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I keep thinking about this game and different party compositions despite trying my best not to start it until it's somewhat more polished (1.1 at the very least). When that happens, I'm thinking of starting on Challenging but I'm also wondering if you really need a sword and board frontliner ("tank")? Would Jaethal and another two handed fighter or paladin manage to hold the front line? But then if I'd pick paladin would the LG restriction conflict with having Jaethal and several other Chaotic companions (Regongar, Octavia, Harrim, etc) in the party..?
Just fill your party with some custom mercs instead. Then you can have decent domains like travel, luck, or animal instead of fucking chaos and destruction.
I keep thinking about this game and different party compositions despite trying my best not to start it until it's somewhat more polished (1.1 at the very least). When that happens, I'm thinking of starting on Challenging but I'm also wondering if you really need a sword and board frontliner ("tank")? Would Jaethal and another two handed fighter or paladin manage to hold the front line? But then if I'd pick paladin would the LG restriction conflict with having Jaethal and several other Chaotic companions (Regongar, Octavia, Harrim, etc) in the party..?
Alignment conflicts aren't major. In fact, nothing i've read suggests any real conflict between CNPC's. You might have issue justifying why you as a Paladin is hanging out with someone that's undead, though, and if anyone in the party has Channel Positive Energy, it's going to be mandatory to pick the feat that discriminate based on friends/enemies, because otherwise she's going to get an ugly tan.
That said, if you're playing a Lawful Good Paladin, I have a hard time seeing why you'd not just use Valerie, who is the tank of the game (for better or worse, but I won't go into that again) and premium waifu-bait for a good boy. And no, you don't need to have a sword-and-board tanky character, but it does help a lot. Also, if you really want to make Jaethal into a tank I'd just recommend giving her Sickles and a shield. She can make a great tank, especially due to her undead immunities.
Not really, just curiosity since from what I've read so far Jaethal seems more appealing that Valerie to me and the latter doesn't have the best stats.. I know there's a respec mod out there but I'm not sure if I want to go into that.
Valerie is actually great and her stats are fine (and better later). She's not min-maxed, but min-maxing is gay and unnecessary. If you feel so strongly about it or fear that she's going to suck (she won't... sadly) just cheat her stats up a bit and be done with it. An extra two-to-four points of Strength or Constitution won't change things much. Also, her Charisma helps her as a Regent.
Pretty sure between tuskgutter and the 'quest' reward it was around 1000 xp. Plenty of enemies like that with massively inflated xp rewards if someone asked you to kill them.
Compared to tuskgutter the count is not much of a "high level challenge", though. One is easy to hit, but also hits hard (he actually two-shot Amiri in my game before Valerie could crawl over), while the other is tough to hit, but can't do much if you use the relevant protection spell.
Imo the count is a play on the good ole Kangaxx, because a) that animation and b) he is a one trick pony.
re Luckmann rant: god forbid we admit we actually like D&D and playing D&D and d20, saying anything close to that without also crying how trash and bad and mcdonalds it is would completely ruin our street cred as critics, eh?
From what I recall, the happy skull drops a diamond. And I'd like to know where those 1000xp boars are, because not even the owlbears were worth that much.
re Luckmann rant: god forbid we admit we actually like D&D and playing D&D and d20, saying anything close to that without also crying how trash and bad and mcdonalds it is would completely ruin our street cred as critics, eh?
It has been said that Dungeons & Dragons is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried.
(That's a joke. I grew up in a community of extreme storytellers / LARPfags that ruined WFRP2 for me, so I honestly prefer to play games for their crunch and ludic side, mixed with beer and snacks.)
Keep them, at the end of Chapter 1 you will find an NPC in the throne hall who will accept the fragments and relics and trade them for gold, items or stories.
re Luckmann rant: god forbid we admit we actually like D&D and playing D&D and d20, saying anything close to that without also crying how trash and bad and mcdonalds it is would completely ruin our street cred as critics, eh?
I was trying to make a point about the difference between Paidrones and PF fans, and how you can enjoy something while still knowing the flaws. PF as a system is pretty shit, and there's much better systems out there, but PF is still good for what it is, when played for what it is, you savvy?
re Luckmann rant: god forbid we admit we actually like D&D and playing D&D and d20, saying anything close to that without also crying how trash and bad and mcdonalds it is would completely ruin our street cred as critics, eh?
It has been said that Dungeons & Dragons is the worst system, except for all the others that have been tried.
(That's a joke. I grew up in a community of extreme storytellers / LARPfags that ruined WFRP2 for me, so I honestly prefer to play games for their crunch and ludic side, mixed with beer and snacks.)
WFRP has a loud niche of people here that play it without Fate Points and with an extremely slow XP growth rate added to a massive emphasis on how miserable it is. Over here, you have a huge chance of running into a group that plays it like oWoD, but instead of contemplating the dark nature of being a vampire you lament your miserable fate as a perpetual Ratcatcher who lost his legs and is dying to gangrene. With barely any rolling. The scene is also marred with absolute edgelords. From the few good games of WFRP2 I had, it is also not particularly good at running full-blown dungeon crawls without being in late-game careers with good armor, and I like doing dungeon crawls, so I prefer D&D over it in the end.
That said, your post is inherently conradictory to me:
PF as a system is pretty shit, and there's much better systems out there, but PF is still good for what it is, when played for what it is, you savvy?
Like... yeah. That's kinda how systems work. You don't play Maid RPG in Savage Worlds, D&D isn't good for games of slow-paced political intrigue, and WFRP2 is not good for playing superheroes. You're basically saying "this system is shit at things it wasn't meant to be doing". I made an entire post that says "4E is good for what it is when played for what it is" and even made examples and you just disagreed.
Originally designed as an alternative to the 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Paizo Publishing's pen-and-paper Pathfinder Roleplaying Game was released back in 2009. With its robust fantasy world of Golarion and a rich ruleset based on the modified 3.5 edition of D&D, it's quite surprising that we're getting our first Pathfinder cRPG just now.
Released on September 25, 2018 after a successful Kickstarter campaign, Pathfinder: Kingmaker is that game. It was developed by Owlcat Games, a Russian studio that consists of numerous industry veterans and Pathfinder enthusiasts, with the help of such notable individuals like Chris Avellone and Inon Zur.
During the campaign, Kingmaker was said to be inspired by Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and Arcanum, and after spending roughly 100 hours with the game, I can safely say that those weren't just marketing buzzwords, even though Arcanum's legacy is mostly represented by an abundance of bugs of all sorts. Still, out of all the games released in the past decade or so, in my opinion Kingmaker comes closest to recapturing the magic of those classic cRPGs.
Quite an endorsement, I know, so if you're interested in a detailed breakdown of what makes Kingmaker worthy of such praise, you should read on.
Rules of Engagement
If you're at all familiar with Dungeons & Dragons or any video game that uses that particular role-playing system, figuring Kingmaker out will feel like putting on a pair of cozy old slippers.
Some people call Pathfinder “D&D 3.75” and that comparison is fairly apt, I think. Without any prior Pathfinder experience, it didn't take me long to familiarize myself with Kingmaker's rules, create a character, and jump into the action.
The biggest differences you should be aware of, and this combines both Pathfinder rules and Kingmaker's implementation of them, are that single classes are now more desirable due to strong class-specific abilities, you get way more feats, each basic class comes with three distinct archetypes, and teamwork feats are a thing. The latter give your characters considerable bonuses when two of them have the same feat. There are plenty of other minor differenes, but if you know the basics, you should be able to figure those out with some experimentation.
For someone who enjoys character building above everything else in an RPG, just seeing all the options filled me with absolute joy. Multiply that by twenty levels of progression and a party of six, and you get a game where you can spend hours just on the character creation screen alone. And the best part there is that the game doesn't hold your hand and allows you to make bad decisions. This sort of thing leads to highly memorable playthroughs where in order to win, you first have to deal with an extra bit of challenge you have no one but yourself to blame for. But, if that doesn't sound like your thing, you can also just pick a premade build and be sure that it will be at least somewhat competent.
Now, when it comes to difficulty, Kingmaker offers six difficulty settings ranging from Story to Unfair with plenty of custom options on top of that. You can adjust the damage your enemies deal, the severity of their crits, their armor class and saving throws, and so on. Whatever your skill level may be, you can fine-tune the game to offer you the right amount of challenge.
What you should also keep in mind is that when the game says challenging, it means it. You won't need to play on the highest difficulty level just to avoid left-clicking your way to victory. In my experience, the “Challenging” difficulty should be your starting point if you're familiar with the classic cRPGs - you'll get some fairly tough encounters and will need to plan ahead and use your resources with some consideration, but you won't need a min-maxed party to finish the game.
Speaking of encounters, the game's combat follows the classic real-time with pause formula seemingly taken straight out of Baldur's Gate. It even includes the good old 6-second rounds intended to simulate the turn-based nature of the pen-and-paper game.
Thanks to the existence of these self-contained rounds, the game's combat is easy to read and follow, so you're rarely confused as to what's going on and what your characters are doing at any given moment even when things get pretty hectic. Which happens fairly often. The game's enemy variety is absolutely fantastic and you keep encountering new enemy types and sub-types all the way till the very end of the game. You have to constantly adjust your tactics based on who or what you're facing, be it a fort full of bandits, a house-sized owlbear, a bunch of tiny venomous spiders, a cyclops lich, or an army of angry barbarians.
At times, you may even feel overwhelmed, but let me offer you this piece of advice - no matter how grim things may seem, your spellcasters have all the answers. An appropriate buff, a couple of touch spells, or a well-timed barrage of magic missiles can win even the toughest of fights. Now, you may perhaps be disappointed to not find any complex mage battles in Kingmaker like you remember from the Infinity Engine games, but even so, Kingmaker's spellcasters are immensely useful and you should never underestimate them.
Magic items are also an important component of your success, and Kingmaker has plenty to offer in that department. You will find sackfuls of enchanted gear on your journey, and while a lot if it will just offer you simple numerical bonuses, there's no shortage of unique items that you can build your entire playthrough around. For example, early on you'll be able to find a certain bow that despite its measly +1 enchantment can stay with you till the end of the game and bring more to the table than most of its +4 or +5 counterparts.
With Kingmaker's fantastic class variety elevated to the next level by all the cool gear you get your hands on, I had to constantly fight the urge to restart the game and just play around wth different build and class combinations. To me, this is a mark of a great game.
Mind you, the adapted ruleset and its practical combat applications aren't perfect. Some class and ability descriptions are lacking or downright confusing, certain feats may or may not work correctly, there's no way to preview a prestige class in-game before a character qualifies for it and there's not that many prestige classes to begin with, sneak attacks are perhaps a bit too strong, and so on. Still, compared to everything that the game does right, issues like these are relatively minor.
And finally, the last thing I want to mention when it comes to Kingmaker's rules is the new player experience. What if you're someone who never played those old games? What if you don't know how armor class stacks or why you would use a scythe over a greatsword?
Well, some may say that this game is not for you. I disagree. I still remember playing Baldur's Gate for the first time. Back then I had zero familiarity with Dungeons & Dragons, didn't know how things worked or why having less armor meant you had more armor (oh THAC0). And you know what? Figuring all that stuff out was some of the most fun I've ever had when playing a video game. And if you're in that position right now, you have all that fun ahead of you. Just choose a lower difficulty level and don't be afraid to start over, and trust me, you'll master the game in no time.
Story and Exploration
The game's story is based on an established Pathfinder adventure path that revolves around Golarion's troubled Stolen Lands region where nothing ever seems to go right and you, as the region's new ruler, are tasked with sorting it out. From my understanding, the original adventure path is fairly well-respected, so as the bare minimum, the game's story should have been alright.
Alright wasn't enough for Owlcat Games, so they expanded the original story with a new chapter, tightened the main story arc, introduced numerous memorable characters, and added plenty of choices and reactivity into the mix.
Now, I don't know the exact extent of Chris Avellone's involvement with the project other than he wrote one of the companions, but regardless of who's responsible for what, I greatly enjoyed the game's writing. It doesn't assault you with never-ending overly verbose paragraphs nor does it devolve into a barrage of zany quips. It's just a solid old-fashioned fantasy story that doesn't take itself too seriously. In this day and age, a story like this, one that doesn't try to subvert or deconstruct anything, comes like a breath of fresh air.
And even though most of Kingmaker's writers are Russian, the game doesn't feel translated. Sure there are numerous typos here and there, but no more than you can expect to find in any other western RPG from the past few years where it's obvious the developers decided to cut corners and not hire any dedicated editors.
This is especially impressive since there's quite a lot of text in the game, be it the traditional multiple-choice dialogues that feature plenty of skill checks and allow you to reply based on your character's alignment, or the popular these days choose your own adventure sections.
The game's story companions also deserve to be mentioned. Totaling at 11, they all have their distinct backgrounds, personalities, and voices. And despite some less than stellar first impressions, after learning a bit more about the companions during their personal quests, I was struggling to decide who to take along when going out adventuring.
Still, if you don't find the story companions to your liking, you can always just hire some mercenaries and create whatever custom party you want. Just be aware that you should do it sooner rather than later, because as the game goes on, the mercenaries become more and more expensive.
But regardless of whether you go for companions or hire a band of mercenaries, you'll spend most of the game exploring the vast and detailed map of the Stolen Lands, discovering all sorts of areas and points of interest, stumbling onto random encounters, and delving into various dungeons.
All that exploration takes time, quite a bit of it in fact. To the point where the game has actual dynamic seasons. It's a relatively minor touch, but it adds to the sense of this grand adventure that spans multiple years, and so your journey from a fledgling adventurer to a powerful king doesn't just happen in what feels like a couple of weeks.
The passage of time also means that many of the game's quests are time-sensitive. And even though the timers are more than generous, they add a sense of urgency to everything you do and make you think twice before taking frivolous detours while your kingdom is being ravaged by marauding trolls.
And that's just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. There are numerous other features that ensure that Kingmaker feels like a labor of love and not just another by-the-numbers “product.” For example, the game's journal is not a dry checklist of quests, but instead a book your party's bard writes to document your journey; resting isn't just a button you press, but an involved system where you assign camping duties to your party members; and even the monster miniatures that represent random encounters on the map don't just disappear when you defeat them, but instead they fall over and roll away.
At the same time, Kingmaker is definitely not a perfect game and has plenty of room for improvement, be it in an enhanced edition of some sort or even a potential sequel.
Despite the fact that the game's story dungeons are nothing short of stellar and some of its side areas are pretty decent as well, a lot of its optional locations are tiny and offer just a single encounter. The game clearly lacks some more involved side quests. And while Kingmaker's dialogues offer plenty of alignment-based options, its class and race reactivity is close to nonexistent, which is a shame.
Some of you may also dislike the absence of a mega city with numerous districts and quests, but personally I always feel lost in those, so I didn't mind that one very much.
And now, let's get to what I think is the game's biggest flaw - its ending that feels rushed and lacking in content, which is honestly a strange thing to say when talking about a game as massive as Kingmaker.
Still, the fact remains and is especially obvious in what can be considered the game's final dungeon that combines horrible encounter design with a lack of sense of direction and some fairly obtuse mechanics. It's like that whole area was slapped together without much consideration or testing and as a result, it can sour your overall enjoyment of the game right when you're about to complete it.
I also want to mention the unfortunate lack of item descriptions. Most of them are extremely basic and do nothing for the game's atmosphere. A sword is just a sword and a mushroom is just a cooking ingredient. Maybe it's just me, but having at least a few sentences of flavor text for each item, no matter how mundane, would make the game much more enjoyable. Tell me a bit about Golarion's sword traditions, explain the culinary uses of mushrooms, that sort of thing. Otherwise, the world feels a bit too mundane and sterile.
Kingdom Management
Other than traversing the land and dealing with all sorts of evils, in Kingmaker you also get a barony, and then a kingdom, of your own. Managing this kingdom is like a game within a game, a little side dish of simulation to go with your RPG.
As a baron, you will develop your lands, build and upgrade towns and villages, and make sure your people are content and well-protected. You will also need to assemble a council of advisors and use them to deal with whatever miscellaneous problems and opportunities may arise.
Another part of kingdom management are the royal artisans that act as the game's crafting system, exchanging quests and favors for valuable pieces of gear. As someone who generally doesn't like crafting, I didn't mind dealing with the artisans, and the items they created were usually worth the hassle.
All in all, kingdom management is not too complex, but it plays an important part in making you feel like a proper ruler and not just some upstart who magically solves any and all problems with a few sword swings.
Now, if you don't like the idea of managing a small kingdom, then you also have an option to let the AI manage it for you, but I don't recommend it. As an experiment, roughly halfway through the game I turned on the auto mode and soon discovered that without the kingdom parts, the game becomes a bit disjointed, where at multiple points you have to just sit in your throne room, skipping time between important events.
Technical Information
And now, let's finally address the elephant in the room. The game launched in a sorry state comparable to an early beta. The bugs were numerous and ranged from minor to game breaking. And regardless of who we blame for this - the developers, the publishers, or the Unity engine - this sort of thing should never be encouraged.
Still, even though the bugs are many, I honestly think that their ubiquity is greatly overstated. I started playing Kingamker roughly a week after it launched, installing new patches as soon as they became available and this allowed me to play through four out of the game's seven chapters without any major issues and just a single crash. When I got to chapter five, I experienced some finicky interactions, had a few broken side quests, and was forced to improvise some workarounds during the main quest, but the game was very much beatable.
And according to the recent patch notes, most of the bigger issues have since been addressed, so if you pick the game up right now, you should have a more or less smooth playthrough with maybe an occasional visual glitch or some minor bug here and there. At the same time, take everything I say here with a grain of salt, as this review is based on my own experiences and nothing else, and when it comes to bugs, a sample size of one is not what you'd call extensive.
Moving on to the game's visuals, while not overly impressive, they're more than competent and have a certain rustic charm to them that helps reinforce the game's fantasy atmosphere.
The sound design, on the other hand, is pretty great. Even just the opening notes of the main theme you hear when launching the game are filled with power and determination. The rest of the music, some of it composed by Inon Zur of Baldur's Gate II and Icewind Dale II fame, is not far behind. And while the game's voice acting is limited to important dialogues, party banter, and chapter introductions, it sounds great and shows plenty of character.
Another thing I want to mention is how the game handles saving. In theory, Kingmaker ticks all the right boxes - it has an adjustable number of quick and auto saves and also allows you to save the game at will. But with this being a Unity engine title, while initially saving and loading is almost instant, as you go through the game, that time can easily reach roughly 20 seconds per loading screen. I won't lie, it's less than ideal, especially when you're trying to manage your kingdom.
I really hope something can be done about this in the future, because during the tail end of my playthrough the lengthy loading times were honestly more annoying than all the bugs combined.
Conclusion
Even today, games like Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and Jagged Alliance 2 stand proudly as benchmarks of their respective genres, since for whatever reason, video game developers spent the past 20 years not building upon the foundation of those games, but instead streamlining and simplifying their mechanics.
No more, says Owlcat Games with Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It's time to move forward, to take the old classics as the baseline and expand them, add more features instead of taking them away. Massive, complex, and immensely fun, even a heap of bugs was not enough to diminish my enjoyment of this game.
If you like isometric RPGs, you simply owe it to yourself to play Pathfinder: Kingmaker.
4E isn't even a bad game. It's really good at emphasizing tactical options, and it's far from "perfectly balanced" or "MMO-like" (which is a complaint I never understood at all - when did everyone start running game sessions that were about bringing 10 bear asses? Where are the turn-based MMOs?). The only thing 4E has done that was "MMOified" was codify roles that most people were used to anyway (e.g. Wizards as Controllers or Rogues as Strikers), and you didn't have to rigidly follow them to have fun; you could have had a team of four Strikers or be missing a Leader or whatever. The entire concept of "role codification" was there for convenience and typecasting - Paladin wasn't a strict Defender, Striker or Leader, but a generic guideline said that these are the three roles Pally was most suited to, so nothing new in that regard. Not to mention that 4E gave Fighters a strong ability to be a Controller (actually expanding martial options to control the battlefield) straight from the PHB instead of requiring people to get other books for goodies like Robilar's Gambit.
A common criticism for 4E is that it didn't supplant enough rules and material for roleplaying, but the 4E DMG is actually a really good source on how to run games and most "indie" D&D derivatives (or even most tables) already only roll for combat and let everything else be pretty much improv, so I don't understand why 4E got blasted for that.
4E had problems that were mostly tied to the developer of the online 4E application going insane and entangling his wife in a messy murder-suicide, the original Monster Manual having massive HP bloat issues (leading to the development of the MM3 On A Business Card; all monsters from MM3 had gotten rebalanced to speed up combat and all the previous Monster Manuals basically got an errata to bring them up to speed) and failed products like Essentials, which, in turn, tried to "downgrade" everything that is good about 4E by releasing new classes based on ones from old editions. It satisfied no one - the 4E playerbase that remained liked their at-wills and special moves, and the people it was supposed to win back didn't want to go to 4E, and it was really, really obvious that those half-assed throwbacks to 3E weren't nearly as deep or satisfying as their original implementations.
Another failure of 4E is simply that it was trying really hard to sell the idea of it "not being your dad's D&D", as it marketed itself disastrously by alienating its old playerbase.
But you would also notice that the current big hit, 5E, is taking a lot of its cues from 4E (which took its turn from Book of Nine Swords: Tome of Battle for 3.5) as well - Battlemaster Fighter, with its Superiority Dice enabling special moves in combat, is pretty much entirely a throwback to the more involved ToB/4E warrior (and contrasted with the Champion Fighter archetype that is all about hitting them harder with your sword).
I took 4E for a spin long, long after it had its heyday and I found it surprisingly good, and it was really nice at giving the DM tools to make really cool combat encounters. It would have been a perfect system to run a heavily tactical turn-based game in, and it's still one of the better editions for fans of martials - unless you find the idea of "martials casting spells" (which is grossly oversimplifying the idea of "mundane" powers) abhorrent or weeaboo. Personally, I really dislike the idea that a level 10+ Fighter is still a bumbling soldier just out there trying to survive, and it's kind of silly to assume that. I want my high-level martials to be like Cap or Hulk, not just the same guy as at level 1, but with +20 numbers. 4E is easier to get into than 3.x and my players generally liked that everyone in a classic Fighter-Rogue-Cleric-Wizard party had their own special stuff to do, especially since it wasn't nearly as homogenized as is asserted - most powers are fairly unique, and even if a few classes have some variations on some sort of generic cantrip bolt, the way they are applied (both in fluff and the role they play within a given class) are pretty nice.
Also, 4E had a pretty good promotional comic written with some absolutely classic party banter. I binged the whole thing in one boring morning, because it didn't have that many episodes. Check out Fell's Five.
But yeah, regarding PF2 trying to be more like 4E, it seems more than a little bizarre and a big misread on the population that just wants to play 3.x.
I actually like 4e, it was my first PnP experience and it didn't deserve most of the flak it got. It's fun.
Fell's Five was great, it's too bad it ended so soon without a proper ending.
Yeah, it would be difficult to justify from a roleplaying perspective even though the game doesn't enforce it.
Not really, just curiosity since from what I've read so far Jaethal seems more appealing that Valerie to me and the latter doesn't have the best stats.. I know there's a respec mod out there but I'm not sure if I want to go into that.
Valerie is basically specced to be a Stalwart Defender with Cornugon Smash and Dreadful Carnage, and she works pretty well as that kind of tank/debuffer.
WFRP has a loud niche of people here that play it without Fate Points and with an extremely slow XP growth rate added to a massive emphasis on how miserable it is. Over here, you have a huge chance of running into a group that plays it like oWoD, but instead of contemplating the dark nature of being a vampire you lament your miserable fate as a perpetual Ratcatcher who lost his legs and is dying to gangrene. With barely any rolling. The scene is also marred with absolute edgelords. From the few good games of WFRP2 I had, it is also not particularly good at running full-blown dungeon crawls without being in late-game careers with good armor, and I like doing dungeon crawls, so I prefer D&D over it in the end.
Aside from not using Fate Points, barely any rolling, and the scene being marred by edgelords, that actually sounds pretty much exactly like WFRP2 should be played. And no, it is definitely not meant for dungeon-crawling. The best quote I've ever read about WFRP, and which best encapsulates the amazing game that is WFRP, is from this article and it is the following:
You do, however, seem to have got part of the point: you note that Warhammer FRP isn't like D&D, and the monsters don't automatically carry gold and magic items. D&D is about quests for glory and riches; WFRP pretends to be the same, but in fact is about the PCs' day-to-day fight for survival in a universe that hates them. If you don't finish each adventure worse off than when you started it, your GM is doing something wrong. If you find yourself in a WFRP adventure and not knee-deep in shit then duck, because another load is past due.
Mud-covered peasant-games in which you die of gangrene or go insane are the best games.
Like... yeah. That's kinda how systems work. You don't play Maid RPG in Savage Worlds, D&D isn't good for games of slow-paced political intrigue, and WFRP2 is not good for playing superheroes. You're basically saying "this system is shit at things it wasn't meant to be doing".
PF is shit compared to many other games because it doesn't even really do what it is meant to do very well, and is shock-full of ill-written rules, overlapping subsystems, and is based solidly in ivory-tower game design, but still attempts to be "balanced", and is wide open to abuse. It is also firmly based in one of the worst thought-through settings known to man, Golarion, which is the shittiest of kitchen-sink settings, with little rhyme or reason. It can handle slow-paced political intrigue just fine, because the rules are near-universal at this point, but with incredibly disparity between the various focus points, and it's mostly written in such a way that it is not necessarily intuitive at all where some rule regarding something may be - but you can rest assured that if there's a situation, there's a rule for it, just like there's a class ability or feat or talent for every occasion, every circumstance. I wouldn't be surprised if there'd be a Prestige Class with a bonus when it comes to swinging in chandeliers. D&D/PF also tends to foster in people a tendency to incredibly degenerate expectations or activities that are detrimental when playing other games - a perfect example being how D&D/PF conditions players to have "builds" and to plan for some mythical 20th level, or the idea of "character concepts" that are impossible to realize before X+3rd level, which also contributes to my general dislike of D&D/PF as a whole - and this is before I even consider more modern or "social" issues, but entirely focusing on systemic stuff.
I wanted to beat my players in WFRP2 every time one of them started talking about what careers they were planning to get into, because WFRP2 is largely antithetical to that kind of thinking, because there's no guarantees whatsoever that things will work out as you planned, although you'll always have different options. The evolution of a WFRP2 character is very organic, whereas a D&D/PF character is very rigid, rules-enforced, pre-planned by necessity and design. I played a Shallyan Initiate in a WFRP2 game once, and I was fully prepared to take another career (such as Friar) if I were to fail my initiation into the priesthood proper, only to have the GM storyfag the whole thing, making the whole thing feel undeserved and anticlimactic (he was a great GM in other regards, though). In D&D/PF, this is the norm, almost by necessity, and classes are very far from careers, and incredibly abstracted, whereas I enjoy narrative/mechanical fidelity and interaction a lot.
But like I said, this doesn't mean that it (PF) is entirely without merit. You can acknowledge all these things and still have fun with what you're doing, especially if players are mostly noobs or on the same page. This doesn't make the game good, or even good at what it does or what it is intended for, it just scratches an itch much like how a cheeseburger from McDonalds does, or that it forms a popular basis which a lot of people are familiar with, making for easier games than, say, fighting people in terms of expectations of what WFRP2 "should" be approached or how it "should" be played. Everyone knows D&D/PF. You go on adventures, you raid dungeons, you kill the dragon, and sometimes you plow the maiden, the end.
Your post started with "4E isn't even a bad game" so it was doomed from the start. 4e is complete shit in almost every way. I'm sure it could be repurposed for a board-game dungeon-crawl reminiscent of Descent: Journeys in the Dark 2nd Ed., with lots of codified and essentially same-y abilities all working by the same core, but that's not what 4e even pretends to be. It wants to be a PnP RPG, but as far as I'm concerned, it simply fails at it.
If what you enjoy is a mega-dungeon dungeon-crawl from lvl 1 to the end, there's nothing wrong with that in itself - I fucking love playing Journeys in the Dark, it's a great faux-RPG board-game - but when it comes to being D&D and being an RPG, D&D 4e was and is an abject failure across the board. You'll probably disagree for whatever reason, since you never even understood the "MMO-critique" (or dishonestly reframe it into a strawman, since no-one ever even suggested it had anything to do with quest design or "lol turn-based MMO's xD"), so it didn't really warrant anything other than a press of the button, representing my disagreement with the very basis of your post, let alone your attempts to tie the failure of 4e to online features and shit nobody except people that were actually into 4e cared about anyway. It wasn't a marketing issue, and only 4e fans try to push it like that, now, so long after the facts.
But I really don't feel like going through your post and picking every part of it apart. So I just disagreed.
I noticed in the beta notes that Owlcat finally fixed the Corax/lumberjack/Overgrown Pool bug. That's where I stopped my playthrough since I figured that once they had the early quests bug-free it would be safe to play through Act II. Looking forward to picking the game back up once 1.1 goes live.
I mean, there's plenty of potentialexplanations, sure, but not any one encompassing one. For example, Raise Dead costs a minimum of 5000gp's worth of diamonds, and is a lvl 5 spell, requiring a cleric or equivalent of 9th level, which the world isn't exactly littered with, despite appearances. Resurrection costs 10000gp's worth of diamonds and is a lvl 7 spell. True Resurrection costs 25000gp's worth of diamonds and is a lvl 9 spell. I realize that we as players and adventurers have a somewhat skewed perception of the world, but in most settings this isn't pocked change, and some of these spells come with other restrictions or ramifications that one could interpret narratively as highly undesirable, to say the least. Raise Dead, for example, requires that the body is mostly intact and you straight-up lose two levels, and if you can't, you take constitution damage. Assuming that D&D logic applies, experience points and levels represent the strength of your soul and your growth as a person as well as your memories and actual experiences, so playing someone that has been subject to Raise Dead off as suffering from some sort of dementia wouldn't be unreasonable.
Raise Dead, specifically, also has a limit as to how long it can take before you can no longer be raised. If it takes more than 20 days to find someone capable of casting raise dead, you're most likely beyond any chance of help. We'd need Resurrection, and then we're suddenly talking about needing an even higher cleric and even more dosh for even more diamonds. Hardly something you scrounge up for the village elder.
Also, the soul has to want to return, and frankly, a lot of people that die probably doesn't want to come back, especially if they were good, and may be at peace with their deity or otherwise not in a philosophical mindset that prompts them wanting to return. Even rulers might feel that they have done what they were meant to do, and their deity or other servants of the heavens (or the hells) might persuade the concerned to let it go, saying that their destiny has been fulfilled - and they might even be right. It is also not unreasonable for someone to consider raise dead or resurrections in breach of divine will, even before they die, which might not just mean that you have no interest in returning, but might also prompt you not to raise or resurrect those that have died (especially at such a cost).
You also have to own your own soul. If you've sold it, they decide what happens to it. This might be an issue for the more selfishly inclined.
To further complicate matters, there's definitely deities that may straight-up prevent your resurrection, for one reason or another, and interfere with the process. If you've pissed off the wrong deity, they'll keep your soul locked up somewhere. This might especially be an issue for high-profile evil characters that have managed to piss off the deity of whatever hell they go to when they die, possibly simply out of spite.
There's probably more reasons that I cannot think about right now, but those are just some possible explanations. If you were thinking from the perspective of "why can't I just resurrect this dude?", then yeah, I know, it's mostly bullshit. There's no real reason you can't try to resurrect Tartuk and beat him senseless in an effort to get the truth out of him. It's just a limitation of the format - I know players that have killed people just for saying "I'll die before I tell you anything!", and then resurrected them afterward, just to prove a point.
Yeah, sorry, this is not only a very minimalistic view of the system (which implies all the fun happens at 0 XP), it's also only supported by one angle of the WFRP handbook. I personally dislike playing it that way. I'd rather play it as a zero-to-hero adventure where players ARE very weak and easy to kill and then progress to become somebody more interesting, but still capable of finding death at the hands of mundane threats. Dwelling in shit constantly in a bleak universe doesn't cut it for me. I didn't read Gotrek and Felix to be told "You can never be cool like these people, now eat your shit". I simply disagree with the author's philosophy. I'm happy if it works for his - or your - games, but in my experience, it fosters edginess. In my opinion, WFRP should be about forlorn hope. I played in games where the tone was constant lows upon lows - and it stopped being fun, we wanted to see some highs. This can't happen if the highlight of your three-session campaign is that your peasant went insane and started eating his own vomit because the Warpstone coin he was paid with for a request turned him into a Nurglite. I'm tired of every single WFRP2 GM I've met thinking that a noble swindling the PCs out of their payment of 5 gold pieces to split for a mundane task and enforced by a horde of his actual personal guard is a good plot twist rather than a reason to ask "Why the fuck would you contract us in the first place if you're apparently untouchable".
The MMO-critique had everything to do with the 4E abilities acting supposedly like WoW-style cooldowns and all classes being given a preferred "role" that they're supposed to fill, which was suspiciously similar to the Tank/Healer/DPS trifecta (even though it was not a rigid role, but merely a guideline of what you should expect from a given class). You're somehow refusing to acknowledge that Fighter and Rogue designs were good enough in 4E to carry over in many ways to 5E, and that 5E is, in many ways, a marriage of good, traditional D&D elements with 4th edition revolutions, but streamlined to be more appealing to a non-optimizer.
My time playing 4E wasn't rife with the issues you're implying it has, and throughout the whole post I feel you're trying really hard to invent a new way to say "D&D as a whole has very many fun things you can do in it, but it's still shit". Just say that you enjoy the system if you find enough enjoyable things in it to actually play it. Especially since you went all the way from "PF is good for what it is when played for what it is" to "PF doesn't actually do what it's set out to do very well". It reads more like you're trying to give a politically correct opinion instead of just admitting that you enjoy things.
My bottom line is, 4E is the Final Fantasy Tactics system. The DMG (whose general section, BTW, a good read to any new GM) and the various inventions it made ensure that the DM has fun creating encounters and every player has something to say beyond "I hit it with my sword". It isn't perfect, and I acknowledged it has issues including the absolutely busted MM.
And I don't think that your disregard of the online tools as not important is a good point when online infrastructure is likely to be one of the reasons 5E got as big as it did.
Got into the dragon's lair (could not find it before I got perception pumped at 32), tried him for a while, once I managed to morph him. After few rounds of pounding him he suddenly morphs back into a drake. I was like WTF. Then i discovered that nok-nok's rogue dispel works both ways
Yeah, sorry, this is not only a very minimalistic view of the system (which implies all the fun happens at 0 XP), it's also only supported by one angle of the WFRP handbook. I personally dislike playing it that way. I'd rather play it as a zero-to-hero adventure where players ARE very weak and easy to kill and then progress to become somebody more interesting, but still capable of finding death at the hands of mundane threats. Dwelling in shit constantly in a bleak universe doesn't cut it for me. I didn't read Gotrek and Felix to be told "You can never be cool like these people, now eat your shit". I simply disagree with the author's philosophy. I'm happy if it works for his - or your - games, but in my experience, it fosters edginess. In my opinion, WFRP should be about forlorn hope. I played in games where the tone was constant lows upon lows - and it stopped being fun, we wanted to see some highs. This can't happen if the highlight of your three-session campaign is that your peasant went insane and started eating his own vomit because the Warpstone coin he was paid with for a request turned him into a Nurglite. I'm tired of every single WFRP2 GM I've met thinking that a noble swindling the PCs out of their payment of 5 gold pieces to split for a mundane task and enforced by a horde of his actual personal guard is a good plot twist rather than a reason to ask "Why the fuck would you contract us in the first place if you're apparently untouchable".
See, this is why I didn't actually respond to your post initially; you're so clearly fucking retarded. Nothing I said remotely implied that "all the fun happens at 0 xp", but rather the point was that "mud-covered peasants that die of gangrene or go insane" is a particular playstyle, and it is part of the whole approach of "the journey is the goal" rather than clamoring for the next level or (in WFRP) the next career. If you have a GM that gives no highs, only lows, that GM was shit, because that is not the point of the game. That said, you're not meant to be Gotrek and Felix, you're meant to be some bumfuck nobody that maybe, just maybe can work their way out, after years of trials and maybe losing a leg or two. It's different from D&D at a fundamental level, as is the appeal - there's nothing edgy about it.
As for the noble shitting on you, that's par for the course. Nobles are shit. They're meant to shit on you. You were an idiot for trusting them to begin with, especially at a point where you have no legal recourse and may not even be able to fucking read, you mud-covered piece of shit.
"Agreeing to disagree" is the faggots way out. It doesn't mean anything other than "I can't defend my position, but I'll still keep it and pretend that you're wrong". And what I said wasn't a strawman, because I wasn't talking about you, which would be obvious to anyone that isn't an idiot, as part of the running text. My statement was on the possible applications of 4e as a system and how it could have been enjoyable if it was not what it pretends to be, and that if one plays it that way - which the game in no way suggest it be played, since it purports to be an RPG, nevermind part of a dynasty of a particular RPG - it could very well be enjoyable, and if that's what someone enjoys, there is nothing wrong with that.
The MMO-critique had everything to do with the 4E abilities acting supposedly like WoW-style cooldowns and all classes being given a preferred "role" that they're supposed to fill, which was suspiciously similar to the Tank/Healer/DPS trifecta (even though it was not a rigid role, but merely a guideline of what you should expect from a given class).
You're somehow refusing to acknowledge that Fighter and Rogue designs were good enough in 4E to carry over in many ways to 5E, and that 5E is, in many ways, a marriage of good, traditional D&D elements with 4th edition revolutions, but streamlined to be more appealing to a non-optimizer.
How, I must ask, I have I refused to acknowledge anything of the sort? I haven't even discussed 5e, or even anything tangentially related to 5e, and I haven't even touched upon any specific class elements whatsoever, of any edition. You're just pulling this straight out of your ass, likely in an attempt to divert the topic. D&D 5e has plenty of issues, some of them related to 4e, just like 3.5e had other, completely unrelated issues. But you weren't baiting for 5e, you were baiting for 4e. I sincerely couldn't give any less of a shit about 5e, for many reasons, but mostly because I simply have no interest in it. Had the progression been 3.5->5e, I may have, but 4e severed that cord well and truly, and salted the Earth, and now the "D&D community" and the "RPG scene" have made sure I keep my distance from the collective cancer of their platforming and gatekeeping.
My time playing 4E wasn't rife with the issues you're implying it has, and throughout the whole post I feel you're trying really hard to invent a new way to say "D&D as a whole has very many fun things you can do in it, but it's still shit".
Your time playing 4e is really quite irrelevant, nor have I mentioned any objective issues that everyone will agree are issues, especially if 4e was their first "RPG" and if they have a very limited frame of reference (as is often the case. And I'm not trying anything, I'm flat-out staying it, there's not two ways about it: 3.PF is pretty shit, and 4e is a massive, steaming pile of shit, but as far as the former goes, there are still things that can be enjoyable. You describe this as some kind of mental gymnastics, but what I'm saying is actually very straight-forward and I'm not sure why you're having such a hard time following.
Just say that you enjoy the system if you find enough enjoyable things in it to actually play it. Especially since you went all the way from "PF is good for what it is when played for what it is" to "PF doesn't actually do what it's set out to do very well". It reads more like you're trying to give a politically correct opinion instead of just admitting that you enjoy things.
I'm really not sure what you're not getting here. Yeah, I enjoy 3.5 and PF and think that parts of them can be fun, for a variety of reasons as stated. I've never said or implied otherwise. This doesn't in any way imply that it's well-designed. This isn't "political correctness" (however the fuck that would even apply in this conversation), I'm stating things very plainly and clearly. If you have trouble following, it is really not my fault.
My bottom line is, 4E is the Final Fantasy Tactics system. The DMG (whose general section, BTW, a good read to any new GM) and the various inventions it made ensure that the DM has fun creating encounters and every player has something to say beyond "I hit it with my sword". It isn't perfect, and I acknowledged it has issues including the absolutely busted MM.
"4e is the Final Fantasy Tactics system" is more or less the only non-retarded thing you've said. And nobody in their right mind would call Final Fantasy Tactics a good RPG. Like I said, had 4e not pretended to be an RPG or D&D, and instead been something more akin to Descent: Journeys in the Dark or some kind of straight mega-dungeon/dungeon exploration/dungeon-crawl simulator/board-game, it could probably have been great, because verisimilitude and things that "make sense" or aspects of reasonable asymmetry matters a lot less in those kinds of games, and they are primarily built around a series of prefabricated encounters or continuous presentation of scenarios, which would all be things that 4e could've done really well.
And I don't think that your disregard of the online tools as not important is a good point when online infrastructure is likely to be one of the reasons 5E got as big as it did.
I'm not saying it wouldn't have been important, I said that only people that had any interest in 4e cared. By the time any online features were relevant, the old D&D fans, fueled partially by WotC's behaviour and many already being part of Paizo's core (due to Dragon Magazine and similar things, which became a complete shit-show when it went in-house) had already kicked 4e to the curb for systemic, conceptual and thematic reasons.
No online infrastructure would've changed that, and further, the online infrastructure and the reliance on it in regards to the modern WotC market model and the "muh community" of 5e is fucking cancerous. Popularity has absolutely nothing to do with quality, which the modern-day D&D scene is a good example of.
