Pathfinder vs. Felltower - expectations & behaviors

So I've been playing the hell out of, and largely enjoying, Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker (hereafter, Kingmaker) shares a lot of the CRPG behavior that I see bleed over into approaches to tabletop games.

So let's look at the example of Kingmaker vs. Felltower, in terms of what is expected and the behaviors that work. Some of these change if you're running a hardcore-mode Pathfinder game, but I'm not and I don't think that's the CRPG default.

Kingmaker: You really need to do certain things in order to maximize the benefits of them. You also benefit from completing everything. The goal is to maximize the benefit out of everything you encounter. There are tradeoffs - sometimes you'll get more XP and less loot by avoiding a fight, say - but in general, you try to do as much as you can. You clear maps, clear dungeons, make sure to fight everything you can and find every coin you can. You never have enough XP or enough money to do everything so you eke out everything from the smallest weed to the biggest suit of armor and sell them or use them.

Felltower: Doing everything is too much. There aren't enough gameable hours in a session. People do try to maximize every coin - we even have a player who spreadsheets out treasure and the sale value as we play in order to ensure they can make decisions to maximize everything. PCs hunt down foes that carry gear to sell it, and want to strip the corpses of everything to sell - and sell the corpses, whenever possible. Some of that is totally reasonable economic behavior in-game.

Kingmaker: Quest payments. You can usually get paid to do something profitable to you. It's rare you don't get a reward from doing things besides the doing of the thing. It's sometimes in extra XP, not just paying in cash and magic items or special items. Some special items are "collector" items and are worth extra for finding them, if you find the right person. So far, no one has demanded I give them what I find, even when they pay me to go find something.

Felltower: Almost no one will pay you to do things you profit from. No one has a burning need to have you clear the dungeon. Only a small handful of people are willing to pay extra for special items; in general, collectors don't exist. A 1,000 year old $20 gold coin is worth $20, just like a newly minted kingdom coin. Some items are only valuable to certain people, but even then, it's not a challenge to find them - you just sell them in town and the price is the price. No amount of roleplaying and "I find a collector!" matters. The number of people willing to pay above-face-value for items is tiny - less than five instances in 11 years of play. I've had about 11 years of players looking for quests and payment for doing things they already plan to do, and expect to get the most profit from.

Kingmaker: You win a lot of fights by saving and re-playing the fight. You rush the monster, you get waxed, you re-load, and then you move into the same room, only this time you've used just the right buffs, advanced just the right characters to certain spots, and so on. You can't easily break off a fight, so you just fight it out and then re-do it for better results. You can general piecemeal foes, too, taking them one group - fighting one part of a fort doesn't automatically cause everyone to pile into the fight. You can even kill half of a dungeon full of intelligent foes and leave for a week and come back . . . and the other half is just waiting.

Felltower: You can't do that. There is no save and re-playing anything. I get players who try to effectively do this - "trigger" an encounter, then retreat, and come back another time with just the right spells, equipment, and plan . . . and do it again when that doesn't work (see: The Draugr, the Six-fingered foes, Sakatha's tomb for most of the sessions, the giants . . . for example). That doesn't always work. Some monsters are stuck where they are, so you can do this. But many learn. They adapt. They adjust. Some of them take their loot and just leave. Oh, and you can't clear a group of foes one area at a time and stay just far enough from the others that you don't trigger them and activate a larger fight. Yet, naturally, the "come back later with a perfect plan" approach dominates.


There are more, of course, but I have other work to do tonight. It's funny how I essentially play out my CRPGs in exactly the way I don't want to play TTRPGs. I'd say ironic, except that I'm really approaching different games with different approaches. How you get the maximum fun out of CRPGs insn't how you get the maximum fun out of TTRPGs.

Felltower: Dungeon Draw day

I'm pretty much spending my free time today playing around with Dungeon Draw for Foundry.

It's rough going, but I'm hoping I can get a solid, usable battle map out of this.

Dungeon Draw

I got distracted by this, though:

Dungeon Map Doodler

So we'll see if I get anything done for real. I need to - there are a few big battles I expect to have in Foundry for DF Felltower and I need to have an accurate map for them.

Snow day Saturday Pathfinder Kingmaker

I'd be lying if I didn't say I spent my snow day playing a lot of Pathfinder. It's not all I did . . . but I spent a good deal of time on it.
My guys are 8th level now, and only since level 7 have wolves and worgs become reasonable foes. Before that, I spent a good deal of buffs trying to avoid getting destroyed by them. You see, they get a free "trip" attack if they hit you. If you trip, you can only Stand Up before doing anything . . . which provokes an Attack of Opportunity, which they get lots of because they run up and surround you. So, you get hit, you fall, you try to stand, and you die. Only once I was high enough level - and armed with ridiculous weaponry like flaming swords and acid bows and corrosive axes was I able to defeat them with only a few trips here and there.

Now Will-o-wisps are my worst enemy. They tend to attack by surprise, and get a surprise round attack that consists of a lightning stroke. And then they go before my guys routinely, and get another. And THEN they get to move into melee and attack again. When it's 3, 4, or even 5 wisps, and they all target my lead character, it's brutal. By brutal, I mean fatal. I had my main guy at 100 HP and with a full Protection from Electricity spell on him get taken to negative HP and killed outright before I could act. Yeah. I won the fight and brought my guy back . . . but I literally went into the fight expecting the wisps and buffed the guys out the wazoo against their best attacks and died while trucking around with 100 HP. So that's not a lot of fun.

I'm still enjoying the game, but it's really tough to figure out what's next - and believe me, there is a useful order to do things in. Checking some companion guides, I see I permanently missed out on one guy because I short-circuited the troll adventure by directly going after and destroying the trolls. Yeah, I didn't realize I needed to wait. It's a lot like Planescape, where my first playthrough was good, but I missed a lot. My second was much better. I don't know if this one will get a second.

I don't want to waste time, but then again, I don't want to miss out because I go squish monsters too soon.

I also realized that a lot of random encounters drop useful goods, like masterwork weapons, which sell for 100 each. I avoided all fights I could early on, to save resources. Clearly I should have been taking the fights on as the profit would have paid for the rations, potions, and scrolls needed to clean up after.

Live and learn. Still fun, except when wolves attack - I mean, now, when wisps attacks. Sigh.

Friday Links 1/28/2022

Friday stuff!

- Unfrozen Caveman Dicechucker has been writing about how to play AD&D for people coming to it new.

This post is Part IV

This particular line made me laugh out loud, so I commented on it as follows:

"But then there's a column labelled "Speed Factor." Nowhere is this explained but that's ok because if you use this information while playing a game called Advanced Dungeons & Dragons then you are, by definition, playing 2nd edition."

PVD: Heh. It's explained in the DMG, p. 66-67. But this made me laugh out loud.

- Akratic Wizardry has a bit on the OSR that I found interesting.

- Warren "Mook" Wilson passed away. He was, amongst other things, the author of How to Be a GURPS GM

- Want to be Legolas? Sean Punch and I made that easier with GURPS Martial Arts . . . and here is the breakdown on how to do it:

GURPS 101: A Complete and Illustrated Guide to Being Legolas

- I ran a GURPS campaign set in the Known Worlds, so this bit of history interests me:
Piazza Thread: Original Known World Campaign Documents

Fun stuff.

Pathfinder Kingmaker update

When I last left Pathfinder, I had insufficient rations for no reason I could see after wiping out most of the trolls in their lair.

I ended up restarting from a slightly earlier save, doing some odd tasks for a week, and then coming back after the trolls.

I was a slightly higher level - 6, not 5 - and loaded with the spells I knew I'd need.

I also found a completely ridiculous corrosive damage bow in the troll lair that I'd missed on my previous delve.

I didn't even need my extra rations. I did end up using something like 25 potions of cure light wounds, 4 scrolls/potions of cure serious wounds, and 8 potions of cure moderate wounds to make up for a few nasty critical hits.

But I went into the final fight with a good mix of spells . . . and crushed the head troll (although he did severely beat up my best armored fighter) and his ally. It wasn't even a worry, although it wasn't easy. As far as I can tell, I short-circuited a whole series of events that would have happened had I just let the menace sit. But that didn't occur to me . . . someone came and said trolls were attacking my kingdom. I chose the Lawful Neutral option of saying I'd handle it. And then I just went and did that.

So that's cool, actually. It's still frustrating in some respects, like when my guys that need a 2+ to hit miss 1/4 of the time (you know, exactly the odds of rolling a 1 in 20 . . . heh) or when healing potions roll 2s over and over (5 potions for 10 HP isn't really fun). But it's okay. I do like that your actions have consequences and you aren't locked in to events.

I'll keep playing.

Felltower - Are the elementals still in those Pentagrams?

Last session, the PCs summoned some elementals in summoning circles - basically, a Pentagram spell. They left the elementals there.

Elementals can leave after an hour . . . but what if they are stuck in a Pentagram?

The PCs just don't know.

It's a big question, actually. Can a Pentagram basically contain a summoned creature forever? Or do they just get to leave after a time?

It's an unresolved question. So is the idea of casting Banish at a creature in a Pentagram. How do they interact?

I have answers for some of these, but the PCs do not. I'm curious if others have answered these questions in their own way in their games.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Where'd my rations go?

I played a lot of Pathfinder: Kingmaker yesterday. I had 3 hours of free time, and I spent them all playing the game. I fought a bunch of trolls and fought my way to the boss . . . who then pasted me so hard it wasn't funny (two highest AC, highest HP characters killed in two turns without me landing a blow.) So I realized I needed to rest and change up some spells, re-memorize the ones I'd used up, heal up HP, etc. Yes, rest in the dungeon for 8 hours upstairs from the boss, who won't move or notice that I killed off every other living thing in the place. But whatever.

I went to rest and found I couldn't - I was short on rations. Sure enough, I'm short - you can see it here:

The darker one is the game I'm about to load:

But this second save game is the same day, 3 hours earlier, just before entering the wilderness location where this all happened:

These save games are 3 hours of game time apart; I didn't rest in between at all. Even if I had, how did I go from 7 rations to 3? Resting in the dungeon would cost 4.

Is there some in-game ration cost for time indoors or in ruins/dungeons? Are my guys nibbling on them? I sure as hell didn't drop them . . . and an earlier save game (not pictured) has me with 4, not 3 . . . so some rule, or bug, is devouring them.

So now I'm stuck - I need to fight my way out of the dungeon, through multiple fights at point blank with no breaks between, so I can escape to some area and hopefully rest, so I can come back in and finish the dungeon. I'm not looking forward to that. Nor to abandoning this mission, restoring from a save game, getting extra rations, and then coming back in and trying it all over again.

Does anyone know - is this a rule or a bug?

It's very disappointing. All of that work - it was fun, yes, but it took real time - is probably gone as I try this again . . . and I'm nervous that it will happen again. I'll ditch my quest and get more rations if necessary and then come in . . . but this shouldn't be - or should it, and I'm just suffering from a lack of a manual explaining that delvers get the munchies in dungeon combat and eat up camping supplies?

PS - Yes, I have using rations during camping turned off. And we do hunt . . . so I have no idea.