The tutorial ruleset is 58 pages, pages 74-131 in Ultimate Campaign. The chapter is titled "Downtime", but as I have explained before for us this means "Adventure-strategy"; there's no downtime whatsoever in Ultimate Edition: every aspect of life is somehow simulated.
However, I want to present the tutorial as a modern videogame tutorial, meaning the player shouldn't have to read the manual and can just jump right into the action with the help of pop-up prompts and tooltip mouse-overs. And since this is a Game Master-powered game, I will be personally throwing the pop-ups at SriK in the #master-of-heroes Discord channel, and he will be "mousing-over my tooltips" by asking me questions in there. Of course, if he wants to start digging into the rules in the meantime, that's cool too. But don't let reading slow down play. Just take one of the options I give you, and ask me a question if you need to until the 7 turns are over. Then you can take time to read.
Does this fast mode of play mean SriK's first 7 turns will be suboptimal?
Sure, but then again he gets 7 turns before anyone else so it's not a huge deal. Not to mention this isn't a strict PVP game, a player may just want to wander around and explore without leveling much or building anything (this IS the biggest fictional world ever, after all, so unlike any other game ever, a player here could just explore forever without running out of new things to find: Paizo publishes hundreds of new pages EVERY MONTH). So the players will rarely compete directly with each other, making hardcore optimization a choice rather than a necessity, as it is for example when playing multiplayer Heroes of Might and Magic, etc. If your hero dies, well, I hope he died an interesting death, and you can just buy a new one and start over. There's no win condition here.
Moreover, to fully optimize his moves a player would have to know the FULL ruleset I am planning, which even I don't know at this time. So, once more, just don't worry about it and just make some moves that seem interesting to you for 7 turns, and that will be the tutorial, SriK.
So where precisely in the Sandpoint Hinterlands is SriK's Galden right now?
Nowhere in particular! That's the beauty of the adventure-strategy layer! It works at a much lower resolution than the roleplaying layer, which works at even subatomic resolution when needed lol (e.g. in science-fiction worlds/dimensions). The adventure-strategy layer merely operates at the level of hexes, which in the Kingmaker/"Ultimate Campaign"-derived system we'll be using are "12 miles from corner to corner, representing an area of just less than 95 square miles". The entire Sandpoint Hinterlands then are contained inside one of those hexes, and Galden could be anywhere in those 95 square miles at any time!
Note that Paizo's hexcrawl system isn't the only one that exists, and other companies have smaller-scale ones which have their own benefits. So I am currently exploring how we could incorporate some of these systems in a multi-level hexcrawl system where different activities occur at different levels. But for the purposes of the tutorial, and for a while after, we'll be sticking with Paizo's system, which renders the Inner Sea Region as follows:
That's 2,400 hexes! A Standard map in Civ5 has 4,160, but that's the entire planet. Here it's just one continent. And we have many planets.
So Galden is in precisely the hex I have indicated with the giant arrow on the map above.
Can he move to other hexes? Yes, but not in the tutorial. You see, Paizo's "Downtime" rules don't include cross-hex movement because, for them, movement is part of normal roleplaying, not part of downtime from roleplaying. So the 58 pages I linked above don't contain movement rules, nor combat rules, because combat, again, is part of roleplaying for them. For us however, the adventure-strategy layer will of course include both movement, and combat. Roughly speaking, we will take the movement rules from the hexcrawl rules in Kingmaker/"Ultimate Campaign", and as for the combat rules... that's more complicated. I'll explain in detail soon in the Alpha 2.0 thread.
So if Galden can't move and can't fight, what can he do in the tutorial?
It's in page 84 of "Ultimate Campaign": Downtime Activities, meaning Adventure-strategy Activities.
- ADD SPELLS TO YOUR SPELLBOOK (Not a spellcaster.)
- CONSTRUCT BUILDINGS (Cheapest you can buy outright is Shrine for 270 GP which is all of Galden's money, which means you'd also struggle to build anything from scratch at this point; you need to amass more capital before you think of building anything, and note that, though rooms are cheaper than full buildings and there ARE some you can afford right now, you can't build rooms on their own.)
- CRAFT MAGIC ITEMS (Not a spellcaster.)
- CRAFT MUNDANE ITEMS (Better off buying them at this point, you have the gold.)
- EARN CAPITAL (This is a decent choice. The work can be either Skilled or Unskilled, but Galden doesn't have any marketable skills at this point (he only has Climb, Ride, Knowledge (Dungeoneering), and Swim). So he can only do unskilled work that pays 5 SP a day, which is half a GP. "Alternatively, you can choose to instead earn 1 point of Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic. Neither approach requires any particular knowledge or skill check." As you can see, unskilled workers don't make much in Golarion, but if you run out of resources and find that you need a few more GP or other type of capital to accomplish a short-term goal, you can turn to unskilled labor for a few days.)
- EARN XP (Only for catching up to companions, and Galden doesn't have any.)
- GATHER INFORMATION (This could be good, though it'd help to have ranks in Diplomacy, which Galden doesn't; still doable though, especially if you convert some gold to Influence to boost the roll.)
- HEAL OTHERS (There are no others.)
- LEAD YOUR KINGDOM (Don't have one.)
- PROMOTE A BUSINESS (Don't have one, nor an acquaintance who does; well you could promote Cyrdak's theater I suppose.)
- REPLACE YOUR ANIMAL COMPANION (Don't have one.)
- REPLACE YOUR FAMILIAR (Don't have one.)
- RECRUIT FOR AN ORGANIZATION (Could be a good one though the max follower level is 1 because that's Galden's level, so he could e.g. recruit 5 cutpurses for 110 GP, which he can easily afford, and they would generate capital for you every turn thereafter, though note the Sandpoint sheriff is friends with our Sandpoint Crew, so there could be trouble lol, but that's weeks in the future and you can stack some paper in the meantime! Just skim the Teams section in page 104 and see what looks interesting and affordable, and maybe also legal depending on your risk tolerance. Note that, unlike rooms which require buildings, teams don't require organizations to function, so you can hire just a single team. This is all hazy in Paizo's rules, so this is my ruling for Ultimate Edition.)
- RESEARCH A SPELL (Not a spellcaster.)
- RESEARCH FACTS AND LORE (Another good one, and this relies on Knowledge checks, and Galden has Knowledge (Dungeoneering)! So he could look into info on Black Fang's dungeon assuming he knows where Black Fang is, which would require success in the Gather Information activity!)
- REST (Fully rested.)
- RETRAIN (1st-level hero so not much scope for retraining.)
- RUN A BUSINESS (Don't have one.)
- SCHEME FOR AN UPCOMING ADVENTURE (Another good one for Galden, given his plans to tackle Black Fang's Dungeon.)
- TRAIN AN ANIMAL (Don't have one.)
- CLAIM BUILDINGS (That's the activity I added for Ultimate Edition, and the link takes you to it, but you have no buildings to claim at this time.)
So a commonsensical first turn would be recruit a team so it can generate capital for you over the remainder of the tutorial, and then in the next turn start trying to find where Black Fang is, and if/when you succeed at that start researching his dungeon, and finally research the scenario's particulars themselves for some tips. On the other hand, you could also do some math and determine that the gold that would go for the team perhaps wouldn't be recovered before the end of the tutorial? So maybe don't recruit a team and put all your money in the info-gathering activities for maximum chance of finding useful info to utilize against Black Fang... Or you could just YOLO Black Fang and put all your money into as many Teams as you can afford, and start stacking that paper to get ahead of the curve when the other players join!
Note that "Unless otherwise noted, the members of a team are not adventurers and are unwilling to accompany you into dungeons and other deadly locations." So no matter how many teams you recruit, you aren't taking them to Black Fang's dungeon.
So choose Galden's activity for the first turn and then go to the #master-of-heroes channel on Discord and simply type:
Galden>[Activity]
So if the activity is Earn Capital, you would type:
Galden>Earn Capital (Unskilled, GP)
And I would reply with:
Galden: +5 SP
You see I want to run Master of Heroes as close as possible, in terms of the interface, to a text adventure game. Obviously it's not a text adventure game, we'll have every room rendered in photorealistic virtual reality eventually and with great graphics until then, but I want to condense the commands and their results in as tight a format as possible because I want the system to be scalable to dozens of players and GMs running hundreds if not thousands of heroes. So we must strive for efficiency.
Any questions, post them in the channel, before or after you give a command, and remember there are two #master-of-heroes channels, the top one for forum notifications, and the bottom one where the actual playing happens. So use the bottom one.
See you on Discord, and can't wait for your first command! Please make it as soon as you can today, or tomorrow at the latest! Let's get me this GOTY and start the game!
