, I'm not "putting it back in the gamebox" just cuz the rules said so. If you take a survey at tabletop players, you'll find that most people indeed do not follow all the rules if it doesn't make sense to them.

 

No, if you were to take that survey of Pathfinder ACG players, you would find that most people would just grumpily banish awesome cards if the game leaves them no other choice.  Yes, the game mechanics are occasionally not in your favor, but that doesn't make they do not make sense.

 

Why even bother playing the game to "grind" for cards if you can just grab whatever from the box in the first place?  Sometimes the game grants you some awesome cards, and then sometimes on rare occasions it forces you to give them up.  It is just the nature of how the game was designed.

 

If you lost a loot card, yes, there are tricks to get it back by playing a single scenario. But any other card that gets returned to the pool might just have to wait until you randomly encounter it later.