Kingmaker - Beginners Guide

Fextralife outline some beginner tips for Pathfinder: Kingmaker.

The first thing you need to know is that Pathfinder Kingmaker is based on Pathfinder Pen and Paper rules. There is a lot of depth and complexity in these rules, which can put off many players immediately. The most important thing to know here is that it is a Dice based system, meaning RNG is an important factor because of Dice Rolls. If you fail badly in a certain encounter, that does not mean you will fail a second time, but building characters properly increases better overall score thanks to added bonuses. The same system applies to, let’s say, disarming a trap. Trickery + Dice roll determines if the trap will be disarmed. A low roll can lead to activating the trap instead, damaging everyone around it, even with an significant investment into Trickery.

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Thanks Farflame!

More information.

I remember starting Drakensang TDE and seeing numerous tooltips and explanations on every single thing possible - I've never seen those rules before that.
Noone made any beginners' timewasting video, the game turned out epic and micromanagement based on ingame info was enormous fun.

I didn't start Kingmaker yet. If it doesn't have ingame explanations on everything, that's bad. But still. I'd appreciate text guide more than some stream-o-rama.

They have lots of ingame explanations on stuff, but it's definitely far from complete.

So... if you want to min-max your character, best read some other material first.

Min-max is for jdr and dartagnan.
I play my games on normal setting, not on socalled iron mode.

However, if discussing a game and sharing tips and hints is exciting, then I'll try to min-max something as it's a challenge of it's own.

No real need to min/max. Some of the companions are multi-classed and therefore gimped and you can complete the game with them.

Also they're of varying alignments, so several of them are useless in comparison to rolling your own party of same alignment characters. For instance, Unfortunately, you can't assign hirelings as advisors, so you're going to need to use less than optimal choices in your group. This is why I generally dislike party-based games; not enough companions to fully make the best choices.

Kingmaker is fun though, so I keep playing. I finally settled on an Sacred Huntsmaster to finish the game. I played 4-5 characters through most of the first chapter. It's a fun game, @joxer;

crpgnut said:

Unfortunately, you can't assign hirelings as advisors, so you're going to need to use less than optimal choices in your group. This is why I generally dislike party-based games; not enough companions to fully make the best choices.

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Who cares about advices?
Can you *khm* assign them as at-the-same-time romances?

Yeah I've noticed that the only person in my group that seems to be good-bent like me is the wimpy bard. I'm hoping I don't come into actual conflict with anyone in my group over alignment issues, I'm still fairly early in the first chapter, I believe I have seventy days left or so to resolve a certain situation.

crpgnut said:

No real need to min/max. Some of the companions are multi-classed and therefore gimped

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Is that really true in the pathfinder rules? In 3rd edition system that it's based on, almost every ridiculous min/max character would multi-class into something like 5 different classes. The only characters that tended to stay single class were the pure spell casters, and even then not always.

joxer said:

Who cares about advices?
Can you *khm* assign them as at-the-same-time romances?

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Hmmm, not sure. Octavia and Regongar (a really ugly half orc) want to threesome up. I think Tristian is bi/homosexual and I think Valerie and Amiri are both playing the romance card. Hopefully, Purple will pop in here and espouse about the relationships. I only like "romance" if it's in a game with good first person graphics! CBBB and Vilja or Piper. Triss and the black-haired girl in TW3. Although, I was hoping gramps would grind with Ciri too. Guess that was too close to incest.

joxer said:

Who cares about advices?
Can you *khm* assign them as at-the-same-time romances?

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Hmmm, not sure. Octavia and Regongar (a really ugly half orc) want to threesome up. I think Tristian is homosexual and I think Valerie and Amiri are both playing the romance card. Hopefully, Purple will pop in here and espouse about the relationships. I only like "romance" if it's in a game with good first person graphics! CBBB and Vilja or Piper. Triss and the black-haired girl in TW3. Although, I was hoping gramps would grind with Ciri too. Guess that was too close to incest.

Oops, I was wrong about Tristian, he's straight. If you want a male/male it has to be Regongar the hideously ugly half orc. Now that's just wrong. I think they should have made Tristian bi and maybe ranger boy too.

Here is the real list of romance options:

I absolutely had to do the polyamorous relationship with Octavia and Regongar.

crpgnut said:

Hmmm, not sure. Octavia and Regongar (a really ugly half orc) want to threesome up. I think Tristian is homosexual and I think Valerie and Amiri are both playing the romance card. Hopefully, Purple will pop in here and espouse about the relationships. I only like "romance" if it's in a game with good first person graphics! CBBB and Vilja or Piper. Triss and the black-haired girl in TW3. Although, I was hoping gramps would grind with Ciri too. Guess that was too close to incest.

Oops, I was wrong about Tristian, he's straight. If you want a male/male it has to be Regongar the hideously ugly half orc. Now that's just wrong. I think they should have made Tristian bi and maybe ranger boy too.

Here is the real list of romance options:

Spoiler: romance

Here is the full list of Romanceable companions as confirmed multiple times by the Devs:

Octavia (Bisexual)
Valerie (Straight)
Tristian (Straight)
Regongar (Bisexual)
Octavia and Regongar at the same time (Bisexual).

People who have no romances:
Linzi (which has made everyone super sad)
Harrim (which is kinda sad, but makes a bit of sense)
Nok-Nok (despite widespread fan support)
Nok-Nok and Linzi at once (Definitely unequivocally not! You can write some fanfiction about it, but it's never getting in the game, even if a blind date followed by an epic medieval rap battle [the actual term of art is flyting but rap battle captures the essence] atop a burning building would be super amazing and everyone would love it)
Amiri (for reasons?)
Jubilost (Forever Alone, for Jubilost, no one regrets this fact)
Ekun (the man can't even take care of his first family and you're going to give him a chance at a second? yeah, right)
Jaethal (Romance should be warm and fuzzy, not room-temperature)

I hope that clears things up.

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you should chnage your forum handle to dirtyoldcrpgnut

Probably. I just like to upset the politically correct stuff at every opportunity You know, from #metoo to #bitemetoo

I'm not purposely doing any of the romances, but I typically click on every dialog choice so several are happening. Glad to see I don't have to kill Tristian and I'm waiting to see if I need to off Gag-me-orc. Probably. He's C-E and I'm N-G, so he's probably gonna die.

I could've used a guide to get me through that damned Sycamore Caves dungeon...

Capt. Huggy Face said:

I could've used a guide to get me through that damned Sycamore Caves dungeon…

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Okay

https://www.gamerguides.com/pathfinder-kingmaker/walkthrough/chapter-1-old-sycamore/old-sycamore

Heh, thanks, but I finished it last night the old fashioned way. Seemed like I was going up and down and all around the stupid kobold king a dozen times.

How do people get lost in Old Sycamore?

It has two maps and all the exit/entry points have tooltips saying where they lead to.

crpgnut said:

[…] Also they're of varying alignments, so several of them are useless in comparison to rolling your own party of same alignment characters. For instance, […]

Spoiler: companion names and alignments

Amiri, Valerie

… don't match my character's good leanings. […]

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Aren't those two just Lawful Neutral and Chaotic Neutral? It seems way too restrictive to make it difficult keeping them in a good-aligned party unless there's a conflict on the Law-Chaos axis.

Judging from the Steam forums (yeah, not really a great metric to go by), the best advice right now is to wait for them to patch the game several more times so it can be finished. Last I checked it looked like bugs were preventing people from finishing act 4.

As for character builds, they're pretty tricky in this game because of the vast number of options and what information is available to you. Further, you can't respec, so if you make a mistake then you have to load a previous save or start over (surprisingly, a lot of people actually seem to support this, despite Pathfinder actually having rules for retraining). Pathfinder is quite a bit different from 3.5e in character advancement because classes gain different things at level ups other than just more spell slots, BAB, hit dice, etc. They also gain class abilities that are unique to that class or that class archetype. Playing a single class to level 20 (the max) allows access to that class's "capstone" ability, which in some cases can be a decent incentive to stick with the same class. People that are really experienced with the rules and planning ahead can definitely find ways to min-max and figure out how to optimize whatever kind of character they're trying to make. Sometimes that includes multiclassing (whether it's just "dipping" or going for a more even distribution of levels) and sometimes it's just a particular choice of feats, equipment, and stats.

https://www.d20pfsrd.com/ is a very useful resource if you want to read up on the Pathfinder rules. Though not everything on that site is actually implemented in the game, it can help fill in some of the gaps of information and give you a bit of an idea of what's going on in some places.

Bugfinder: Patchmaker.