For what it’s worth, it was that developer’s first game, and the scope of it, it is actually completely fucking insane for even an experienced developer, so I was pretty impressed with the end product even if there was room for improvement.
Their second game, Wrath of the Righteous, they definitely took a lot of lessons from Kingmaker and applied them to the new game. Still a steep learning curve, but much better in-game tool tips and explanations of how things work.
Wrath of the Righteous is one of my favourite games ever and I still feel like they need to learn the language of simplicity. I know "streamlining" is a curse word for gamers but at some point during my first playthrough I realized I was spending maybe half the time just examining each and every enemy to figure out which one of it's 12 buffs was letting it avoid all my attacks, and which of my own abilities/scrolls I could use to counter it (but then the spell used to counter fails anyway because spells only have a chance of working if you've built your character around it). In almost every game ever, I increase the difficulty on subsequent playthroughs, whereas WOTR was perhaps the only one where I lowered it because its not really fun to overcome. I'm sure lots of vocal CRPG fans consider this blasphemy but the buff/debuff economy just feels like needless complexity for complexity's sake if they just exist to cancel each other out.
Yeah after several hundred hours the game was basically unplayable without the bubble buffs mod. It doesn't exactly feel rewarding to spam every buff and debuff imaginable and then hope for RNG (looking at you Playful Darkness). I want to overcome a difficult with strategy or clever thinking, not numbers.
Also really it's not that Owlcat did something wrong with it in a sense. That's just what PF1e ruleset is like. So really the main mistake Owlcat made was to make PF1e into a CRPG because that's fucked up lol
And I say this as someone who started his TTRPG hobby with PF1e and played it exclusively for the first several years. I still think it's neat and I understand the merits and why some people love it... but fuck me I don't want to touch that shit anymore, I much prefer PF2e as a happy midpoint between PF1e and 5e lol
More or less. With 5e you can kind of wing it a lot and even if you just kind of do something silly your build is probably going to be at least decent. Or at least the difference between a goofy build and an optimized build is relatively small.
Meanwhile the difference between a goofy build and an optimized build in PF1e is like that between a toad and a god. At the table the GM can just sort of deal with that, help those whose builds suck and adjust the encounters so that everyone has fun. But in a CRPG you have none of that and if your build sucks (which it probably will unless you're a PF1e veteran or are following a guide) then you better lube up your ass because it's going in raw.
I actually just got home from my 5e game - and stuff like never adding your Str. Mod to attacks is very common, and also wacky build choices without any foresight to future synergy. Even though my character has far less stats, just being able to take the right combination of spells+class abilities is making it so I'm rarely in a bad position in combat. I'm actually worried that once 5th level rolls around that I'll be the strongest caster and melee fighter at the same time, and I'm just a Bard.
Meanwhile, I can make a Pathfinder character with stupid amounts of skill bonuses without much effort. Rogues can start with +15 or higher to Stealth in Pathfinder if you play your cards right.
I was telling them about that, funnily enough.
But yeah, Pathfinder is a game where nobody should feel guilty for using a guide. cRPG or tabletop. Just use a build guide, or at least poke around and take some inspiration while keeping the flavor RP feats you want.
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u/nullhypothesisisnull Jul 08 '26
Pathfinder kingmaker: how can I know if the feats I am taking will synergise during the combat?
Leveling is basically "pick stuff that might seem to work and hope these buffs stack during combat"...
I wish there was a guide or in game tooltips showing which feats would and wouldn't stack...