Kingmaker

So I may or may not have been allowing my days this last week to be completely taken over by the new Pathfinder: Kingmaker game.

I really enjoy it. However, I think Owlcat made some strange choices. Some of these deal with the real-time-with-pause format in general. Turn-based is superior, and I’ve never understood the need to have less control in a game. I know for a fact that my choices are going to be superior to the AI, so why would I give that up?

Second, damn this is hard. Like, silly hard, and I’m playing with the difficulty turned pretty damn low. I get that tabletop Pathfinder is optimized for a party of 4, and in Kingmaker you get a party of six, but I would have lost the game a hundred times over by now if I was playing on a difficulty where you could die in combat. I simply couldn’t afford to raise the dead so often. Someone would die practically every fight. The encounters are such that I basically have to rest after most of them, which while this is how I run games myself on pen-and-paper, I also have drastically fewer encounters. In my own games, I have zero random encounters. Everything is a set piece planned in advance. If you happen to go to the place or are under the right circumstances, an encounter happens. I do ad hoc something together for PCs if they do something truly unexpected, but even then it’s a logical reaction to the situation.

I also don’t understand why it is so expensive to have a custom party. If the player wants to play that way, fine. While I like most of the companions they provide, I get wanting to have a party of your own, optimized to your own play style. At 2000 gp per level, it is cost prohibitive to do so. I mean, either support the function or just don’t; the current status is basically just a tease.

I do love the UI for character generation and advancement. I also like that while there have been changes to the rule set, Owlcat mostly kept things as close as possible to the original rules, even with the change in medium. There are free actions, swift actions, and standard actions, etc.; it is just that I can’t control those very easily without constant pausing.

Anyway. Overall the game is still fun, but also a tad disappointing.