Pathfinder CRPG? (Kingmaker)

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A proper role-playing-game needs enough realism that it allows common sense to play one safely through the game. Warm winter clothing for bracing a mountain pass in winter is just the sensible thing to do. Having ropes and tools to create a raft instead of trying to swim through an icecold mountain river with the weight of all your gear including armour to drag you down was another. Or ropes to safely pass snowdrifts on the pass and not lose members of your party falling into a crevasse under the snow...

Realism stung me only once - in "Pool of Radiance" (the first one) when I cleared the kobold cave and found their treasure of thousands of coins. Back then in that game coins had WEIGHT. Had to cast a strength enhancing spell on everyone in the party to be able to carry the more valuable coins like gold, silver and electrum home and was still grumbling that I had to leave thousands of copper coins to rot there...

Well, they could not have translated that literally to "The Black Eye"...

 

Nothing wrong with injecting some gritty "realism" into an RPG, just as long as it's not at the expense of fun. Most of these things are handwaved in tabletop as well. Obviously, you gotta be properly prepared for the challenges that await you on your journeys, but at the same time, you don't need to force the players to assemble every piece of gear in their backpacks or track every single ration (unless it's a major challenge of that part of the game). Nothing wrong with simply buying "Adventuring Gear" and "Warm/Cold/Wet/etc. Weather Outfit", so that you can get to the fun stuff instead of spending hours playing a micromanagement simulator. Likewise, most people don't track the weight of coins, as mentioned above. Coins weigh about a pound per 50 coins and with the ridiculous fantasy economy in D&D, it's just not particularly reasonable or fun.

Obviously, I don't know how it plays in this game since I haven't actually played it yet. Maybe it doesn't take away from the whole experience or maybe it even adds to it. All I'm saying is that more often than not, these decisions will backfire, so I'm doubtful most players will see it as a selling point. I'll reserve my judgement for when I'm writing the review.

As for the encounter (im)balance, it's ingrained within the system itself and it can't really be "fixed" (trust me, I've tried). I'm assuming most people having trouble simply aren't familiar with the system enough to know how to get around that. Bringing the challenge down to where a casual player can handle it, likely makes it boring for seasoned PF players.

 

Not being able to carry all that back in one trip wasn't that big an issue for me.
Not being able to go back and make another haul because once you left the loot screen all the treasure you did not have in your pack was lost forever DID bother me.
The game needed a bank and the ability to make multiple trips. Especially for hordes like that. It's like you can assume that a bunch of hireling camp followers were following you around just waiting to take anything you left behind, yet you did all the fighting. You get first pick, they get all the scraps as payment for providing you with food and maintaining your equipment.

 

I remember you could change your money currency in to platinum coins. And money was spent (lots) on training your characters when they level up. Especially with lots of multi class characters. I can't remember if you could buy gems/jewelry but I know you weren't required to sell gems/jewelry you could keep in inventory and they were lighter weight per value than platinum usually.

 

In PoR you could buy gems/jewelry. It then took up space in inventory. Unidentified gems/jewelry only took up weight and were under the money pool.
In CoTAB and the later games, I don't recall being able to buy gems/jewelry. I don't recall any stores that sold them in Curse.

As for money being changed to Platinum, that was done automatically to all the money in the character's inventory and in the pool whenever you made a transaction in a store. Although IIRC it would round down to the nearest GP, causing you to lose any lessor coins that didn't add up to a GP.
So the thing to do was to make sure to always have some piece of junk to SELL, head to a store, POOL all your money, then have somebody NOT buying/selling anything grab the odd cp/sp/ep and then sell your loot, then SHARE the wealth.

 

This game is super cheap on GoG right now....

 

Sorry...

 

But is it any good to get? Reviews seem to trend towards not that good of a game, though apparently it can be modded to fix some of the issues.

 

Have only gotten about half an hour into it. I’ll post more later this week. Starting out as a Magus, with the Sword Saint build. Basically single handed sword wielded who can also cast some Arcane Magic. Bard combat like or Bladesinfer combat like is my best guess. A friend told me he enjoyed the combat, so we’ll see....

 

1st impression. BG meets NWN. But not necessarily the best features from each game. A bunch of characters are thrust at you from the get go. Half lung Bard voice is less than desired. Female Barb is annoying at best. Not impressed so far.

Though I enjoyed Pillars of Eternity 1, I find that for the most part I greatly enjoy older games more than the newer games in the CRPG genre. I just don’t like the graphics of Pathfinder.

 

Note, I’m not that far onto it.

I always initially play on Normal difficult. Combat in the early game is a breeze. I switched to a Paladin. Chain Mail and Greatsword. I haven’t been hit at all, not once. Odd....Character choices seem narrow so far.

 

I really like the game. Doing the lvl 52 of the "Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC" right now.
The Diff i choose is Hard and i like the challenge
Underrated game if i may say.

 

Has anyone else played this? Just bought it from Steam's summer sale. What did you play as? Planning on playing a 2H Aasimar paladin but not sure how to divide my stats. How important are INT and DEX for a paladin?

 

Yes, I have over 400 hours in Pathfinder:Kingmaker

I played as a 2H Aasimar paladin as well (first run through, I played as a cleric). For a 2H, you want to spec mainly into strength. You can dump int, and dex is fine at max 13 for the +1 AC bonus from heavy armour. If you want to cast, you need a minimum charisma of 14 to cast all paladin spells.

 

Which npcs did you guys wind up taking with you?

 

For my adventuring party, I went with my main character paladin, Jaethal, Nok-Nok, Okundayo, Jubilost and Octavia.