And he’s a vendor!
I like the addition of the Dhampir. That should be neat.
Next goal is just barely visible on the Kickstarter page.
Looks like “Martial Combat” though one can’t be sure. I guess it could be Mortal Combat.
Mounted Combat, maybe??
That would be wild.
That would be… interesting, but I feel like that would take up a lot of resources for not much game.
What are you going to do with your horse in a cave or fighting in some castle ruins?
Occultist perhaps?
I was just going to say that could still be a lower case “d” but then I saw your edit. I still think “Mounted” is the most fitting word, but the more I think of it the more I’m not sure I want them dedicating resources to it.
M__t_l Combat?
Some have postulated that “Mounted Combat” could signify the Cavalier class instead of actual, you know, mounted combat.
Because mounted combat would be dumb.
Montreal combat. The Bruins come to town and bring with them cestus-like weapons that fling rubber discs.
as kinda shitty as I always found the Cavalier (having even one really pulls the whole campaign in a very particular direction, and some of the flavor is just. . . weird) in the tabletop game, if you spin up a moderately decent mount-riding system for one class, you suddenly open up a bunch of class options and archetypes elsewhere. there are some mount-heavy paladin builds, obviously rangers who spec into mounts larger than themselves that can be ridden around, etc.
It does present issues in dungeon design. Any dungeon with 5-foot corridors basically just says “fuck you” to a player who’s spec’ed heavily into a mount. I remember one of my players, an Oracle of some description who was heavily abusing the Aasimar alternate class bonus that granted extra effective levels to their Animal Companion feature, took some goofy feat tree on the AC to let it basically turn its 10-ft wide, 4d6+soMuchStrengthBonusOMG horns fully 90 degrees to pass through dungeons at a reduced “squeezing” penalty.
That fuckin Moose was the strongest character in the campaign the entire time the Oracle was with them. The running joke was that the Oracle was really the animal companion, not the other way around. . .
This is why you bring the Mole (from Monaco) and just knock out all the walls as you go.
What about a mole from Morocco?
I was writing to my cousin this morning about Pathfinder, he’s interested in this new game but only if they put in some sort of turn-based mode. So I wanted to share my thoughts on that with him, and decided to repost it here, as well.
As for Pathfinder being turn-based, it’s not planned so far. There are a few things to keep in mind here. The first is that Pathfinder Kingmaker, as I’ve mentioned, has an excellent Turn-based Mod that allows you to play the game turn-based (and @ShivaX loves it, though I tend to leave it OFF once I have it installed for reasons I’ll explain shortly). The developers said in an interview just yesterday that they love the mod, and love playing in turn-based mode, and are not opposed to looking into making the game turn-based at some point as launch approaches, but for right now, they have no plans to do so. And the next point I want to make is you really have to be careful with balance, because a game designed to play real-time with pause will be very, very bogged down with turn-based mode simply tacked on. Consider the number of times your party of six characters is walking into the fog of war and maybe two wolves rush at you - and are killed as they engage by the archer in the group, a wizard that casts Acid Arrow, your barbarian takes a swing, and done. In an instant, these wolves rushed out, jaws gaping, and in a flash of fun and cool special effects and savage animation, they drop. Looked good, felt good, is good. The party moves on, and repeats. When turn-based mode triggers, the wolves roll initiative, and so does everyone else. Now the archer goes, taking a shot and killing a wolf. Now it’s the wizards turn… let’s see, here is my Acid Arrow, click, cast. Wounding the wolf, very cool. Now the wolf goes, getting into melee range and attacking, a miss! Now the barbarian goes, making an attack - a hit! Wolf dies. Something that took 6 seconds in real time now took almost a full 30 seconds in turn based. The point is, you really need to tune the encounters so they are all meaningful and exciting, or these two wolves (fun around level 3 when you’ve got a few hours into the game) represent very tedious battles around level 8 or 9, 13-15 hours into the game. I bailed on my second, turn-based play through of Kingmaker and this is in large part why - the game isn’t designed for turn-based play just on how the encounters are structured. Everything felt like it took so long to get to.
It’s a shame so many folks dislike or otherwise do not click with real time with pause (and vice versa with turn-based). I enjoy both, but I will admit the more real-time games I play the more I appreciate they don’t waste my time, as well. There is something wonderful about a turn-based game, played at your own pace, for sure. But I’ve said for years that real time combat, while it has lower lows than turn-based, has higher highs as well. When you pause the action, tell your fighter to pop a potion of heroism and tell your wizard to drop a web spell on the incoming rush of goblins, and have your archer focus on the enemy druid, and your own druid you tell to turn into an Earth Elemental or whatever, and you un-pause the combat and watch it play out it can honestly be the best RPG combat experience. But on the other hand, having your guys just drop dead from something and not knowing what the fuck just happened is the lowest of lows. The best way to play Kingmaker, in my opinion, is real-time but with the turn-based mod installed - for those tough fights, you can toggle it on and there you go, Bob’s your uncle, and then for most trash fights, leave it off and it works great. It’s how I’m playing my current game (which I need to get back to at some point, but I’m into DOOM right now!)
By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t bring up Pillars of Eternity 2 - they did this right, as they require you pick turn-based or real time at the start of the new campaign. Why? Because turn-based re-does the encounters to get rid of trash fights - each battle is a bit more meaningful. It’s also going to double the length of the game, I suspect, as turn-based mode will always be slow (even when you increase animation speeds, which is an option but I don’t like doing it).
I mean, this is arguably the case in PF Kingmaker for the animal companion classes, and definitely the case early game.
They were like Level 12, Mythic Tier 2 or 3 by that point. Shit was hyper-goofy.
God, I wonder how many bugs and glitches mounted combat will cause.
My understanding is that mounted combat was either weak and useless, or completely broken.