Pathfinder Adventure Card Game: Rise of the Runelords (Base Set) - Tips & Strategies

I just posted some Lem strategies in the Path:ACG discussions, but since each character has their own play strategies – why not make tips for Character Play readily available 🙂

Meet Lem

Lem is a toughie – he’s a little good at everything and not good enough at one thing – but his ability to dual wield magic makes him too good of a character not to have around. I don’t play him personally, but he is part of our Pathfinder Six so I’ll share a few things I’ve seen in action

1) Get him a crossbow – a Dex based weapon is his best friend as his combat die is fairly low. His fault is he can only have one weapon, but his boon is he can choose his favored at the start of an adventure. Make it ‘Weapon’ and that crossbow will always be at the ready – just make sure it stays there. 🙂

2)Use his ‘exchange’ wisely -especially with ‘Cure’. Lem with a ‘Cure’ can become a solid healer because you don’t have to recharge it and send it to the back of your deck – you can just send it to the discard pile. WHAT??? Craziness!!! Nope. Any spell in hand can now ‘become’ Cure if you need it through the power of spell exhange. 🙂

3) Lem is a follower – not a leader Lem and Harsk make a good team up. Harsk can hold his own when exploring and then scouts the next card in the deck. Our Harsk usually announces what he sees (in a whisper as any ranger would do :)) and then if it is Lem-able, Lem bats clean-up. If not – Lem usually heads over to a ‘safe’ zone and loots. He can usually pass most loot/spell rolls so he makes for a handy backpack until QuestEnd and it gives him a little more card HP for the current adventure.

Let’s face it, although very well designed and generally well explained, the fact that this game lets you do such a variety actions, well, things bogus in the rules are bound to happen.

Paizo compiled and answered an impressive list of those wandering questions and published them in the FAQ section on their website. Available here, (http://paizo.com/paizo/faq/v5748nruor1gk). You should definitely take a peek. I personally found answer to questions I didn’t even have, yet.

They also took all these answers and revised the rulebook based on them (available in pdf on top of the same page).

As @Ragu, we do not like the rules about character dying while others succesfully completing the scenario. But, dying should be a real risk and so it should have some penalty, also to avoid strategic suicides (heroic suicides should be also fun!)

Our solution is similar, we do not rebuild characters and we give the scenario reward also for the dead character (the team has won anyway!). But when rebuilding decks and trading between characters, the dead ones are out of the trade: they should rebuild their decks with their own cards and rewards, and if not possible they must complete with box cards according to rules restrictions. Just take it as ‘they are recovering from their injuries’.

The game comes with “Token” cards for each character. The players place these token cards next to the various location decks to show that which character is at a particular location. I felt this was a little cumbersome, so I brought my Pathfinder Beginner Box miniatures out, and I use those rather than the Token cards to indicate where the characters are. The Beginner Box minis include four of the characters from the base game, and the others are available to buy, mainly on the secondary market. For some characters, I don’t have the correct mini, so I use a comparable proxy, it doesn’t add to the gameplay, but it definitely adds to the theme and makes the game look much cooler when you’re playing.

Many players have suggested using tokens rather than the character card that comes with the box set. Taking this a bit further, if you own or are willing to pick up the Pathfinder NPC Codex Pawns it contains all of the characters for both the base game and the character add on deck. We’ve been using them since the game was released and makes it much easier for us. In addition, the NPC codex is full of awesome pawns, and you can use any of them to represent your character in game, particularly with all the new characters coming out when the Class Decks are released.

Below are more suggestions to making Pathfinder harder. Not all of these house rules are mine, but I wanted to put them all in one location.

SIMPLE VARIANTS:
– Henchmen and Villain are shuffled into the bottom 5 cards. This removes the lucky “Oh he’s on the top of the deck! Location closed”.
– If you take damage exceeding your hand size, bury one of the cards from your hand or discard the top card of your deck.
– Setup an additional location. This only works with 1-5 players, but is a good way to increase the difficulty.
– Characters can only move to adjacent locations. Reduced mobility makes you plan your movement so you don’t waste turns “getting across town”. Cards like Levitation allow you to break this rule.

I’ve played through the first scenario 4-5 times and the first adventure 2 times.
I always start with closing an ‘easy’ location or a location that have boons that are useful for your character. That way you will have more possibilities picking up boons that will help you in your further adventure.

This game is pretty notoriously easy, particularly when playing with a full party. You just spread out and individually work on closing locations, right? This also minimizes the risk of traps and enemies that deal damage to all characters at a location.

To offset this, make the game a little more difficult, and force a bit more cooperation between party members, we use a house rule that all players start at the same location (determined by numbering each location and rolling a die), and that party members can’t be more than two locations away from the members farthest from them. This makes it more likely that you’ll still be working with someone to close a location, can make it more difficult to keep the boss from escaping, and increases some of the risks of being together, while still allowing Harsk to use his ability to help characters at other locations and Merisiel to use her ability that requires she be alone. It’s not a perfect fix, but it certainly helps.

I’ve played The Skinsaw Murders with 2 characters now and want to get my other characters up there so they can also do this adventure. I’ve left all the cards in the big box (not putting them back in the addon box which the rules say). I currently play Burnt Offerings and if I encounter a boon or a bane from Skinsaw (numbered 2) I simply draw a random card of the same type replacing it. The same thing can be done the other way around; i.e. if you play The Skinsaw Murders and encounter a Goblin Raid barrier, switch it out with the Zombie Horde barrier from Skinsaw instead. This way you don’t have to sort the cards in and out the addon boxes when playing different characters and different quests.

I’ve also tried not doing this but instead encountering a card from Skinsaw when playing Burnt Offerings. This may let you get a better deck faster, but I’ve seen that I more often encounter a bane than a boon when doing this. The theme of the current adventure will also more or less vansih doing this.

I’ve seen people complain on different forums about the theme of the game when encountering a sea creature while a on land location; just draw a new random card and it should be solved.

This might not work when we see the 4th and the 5th adventure addon.

There are a bunch of strange synergies in the game that can help you out. For example, there is an ally that lets you deck-peek at the locations, but the downside is there is a 1/12 chance of encountering a super-boss. Give this card to Merisel, who can choose to evade any encounter.

Father Zantus is a great card for Kyra. It’s tempting to bury him for a heal, but you are better off discarding him for the divine trait and using Kyra’s innate heal ability, or recharging him to gain the +d4 on a divine check when recharging a spell.