So, yeah. I’ve been absent for the last week or so. I blame the official release of the Pathfinder: Kingmaker video game. I’ve been playing it almost nonstop. Admittedly, it’s still a bit buggy – Owlcat Games is a pretty small studio and, as someone who also works in a small software development company as the QA guy, I know all about how easily it is to break the software without realizing it. As a result of that, I’ve been pretty lenient on these guys, especially with how responsive they’ve been. The game dropped on Tuesday and they’ve released 5 hotfixes as of yesterday to resolve major issues. Sure, that’s indicative of a lot of issues, but it’s software.
Anyway, my current character is a Magus with the archetype Sword Saint and it amuses me to no end that his AC is, during a fight, higher than the tank’s even though he’s only wearing a chain shirt and she’s got full plate and a tower shield. Admittedly, he can’t hit the broad side of a barn unless he’s either lucky (really high d20 roll) or I cast True Strike (which gives me a +20 to hit), but that’s not the point. I’m currently into chapter 2 of that adventure path which is fighting the trolls. I’ve got another character – an aasimar paladin – who is into chapter 3 (which we just finished in our face-to-face group) but that game hit an irritating recursive loop bug in my capital so it’s pretty much dead.
Overall, I am enjoying the game though I did have to dial down the difficulty because man, they seriously ramped that up! I suppose it goes to the whole “you can reload” mindset which isn’t available in a F2F game, but honestly, if my 1st and 2nd level characters were running into random bandits with AC 22 or 23 like in this game with “default” difficulty level, I’d be wigging at at my GM. Case in point: my 3rd level PCs had a random encounter yesterday with an Elder Fire Elemental. That’s a CR11 creature! Before I’d really realized how insane this was, two of the six characters in my group were dead. Naturally, I reloaded and, from what I’ve gleaned on the Owlcat forums, that was fixed in the latest hotfix so random encounters are more level appropriate.
I’ll try to remember to post an image of the “character sheet” for my current PC…