Armando is 100% correct and the great tragedy that he doesn’t address is that we never got a CRPG of 4E, the best tactical ruleset ever written by any designer, ever.
Well, it’s an irony anyway in as much as 4E was pretty clearly written to play like a video game.
As to the rest, well, there’s a reason Pathfinder became a thing.
As someone who has played hundreds of sessions of both Pathfinder and 4E, who loves and appreciates them both, I don’t think there’s even a serious conversation to be had as to which system offers a better tactical combat ruleset. If you want a high magic, fun, exploration game with incredible Adventure Path support, Pathfinder is your game. If you want an incredibly balanced combat engine with INTERESTING choices from round to round for all classes, then 4E is your game.
But shit, that’s a war that was fought and lost years ago. The public spoke.
God fucking yes.
I miss the old 4E campaign I spent a few years in with friends terribly. It was so much fun!
I have to come down on the side of choice being good. It potentially could be a lazy design choice, but that doesn’t make a lot of sense really, because more options means more coding etc. Lazy is releasing a game with 3 difficulties, and just upping monster hit points and damage.
The other crucial question would be, balance the game for whom? There are a number of games, actually quite a few of them out now that force you to play a game ‘my way or the highway’. I tend to really push back against those games. Player skill varies wildly from person to person, and can and often does extend into actual disabilities. The notion that there is some perfect balance and difficulty, that’s correct to foist on everyone is specious at best.
I personally love the fact that I can turn on and off very specific game play mechanics. Different mechanics will annoy different people.
I’m for Devs giving you a lot of options, and making a setting that is “their way”, and giving you some extra reward to complete it. Incentives are always more fun than hubris.
But not PoE? Sorry if I missed it, but isn’t combat basically the same as PoE as well as those other games?
I generally don’t like the real time combat of these games, but with Tyranny I came to accept it, which made PoE easier for me to get into.
So I guess my question is, how does combat compare to PoE?
To get a grasp of the combat is how much you know of 3.5 dnd. So if you were able to play NWN II or BG generally you should have the basics down. The big hurdle is getting an idea on the Attack of Opportiunity rules which are more in line with games like PoE and ToEE.
If you know basic DnD, Kingmaker combat is easier to get used to than PoE since PF is d20 and PoE is d100 generally. Imo, the combat is easier to manage in Kingmaker than in PoE, but I haven’t played much of the new PoEII (will get to that soon), I hear its alot better.
Also tidbit, use movement and stance right click options, your characters will bullrush/charge when its open! The animations are awesome when you see the melee rush into battle!
Well I am enjoying it. My contribution to the great difficulty debate is that I like my RPG’s easy because I enjoy the character advancement and loot more than the story or combat or puzzles. I definitely do not want any kind of challenge. So a difficulty setting that allows me to do that is what I like.
My plan (as with Pillars ) is to play a solo character. We shall see how that goes, so far there has been no opportunity to ditch these fools.
I am gonna play a little BG2 tonight but my recollection is that it was “classic” that was dnd standard difficulty and it was pretty hard in that game. Middle difficulty. I’ll be back. My poe time has made me want to replay BG2 lol.
Ah so it was set “core rules” in the middle. Now there is a nice game. Hard but made me feel better by playing it in the middle.
I must be missing something but I couldn’t find anything beyond “I need proper incentives” or “devs didn’t bother to balance their own game”. I don’t expect your answer to be deeply detailed or relying on knowledge of the encounters of the game/deep understanding of the tabletop or anything like that. But something more, yes. Is it “I should get more experience on harder difficulty?” Is it “I get more story” or something like that?
It is weird that you can change difficulty mid fight I agree, but whatever.
I get that for you just having an extra challenge by itself isn’t rewarding. But that’s not true for everybody. It’s not even always true/not true for a given person all of the time. I sometimes do enjoy cranking up difficulty on CRPGs if I can. Not always. My decision to do so is based on many factors (and certainly does include my own personal mastery of a mechanical system, or lack thereof).
I hardly think including the options qualifies as the devs not knowing how to balance their own game (now there are other arguments that maybe they don’t and that’s something else entirely). And really, it’s a game they ported from an existing game in another medium with an existing ruleset desgined for that medium. A ruleset that is amazingly complex, and it’s not a big team.
I wish they had thought through all of the things they were porting. Although part of what they wanted to do was to satisfy he people who, yes, played the tabletop tracking encumbrance. All 12 of them. Might have been a bad idea but here we are. They also wanted to cater to the 12 guys who wanted to try and play this with incoming party damage set to 5x or whatever. That might have been a dubious use of time but it’s just one slider and the slider still loves you Tom (it does not love me).
They have an incentive, but it doesn’t appear to be one you care for. But again, I don’t think that by itself means they couldn’t balance the game at all. Or they failed at their work etc. They might have failed at building a functional engine that shows someone understood how to load things in and out of memory, and at some UI stuff. The kingdom UI is not good. And to be honest I’ve got some bones to pick with the normal UI (active buff tooltips shouldn’t be regurgitating what things can do from the spell/ability descriptions, but telling me exactly what they are doing at that moment).
Tom, I am not trying to stick it to you. I ask in earnest. I don’t think the complaint itself is always appropriate. And I guess I don’t agree with how something should be incentivized in every case, or that things should all be incentivized in a certain fashion.
Tom. . .
Of course they are. There’s nowhere you can point to where I suggested anything to the contrary or displayed some sort of understanding of the situation that did not include this. You are making argument that, in a certain light, could be called bad faith. I don’t think it is, just saying. Do I think god put the kobold there? No Tom, I do not think god put the kobold there. I think the scenario designers did, I even said as much. I drew a distinction between this aspect and the other things a GM does. Because that’s important.
The GM is not always the scenario designer and it;'s not the most important thing a GM does anyway. Such is the case when @ArmandoPenblade runs the Kingmaker adventure path for his friends (if he ever did, I can’t remember, doesn’t matter). The most important part of GM’s presence when he or she is running a game for friends is the active presence. It’s far more than dictating what enemies do and rolling dice and such. Armando is part of the story, and the game.
It’s in the mutual decision on the type of game that it’s going to be. Beyond “let’s do GURPS and not D&D” and “let’s do steampunk and not high fantasy”. Are we going to follow this adventure path closely? Maybe we want to add in lots of side stuff (maybe we want to go all Game of Thrones on the political side). Or, maybe the empire building is just a good excuse backdrop for us taking this motherfucker off the rails entirely and and use our little portside paradise to become a band of evil whalers. By which I mean whalers who catch evil whales (maybe they’re undead whales), not evil people who whale indiscriminately. A good GM will breath an absurd amount of life into even the most vanilla-run “on-rails” scenario, module, adventure path, published setting, etc. If the campaign succeeds, which it surely will if we’re on the same page, we will tell many a fond story about it and the GM will be part of all of them and have stories of their own.
There is none of that in this game because it’s a fucking single-player CRPG. Even if it had IE style or DOS 2 style multiplayer and it was me and you and every Chris ever - thousands of them Tom, a Chris for every occasion - there would still be no GM. Neverwinter and, uh, that other game that came out last year whose name suddenly escapes me but it was a D&D game I am pretty sure. . . anyway they sort of tried that and it didn’t go well. Anyway, all we get is a pre-designed scenario, to play Solitaire-style. That’s ok. it’s fun and scratches a certain itch. But it’s nothing like the game Armando would have run, which is not necessarily anything like the game I would have run, which is not necessarily anything like the game that Yennifer Lawrence Hewitt would run. It’s nothing like the game any living human would run, and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that.
I think the devs erred in not including more information about what a couple of settings do (and, uh, it looks like one setting is horribly misnamed). It also looks like the devs took more liberties than everyone realized. But I don’t think they erred in having certain settings present, given (1) the desire to try and please a wide range of tastes/desires and (2) deal with the fact that there’s not a living, breathing GM present. And I’m still not sure how the correct way to do the settings (if at all) would have worked in your eyes. And maybe there isn’t one for this case, for you. I don’t know.
Just to clarify, I don’t think anyone is saying choice isn’t good.
I understand what you’re getting at, but why do games have to appeal to so many different kinds of people? Part of the art of entertainment is knowing your audience and making something specifically for them. It’s only when it comes to selling entertainment that this concern about appealing to the widest possible audience comes into play.
Would anyone mind if I just went through the thread and pulled out the relevant posts for another thread? I think I’m going to do that just to keep from detracting from the Pathfinder-specific conversation. Besides, that will give me a place to rant without trashing up other folks’ conversations.
-Tom
I remember BG1 starting at 1st level, getting to that first Inn with Imoen and repeatedly getting my ass kicked. There was like a Bounty Hunter or some type of fighter there that repeatedly tore me apart, and that was like the first thing you were supposed to do in the game.
On the plus side, Baldur’s Gate was really amazing, here was the graphically rich DnD adventure that I always wanted to play. For its time I thought it was really an extraordinary experience.
I think starting characters off at level 4 or so would probably even out an awful lot of the really rough patches. Level 1 and 2 characters are just super fragile.
Counter point, I would rather throw myself off a building than do anything with 4e. It’s the least interesting tabletop ruleset I’ve ever encountered, not counting shit that’s crazier than a shithouse rat like FATAL or Wraitthu. It’s like playing chess on a 100x100 board but every piece is a knight with small variants on how the knight moves. This guy gets 3 vertical before turning. That one moves 3x2 and can jump on both ends. The third knight moves 3x1 but he’s a lovely shade of purple. On the way to create that tactical combat they robbed the game of all it’s color. Sure, the moves themselves are different and combo in interesting ways. But they robbed the game of it’s color.
Different strokes for different folks.
New information that has come to light. Source, and this all still counts as “alleged”. But the game has been decompiled apparently.
So, “Monster stats whatever” is horribly named. It apparently affects monster regen and damage immunity (I’m not 100% clear on what damage immunity is), and thanks to bugs not every setting is doing everything. Let’s forget him for a moment, except to say “name him better, please”.
Monster Difficulty just changes (1) modifiers stats give and (2) “other stats like attack bonus”. You did not in fact read the first thing there wrong and I did not type it wrong, if the guy who decompiled is correct. On weak, normal, hard, insane the changes are -2, 0, +2, +4. So if your lovingly crafted level 2 bandit boss dude had 18 strength (+4), on those difficulties he apparently has 18 strength (+2), 18 (+4), 18 (+6) and 18 (+8). But those bonuses also apply to things like ac, attack bonus, and the like. So on normal he’s at +2 BAB and +6 AB. But on Hard he’s at +4 BAB and +10 total AB.
Second thing: according to the post author Trolls have 26 strength. As you well know Trolls do not have 26 strength in table top (21, for those curious). But this sounded like it was one of many such stat adjustments. Your lovingly crafted rando Troll has +4 BAB (maybe?) and +8 from 26 strength, for +12. On Hard he’s at +6/+10 for +16!
And lastly, apparently the devs were liberally giving out bonus feats to monsters.
So, if the double dipping thing is true I think that’s a bad way to do balance because it makes the calculus more complicated than it ought to be. If you want to add stats, Just assign a bonus to derived stats like Attack Bonus, np, damage, saves, and be done with it. Changing the bonus you get from stats is very weird because. . . it’s very weird. I do wonder if the decompiler has this correct.
Changing base stats feels 100% like an attempt to conquer the alleged black belt Pathfinder players who backed the Kickstarter, I guess. I wondered during the campaign if they were adding too much content in terms of spells, classes, etc. That’s much easier content to add than, say, an entire area with a dungeon in it. But it’s got other costs. It’s also weird because if they had asked anybody they would have discovered that PFS scenarios accomplished this much more easily. Sure, this means Succubi with a nice stack of rogue levels and spiritual weapons and whatnot.
So I would say their approach is actually a result of the time line being interfered with by people from the future.
No. Seems like a lot of work though. Can’t you order an underling to do it?
Hey, those would both work for me. It sounds like you’re wanting me to submit specific design proposals, but that’s not really my bag. I play games, I don’t make them. As I’ve said many times before, I’m really easy to appease. I’m interested more in the principle of providing incentive than the actual content of it.
A brief aside if I may, but that’s not an acceptable excuse! If I had a nickel for every indie game that tried to gloss over someone’s complaint with the “well, there are only two of us working on the game…” But, sure, I get that what I’m complaining about it not a focus of these developers’ limited resources.
Wait, what is the incentive? I thought the idea was that it’s challenge for challenge’s sake? That’s the opposite of an incentive. Keep in mind, I haven’t played Pathfinder: Kingmaker, so I’m just going on what others have said in the thread. If I’m wrong and there’s some reason to actually push the difficulty level higher, I’d love to know!
Pointing out that games – whether tabletop or video – are experiences engineered, designed, created by someone else to provide you with entertainment is an argument in bad faith? I think you must have misunderstood me, because I can’t believe you take issue with that.
In fact, it sounds like you think I’m trying to establish some sort of strict 1:1 equivalence between tabletop RPGs and videogames. To wit:
It sounds like you’re trying to explain to me that tabletop RPGs and videogames are different from each other. I honestly don’t need this explained to me. Seriously, I’m well aware of this fact! I have been for many years! My only point is that they’re both game design. They’re both premised on the art of enjoyable frustration. Otherwise, you’re just listening to someone tell a story.
Dude, you better watch it or I’m going to segue into a rant about poor documentation! :)
-Tom
Just wiped in the first dungeon BG 2 and rage quit. GRRRR!"
Core rules. Traps in the brothel room. I am rusty.
That underling’s name is…Discourse! It’s seriously easy. Check it out. BOOM. New thread.
-Tom
Do really not want any sort of challenge from an RPG? If you enjoy character advancement and loot, doesn’t there need to be some kind of “work” for the character advancement, and doesn’t the loot need to be some kind of reward for prevailing against something? It sounds like you’re approaching RPGs as a way to scooch an avatar through a forking story, developing it however you want as you go.
Let me put it this way. If an RPG had an option for godmode in which you just decided you could win any battle and pass any check, you would enable that option?
I guess I’m just surprised, because I’m assuming someone who understands game design – I know for a fact “understands game design” appears on your CV – would agree with the enjoyable frustration* concept.
-Tom
* I wish I could remember who I cribbed this from, because it’s not my phrase.
Wow awesome! A true life battle ! I have mixed feelings. I am going to try and originate my first 5 mins with any game and see what I do as a reactionary re: Difficulty levels. My bet is I run to the center.
Fallout 4 I went survival witch was super hard difficulty so they say.
Though I would change this thread name to “Tom’s serious debate on difficulty settings that might cause a war”
Though I hope marq is around…