Idk what you even mean by saving throws. They are not actually that important in PK, although they are more important than in IE games,
AC is a saving throw, they do appear to be more important because you have to match the treadmill but that is indeed wrong. Because by eclipsing the D20 you are making it very important to be able to match up to that now greater than 20 number in rolls. I.E if you have an enemy with 35 AC, and you have modifier of 18 AB, you better hope you roll higher than 17. Meanwhile in IE games usually rolling higher than 10 tends to be enough to get past a saving throw, because you'll likely have 3-4+ to your roll and enemy will not have absurd defences requiring that high rolls.
Nobody ever relied on "assist in rolls" IE games. Because many of them are either pointless/or because you don't want to rely on sheer luck of not dying instantly to something in your plan.
You make d20 rolls in IE games, you should be aware of this fact. When you have a longsword +2 and have an ability that gives +1 to your weapon rolls you are making an assist to that roll, if you have modifiers stacked to 45 the roll becomes a treadmill.
And stacking numbers is indeed the whole or most of the genre. RPGs are about stats, or rather, stats is what makes a game an RPG. And the more control you give player over them, usually the more people like the game.
Argument by popularity? Indeed then we should all design our RPGs to be like MOBAs, which are incidentally also about stacking modifiers. I am to one to not like RPG as a genre than. In this feat, I do agree that PFK succeeded as far as the minutiae of combat and character building is concerned. Where your build is limited to
as you actually have enough control over your character building to make them high enough to rely on passing them instead of just praying or resorting to a hard counter. That alone actually wins over any IE game since you have options: either increase saving throws through builds, or use spells/scrolls/equipment.
This is where we fundamentally disagree, to me its clear as a day that IE is the better choice here and true to the RPG genre. BG1 and BG2 are much better in this regard because there is strategic and tactical approach to the game, where knowledge matters because it provides you with tools. Meanwhile in overinflated world of PFK, the knowledge is the knowledge to get all stacking bonuses you can get, a design which is most commonly found in MMOs.
because aside from balance and encounter execution you also have things like player ability to express themselves in the game. and for that you need choices.
Indeed, which is why PFK fails. Because there is no expression except the expression of stacking +1 modifiers in the optimal way until you eclipse the d20 rolls. Rather than say expression of an inquisitor in party being a natural counter to a lich.
>In BG1 and BG2, you beat an encounter because you use the correct abilities in correct positioning allowed by your build that you did with knowledge of using these, in PFK you do because you had the clarity to stack correct bonuses so that your d20 roll can actually catch up to enemy saving throw without having to hit a natural d20
What are you even talking about? Go back and replay Neeshka Mines in Baldur's Gate 1. Then come back and replay the prologue area in Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
Prologue of PFK, as well as the gameplay up to where you establish the kingdom is good exactly because it is more alike BG1. After which it rapidly detoriates because it doesn't handle increasing power levels like BG2.
If you are to propose that PFK has better combat than either BG1 or BG2, this is fundamentally wrong. On the other hand, you can argue that PFK has meaningful resource management thus is fundamentally better game failing its system and combat in details, that I would agree with. Unfortunately, these games are very combat heavy thus we cannot ignore that and on that account alone BG1/2 have much more coherent as games.
