You only try many things (like locks) once per level, I would have to come back after gaining a level to try again. Often the party takes a lot of damage if someone fails an Athletics check trying to traverse the environment, like climbing a felled tree. I’ve tried save scumming but it seems to never work (never roll more than a 5). Could be intentional, a bug, or me being incredibly unlucky.
@Lucidvizion I also forgot about Guidance. :) Need to put that on a toolbar.
@peacedog You are describing my freaking nightmare. I wish I understood more about the Kingdom stuff, I read your tale happening to at least one other person (“32 hours down the drain”) on the Steam forums, and myself I got a pop up about unrest and I don’t know if that’s just “hey, FYI, this is something to keep an eye out for, but everything is cool right now” or “Hey, people are unresting!” and I’m like “I literally just became Baron like a minute ago!” So I’m super not cool about that.
I think I might drop the Kingdom stuff down to Easy for my first play through, and honestly I may have more fun if I just accept the difficulty at the easy preset as well.
“Normal diffculty”, that is, the preset normal, is Enemy Difficulty “normal”, Enemy Stat Adjustments “somewhat easier” and .8 damage. That is not table top Pathfinder under any definition possibly.
The CR9 Enraged Owlbears encounter in this gives them +18 BAB apparently. That is not CR 9 BAB. It’s CR13, minumum. I have been unable to confirm if this person was playing on normal or some variant thereof, but holy shit.
The DCs are. . . uneven. Scott’s chest seems to assume you’ve a rogue. At level 6, say, that’s +6 (skill) +3 (class skill bonus) +4 (dex) + 3 (rogue bonus) or +16. And probably either got skill focus or the +5 gloves from the fort first thing.
CR’s in pathfinder are geared towards 4 person parties, as you well know. People who don’t know table top don’t know that CR5 means a party of four 5th level characvters should use roughly 1/4 of their resources to win the encounter. They also don’t know that a 6 person party gains +1 effective party level for this caluclation. Or that there are guidelines to help the DM buff encounters.
I don’t think those guidelines and calculations have been followed by the devs. When I started on hard the spider swarms had 21 touch ac. Your dex based fighter specialized in throwing things (a build used by nobody) is the only person on the planet who has a prayer at reliably hitting these guys and they had so many hp that just relying on the “splash” from missed grenades wasn’t very effective (read: they killed 2/3s of the party before I finished the fight)… I’ve read “hard” means +4 ac/attack and possibly other stats and I haven’t tested this yet (but keep meaning too). It feels like the devs veered from the proscribed table-top methods for changing difficulty and ran with their own numbers.
Now, unlike @tomchick I like choice and things that are good. So I don’t mind multiple difficulty settings with multiple levels each. But isn’t it more than a bit weird that there are two separate settings for monsters when the only possible things we would be doing to change difficult are:
Adjusting stats, as per the ancient ways.
Adjusting the makeup of encounters, which there is also advice on doing and which a seasoned GM can do very well. But which a not good GM is likely to fuck up.
Why did we need two separate settings? What’s actually going on with those settings? Like Tom, I do like when games present the right amount of information and they’re not really giving us any here, although we can discern at least some of it from combat logs.
I’m still not 100% certain what “table top difficulty” is right now. Normal/Normal for the twin difficulty settings seems close, but not 100% right to me although I can’t put my finger on it. I expect my level 6 party to struggle with the trolls in this game, for thematic reasons. I often have to fight 2-4, or 1-3 + troll hounds. But these fights have been brutal, and even Ms Tower Shield Specialist only lasts so long in them. I should look more closely at the rolls, but these do not feel like +8 bab trolls. It feels much higher, even on normal/normal.
To be clear, I was only referring to the text of the difficulty selections (e.g., Normal still reduces Damage and Crit Damage, while Challenging increases Enemy Stats, so you have to sort of split the two to make everything basically level out). The actual challenges faced might be wildly out of scale for CR, but they’re ostensibly rolling their straight (way too high) stats when it comes to damage, etc.
But even then, I’d still recommend a full party of highly optimized characters to compete, precisely due to things being built so wildly out of scale for standard CR. It’s like the game was designed by a beleaguered, vengeful GM suffering PTSD from running for a party of 6 highly minmaxed munchkin characters.
edit: and even then, said GM forgot that Witches, Gunslingers, Summoners, and Slayers aren’t in this game. . .
I agree with you 100% about getting tired of RTWP. I would pay large sums of money for this in a turn based system. Look at how well Divinity did. Turn based is still very popular.
I currently have Pathfinder set to pause at the end of every round which makes the RTWP somewhat passable.
The mechanics here are easier to follow, IMO, than those in Pillars. Even for people who don’t know the table top. I don’t know if that makes a difference for you but there will be a crowd for which that makes them prefer this game.
This is the kind of thing that make me fall madly in love with Pathfinder Kingmaker.
Resting along the road, we are startled awake and ambushed by bandits. When the combat loads in, the auto pause features a perfect lightning strike, which was totally random. That’s not the best part, though it is cool. Here we are, waking up in a torrential thunder storm, beset by bandits.
Nevermind how great the camping mechanics are, they are great, but after we clear out two bandit melee types and two illusionists, we finish camping and when we wake up the day breaks and the sun in shining, and we wander down south to the map exit. Where there are three bandit archer corpses. It seems the storm helped us out a bit. :)
I wish so badly that I was home and could be playing this, it sounds so awesome. I even like the fact that battles are so irregular and that some are super tough.
I work from home, and I have nothing to do, but I am on the clock, so I would feel bad if I played the game. So instead, I am staring blankly at my Defined Contribution 3 book, pretending to study for the DC 3 exam.
Why do I agonize over every decision! Just getting ready to be named baron and some guy is offering to foot me some building supplies. I don’t like being indebted to people so I’m inclined to say no. I wonder if that will slow me down.
Same. That’s the sort of thing I was referring to previously about feeling like I was thrown in to the deep end with politics and having no idea what to do.
I sad the same thing as well. I figure he’s not necessarily evil, but do I really want to get tied into a contract with a guy I don’t know and I don’t understand which side he’s on. Beyond that, I don’t even know what the sides are really.
Who says you can’t play a class that literally throws bombs all around? My Alchemist rocks! This was only available since Wizardries! Next up is a new AP with new classes like Psionicists and shit! Who needs DnD?!?!
