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Pathfinder Why Owlcat's Kingmaker Sucks, in Plain Language

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
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11,297
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Turn right after Alpha Centauri
It is not really that exceptional or outstanding. Should be able to adjust this sorcerer to other sorcerers. Wizards can probably solo it as well just needs better planning/execution. 18 Sorc and 2 Vivi at the end for +4 cha mutagen is hardly something exceptional in terms of character building.

The game has yet (to my knowledge) to be played on the hardest setting - unfair kingdom management. Tht would blow this rest spam build right out of the water. My last playthrough I radically minimized rest. Here's VTomb full clear Unfair, no rest:

View attachment 12435

But my kingdom management was still on regular, so I just got a ton of benefits like all masterpieces by Pitax. If you put KM on unfair you'd have to play like this just to survive.

And again, that Vivi splash is awful. Caster level is the hardest cap.

It was to maximize Weird and PK DCs. You won't get any higher than getting another +4 charisma. Though I would never stoop to that level. Then again I am happy with Challenging and ignore anything above. Just boring and obnoxious.
 

Gregz

Arcane
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Messages
9,050
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The Desert Wasteland
note the beginning of review of left bottom one.
"I've Dmed Pathfinder for over 7 years now, and I was never as much of a capricious and scournful god as this game is"

Yeah. Reminds me of the old steam days.

Miss the accurate commentary from experienced gamers?
Nah. I just remember I used to school people like you in the steam discussions. Desiderius too.

'schooling' people doesn't get you banned. Being a fanatical shill does. Luckily for you Codex = free speech, even if that speech is paid for with rubles.
 

Grampy_Bone

Arcane
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Jan 25, 2016
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Wandering the world randomly in search of maps
In 3.0/3.5 D&D multiclassing was discouraged by an XP penalty. Players were all about the PrCs instead because they were exempt. Typically you did not allow players to take multiple PrCs because you were supposed to have a story/quest requirement for each of them. It didn't make sense thematically to join multiple secret elite orders.

PF gets rid of the penalty so there's no reason not to do it, but I've still never seen 3+ "dip/splash" multiclasses in any tabletop game I've played in, though I'm sure some groups allowed it.

Even so, there's almost no multiclass in vanilla 3.x as good as a 2e Mage/Cleric, which was supposed to be balanced by level limits (that no one used). D&D was never really a balanced system to begin with.

There's also the issue of carrying over older mechanics without really thinking them all through. Consider that fighters in Pathfinder are still using the same hit die since 1e (d10). The only increases in health since then has been the change from 9 max hit dice to 20, as well as easier gains to CON, but it still means a 3.x fighter has roughly the same HP gains from levels 1-10 as an old school 1e fighter. Meanwhile damage goes up in every edition, from 3.0 to 3.5 to PF, everything keeps hitting harder. In Kingmaker they beefed up enemy stats even more while mandating a strict 1/2 hit die HP gain, so you get the recipe for 'Rocket Tag Xtreme' so many players either love or hate. There's simply no option here to build an HP tank, your health is just a tiny buffer between one or two hit kills.

Owlcat were taking ideas from JRPGs and MMOs but seemed to forget those games have much cheaper healing resources and deeper HP pools, as well as player-directed level grinding.

I see this pattern emerging again.

Most of us are noting the pattern of russians having oddly low standards in game design.

No, he's a straight up Mystic Theurge, just like he was likely designed to be given his 16CHR

I find this doubtful, Charisma does have utility for pure clerics; what happens when you turn on his auto-leveling?

I think there is a disconnect between different players. Consider there are popular builds for this game which are straight-up bad for the first 5, 10, or even 15 levels. Mystic Thuerge is notable for hosing your character for several levels, taking a long time to catch up. This is considered an acceptable tradeoff for endgame power to min/maxers, but not so much to normal players. Also there are people who build purely to exploit high skill check XP in various ways, or who "grind solo in old sycamore until level 10" or other silliness like that.

It reminds me of Wizardry 8 discussions where people claimed maining a class with the Locks and Traps skill was bad because you could multiclass into them for one level and click on the 8-tumbler lock in Arnika for 4-5 hours to max out the skill. If that seems reasonable to you then we're just not playing games for the same reasons. If you're willing to go to such extreme lengths to break the game, anyone complaining about difficulty would seem like a whiner.

I doubt when a normal player puts a cleric or mage in their party they do so expecting to have a front-line melee powerhouse (the player has no way of even knowing what spells are in the game until they reach the required level). The fact you can turn spellcasters into multi-role combatants speaks to the versatility of the underlying system (and D&D's perennial OP spell list) but expecting this from players is deeply unintuitive, pretty much regardless of genre.
 
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mediocrepoet

Philosoraptor in Residence
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Combatfag: Gold box / Pathfinder
Codex 2012 Codex+ Now Streaming! Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. MCA Project: Eternity Divinity: Original Sin 2
In 3.0/3.5 D&D multiclassing was discouraged by an XP penalty.

You could still get around this in 3.x by paying attention to your favoured class, as long as every other class was in range of one another, so you could still do a high level favoured class + 1-2 level dips in whatever you want. As I recall, human favoured class was any, so it basically boils down to the same issue in PF.

I've never played PF at a table, though I do own the main book (no splatbooks), but I have DM'd D&D from 2nd edition all the way up. There were guys who I had to argue with because they wanted small monk dips in 3E as well, but I thought the idea was stupid for RP reasons and tended to ban it even though it's not against RAW.
 

Pink Eye

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I'm very into cock and ball torture
>Consider there are popular builds for this game which are straight-up bad for the first 5, 10, or even 15 levels.
I think my pure monks are the best!
Anyone who disagrees is Hitler incarnate.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
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Joined
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New Vegas
Only 5 hours in and definitely seeing the issue with chaotic/lawful/good/neutral stuff not feeling right. I always play a chaotic good Dirty Harry type, and yet most of the decisions that seem to fit that style are either neutral or lawful half the time. Just raided a slaver camp and of course my righteous vigilante wanted to execute all the slavers, and I got "neutral" points for it. Slavery isn't evil to be vanquished? Meh.

P.S. That was a tough fight, took me 3 tries, but it was fun. Combat on hard or whatever it's called seems just right to me.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
Being a fanatical shill does.

No it doesn't. Otherwise we'd have ejected people like Volourn years ago.

Spamming the same shit over and over again, however...

Pink Eye was banned from the kingfaker Steam forums, that's what I'm referring to.

He was banned for overzealously imitating my blunt amateur modding style. We were able to turn around the vibe there for a few months and get some new people into the game and help a lot of people have better experiences with it. Going in with a bad attitude precludes getting the most enjoyment out of games which seek to restore some of the classic challenge of RPGs. There's joy in discovery/invention once you recognize that it requires non-faceroll content.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
No, he's a straight up Mystic Theurge, just like he was likely designed to be given his 16CHR

I find this doubtful, Charisma does have utility for pure clerics; what happens when you turn on his auto-leveling?

I think there is a disconnect between different players. Consider there are popular builds for this game which are straight-up bad for the first 5, 10, or even 15 levels. Mystic Thuerge is notable for hosing your character for several levels, taking a long time to catch up. This is considered an acceptable tradeoff for endgame power to min/maxers, but not so much to normal players. Also there are people who build purely to exploit high skill check XP in various ways, or who "grind solo in old sycamore until level 10" or other silliness like that.

It reminds me of Wizardry 8 discussions where people claimed maining a class with the Locks and Traps skill was bad because you could multiclass into them for one level and click on the 8-tumbler lock in Arnika for 4-5 hours to max out the skill. If that seems reasonable to you then we're just not playing games for the same reasons. If you're willing to go to such extreme lengths to break the game, anyone complaining about difficulty would seem like a whiner.

I doubt when a normal player puts a cleric or mage in their party they do so expecting to have a front-line melee powerhouse (the player has no way of even knowing what spells are in the game until they reach the required level). The fact you can turn spellcasters into multi-role combatants speaks to the versatility of the underlying system (and D&D's perennial OP spell list) but expecting this from players is deeply unintuitive, pretty much regardless of genre.

Why would I turn on auto-leveling? That's for new players and straight Cleric is in the top 5% of builds for him so that's how he autolevels. As with the "secret" ending, each companion has a "secret" build (or three) which can beat it. For Tristian it's Scion/MT (although Scion is tricky to get the most out of on RTwP). As for the weakness of that build in the midlevels the game is designed to both (a) have more companions than slots (b) encourage all companion quests to be completed which suggests that you were intended to have some companions ride the bench early and shine late, which is how Tristian optimally plays. Indeed that's how his character arc plays out as well. There's nothing munchkin/min-maxxing about it, it's playing the game as intended. Harrim's substantial bonus vs Trolls and Zombie Giants reinforces that idea. BTW, you'll find exactly zero min-maxxers who have Tristian in melee, I'll guarantee it. But with nearly 2,000 hrs under my belt and having mastered Unfair I'll vouch for it being optimal from the perspective of team synergy and rest minimization.

The game is Rogue-like in just that sense - it is designed to be not just replayable but replayed, with new options and builds drawing on the hard-won expertise of prior playthroughs.

I am a normal player. I've never played any other RPG (going back to Atari Adventure!) on the hardest setting. This is where I ended up in P:K on my fifth, and final playthrough (only one complete).
 
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Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
They should simply couple the boni from class feats to your respective class level. This way you would actually
have to dedicate to the classes and not simply dip in a bunch of levels to get that one power build feat.
That would make actual class levels more meaningful without losing the importance of feats. At the moment
it feels like class levels only matter as a prerequisite for feats, especially for martial classes. If they scaled similar
spells, it would be more interesting.

This is in fact how the game plays out with a couple debatable exceptions, although it doesn't appear that way at first. Certainly anyone trying to beat a save/penetrate SR on Unfair can ill afford losing even one caster level for a splash. There are several martial classes which need every level as well, such as Fighter with the free Weapon Mastery feats.
 

Desiderius

Found your egg, Robinett, you sneaky bastard
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Insert Title Here Pathfinder: Wrath
It was to maximize Weird and PK DCs. You won't get any higher than getting another +4 charisma. Though I would never stoop to that level. Then again I am happy with Challenging and ignore anything above. Just boring and obnoxious.

Yes, I'm aware of the purpose, but you lose more than you gain. It's a strength of P:K that is doesn't lend itself readily to InEffect style min-maxxing. It's much more multi-dimensional than that. If you continue to play you'll naturally find yourself upping the difficulty without having to min-max anything at all.
 
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Pink Eye

Monk
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I'm very into cock and ball torture
Being a fanatical shill does.

No it doesn't. Otherwise we'd have ejected people like Volourn years ago.

Spamming the same shit over and over again, however...

Pink Eye was banned from the kingfaker Steam forums, that's what I'm referring to.

He was banned for overzealously imitating my blunt amateur modding style. We were able to turn around the vibe there for a few months and get some new people into the game and help a lot of people have better experiences with it. Going in with a bad attitude precludes getting the most enjoyment out of games which seek to restore some of the classic challenge of RPGs. There's joy in discovery/invention once you recognize that it requires non-faceroll content.
I will always look up to you. Codex and steam fags be damned. You were the best of us. Always schooling the faggots who did nothing but stink up the place!
 

Technomancer

Liturgist
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
Messages
1,565
the player has no way of even knowing what spells are in the game until they reach the required level
That's not exactly true, on char creation you can right-click on the column for each level to see the spells. But I agree that you can't do it in the game without gaining a level or hiring someone.
 
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Harthwain

Arcane
Joined
Dec 13, 2019
Messages
5,500
Turn based is basically disabilty mode, everyone knows it.
Except real-time with pause isn't really that much more difficult to handle over turn-based. All you really have to do is press the space bar from time to time. Unless you are playing real-time without pausing...?

The reason some people will always prefer turn-based over real-time with pause is largely because real-time with pause adds an extra step between orders and resolution, but that is be more accurately described as "annoyance" rather than "difficulty" (although I could see a problem if someone is playing one-handed...).
 
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Gregz

Arcane
Joined
Jul 31, 2011
Messages
9,050
Location
The Desert Wasteland
Being a fanatical shill does.

No it doesn't. Otherwise we'd have ejected people like Volourn years ago.

Spamming the same shit over and over again, however...

Pink Eye was banned from the kingfaker Steam forums, that's what I'm referring to.

He was banned for overzealously imitating my blunt amateur modding style. We were able to turn around the vibe there for a few months and get some new people into the game and help a lot of people have better experiences with it. Going in with a bad attitude precludes getting the most enjoyment out of games which seek to restore some of the classic challenge of RPGs. There's joy in discovery/invention once you recognize that it requires non-faceroll content.

So you and Pink Eye abused your mod powers to silence detractors, were sensibly banned, and now you're in here shilling for Owlcat?
 

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