Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

I'm concerned that neither Iron Gods nor Strange Aeons have an underlying management system the way Kingmaker and WotR do. If they do another Pathfinder (as opposed to Starfind which I have also heard rumors of) My money is actually on Skull and Shackles.

Strange Aeons is quite good though. It's one of the two APs i've management to run start to finish PnP. The other is Carrion Crown.

With all the additional stuff they reportedly added to WotR, I can see them bolting something onto Iron Gods or Strange Aeons, but managing a ship/fleet in a nautical AP also sounds like tremendous fun.

Good Lord, Vordakai's Tomb from Kingmaker does go on a bit doesn't it?

So Question for Kingmaker - Spoilers as well I guess just for where I am in the game:

Spoiler:

I've defeated Vordakai, and this game being this game it would seem that rather than rest and recooperate at my homebase, I've had to go off and sort out some rebellious Barbarians

However I've noticed something a bit odd with my encumbrance limits - when I was just playing the short section with just Amiri it was around 3000lb. With my full squad of 6 it's only around 1150lb. Is that a bug? I've done some searching but it doesn't seem to be something that's specifically addressed. I've noted that in CohhCarnage's 2020 playthrough of Kingmaker he's happily rocking the full 3000lb in the same section of the game I'm currently in. I know I've got a few of the weaker characters in my squad but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense? How can Amiri have the full allocation by herself but my full squad only have a third of it?

EDIT: It's OK I've figured it out - turns out lots of low strength characters has a real impact on your carrying ability. This game does have it's idiosyncrasies doesn't it?

Yes it does
But Pathfinder in general seems to thrive on/in the minutia.

fangblackbone wrote:

Yes it does
But Pathfinder in general seems to thrive on/in the minutia.

Having got to more or less the end of the 4th act, I can see why the people who love this game love it. It's a really good RPG buried under so many systems it feels like it can't breathe. Doesn't make it a bad game but it does feel like a game who's potential is suffocated more than a little.

That said, I can also see that without those mechanics it just wouldn't be a Pathfinder game.

Right, looking for some advice without - I hope - being too spoilery!

I finished Act 4 - Vordakai, The Twice Born Warlord, Betrayer's flight and the battle at Bald Hill etc a couple of nights ago. I had the big catch up with my advisers and the splash screen from Linzi saying it was all over.

I had 279 days (I think) on the timer before the next Bald Hill attack so decided to do a some kingdom development work - annex new areas, promote my advisors, upgrade my regions etc etc while I wait for whatever the trigger is for the next act, and explore my new areas.

Problem is I'm now only 82 days out from the next Bald Hill attack and - so far - I've still had no trigger for the next act. I've explored everywhere available on the map that I can reach, all my companion quests are up to date, as are my artificers requests. There's nothing more for me to do.

Is it supposed to take that long? It's been great for Kingdom development but I'm now up to about 80 hours of this playthrough and I'm increasingly nervous that I've missed something or the game is bugged. That's a lot of time to lose.

I just finished my Second playthrough of WotR - first was Angel => Legend, this latest one was Azata. Starting *another* one as an Aeon. I'm kind of amazed that after two full playthroughs of this massive game, I'm still wanting more, but I'm still having fun, so yay replay value!

So I snagged this today and spent an hour building an elf archer with an elk companion, and so far I am having a fantastic time. I'm playing on baby/story mode and so far it's just been a blast.

So I'm into - I think - the later stages of Kingmaker, and I'm starting to lose the will a little bit. My god this is a long game, and I don't even have any of the DLC. It's definitely hit a point where it's now just being long for the sake of being long. Get on with it Already! They could easily have split this game into two and had tow, solid cRPGs that would have been much easier to swallow in two doses.

I'm currently battling my way through

Spoiler:

Irovetti's Palace in Pitax

and the difficultly curve is fluxuating like a Geiger Counter in Chernobyl, plus I've hit a bug where - apart from my quicksave file - my save files are all disappearing. I'll see it through because I'm a stubborn bugger, but Wrath of the Righteous can wait I think.

I just finished today, and that's around the point where I started being ready for it to be over too. I was already running with the Bag of Tricks cheats/tools mod, so I just cranked down the difficulty a lot. There's an option to add a key that toggles always rolling 20 and another to heal the whole party to 100%. You are in the home stretch though. There's plenty of good story left so if you're willing to steamroll the fights you can still see it.

My party was melee-heavy in DPS, with only one memorization caster, so it didn't require a lot of babysitting in real-time combat. My PC was a fighter (2H) / bloodrager, and I usually brought along Amiri, Linzi, Tristran, Nok Nok, and Ekun. I made Tristran a Dawnflower-whatever towards the end, so while he was usually a healbot with a crossbow he could flamestrike the map on demand.

qaraq wrote:

I just finished today, and that's around the point where I started being ready for it to be over too. I was already running with the Bag of Tricks cheats/tools mod, so I just cranked down the difficulty a lot. There's an option to add a key that toggles always rolling 20 and another to heal the whole party to 100%. You are in the home stretch though. There's plenty of good story left so if you're willing to steamroll the fights you can still see it.

My party was melee-heavy in DPS, with only one memorization caster, so it didn't require a lot of babysitting in real-time combat. My PC was a fighter (2H) / bloodrager, and I usually brought along Amiri, Linzi, Tristran, Nok Nok, and Ekun. I made Tristran a Dawnflower-whatever towards the end, so while he was usually a healbot with a crossbow he could flamestrike the map on demand.

Oh. My. f*cking. God. I've just had a battle with a high level mage and Valerie got herself turned into a dog. Ok, fine.

So I find the one "remove curse" scroll I have in my inventory, use it and...... nothing happens. As it's the only scroll I have, and dogs can't apparently be fed potions (I can sympathise with this in real life, not so much in a game) I have to leave the location I was at, travel to the nearest village so I can purchase some more scrolls from the village priest. Leaving aside the slightly "Oh sorry person I'm in a titanic battle with to save my kingdom, I have to go and turn my dog back into a person. Do you mind waiting a day or two, thanks awfully." bizarre circumstances, it's also hideously immersion breaking.

So, purchase some scrolls. None of them work either. I'm just starting to wonder if it's a bug or something when i check the numbers. The DC for removing the curse is 38. Thirty Eight. I best I can muster is about 27. It's only then that I notice that Valerie is also cursed with a Curse of Deterioration as well. The DC to remove that is 41.

At that point I break the game by clicking the "negative effects removed on rest" button in the difficulty menu because it really takes a really moronically stupid developer to think that leaving unremovable curses in their game is in any way "fun". I shall be leaving it on.

35 minutes it's taken me to figure all that out. My patience is not inexhaustible.

I feel like Wrath does a lot better job with that sort of thing, though thankfully the difficulty fine tuning options exists or Kingmaker would be borderline unplayable (even though I think it has a ton going for it despite its occasionally bizarre choices.

Those bizarre choices can be really good sometimes.

I just got to... The Act III Camilla reveal.

Spoiler:

I briefly regretted having literally just equipped her with new, good sh*t. I was like "OH, I haven't upgraded her equipment in awhile. There ya go Camilla, now I'll turn away from you for a second secure in the knowledge that you won't be a murderer in literally five minutes time."

My regret dissipated as soon as I one hit crit murdered her with force punch bastard sword vital strike. Too bad she never got to use that sick rapier.

Yeah, that was something.

Spoiler:

I could tell Camellia was bad from the moment I found her standing over a mangled crusader during the gargoyle attack. Having Anevia track her down and put me on the job was a good way to end that arc. I found it very satisfying to take her out.

I'll be interested to hear what you think of the capstones to the stories of the other companions as you get to them. I found some to be legitimately shocking, and several to be totally predictable in the best way.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I feel like Wrath does a lot better job with that sort of thing, though thankfully the difficulty fine tuning options exists or Kingmaker would be borderline unplayable (even though I think it has a ton going for it despite its occasionally bizarre choices.

Those bizarre choices can be really good sometimes.

It does yes - if it didn’t I’d have given up it ages ago. It’s noticeable that none of this appears in Baldur’s Gate 3 for example, which is more or less the same set of rules. Larian apparently understand the different between playing a PC game and playing a ‘desktop’ PnP game.

Sorbicol wrote:
TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I feel like Wrath does a lot better job with that sort of thing, though thankfully the difficulty fine tuning options exists or Kingmaker would be borderline unplayable (even though I think it has a ton going for it despite its occasionally bizarre choices.

Those bizarre choices can be really good sometimes.

It does yes - if it didn’t I’d have given up it ages ago. It’s noticeable that none of this appears in Baldur’s Gate 3 for example, which is more or less the same set of rules. Larian apparently understand the different between playing a PC game and playing a ‘desktop’ PnP game.

It's actually not the studios as much as you might think. The rule sets are very different.

Baldur's Gate 3 is a pretty radically different set of rules. D&D 5e (Baldur's Gate 3) and Pathfinder 1e (Based on D&D 3.5e; Kingmaker and WotR) are both D20-based fantasy games, but the underlying assumptions of everything from the basic math for things like HP and armor class, to the importance of magic items, to how much mechanical weight alignment has, the the presence and role of static bonuses to the number and severeity of conditions are *radically* different. Both Kingmaker/Wrath of the Righteous and Baldur's Gate 3 are extremely faithful to the rule sets they're using.

The mechanical guts of 5e are incredibly sleek and consistent; 5e plays much faster on the tabletop than 3.5e/Pathfinder does*. Pathfinder, on the other hand, is a very dense, crunchy system with tons and tons of moving parts. It can do an enormous amount of cool stuff, but having a computer to keep track of everything that's going on "under the hood" is an enormous boon, IMHO. Pathfinder/3.5e is also a much "meaner" system. To use one example: 5e (even on the tabletop) has no concept of ability damage, ability drain, or negative levels. As you've doubtless experienced, Pathfinder uses those concepts frequently.

I think they are both very good systems, but they're pretty radically different once you scratch the surface.

*Just to give you a sense: I was one of the design team members for Level Up: Advanced 5E, which adds entire new systems to 5e, retools the classes, separates "race" into heritage and culture, and various other upgrades. It is significantly more crunchy than baseline 5E and still doesn't get anywhere near as crunchy (or brutal) as Pathfinder.

I'm going to check out Level Up now! That sounds rad. I can see a use case for something in between the two systems crunch/brutality-wise.

5e completely falls apart once players hit 12th level and on. It becomes increasingly challenging to present a interesting encounters that aren't utterly brutal or a cakewalk. The players win or lose in the first round or before combat starts, even if combat takes longer. If you guys solved for that, I'd be super interested in it.

I'm intrigued as well.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I'm going to check out Level Up now! That sounds rad. I can see a use case for something in between the two systems crunch/brutality-wise.

5e completely falls apart once players hit 12th level and on. It becomes increasingly challenging to present a interesting encounters that aren't utterly brutal or a cakewalk. The players win or lose in the first round or before combat starts, even if combat takes longer. If you guys solved for that, I'd be super interested in it.

I think we did to a certain extent; one of the design goals was backwards compatibility, but things like massive damage and critical hits got a redo, the exploration pillar is a mechanically-interesting set of challenges on its own now, and there are numerous other little adjustments and tweaks.

Also, the Monstrous Menagerie is an enormous upgrade from the WotC Monster Manual in terms of encounter building. Monsters actually have things like bonus actions and reactions to make fights more dynamic now. Paul Hughes also came up with a new system for balancing encounters that works much better than the WotC one and is easier to implement as well.

I also think you'll appreciate a lot of the lore changes. I'll give you one example that I personally worked on and am proud of: Grimlocks aren't cannibalistic mind flayer sycophant CHUDs any more; we took a little bit from The Time Machine and made them into a society of subterranean engineers who build massive machines that stabilize the geology of entire regions. (We really worked to get rid of a lot of "evil and/or stupid by default" in the lore; it's still unwise to trust literal fiends from hell, but I'd happily live right next to the orcs from Level Up in real life. Like, "in the middle of an orc neighborhood" levels of "right next to.")

I'm enjoying my Aeon playthrough significantly less than my previous two. While I've managed to keep my PC firmly on the side of good, having a literal devil standing there at my table of advisors (with no option to send him packing) is squicking me out, and I'm not really finding the "pitiless cosmic enforcer" thing to be much fun on a conceptual level.

I'm going to stick it out for a bit because I guess once you can start with the time travel stuff it gets cool, but I much prefer the Angel and Azata in terms of flavor.

So I did just have my first meaningful time travel thing with the Aeon last night, and that was indeed cool. I'm still not a huge fan of the flavor, but that moment was pretty satisfying.

I have one more big quest in act three that I've been holding off on as things keep happening and I don't want to jump the chapter forward. Besides, my main army is still at 9 strength and there's a few 10 strength armies to clear.

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

I have one more big quest in act three that I've been holding off on as things keep happening and I don't want to jump the chapter forward. Besides, my main army is still at 9 strength and there's a few 10 strength armies to clear.

If you've got a spellcasting general with some good AoE spells like Fireball or Ice Storm, you can usually "punch above your weight class" and take down enemy units that are 1 (sometimes even 2) stronger with minimal casualties.

They're mostly hiding behind a fort with a 10 strength, Forts are always a bit more daunting because they have enemy generals, but I have a crushed a few wandering armies above my weight!

TheHarpoMarxist wrote:

They're mostly hiding behind a fort with a 10 strength, Forts are always a bit more daunting because they have enemy generals, but I have a crushed a few wandering armies above my weight!

Yeah, those can get annoying. Especially the ones with scorching ray. That's *really* obnoxious to deal with.

So

I've reached what I assume is the final stage of Pathfinder: Kingmaker and my patience, which as been wearing very very thin the last couple of days I've been playing this game is also at an end. I'm very distinctly not having fun any more and just trying to plow through to the end.

Spoiler:

The House at the Edge of Time with it's two time states is a great testament to the ingenuity of the developers, but also a damning condemnation of their consideration of their players what with all the mass mobs Wild hunt vermin with their multiple, uncounterable paralysing and ability stripping gazes and poison clouds, unless you had the foresight to know you should go in with every freedom of movement, mass heal and greater restoration spells you can get your hands on. What in the name of f*cking God were they thinking? Make it hard, yes. Make it deliberately designed to make the player waste time until their realise they've got to go back to a hard save before they entered the house, get properly prepped up and the start again? Yeah, right. And lets not get on the fact there is no indication which time state you are in once you are in there, so have no idea what you should be doing even when you've given up entirely and are using a walkthrough, note pad and multiple colour pens.

Is it a good game? Yes, for the most part it very clearly is.

Is it far too long? Yes, very very much so

Is it a game that needs the equivalent of a very good editor? Yes. If it were a book this would be The Wheel of Time. There's something really good in there but it's swamped by too much superfluous content that's not needed.

I think I'm just going to dial it down to "easy" now and get through it. Bloody hell, I have never had any game test my patience like this one does.

I did that (turn the difficulty all the way down and plow through) with the final area of Wrath of the Righteous both times. It's very repetitive and tedious, and at some point, I just wanted to see where the story went.

Well, turns out I was much closer to the end than I thought and I've just finished the game - without having to dial down the difficulty in the end. I defeated

Spoiler:

Nyrisssa in the end with a well placed Baleful Polymorph spell from Octavia, bless her cotton socks. The it was just a case of trying to dispell Nyrissa's protection spells and just unloading on her

and pretty much left it there - I know there is a bit extra you can do with the right choices but believe me, I'm done with this game if you couldn't already tell.

I would very much like to give Wrath of the Righteous a go at some point, but maybe....... not just now.

EDIT: I note from the steam achievements that only 8.3% of the people who've played Kingmaker have ever completed it. That feels a very low percentage?

Not for Kingmaker... or WotR.
Both are very long games.

Sorbicol wrote:

Well, turns out I was much closer to the end than I thought and I've just finished the game - without having to dial down the difficulty in the end. I defeated

Spoiler:

Nyrisssa in the end with a well placed Baleful Polymorph spell from Octavia, bless her cotton socks. The it was just a case of trying to dispell Nyrissa's protection spells and just unloading on her

and pretty much left it there - I know there is a bit extra you can do with the right choices but believe me, I'm done with this game if you couldn't already tell.

I would very much like to give Wrath of the Righteous a go at some point, but maybe....... not just now.

EDIT: I note from the steam achievements that only 8.3% of the people who've played Kingmaker have ever completed it. That feels a very low percentage?

I think when you *do* get to Wrath of the Righteous, you will find it to be a much improved experience. Kingmaker is a good game, but nowhere near as good as Wrath.

The biggest things I missed from Kingmaker were the companions; I really loved Jubilost, Octavia, Tristian, Valerie, and Ekun in particular from Kingmaker.

But the companions in Wrath are every bit as good, and in some cases, even better.