KickStarter Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[CaesarCzech]

There are enough interesting options without Persuasion. Also it often leads to Good alignment. Some alignments also can lend a similar success as Persuasion checks. Lawful for some reason is the king of alignments there. Although maybe it's just first half of the game.

On Evil character, I'd skip it, for example. Or pick Intimidation Feat to add your STR to check if you're playing Sarevok.

Chaotic Got some decent bonuses as well for example allowing yout Vassalize trolls to get Troll soldiers.

 

[Whisper]

For example my lvl 4 tank has 39 AC with buff from cleric. Enemy bosses hit with +19 to hit. So they only hit on 20 (natural crit).
I can see options to get to 44 AC with lvl 4 tank with some more buffs.

What stats do enemies need to hit my tank?

Also there are fortification items that negate crits.

 

[Notorious]

-terrible encounter design with enemies who are only challenging because they've incredibly bloated stats and they often come in waves which is always cheap. It's still mostly easy though, the only difficult enemies are the ones with insane AC or because you're heavily outnumbered.

Stats are OK, unless you talk about "Unfair" difficulty which is... unfair.
If they had less stats, fights would be too easy, on Hard they are reasonably hard.

Remember your own character stats are bloated too if you make them so.

That's... not what I argued...

 

[CaesarCzech]

because stronger monsters is a such a bad thing.

There are only so many challenging fights* using 3.x combat:

-The enemy is weaker but more numerous
-The enemy is equal in strength and numbers
-The enemy is stronger but fewer in numbers

If the enemy is stronger and more numerous, you are in trouble. You can only push things so far with super-genius tactics, at a certain point math will take over and you will simply lose no matter what.

Fact is, most players will avoid such a scenario precisely because they know it's hopeless. They will try to even the odds, reduce the enemy numbers, or change the battlefield in some way to gain an advantage. Think outside the box.

But this is a CRPG which means you are only allowed to think outside the box in ways the developers already thought of. In the case of the bandit fort there are a few different ways to even the odds, but I can think of dozens of options that players would use in such a PnP scenario that are simply impossible in the game. This is why I think balance is actually more important here than in a PnP game.

*(Some other examples would be a "puzzle fight" where the enemy is hard to fight unless you exploit a specific weakness, then it imhoecomes easy, or a gimmick battle where the enemy has some huge advantage but the players can nullify it or reverse it in some way using some device or aspect of the battlefield, like using a plot-artifact.)

The Enemy stronger and more numerous is IMHO DM failure unless party is tackling Major Villain not necessarily BBEG but you only push them this hard when its one of Defining moments of story.

 

[Whisper]

-terrible encounter design with enemies who are only challenging because they've incredibly bloated stats and they often come in waves which is always cheap. It's still mostly easy though, the only difficult enemies are the ones with insane AC or because you're heavily outnumbered.

Stats are OK, unless you talk about "Unfair" difficulty which is... unfair.
If they had less stats, fights would be too easy, on Hard they are reasonably hard.

Remember your own character stats are bloated too if you make them so.

That's... not what I argued...

What insane AC enemies you talk about?

Remember, you can debuff them (remove armor, reduce AC, reduce Dex etc).

Also your party can get very high +hit.

 

[markus]

The stat bloat is hilarious judged by the standards of P&P and what the DMG would tell you are appropriate encounters, but with a few munchkined characters and some custom difficulty settings it's not really that bad. The majority of the hard encounters (minus that boss fight in which he has a Free Action item equipped) can be dealt with by Web + ranged abilities and anything that makes its Reflex save will fail a Will save. CC is much better than trying to tank things when even trash monsters have a higher BAB than your fighter, multiple attacks per round, and the strength of a fire giant. To tank anything you would need to have Displacement on the character plus a bunch of other buffs but it's easier to just root all the enemies and shoot them. Their HP is not bloated even if their stat blocks are crazy.

If you are trying to tank stuff as if it were an MMO you are going to have a bad time even if you have extreme AC just because every random owlbear has an Ancient Dragon-style stat block plus feats, but their saves don't tend to be that great by comparison even if everything has +save feats also.

I'm torn personally on the difficulty. On one hand, all the broken encounters more or less require you to cheese things. On the other hand, it creates a lot of memorable fights whereas in Pillars 2 almost everything was so easy on the hardest difficulty that everything was forgettable and none of the details of the game system were important because the challenge level was so low. The Stag Lord being capable of TPKing your party in 3 rounds makes him memorable. If you can sneak around and charge him and AoO him to death he can't do anything. But blundering into his kill zone a few attempts and having him effortlessly kill your whole party makes it more rewarding to actually beat him. Plus the boss enemies so far all have really cool unique items that give them all their powerful abilities, so it feels less 'cheap' when you kill them. Although the game bends the rules a lot at least it still obeys the rules that it doesn't bend.

I like the map travel aspect of the game. The random encounters (even if many of them are trivial) make it so that travel has a cost and the fact that everything is timed also makes it so you have to think about the journey. It makes me wonder how a more PnP like game with permadeath/no savescumming game in which you just rerolled characters when you died while keeping the same general goals would do. It'd be interesting to have the same kind of game in a reactive world in which the adventure just picks up again without a real protagonist or plotted hireable NPCs would go. It'd be nteresting to have a similar structure but just built like you would have a real PnP campaign go after you had a TPK.

 

[Shadenuat]

If you are trying to tank stuff as if it were an MMO you are going to have a bad time

which is great.

 

[Notorious]

-terrible encounter design with enemies who are only challenging because they've incredibly bloated stats and they often come in waves which is always cheap. It's still mostly easy though, the only difficult enemies are the ones with insane AC or because you're heavily outnumbered.

Stats are OK, unless you talk about "Unfair" difficulty which is... unfair.
If they had less stats, fights would be too easy, on Hard they are reasonably hard.

Remember your own character stats are bloated too if you make them so.

That's... not what I argued...

What insane AC enemies you talk about?

Remember, you can debuff them (remove armor, reduce AC, reduce Dex etc).

Also your party can get very high +hit.

I said that the game wasn't all that challenging even with it's bloated stats and quite frankly unfair encounters. And that it's an fundamental flaw of D&D (Stat bloats). If I would DM this shit my players would criticize me non-stop and they would be right. Min/Max isn't fun to me, I can do it, but I just don't find it fun.

 

[Shadenuat]

The best part of Staglord quest is that you can pick Lawful Stupid option and challenge him on a "fair duel". After which he just aggroes his whole camp on you and stomps you.

AoD material right there.

I wonder how many people felt for that.

 

[Lambach]

At what level did you guys reach the Stag Lord? I'm in front of the fort right now at level 4, don't think I could get to level 5 without some serious grinding (and the time cap puts a dent in that idea).

 

[Ent]

Did Kingmaker buff monks? I don't remember them having full BAB progression in pathfinder.

 

[Luckmann]

At what level did you guys reach the Stag Lord? I'm in front of the fort right now at level 4, don't think I could get to level 5 without some serious grinding (and the time cap puts a dent in that idea).

3 or 4, so yeah, no way you'd be 5 earlier.

 

[Lyre Mors]

At what level did you guys reach the Stag Lord? I'm in front of the fort right now at level 4, don't think I could get to level 5 without some serious grinding (and the time cap puts a dent in that idea).

I'm there right now at about halfway to level 5. Yeah, it would take some doing to level-up right now, but it's possible. However, there are a number of different approaches to the fight you can take. As someone mentioned, there's about 5-6 variable approaches (including additional NPC allies, etc.) to the situation. Really great design.

 

[Whisper]

At what level did you guys reach the Stag Lord? I'm in front of the fort right now at level 4, don't think I could get to level 5 without some serious grinding (and the time cap puts a dent in that idea).

What difficulty?

You use story characters or custom? Story ones are bad. Playing them you get like +1 to difficulty. Only good is Rogue/Mage and maybe cleric from temple.

 

[Mortmal]

I have reached the PoE point in Kingmaker where having one tanking and the rest using bows/xbows is the best approach to most of the encounters. Except the bosses of course that still wtfpwns everyone.

Far from it, a melee team with teamwork feats and rogues/caster hybrid with opportunist feat works perfectly.Greater invisbility do wonders for sneak attacks and nok nok is a beast.

 

[Whisper]

The stat bloat is hilarious judged by the standards of P&P and what the DMG would tell you are appropriate encounters, but with a few munchkined characters and some custom difficulty settings it's not really that bad. The majority of the hard encounters (minus that boss fight in which he has a Free Action item equipped) can be dealt with by Web + ranged abilities and anything that makes its Reflex save will fail a Will save. CC is much better than trying to tank things when even trash monsters have a higher BAB than your fighter, multiple attacks per round, and the strength of a fire giant. To tank anything you would need to have Displacement on the character plus a bunch of other buffs but it's easier to just root all the enemies and shoot them. Their HP is not bloated even if their stat blocks are crazy.

Difficulty?

They had high saves on Hard+. I wouldnt try Web unless have specialist caster for its school.

 

[Lambach]

What difficulty?

You use story characters or custom? Story ones are bad. Playing them you get like +1 to difficulty. Only good is Rogue/Mage and maybe cleric from temple.

Challenging with story companions, I don't know how people can afford custom characters when they're 2 grand a pop and that's just for a level 2 character.

I didn't actually enter the fort yet, I was just wondering if I'm maybe underleveled. It sort of feels weird fighting the first "boss" without so much as a Fireball or Haste.

 

[Elex]

Oh shit, maybe this is why we're not getting our keys - they burnt out their community manager! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/owlcatgames/pathfinder-kingmaker/posts/2300895



This is crazy. The upside is Roqua has no reason to be butthurt at Owlcat anymore.

this explain all.
So basically this is the secret of the game success?

 

[Luckmann]

Did Kingmaker buff monks? I don't remember them having full BAB progression in pathfinder.

They have had, for quite some time: http://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/unchained-classes/monk-unchained/

 

[Fedora Master]

So there ARE robes in the game:

 

[AwesomeButton]

in Pillars 2 almost everything was so easy on the hardest difficulty that everything was forgettable and none of the details of the game system were important because the challenge level was so low.

Sounds like you too played Deadfire 1.0 with the encounters bug and thought it was too easy.

 

[Thonius]

69% On Reviews. 1% to mostly Positive!!!

 

[Incantatar]

I gave in with all this shilling here and bought it. Got my first hilarious bug in char gen. I can only type two letters at the same time, so I can only have names like Yyaaggoorr.

 

[Whisper]

What difficulty?

You use story characters or custom? Story ones are bad. Playing them you get like +1 to difficulty. Only good is Rogue/Mage and maybe cleric from temple.

Challenging with story companions, I don't know how people can afford custom characters when they're 2 grand a pop and that's just for a level 2 character.

I didn't actually enter the fort yet, I was just wondering if I'm maybe underleveled. It sort of feels weird fighting the first "boss" without so much as a Fireball or Haste.

500 gold at lvl 1. You get around 2000 gold so its 4 companions immediatly when you can recruit them.

 

[Thonius]

So there ARE robes in the game:

I dipped one level in fighter. 10% arcane failure is pretty chill, in fact I had zero arcane failures so far ( maybe bug??)