Tag: RPG

Pathfinder Kingmaker – A Classic Modern Roleplaying Game Coming From The Golden Age Of Dungeons And Dragons

Pathfinder Kingmaker – A Dream Come True For Every RPG Player, New And Seasoned?
(ongoing Development / Discovery Blog, post will be updated, so bookmark 🙂 )

December 30th 2017 – A First Look At The Alpha, Impressions

Pathfinder Kingmaker Roleplaying Game Sensation Dungeons And Dragons
Pathfinder Kingmaker – A New Roleplaying Game Sensation From The Golden Age Of Dungeons And Dragons

By some stroke of luck, this game found me as I found the game – weirdly missing its Kickstarter Campaign, I got contacted by the Owlcat Games Team. One of its prominent members: Chris Avellone, a name a few of you might know, a very important former Black Isle  Studios member (Baldur’s Gate…) and recently, Co-Designer of the massively successful Divinity: Original Sin 2. Having only recently discovered Pathfinder: Kingmaker’s existance, I cheered fate and went to communication happily, welcome to the Alpha 🙂 The ALPHA – this looks already REALLY great! Too good for an Alpha!

Pathfinder Kingmaker Character Creation Start Screen
Pathfinder Kingmaker Character Creation Start Screen, only the limited selection speaks Alpha

And now the legendary Chris Avellone and his team are taking on the Pathfinder system, based on the old Dungeons and Dragons 3.0 / 3.5 system, often thought as the most accomplished and fun system there is and still played on many gaming tables. It’s a crazy feeling for someone playing Dungeons and Dragons and Pathfinder for so long to see that system too come to fruitition in a computer roleplaying game. What a great opportunity to have new players enjoy the infinite possibilities of such a ruleset and game!

Pathfinder Kingmaker Ruleset Choice
Pathfinder Kingmaker Ruleset Choice, Advanced Rules are great, implementing the whole Pathfinder ruleset, but will regularily kill even the veterans, so you should start with simplified or adapted rules.

In its fullness of detail and immersion it seems made for the computer, and not only often hardcore Pen & Paper players. Saving you a lot of hassle to learn this system by heart in Pen & Paper you can now – SOON! (2018!?) – enjoy its full power and enchantment and immersion in the coming Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

Pathfinder Kingmaker Character Classes
Pathfinder Kingmaker Character Classes – 16 classes for a start, combine freely. Due to alpha status, (some) feats have placeholder letters still, but this is already changing!

I am enchanted, thrilled, thunderstruck by this opportunity. A feeling of unreality is there, and a want to bring this game to as many players as possible. Give it a try, or already a buy (you can pre-order) if you like deep immersion into story, also if you love to tinker and to optimize. If you’re new to “old hardcore” DnD, this IS your golden opportunity to have great fun without having to know it all by heart.

Now you say: Give me some ingame screenshots after all that hype and.. here they are 🙂

As you can see, I tried the Advanced Rules.. and died in the tutorial mission 😀
As it should be!

Happy Gaming to you – see you in another update soon, your
Immanuel Can 🙂

 

Pillars of Eternity Character Creation: Adonan, Aumaua Fighter and Quoril Yogsword, Pale Elf Priest

Hi guys and gals!

So, as we wrote earlier, Kevaver will be joined by his friends, a concept custom party designed for Path of the Damned (which will hopefully fare well, as this is a mostly blind Playthrough).

And to create the “basic” group, we chose two of his friends to join him early. Adonan, a tough Aumaua Fighter and Quoril Yogsword, a Pale Elf Priest of Magran.

So first, Adonan:

Race: Aumaua – Many enemies in the frontline have stun or knockdown abilities. The Coastal Aumaua ability (resistant to these abilities) is excellent against that! This enables him to better control the combat himself (and to take fewer hits of course).

Might 13
We want some Might, but he’s not a damage dealer, so we won’t spend too much on it. 13 is a pretty OK value getting a nice Fort save as well.

Constitution 18 (+1 = 19, from Rauatai)
He’s a tank. He has to have many hitpoints. And Fortitude save is the most important save for tanks too, they can take the Reflex save based Area Damage no Problem. But failing your Fortitude save will bring you in trouble as many melee opponents have abilities just against that save.

Dexterity 12
Dexterity isn’t crucial for a good tank, but it’s just so good generally. We just have to take it to bring down cooldowns and recovery times a bit.

Perception 13
On Hard we would dump this stat, as we wouldn’t have a problem hitting enemies anyways. On Path of the Damned, if your Perception is too low, you will have problems with anything combat related (if you’re not only buffing / healing). So, a compromise.

Intellect 3
The only ability we can afford to dump. It’s not crucial for a tank even though it wouldn’t hurt either. But many effects and abilities of the tank are instant and have to do with doing engage / disengages. Intellect won’t help there much. We are bleeding on the defensive Auras though, but sometimes, we have to make sacrifices for a gain elsewhere.

Resolve 18
We are playing a tank. He should have good deflection. This helps. It’s rather useless for a non-tank though.

 

Second, Quoril Yogsword

Race: Pale Elf. He is more resistant to elemental damage now which can be a problem even in the back row (think Fireballs or spells in general). This will help him, as he has that super low Constitution…

Might 18
We want our spells and abilites to be as strong as possible. We want to do damage too, if using weapons. This is giving us the power. What we sacrifice is..

Constitution 3
Our priest is mainly a buff / debuff character with ranged attacks. So we don’t ever want him to be under attack. He’d be dead then with Con 10 as well, so no point in going for more than the minimum. We’ll have to be careful with him though, as there are many archers and other ranged opponents in Pillars of Eternity.

Dexterity 19
Now how great is quick spellcasting, quick attacks and quick recovery time? Speed has, in most RPGs, been a crucial ability for spellcasters and, of course, healers. Pillars is no exception.

Perception 9  (10 with The White that Wends)
Not that good but not too bad either. We want to be able to hit things when debuffed. Or we want to debuff them. Buffs are more important still, but we won’t cripple our Perception totally. That would be neither helpful nor needed.

Intelligence 18
Just nice to have. A good area for the area spells and longer lasting buffs. Maxing that is mandatory.

Resolve 10
We won’t dump that as for a healer, some help with concentration can be crucial. But we won’t boost it too. As it’s really a tank stat.

 

Alright, I’m out – see you on YouTube in the Playthrough!

Have fun gaming,

Immanuel-Can

 

 

 

 

#Wizardry8 #TLDR #Tactics 1

In the 2nd Video we learned three things:

You will massively improve the combat abilities of your party if you

  1. Attack the opponent with the lowest hitpoints first (if all opponents are similar)
  2. Maneuver your party into edges or doorways to make the opponents come to you one by one.
  3. Distribute items like healing pots to the people who will most likely need them in the coming combats.

Also, a good start for an optimal tactical structure is this:

tldr1-tactics

Key elements of these tactics:

  • leave the front row open
  • put your melee fighters in the left / middle / right places with the most sturdy ones left and right as they are most exposed
  • put people with long range melee weapons in the middle, as they can attack left / right and middle then – short range melee weapon wielders would only be able to attack the middle then
  • put your sturdy short range melee guys left / right, so they can at least attack on one side + at the middle
  • put your more fragile characters like mages, rangers, or a gadgeteer in the back

See you soon with another video, happy gaming to you!

Immanuel-Can

#Wizardry8 #Playthrough #Video 2: The #Monastery

…where the party experiences a massive slaughtering of lots of rats, bats and slimes in the lower parts of the Monastery (and avoids getting slaughtered – yet) and all of the girls (and the guy) gain massive experience (and thus level up).

Also: A live introduction to basic Wizardry 8 tactics.

It might need some time still as YouTube Servers seem to not react quickly atm. Some re-production will also be done later because of that delay.

Have fun and hopefully see you around!
If you have any suggestions for me to try or to explain – write a comment anywhere on the Thoughtful Gaming pages.

Immanuel-Can

 

 

Starting the #Wizardry8 #speedrun !

Party building live with explanations for an extremely offensive hardcore late game party. Have fun playing along, lurking, watching, commenting – I’m looking forward to You 🙂 – Immanuel-Can

#Wizardry8 #Gadgeteer : Bullet rain and strange inventions

Our last party member will be a Gadgeteer: She has close to no damage in the early game but reigns supreme late with a rain of bullets. And everything can be used as a bullet at that time. The Gadgeteer has a gun which levels up with her and in the late game can use almost anything you find as a projectile. A shame we don’t find pianos in Wizardry 8, but still… In addition to that, the gun gets lots of special effects like blind or kill.

So you will have a real monster late game. Unfortunately, she doesn’t provide much damage in the earlier stages. But the topic she provides until then is utility: Lots of it. You can build gadgets en masse with the gadgeteer – all kinds of strange items. Which is tons of fun and will give you e.g.: a Jack in The Box for fear effects or, my favourite – a machine giving you a sort of a “radar” buff which is very good to avoid – or enter – encounters. And then she can pick locks – which is extremely useful throughout the game. So she does have a Jack in The Box but she is a Jack of All Trades for everything else – except DPS, which comes very late, but then with BOOM!

The Gadgeteer uses her gun as the main source of damage – which is a modern weapon. The gun won’t get a bonus from Strength, so we’ll have a slightly different build for the gadgeteer.

Senses (For the Eagle Eye Armor Penetration goodness) > Speed (more attacks) > Dexterity (more to-hit) > Vitality (more Stamina, and of course HP).

We will use a Hobbit again for her excellent combat stats – the low Strength and Piety don’t interest us. And she will get a stamina regen item of the early ones – so we will be quickly up to speed again after a fight.

gadgeteer-hobbit

Her skills are pretty straightforward: Engineering (her special skill), Modern Weapon (her key skill) and Locks and Traps (so useful). Once Modern Weapon has a high skill (like 50-something) it makes sense to raise Ranged Combat instead as it will level to max without the need to put points into it. Our bullet rain can begin!

gadgeteer-combatskills

And apart from all that stuff she has grown up as a scientist-gone-adventurer. A mechanical genius meets Indiana Jones. A tough girl not afraid of dangerous experiments to reach her goals. As a mix of Marie Curie and the dangerous May Day.

gadgeteer-character

Don’t mess with her. Until you want to be soaked. By a rain of bullets!

This is the final member of the cast, the mysterious number 6.

See you next time for the beginning of our journey and more – real – videos 🙂

Happy gaming,

Immanuel-Can

#Wizardry8 – building our #Bard : the day the music(ian) killed

Who doesn’t want some music? Some use Spotify, some use Pandora, some use Apple Music or Google Play. We won’t. We shun all these wimps. We choose a bard: The prime difference being that what on earth can you kill with Spotify et al.? Nothing. What can you kill with a Wizardry 8 Bard? Quite some things! And you get her music for free.

Our Bard will also be a melee combatant, but with nice buffs and some area DPS at the beginning. Bards are getting quite nice items, that will help with their lower range of combat skills and weapons. And we will make use of the many instruments lying around practically everywhere in Wizardry 8.

Building the melee bard is practically doing the same thing we already did with Monk / Samurai / Valkyrie: Rising Strength > Speed > Dexterity > Vitality. But there is a difference this time. We are going to use a Lizard-Woman for the job. Why? We won’t ever need magic and Lizards have pretty sexy combat stats (very high Vitality and Strength) – so, no bonus points at the start. But pretty nice numbers all around:

bard-lizardman

We will have to get rid of the negative points first before we can put some points into the precious melee stats. But that’s no problem as our bard is built to fit nicely into a party where Conan would be just one of the guys, you know.

For skills, we are going to put points into Music, Communication and Artifacts. The good combat skills will have to be earned by practice and our nice attributes. Artifacts is pretty helpful for early identification of items, Music is the core skill of the Bard – his instruments – and communication will help massively with shop prices. Something that helps really much in the beginning. Less farming needed for more items. Go, my charming Iguanodon!

bard-combatskills

Iguanodon? You already knew that’s the guy from the featured image. They are rumored to having sung songs as one of the fewer dinosaur species. What a nice Lizard-Girl in the choir:

bard-character

Kindly, I will leave for today. We will meet again soon though, presenting our 6th member of the infamous party.

Happy gaming!

Immanuel-Can

Skyrocketing #Wizardry8 #DPS with a #Dwarven #Valkyrie !

You could guess I only want a divine character as a healer. Or for the precious buffs. Resurrections. No – DPS is also great for the Valkyrie, especially to bridge the midgame. But also because she is specialized in Polearms. And there are some pretty good polearm weapons late in the game.

As with the previous melee characters (Monk and Samurai) our ability priority will be Strength (melee damage and armor penetration final skill) > Speed (number of attacks and initiative) > Dexterity (to hit and AC) > Vitality (hit points in melee are never bad).

You can always argue that Senses or Intelligence are listed under combat skills but they only make you learn the skills a little faster – their endgame final skills (unlocked after you reach 100 Senses or Intelligence) are pretty much useless for a melee character, so we are ignoring these on purpose.

So let’s make our girl strong, quick and dextrous – who wouldn’t want such a bodyguard girlfriend? (especially as a stereotypical nerd 😀 )

valkyrie-dwarf

And she’s a dwarf, too. The damage resistance is always cool for a melee character and the piety won’t hurt for some nice extra heals (piety raises spellpoints and stamina).

Combat skills are pretty straightforward, too: Polearm and Close Combat. We won’t need more. For some ranged damage, if we really happen to get two Tripleshot Crossbows, we’ll put the rest of the points into them (Level 5 upwards these points will go into spellcasting).

valkyrie-combatskills

Her name is gonna be Brunhilda after her famous namesake from the Nibelungenlied whose combat skills were so legendary that she could even wrestle with the uber-strong Dragon Slayer Siegfried.

Yes, another aggressive character. But what are you going to do in combat? Bake bread and pick flowers?

valkyrie-character

Better pick up some kills. Yes Madam. She won’t have a problem with that.

See you soon for party member 5! Happy gaming,

Immanuel-Can

#Wizardry8 : Building an effective #DPS #Ranger

After having built the core style components of our team (SHREDDER THEM!), let’s go to a class you definitely do want in your party. The ranger. He can scout automatically which is a big bonus and has high quality of life. I’d recommend the ranger to every new player’s party of Wizardry 8 just because you will not have to turn “Scouting” on and off. And even if you know the location of every hidden item it’s still really tedious if you don’t have a ranger.

So, take one. There’s no doubt: He’s useful. He can heal a bit, and teleport too in high levels. Can mix potions with his alchemy skill.

And he does tons of damage in the late game, and is still pretty OK early. If you build him right.

In order to achieve a non-balanced offensive ranger with high ranged damage, we are going to buy points in the following priority: Senses (for the final skill Eagle Eye, recommended for late game ranged damage) > Strength (for additional ranged damage and the eventual melee encounter) > Speed (for additional attacks) > Dexterity (for better to-hit and a quality of life Armor Class final skill later).

One of the best, if not the best ranger is a Mook: He has most bonus points, and is even one size category larger than the other choices, so he will have access to a nice late game sword: The Giant’s Sword, with extended range – furthering his DPS role even if the enemies come close.

ranger-mook

The skill category is pretty straightforward: We want him to kill with ranged weapons – bows. A crossbow, and hopefully a tripleshot crossbow later will be our favored weapon. Additional points are spent for scouting, so we won’t miss items.

ranger-combatskills

For his Gorillalike looks, I have baptised our furry ranger Silverback, in short: Silver. Whatever comes his way, he will drop them like flies.

ranger-character

Bonus points for recognizing the Statue up above I used as a featured image 🙂

Happy gaming! See you,

Immanuel-Can

Welcome to the #Wizardry Party, #Samurai #Musashi !

The first member of our party is going live, the most aggressive too, the Samurai!

To the honor of Miyamoto Musashi, we will call her Musashi, after one of the most famous Samurai – a double blade swordsman from the 17th century: Now going to the stars!

How are we going to build Musashi in Wizardry 8? As I already wrote earlier, there are so many possibilities to create viable characters in the game.

For the Samurai class, these choices would be:

  • Melee oriented with minimal Magic for quality of life buffs
  • Magic oriented with combat stats for better defense
  • A hybrid of the two, going offensive
  • A hybrid of the two, going defensive
  • …and possibly many more

For a high DPS endgame party, we will go for a melee Samurai and use magic to provide utility and buffs. For fun we will make her as offensive as possible. She is fearless (immune to fear effects) after all and won’t complain!

We will need:

  • High Strength
    Strength guarantees melee damage, and this is what we are going to need. Also, it provides stamina which is fueling melee attacks. Finally, when we reach 100 Strength we will have access to Power Strike, a special skill to penetrate the enemies’ armor even more. The increased carrying capacity is a nice bonus.
  • High Speed
    Speed guarantees more attacks and a higher initiative. Additionally, it helps to trigger “Lightning Strike”, a special attack of the Samurai where he attacks 4 times instead of only one time. Also, high speed grants some armor. Finally, when we reach 100 Speed we will get a special ability granting Avoidance which is really helpful to avoid malicious effects in melee combat.
  • High Dexterity
    Dexterity provides a bonus to “to hit” as well as armor class. Its final ability grants even more armor.
  • (late game) Vitality
    As we go for a victory as quickly as possible, we will postpone this ability until very late in the game. Vitality is pretty straightforward an ability granting HP and Stamina, as well as carrying capacity. It helps much with survival.

As a race we will go for the most (melee) combat oriented race in Wizardry: Its weak magical abilities give it more points for melee. The Hobbit! A female hobbit for.. well, powergaming! We will need much stamina, and stamina regenerating items are easier to access for female characters at the start of the game.
samurai-hobbit

For the start, we want her to have great Sword skills as well as Dual Weapons and Close Combat. At the beginning of the game it is more important to hit the opponents opposed to critting them – they will have so few hitpoints that they will quickly die through a much easier hit. A crit isn’t of that much benefit, so we will raise that skill later. The blue color of the Sword skill marks the class skill of the samurai: We will get a 25% bonus on the skill in game, it will apply 125% of its skill number – which is really helpful as fighting with dual weaponry gives a malus.

samurai-combatskills

As for the Magic: The Samurai cannot do magic off the bat. It will have to wait until the 5th level where we are going to talk about magic and its specialization for the Samurai in Wizardry 8.

Now imagine a female version of Musashi – you have quite a few portraits, but I like a more calm one, staying concentrated in the heat of the battle. Her intentions are to go for the great enlightenment – to beat any opponent even before the battle!

samurai-character

When the party is starting (on YouTube), you’ll be able to hear the voices of the characters in game, commenting on the events happening in game. It is always fitting, funny, and actually making you like your characters much more.

Such a masterwork!

Let’s get it on – happy to see you at Party Member 2

Immanuel-Can

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