KickStarter Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pre-DLC Thread [GO TO NEW THREAD]

[fantadomat]

So, is it good?

It is not great...

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Re-rolled a mage and can't even get past the tutorial now. The three guys in the library gibs us with their crossbows...

lol.

Not sure what difficulty you’re on, but I got through the prologue on hard with a fairly squishy magus like this:

Linzi and Tartuccio spam their daze cantrips, also using flare at first against the crossbowmen. Magus ended up using daze, too, in fights with three enemies and then doing most of the damage with the acid splash cantrip. Occasionally got in a hit on dazed enemies with my rapier or Linzi’s crossbow.

My daze connected less than half the time, but once it hits you can cast it a few more times before the status effect runs out. In retrospect, the magus’ spell combat was very useful: three characters casting daze AND one of them can poke with his rapier at the same time, so this is going to be harder for a pure caster (then again, a wizard or sorcerer will have a higher DC so those spells land more often). Between daze and acid splash, you should be able to get a soft wizard/sorcerer through the first few fights before you find Jaethal. You also might want to take a feat like spell focus that boosts your DC for a particular type of magic in order to beat those saving throws. Possibly some races and sorcerous bloodlines get a bonus to charm or dominate DC—can’t remember which school Daze belongs to.

And there may be reusable abilities available from the get-go that can let you slightly gimp the enemy’s will saving throw to help those dazes connect, but I’m not at my computer so can’t say for sure. Maybe the intimidation type ability you get from a high persuasion (Linzi has it)?

I tried to save nearly all my first level spells for the big fight at the end of the prologue—some color spray on the assassins, then unloaded everything on the enemy leader before he could hit my guys with his fear spell.

Ad hardest difficulty - a small team, possibly no time to properly balance it out. A word of the wise - never play any RPG on launch, you're wasting that special first moment on a massively undercooked product. Has been true for almost a decade now.

Also a reminder about how completely retarded the hardest difficulty in D:OS2 was on launch. Had to reroll, no idea if they patched it out eventually.

I disagree about this. PK’s hardest difficulty is accurately labeled “unfair.” You can see exactly what it changes on the difficulty sliders. They give you two other options between normal and unfair—challenging and hard. The fact that unfair mode is ridiculously difficult—downright unfair even—is not a result of PK being undercooked. The absurd difficulty is a feature, not a bug. They had a big public beta that covered a major chunk of the game and while there are plenty of areas that still need some polish, I doubt that the unfairness “unfair” mode is one of them.

If people don’t want to feel like the game is totally rigged against them in an incredibly unfair way, there are five other difficulty settings that are not unfair. And you can customize the difficulty sliders to create a more reasonable experience.

Challenging mode with one alteration is the same as core rules. And even challenging mode is somewhat challenging. Hard is actually hard. Unfair is suicidal unless you min-max like a pro and are prepared to die very frequently as you repeatedly pray to RNGjesus to save you. This is just a game developer being honest about its difficulty settings for once and I think it’s a welcome change of pace.

 

[Shadenuat]

Where can you get fire bombs?

Alchemist's fire? Bokken sells them.

Btw, the best user for them is Harrim. He has domain True Strike spell, meaning you can crit with at least 1 of those bombs.

Don't think you can deal with those spider swarms though, on Hard anyway they have more than 10 hp. My druid had to cast 2 Stone Calls to kill them on level 3 (that's 4d6 bludgeoning damage).

 

[jaelkeiset]

That's right. Small areas are a big downer in Deadfire (and PoE) for me, so I sure want to know these things.

Exactly what I feel. I hate small areas and I even do not know why. I guess because they are small.

 

[Parabalus]

How do encumbrance penalties / shared stash work? Can I make a 7/8 STR char without too much fuss?

 

[Shadenuat]

How do encumbrance penalties / shared stash work? Can I make a 7/8 STR char without too much fuss?

Sure, provided you take ~3 dudes with high STR.

 

[Israfael]

What do you mean by missing with spells? Enemy saving throws?

Not sure about PF, but you can miss in generic DnD with touch-based and some other 'physical' spells (like Desintegrate, Vampiric Touch etc). They actually require BAB to hit, and then resists and throws are applied on top of that (which makes most of them shit compared to the other spells)

 

[Turjan]

I wonder whether you get fucked when you get to the "kingdom" phase of the game and have a char with low CHA.

 

[Tacgnol]

Pathfinder balance goes like this: Play a caster.

Eh, nah. Most D&D-derived RPGs vastly downplay the 3E/PF caster supremacy because:
1) the reason casters are gods in 3E and derivatives is because they can solve *every* situation with spells and often do so better than other classes, but in cRPGs, non-combat uses of spells are much less abusive. You can't Dominate a king into becoming your puppet, you can't scry->teleport->nuke something out of existence, you can't teleport everywhere at will, Charming someone to interrogate them usually doesn't work (it's basically a low-key mind control spell for combat purpose). You usually also can't fly, either. If you want to use summons to trip every trap on your way instead of using a Rogue, they are sometimes coded to be unable to use doors, for instance;
2) martials in every D&D edition are very competent at dishing out damage, and that's what most cRPG problem solving boils down to; Fighters are usually much better at dealing damage than Wizards because their damage is on demand, easy to access, and very low resource-intensive. You don't have to abuse the 5 minute adventuring day if you are stacked with Fighter-types. Mages and their kin are amazing for battlefield control and enabling damage to actually get through magical defenses (with dispels), and also really good at dealing AoE damage - which is sometimes unwieldy (friendly fire, ahoy!) unless the game is designed to exclusively fight enemies in Cloudkill shaped rooms with a lockable door. But if you want to crack down on an HP sponge boss, you want swords, not (magical) words;
3) you often get really fucking good magic weaponry in cRPGs, but not too much in terms of insane spellcaster help. Scrolls are randomized and not guaranteed, which may be a problem if you're not a Sorcerer. There aren't many powerful utility items for Wizards as in tabletop, where you can craft a wand for every contingency in existence to save spell slots.
I doubt this game has much non-combat magic usage, but if it is faithful to Pathfinder's combat systems, then martials are probably still capable of chaining feats and features to get some combat maneuvers, which elevates them from the traditional Baldur's Gate beatstick. So you can actually have martials with a semblance of battlefield control.

Yep, the tier system is mostly about versatility in or outside of combat.

Most martials (especially barbarians in PF) are very capable damage dealers even at high levels, the problem is they don't have much they can do outside of battles compared to casters.

None of this is really that relevant in most CRPGs, as your out of combat options are heavily reduced compared to the proper RPGs.

 

[Infinitron]

How is this played in tabletop, anyway? I assume there can only be one king. One player gets to be the king and the rest have to obey him?

 

[Kruno]

The trick to all encounters is to restart until you get the rolls you want.

 

[Turjan]

I never played or read the module, but I can assure you, trying to pull that off with human co-players is not advisable.

 

[Ivan]

The trick to all encounters is to restart until you get the rolls you want.

DETERMINISTIC>RNG

 

[AwesomeButton]

The trick to all encounters is to restart until you get the rolls you want.

So, just like I played BGII back in the day.

 

[MilesBeyond]

I am absolutely loving this game so far, but I'm hesitant to heap praises on it. When PoE 1 first came out, I played it for like eight hours straight and raved that it was the greatest RPG of the new millennium. I still haven't finished it. You do the math. In any case that game taught me that first impressions aren't everything.

But Kingmaker does seem pretty great so far. I'm not a big fan of the voice acting and I still think the game would have been much, much better with turn based combat over RTwP, but I'm really enjoying it. It avoids the things I really didn't like about PoE: I wasn't huge into PoE's mechanics (pre the big update patch at least), and of course Kingmaker is D&D 3.75e so that's not an issue here. I didn't like how PoE was a big text dump that felt like a DM that was waaaayyyy too enthusiastic about this new RPG setting they've come up with so they're cramming it down your throat at every opportunity. Kingmaker seems a lot less wordy and does a great thing where it allows you to highlight proper nouns to bring up a brief description of what's being talked about, allowing you to dig into Golarion's lore if you're interested but not forcing it on you if you don't care. Ultimately, though, it seems more focused - PoE felt like it was trying to be a successor to BG and PST at the same time, and you just can't do that. Despite having the same engine and ruleset, BG and PST are diametrically different games, and you can't do both. You just can't. Kingmaker seems more interested in being just a good old-fashioned swords-and-sorcery RPG romp. We'll see if the kingdom-building aspect dilutes that. It wasn't a problem in P&P Kingmaker but you never know.


A couple of minor gripes:

You don't get a journal. Instead Linzi the Halfling Bard gets a journal. This is kind of a cool concept if you have Linzi in your party, but kind of jarring if you don't. Although it is kind of funny to imagine her sitting wistfully off to the side, jotting down your every minor errand while sadly wishing she were there with you.

There aren't a lot of Prestige classes and they only included half the APG classes. I smell DLC.

But those things don't really do anything to diminish the game's fun factor.


Also it kinda seems like I'm dumping on PoE in here. I still think it's a fairly decent RPG, 7/10 maybe. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that so far, Kingmaker manages to nail most of the things I liked about PoE while avoiding most of the things I didn't like, and that's a good sign.

 

[Tacgnol]

How is this played in tabletop, anyway? I assume there can only be one king. One player gets to be the king and the rest have to obey him?

Depends on the type of party you're running, some just rule the "kingdom" as a collective.

 

[Parabalus]

How do encumbrance penalties / shared stash work? Can I make a 7/8 STR char without too much fuss?

Sure, provided you take ~3 dudes with high STR.

How flexible is this with regards to the premade NPCs? I'll have plenty of options right?
Asking coz the initial 2 gnome wimps hit me with the penalty right away.

Also, how is loot done, with regards to weapon types? Thinking of going knife master instead of rogue, but cba being rekt by itemisation.

 

[Maculo]

I am not all that familiar with Pathfinder. How well does the game implement the system/mechanics/spells, etc?

Edit: I am still trying to wrap my mind around inquisitor. It is a holy rogue/ranger/summoner?

 

[Elex]

I am absolutely loving this game so far, but I'm hesitant to heap praises on it. When PoE 1 first came out, I played it for like eight hours straight and raved that it was the greatest RPG of the new millennium. I still haven't finished it. You do the math. In any case that game taught me that first impressions aren't everything.

But Kingmaker does seem pretty great so far. I'm not a big fan of the voice acting and I still think the game would have been much, much better with turn based combat over RTwP, but I'm really enjoying it. It avoids the things I really didn't like about PoE: I wasn't huge into PoE's mechanics (pre the big update patch at least), and of course Kingmaker is D&D 3.75e so that's not an issue here. I didn't like how PoE was a big text dump that felt like a DM that was waaaayyyy too enthusiastic about this new RPG setting they've come up with so they're cramming it down your throat at every opportunity. Kingmaker seems a lot less wordy and does a great thing where it allows you to highlight proper nouns to bring up a brief description of what's being talked about, allowing you to dig into Golarion's lore if you're interested but not forcing it on you if you don't care. Ultimately, though, it seems more focused - PoE felt like it was trying to be a successor to BG and PST at the same time, and you just can't do that. Despite having the same engine and ruleset, BG and PST are diametrically different games, and you can't do both. You just can't. Kingmaker seems more interested in being just a good old-fashioned swords-and-sorcery RPG romp. We'll see if the kingdom-building aspect dilutes that. It wasn't a problem in P&P Kingmaker but you never know.


A couple of minor gripes:

You don't get a journal. Instead Linzi the Halfling Bard gets a journal. This is kind of a cool concept if you have Linzi in your party, but kind of jarring if you don't. Although it is kind of funny to imagine her sitting wistfully off to the side, jotting down your every minor errand while sadly wishing she were there with you.

There aren't a lot of Prestige classes and they only included half the APG classes. I smell DLC.

But those things don't really do anything to diminish the game's fun factor.


Also it kinda seems like I'm dumping on PoE in here. I still think it's a fairly decent RPG, 7/10 maybe. I just wanted to draw attention to the fact that so far, Kingmaker manages to nail most of the things I liked about PoE while avoiding most of the things I didn't like, and that's a good sign.

many option are not in game simply because they have not reached the kicstarter goal.

 

[Salvo]

I am not all that familiar with Pathfinder. How well does the game implement the system/mechanics/spells, etc?

It's a straight up rip-off. Only thing which I find a bit iffy is movement range and initiative, everything else is pretty great and intuitive.

 

[Shadenuat]

How do encumbrance penalties / shared stash work? Can I make a 7/8 STR char without too much fuss?

Sure, provided you take ~3 dudes with high STR.

How flexible is this with regards to the premade NPCs? I'll have plenty of options right?
Asking coz the initial 2 gnome wimps hit me with the penalty right away.

Also, how is loot done, with regards to weapon types? Thinking of going knife master instead of rogue, but cba being rekt by itemisation.

Be sure to grab Amiri & Valerie

The first merchant has everything up to enchanted kukris and when you get to kingdom mode you get to build smithies and shops etc.

Except for slings for some reason. I can't fucking find a single sling

 

[fantadomat]

It is officially a bug.

 

[Serus]

Damn, despite this being turn-based-made-RTwP, which I hate with a passion I'm hyped after reading this thread. Need to contain my urge to buy this thing and wait for confirmation that the game doesn't get worse after early parts. Keep playing guys and keep posting!

 

[Riel]

The character creation interface is for the most part great. But am I blind or there's no way to know spell progression of different classes? Or even what is the primary casting stat. I assume it works as in 3.5 but I am unfamiliar with Pathfinder ruleset.

Is there a wiki or something like that available somewhere?

 

[Elex]

The character creation interface is for the most part great. But am I blind or there's no way to know spell progression of different classes? Or even what is the primary casting stat. I assume it works as in 3.5 but I am unfamiliar with Pathfinder ruleset.

Is there a wiki or something like that available somewhere?

#makemanualsgreatagain

https://pathfinderkingmaker.gamepedia.com/Pathfinder:_Kingmaker_Wiki
https://pathfinderkingmaker.wiki.fextralife.com/Pathfinder:+Kingmaker+Wiki