Well I've read a little, but I also don't want to spoil anything.

Quick question about the big castle in … There's a LOT of stuff in there that I don't want to lug around. I can just leave it on the ground but I'm not sure what will happen to the place afterward. Will this be a place I can go back into later with some strength belts and haul everything out or will this one get reset?

Just loot it all when you finish the castle. There is a merchant once you exit the castle that is standing next to the tavern.

If you get encumbered to the point of not being able to move a quick workaround is to drop enough and get to the transition point and then pick it up again when you exit.

Did you find any good articles with tips but no spoilers? I'd be interested if so. I got a bit overwhelmed by the kingdom management bit last time I played.

Some, try googling PF:KM Kingdom management tips no spoilers. I found some Steam forum threads that were informative.

A few random tips…

The cards are the main thing. You'll be getting most of your points from those things. Buildings are nice but I think I worried way too much about getting just the right arrangement to maximize points. If you enjoy working that stuff out, by all means, go for it - but you won't be missing out on much if you just plop them down more-or-less randomly.

Missing opportunities doesn't hurt. Missing problems does, so give those extra weight. (Just don't go nuts. If you've only got a 5% chance to solve a problem, you're advisor's time is probably better spent on an opportunity than a failed attempt.)

You really want advisors. If you hover over the various stats, they will tell you what you need to get them.

Mercenaries you hire can work as any sort of advisor. However, they get hit with a -4 penalty. Also, they don't seem to give you the stories and choices the normal advisors allow. (This caused a bug in my game where I had a merc as an Espionage advisor. She would come to the throne like she was about to raise up a level but the dialog was empty. Every time I left the management screen, she would do the same thing! I fixed it by making the ranger the advisor for just long enough to get a proper dialog, then I sent him back to his warden role.)

Don't worry about curse research early on. You'll want to finish them by the end of the game if you can but I would leave them until you get 9 or 10 advisors. At the start, you just don't have the advisors to spare.

Most of your BP is going to come out of your own pocket. You'll want to balance buying nice magic items for your characters and buying BPs to spend on your kingdom.

Some events work out nicer if you've got one or two hundred BP sitting unspent.

You'll get a warning when one of those hilltop battles is coming soon. Once those start, they can pound your kingdom with minuses to multiple stats every day! When you get near one of those battles, start using the button to do one day at a time and stay away from the events that require your personal attention (like training and claiming regions). You might even want to head to the hill one day early and camp out there so you can get bonuses from cooking.

Started a game last night just to check it out. I went with a Human Male Fighter, or at least that's what I wanted.

So I finish the prologue, and at the end of it when Jamandi is giving her speech to me and Tartuccio, she keeps referring to me as "she" and "her". I thought it was a bug at first and then I finally realized my character was actually female.

So I guess I forgot to click the male symbol during character creation since I was focused on the portrait and other things. Yet the game still allowed me to choose a male portrait and male voice.

That's pretty dumb design if you ask me. I'm all about people having options, but the voices at least should be restricted to the gender you chose. It's not a huge deal since I planned this to be just a test run, but I'm still quite annoyed by it.

I don't feel like going through the prologue again, so I'll probably just continue with my manly female fighter for now. I'm thinking about going Fighter with Aldori Swordlord or Eldritch Knight as a prestige class or a Druid when I eventually start a real playthrough.

Talk about nitpicking :)

I played an Aldori Swordlord fighter into Act II. But then went back and restarted with Sword Saint instead with the Aldori dueling sword as my chosen weapon and I liked that class for my main a lot better for what it's worth. I thought the trade off of having just one weapon was better with the Sword Saint because you also get the spell casting. Having a fighter build just tied to one weapon wasn't to my liking. I think the one the best parts about having a fighter as your main is having another character in the party that can use a wider variety of the cool weapons you find during the course of the game. Just my two cents.

What's the advantage of masterwork weapons? Do they give you a +1 to hit like in D&D? I was looking at bows in Oleg's inventory, and a composite longbow and masterwork composite longbow have the exact same stats and price which is somewhat confusing.

Also, I noticed the AC bonus from bracers and rings of protection doesn't stack like in D&D. I'm guessing they're useless then for anyone other than monks and wizards?

Masterwork is +1 to hit only, +1 weapon is +1 to hit and to damage. Also masterwork isn’t magical so it wont harm enemies that require magical weapons whereas +1 will.

Haven’t played long enough to figure out what stacks or not.

Ah ok, so it's the same as in D&D. Weird that you can purchase some of them for the same price as the non-masterwork versions.

I never noticed that. Not saying it isn't the case but I thought from Oleg all the masterworks were 400 gp each while other plain regular weapons were much cheaper.

You can always read the more detailed descriptions on any item - it will explain each quality assigned to it. I.e. right click and read the more information. It says what masterwork is. Same when you see things like "Agile Rapier of Fencing" it will explain what agile means for the weapon, same for keen, cold iron, etc.

Bracers of AC I find only useful if not using armor. They don't stack with armor so really want them for non-armor folks or folks with low strength to avoid them getting encumbered. You want, ideally, for every companions gear to always keep them in "light" encumbrance. You get penalties for higher levels. Valerie was always in Medium and so I always focused on getting her strength up and lighter armor to start (kept tower shield as its her specialty).

You can use amulets of natural armor with Bracers of AC though - that helps a lot and they stack.

EDIT TWO - See post by Drithius. I had the ring of protection wrong (bad memory). I was confusing them with cloaks of protection I think.

EDIT: PS - if you hover over your AC, your saving throws, etc, a pop-up tells how it is calculated so you can use that with adding/removing items to get a good feel for how things either stack or use the highest value.

Bracers provide an armor bonus (same bonus as from actual worn armor)
Rings [of Protection] provide a deflection bonus (and no save bonus).

Both of these will stack with one another.

Generally speacking, AC = Armor + Deflection + Natural + Shield + Dexterity. Each of these values only counts the highest bonus you have. Dodge bonuses will stack but are harder to come by.

There is also a size bonus/penalty and many spells also contribute to AC. But keep in mind that if you're not building a character optimally for AC from the start, it's going to quickly lose its luster as the game progresses. So instead rely on spells such as mirror image, displacement, greater invisibility, and stoneskin.

Nice to see you playing, JDR. The game is amazing once the initial befuddlement fades away.

Thanks for the better information. I should have checked on the rings of protection. Will edit that. So that probably answers my confusion - that cloaks add to saving throws and rings to deflection. I was trying to remember the difference and obviously remembered wrong.

Maybe it's only the composite longbow then. I just looked again, and that's the only one where the regular version is the same price as the masterwork version, at least at Oleg's. Perhaps an oversight by the devs?

Certainly possible, unless they just set the cost that way but unlikely. You have a good eye for detail.

How are the DLCs btw? I'm definitely getting The Wildcards for the additional race/class and the companion. What about the other ones?

My favorite was the Tieflings of course - so few games let you play them. I think you could in NWN2.

I own all the DLC's but have not done the dungeon crawl one beyond two levels. Mostly because I am not a big dungeon crawl person these days - at least not massive ones. Second was the color lighting scheme. At least in the first two levels. It is meant to be sickly and represent madness and decay I think - if so it fits but still didn't like it much. But since it is the only major content I have not done slowly trying to get through the levels.

By far the race DLC is my favorite. I did enjoy the side adventure DLC where you are the general for Varnholds Lot. I played a melee druid for it. It was fun and cool but slightly unhappy with the ending. Also it was supposed to then be incorporated into the main story. I followed the suggested guideline of when to stop the main game and do the DLC so it would bring in the most stuff … and something was busted some place as nothing came over at all. Maybe I screwed something up or maybe it was a bug. Or maybe I missed something (if so then what was carried over must have been very small and minor).

I wasn't really bothered, just a little annoyed, as I did enjoy the DLC. But the ending and issue with the carry-over was enough for me to not rate it high on my end. I may try it again but since its done with a new character, and not your main, I felt a disconnect from it. Especially with how it ends. So doubtful. Plus the final dungeon was a bit of a slog for me. Fun but long and complicated and wore me out. I would have died of frustration if I had to do that long dungeon turn based lol. Even RTwP it was long. I also played on a harder mode than I normally do so that added to the length.

My two cents is if you like dungeon crawls, plus a bit of added story and context, then pick up both.

Maybe some other players will have different insight to provide.

My Tiefling Wulver Blackfur:

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/…23a912f_3k.jpg

His team. The big guy is Thrynn. I used a mod to make Thrynn bigger, with the accompanying penalties and bonuses, to match his character story. Wulver's wolf companion (from Sacred Huntsman) I turned into a Worg (with another mod) but that is just cosmetic. It seemed more fitting a Tiefling would have a Worg companion, even if he is CG/NG. I also found a mod let let me rename the animal from Wolf to a custom name which was also great.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/…d728fa2_3k.jpg

Is there a mod that does away with the kingdom building? I loved the first chapter of the game and just got dreadfully bored once I got the stupid keep or whatever it was. What about timed quests? Is there a mod that does both?

The game itself has an auto-kingdom option. Enable it and no more kingdom management at all. No need for a mod when the game has its own option to remove it.

Not sure on the timed quests as it doesn't bother me so had no need to research it.

I think there's an option that says Automatic kingdom building and you don't have to worry about it.
Not 100% sure if you then just assign advisors or something.

I finally finished the game, btw.

A word of warning to anyone who makes it to the end: what you think is the end is actually the beginning of several quests. You'll think you're about to face the final big baddy, only to find you need to gather another bunch of somethings. (Though, to be fair, the last group of 3 somethings are directly along your path.)

Also, be sure to bring plenty of Diamond Dust around in the end game. I just pulled a big pile of it out of my common chest around half way through the game and pretty much forgot about it. Then I ran out with about 3 spawns to go! Facing Big Baddy without my communal stone armor made it a good bit harder.

I would actually advise against the DLC. Honestly, this game has TONS of content as is. I think it would be best to wait until you actually finish this monster and then buy the DLC if you want to play through a second time.

I'm playing through the game finally and enjoying it. I don't think rtwp is great but I don't think turnbased would make sense for this game as there are too many fights.

I am enjoying it but not sure I will last.

I thought I was halfway through and I think I'm still in chapter 2 [emoji102]

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I happened to play one of my old videos from Divinity 2 when getting toward the end of this game and… hold on, my character has Nyrissa's voice! I looked up the voice actress (Amelia Tyler) looked into her list of game roles and found she also played Malady in Divinity: Original Sin 2.

Just finished the game…oh my. This has been without a doubt my most enojoyable gaming experience since…forever I guess. Extremely satisfying and actually fun the whole way through, can't say that about many 100hour+ games. I only wish you didn't get to keep all the companions for one playthrough, since I've already done all their quests replaying isn't quite as a tempting as it would be if I hadn't seen most of the content already.

I realize most around here don't care about graphics in a game like this. I still do myself though. This mod really makes a difference in the clarity of many textures, for anyone who might want it here is the link:

https://www.nexusmods.com/pathfinderkingmaker/mods/171?

The 256 npc textures upped to 1024 and they were provided by Owlcat - Mortheim community manager.

What's going on with Octavia and Regongar?

I've just finished the Season of Bloom, and all the other characters have given me at least the first step of their personal quests, and a few have given me the second.

Nothing at all from Octavia and Reg. Is this normal? Is there a specific plot event later on that kicks off their quests, or have I messed something up?

I started playing again yesterday after a half year hiatus due to a few game crippling bugs. Since all my mods stopped working I'm playing vanilla at the moment. Which mods are worth having with current version 2.08 besides this one?

I haven't had any issues with my mods and I am on the most current version of the game. Was playing last night and its been good.

What mods are worth it is extremely relative :-) But here are the ones I am using. Mostly visual related. The Bag of Tricks I use for visual as well - to make my character one size larger in scale and make my wolf look like a Worg. Oh and it also lets me name my animal companion with a personal name.

https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/…41235a74_b.jpg

Can click if need full size for readability. Its just an image I threw up on Flickr.

Camera rotation FOR SURE!

I definitely liked the turn based mod. It really helped me understand what was going on in combat.

It's amusing that I ignored a side quest with Valerie for too long and now the Kingdom is falling apart with rioting in the villages. Heh.

I'm not quite understanding what happened here.



In general, its good to address companion quests asap.

Also, you can set kingdom difficulty to effortless without impacting overall game difficulty - DC checks are much lower on effortless to successfully deal with kingdom problems and opportunities.

So I played some 30 hours of this game before quitting, which is not bad by my standards, but I would like to summon the strength to actually finish the damn thing, particularly now that turn-based is in. So, some issues that I was hoping I could get help with:

1. The big thing that ended up turning me off was leveling. I hate leveling in this game. Every time it's dozens of spells, dozens of feats, all of which sound equally unexciting even though I know picking the wrong one is liable to turn the game into an unplayable mess somewhere down the line. Multiply that for however many characters. Look, I'm not a minmaxer; I don't care for the whole 3.5/Pathfinder deal of planning your build twenty levels in advance, or having 90% of builds be traps for people who aren't interested in getting a PhD in crunchy tabletop systems. It turns leveling into a chore, and I don't know how to fix that other than lowering the difficulty (which I don't want to do, since the combat itself is fine and I didn't have much trouble with it), putting far more time into studying the Pathfinder ruleset than I care to, or looking up viable builds online--which feels like copying someone else's homework and doesn't really help make leveling any less cumbersome.
2. Camping! This is not unpleasant, just confusing. I try to go as long as I can without doing this, because of the time limit on quests. The problem is that I have no idea why sometimes camping seems to work better than others. Sometimes debuffs go away; sometimes they don't. Sometimes I get a hefty chunk of HP back; sometimes it doesn't seem to make a difference. So, for reasons beyond my ken, often I camp and wind up barely better than before.
3. Ranger was fine at first, but it started getting kind of boring later on. I'm thinking of rerolling with a different class, but I'm naturally weary of that because of issue #1. Is there a class that maximizes fun while minimizing crunch? One and the same, really.

Thank you kindly.

You don't need to be min/maxer - I finished the game without issues on normal difficulty without min/maxing, I just picked whatever abilities/spells that sounds interesting. I never looked up at "viable build" options either. For me, leveling up was part of fun/roleplaying (e.g. I picked wide variety of skills like healing, buff/debuff, offensive spells instead of focusing on just one because I wanted to be support character).

This has more to do with how certain debuffs/afflictions work rather than "camping issue". Some afflictions will never go away by just resting, it needs appropriate spells to remove it. Check the icons on the portrait and see what each one says. As far as the camping goes, you really need to know that:

*Hunting is for collecting rations, you should assign someone with highest lore (nature) skill.
*Camouflage is for how well you hide the camping sight from enemies, you should assign someone with highest stealth skill.
*Successful cooking gives you buffs, each giving different buffs depending on which dish you cooked (you can learn more dishes as the game progress), you should assign someone with highest knowledge (world) skill. If you really stuff up cooking, food will be burnt which will attract enemies.
*Watch order basically means someone will alert your party if there's an ambush. You should assign someone with high perception skill.

Also, just know that time restrictions isn't as bad as many people think, make you sure you do rest to get your spells/abilities back.

As I noted earlier, I don't think there's "min/max trap" unless you are playing on higher difficulty so my suggestion is feel free to reroll the character if you aren't happy with ranger.

If you have Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC - use this to try out builds. You level up very quick in this DLC so its good to test out different class builds.

I'd add that you can probably use the auto level features which may not be optimal but certainly functional. As long as you don't play on harder difficulties.

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Some additional bits to the other answers :)
Some levels require more choices than others, usually there's more at the very beginning. After that, the choices become less abundant, and you also know the game better, so they are easier to make.

Personally I find that fun and exciting to see the new toys I'll get when I level up, but I admit that I was a bit lost the first time. I took the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (1st edition) and looked at the races and classes that appealed the most to me, that helped me get a little more knowledge for those early choices. You don't need to do that of course, with a party of 6 there should be enough redundancy to forgive non-optimal choices. It probably depends on the difficulty level, but you shouldn't be afraid to select what you like most, do you prefer melee or ranged attacks? Two small weapons, or a big heavy one? You'll do fine, either way.

Important regarding your companions: you don't have to micro-manage their career! As long as you keep the default choices, they will only require you to click once for final approval. If you modify the default choices (by getting back on the character sheet), I think you'll have to continue manually from that moment on, for that companion. I think that's what @Pladio mentioned - perhaps it also works for the main character.

Please someone hit me if I'm wrong ;)

Have a look at the Bag of Tricks mod, it provides you with a respec ability (to be used with caution), in case you made a very big mistake. Cherry on top, there's a camera tool, allowing you to rotate the camera, and extend the zoom range :)
Just to make sure because I had this issue: there is a button at the top of the first screen when camping, MANAGE. It's easy to miss, the colour choice is such as I hadn't noticed it at the beginning ;)

If you hit the button, you can assign party members to the posts @purpleblob has detailed above. When you grab one of the avatars, the game will show their ability for each post. The cooking has a DC for each meal, which makes some easier to succeed than others.

In dungeons, you have to bring rations, again you need to specify that in the camp management screen at the top. If you don't use rations, resting will not restore much, it will only be considered as a short pause (it should warn you about that, also saying hunting is not possible).

You can buy those rations, they are cheap but heavy. As in D&D 5E, the purpose of this "cost" is to avoid people resting all the time in dungeons to refill.

I had a lot of fun with a rogue / eldritch scoundrel. But to each their own, really.

I don't have much more to add since I personally garner so much fun from 3.5esque planning/leveling but, if you happen to own the Beneath the Stolen Lands DLC, you can get a great handle on what's possible with builds one incremental step at a time - and where regrets in character building aren't weighed down with much permanence.

Well, this is the essence of the game - in getting pleasure from the main number of sides of the gameplay. And if half of the processes are a burden and not interesting - is the point in this game?