Need someone to work with on this.

I’m going to need someone who can explain step by step how to do things. Here’s what I need to do to make a pathfinder module.

  1. I need on the main game board to have 8 decks that can be shuffled evenly spaced and then a 9th deck with it’s own discard pile separate from the others.

  2. I need 6 people to have their own windows with their own deck and discard. Also must be able to put cards on the bottom of their deck.

  3. I’ll need windows for the various cards that can be shuffled and have specific cards drawn from the deck. Also need one empty deck that I can put various cards in and shuffle as needed. Basically a card storage setup window.

I’d be willing to help you out as best as I can. It sounds like you want to build this yourself, so I’ll basically just act as an adviser then; ask whatever questions you have. If I get it wrong, I’m sure other folks will help pick up the slack.

Just to be sure, we’re talking about Pathfinder: Rise of the Runelords here, right? Are you planning to do just the base game or are you trying to get in the expansions as well? Asking for the sake of information here.

I’ll work up some mockups to answer the three specific questions you’ve asked already; that way I know I can answer them correctly.

1. I need on the main game board to have 8 decks that can be shuffled evenly spaced and then a 9th deck with it’s own discard pile separate from the others.

Okay. We’ll start here. Presumably you’ve settled on a card size at this point and you’ve got something down for the main board (if not, go ahead and add a board - a 2000x2000 white space is a good generic place to start work on a card game and you can tone that down or replace it when you’re ready). I’d highly recommend adding a zoom capability to the board and setting the default somewhere in the 50% to 63% zone, that way you can more readily see your changes as you make them.

Then it’s just a matter of adding decks to the board. You need ten decks - eight for each of the decks, one for the 9th deck, and one for the 9th deck’s discard pile (you’ll be leaving this one empty with the initial set-up, but it’s still important to have its position set). Give each one a unique name and set their width and height values equal to those of your cards. Set the re-shuffle function on them to “Via Right Click Menu”, and pick a unique Hot Key combination for each deck (I’d recommend key combinations, depending on how often the decks needs to be shuffled.

As for the spacing, you’ll need to experiment a bit with that. Start with your first deck at 100 by 100 (be sure to stick a card in the deck before you start working with it, of course). Hit okay, then edit the deck again and select “Reposition Stack” to put it where you finally want it. That’ll give you X and Y positions for the first deck, and then it’s just a matter of adding or subtracting a value to the positions of each deck to put them where you wish. The values should be slightly larger than the size of your cards - 10 to 20 pixels is usually sufficient. Start a New Game after you’ve positioned the second deck to check how it looks and make further changes if you don’t like it - once it’s where you want it, you’ll know how much to offset the next set of decks.

Time for me to get back to work; #2 and 3 later.

EDIT: You know what, I have done a card game mod and I’ve had do do some of the stuff you’re wanting to do in it. If you’d like, check out Kerbal Card Program; download it and edit it. There’s an area there called the Missions Board; crack it open and you’ll see how I arranged the decks there (each “deck” in this case consisting of a single face-up card).

Hey thanks a lot for your help! Yeah i’m going to do the full game and then the expansions as they come out. My card images are 496 x 690. They seem to come out to big when I was playing with it earlier. I’m going to do your instructions for step one then post when I’m done with that.

No problem, glad to help.

At 496x690, I definitely recommend Zoom Controls on the boards, with the default set pretty low - somewhere in the 30-40% (0.3-0.4) range, actually (that way the players can see the whole layout all at once). You can have a 100% zoom level available for players when/if they need to take a closer look at the cards.

Based on the size of your cards, I’ll suggest a 550 pixel X-axis offset and 750 along the Y-axis. Your board is going to need to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 3300x2250 at a minimum, unless you wind up resizing the cards. Not an issue if you’re just going with a plain color bg, but that could be prohibitive if you do a custom board.

I had a problem with oversized cards early in KCP’s development; I used a Python script to re-size all of them and they still turned out alright. It’s bad code - I have to break it every time I want to use it for something different - but it gets the job done. If you decide to resize all the cards, lemme know and I’ll see about adapting it to this specific case.

Yeah I’ve got zoom and such. I guess the question is is it worth it to resize the cards. I can do it fairly easily but what would be a good image size. My offset is slightly smaller then what you have but I’ll give that offset a try. I’m obviously going to have to settle on a image size for the cards before I really get into this. I was thinking the size of the cards in the dominion module as a place to start.

The only issue I can foresee with leaving the cards the size as they are is the final size of your module; larger images will make the mod bigger. They won’t compress much in the vmod file - so take the file size of all your cards together, multiply that by 0.96, and you’ll have a good estimate of how much space they’re going to contribute to the size of your mod. If that amount is 75 MB or larger, you’re going to want to to shrink your cards down a bit; I’d suggest going down at 50 pixel intervals along the width axis (leaving the aspect ratio alone) unless doing so makes the text on your cards unreadable.

As far as playability goes, that’s one of the things your board zoom setting is taking care of. Keep in mind you’ll also need to have the same zoom capability for your Player Hands when you get to them. Speaking of…

2. I need 6 people to have their own windows with their own deck and discard. Also must be able to put cards on the bottom of their deck.

You probably want to go with Private Windows, especially if privacy is a concern, and definitely if a player should only be allowed to access the cards in their own decks. If privacy isn’t a concern but a player should still only be able to access their own deck, you can set the Private Window to be Visible to All Players. If neither privacy nor exclusive access are a concern, use a Map Window. In all cases, just add a pair of decks to the window, one for the draw deck and the other (empty) for the discard deck. Note if you use Private Windows that you will have to Define Sides in your mod.

Now, as far as sending the card to the bottom of the draw pile goes, I’ll need to do some tinkering to be sure. I know that you can set up a deck with the option of reversing the order of the cards in the deck, so placing a card on the bottom should be a matter of reversing the deck, discarding the card to the deck, and reversing it again. That’s probably going to involve the use of a Trigger Action trait and some Global Key Commands at the window level. Here’s how I think it would work (I haven’t tested this, bear that in mind).

  1. Set the player’s deck up to reversible with the hotkey of CTRL-R.
  2. You want all cards in their deck to include the Return to Deck, Global Key Command and Trigger Action traits, in that order from top to bottom.
  3. Set the Return to Deck command destination to the player’s draw deck, using the hotkey of ALT-1.
  4. For the Global Key Command, set the keyboard command to CTRL-1, and the Global Key Command property to CTRL-R
  5. For the Trigger Action, use whatever Menu Command text and Keyboard Command you wish (provided it’s not one of the ones I just indicated above; I’ll suggest CTRL-B for “bottom”, why not?). Set it to Perform the keystrokes CTRL-1, ALT-1 and CTRL-1 in that order.

That oughta do the trick. Try it out and see if it works; if not, I’ll need to fiddle with it some more. Like I said, I haven’t tested that so I’d be amazed if it actually does like it’s supposed to (quick way to check - select the deck, hit CTRL-R and see if the card you discarded is the card you draw).

#3 when I can get to it.

Hey I shrank the cards by 25% that seems a good size for everything. I’m putting the module on pause for a bit as someone on bgg had already started work on one and sent it to me. I asked him if it was ok to show you to get your thoughts as there are a few changes I’d like to make. Can’t thank you enough for your help.

Ok I can get it to you what would be a good way to send it?

No prob, glad to help.

How big of a mod file are we talking about?

I may have missed it, but I don’t think the ability to shuffle random cards from the player’s discard pile back into the player’s deck has been mentioned. That is the way the healing mechanic for this game works.

Also, privacy is not necessary as Pathfinder is fully co-op, but there is no reason for players to be messing with each others cards so private windows that are viewable by others would probably be optimal.

8 of the 9 decks actually take up the space of 2 piles. You have up to 8 locations and then a 9th deck with a discard pile. Each of the 8 location decks would have a location card located either directly above or below the deck to indicate what location the deck represents. There would also need to be the ability to place the character markers at the locations. In the physical game the character markers are cards, the same size as all the rest of the cards, though for the purposes of conserving space I could see using smaller markers.

Not sure if it would have to be handled separately or not but what about escaping villains? Basically, if a particular card is encountered (the villain) and there are open locations, a separate stack must be created containing the villain and a number of other cards equal to the number of open locations that can then be randomly placed into each of the open locations and those locations then shuffled.

How do you intend to indicate a location has been temporarily closed as opposed to permanently? When playing the physical game we tend to turn the location 90 degrees when it is temporarily closed. I suppose you could just flip the location and use the fact that there are still cards in its deck to indicate that it isn’t really closed.