Hey there good community of Paizo! I've been using Pathfinder as my system of choice for a couple years now, but just now starting to get involved in the community. I'm proud to say this is my first post here. Now, I'm hoping you folks can help me with a question. I've been talking over running Wrath of the Righteous for a friend as a PbP game for a few weeks now, as I thought its epic nature would really appeal to him. He seems very excited at the prospect. It would be just the two of us. We have a larger gaming group spread across the country, but most of them don't have the patience for PbP. I will also be controlling a full-time party member, as this seems the last game to run as a solo affair.
Of course, a typical party is around 4-6, so to up the power level of these two characters, we agreed they could gestalt and be powerful races. Here's where things get tricky. My friend is a silly, stubborn man who has achieved near total system mastery of 3.5, and never wants to even try to learn another system because of it. So, despite my reservations, I let him craft the character thus: a Vow of Poverty gestalt Monk/Druid Half-Celestial in the 3.5 mold with a couple third party feats he found. Now, that sounded weak to me. Way weak. But after crunching the math, it seems he's come up with a way to crack 60 AC at the higher levels when fighting defensively. Now, this is a tricky situation, because I don't know exactly how this character will turn out in the end, and though I'm reading through the game, I'm not genius enough how to predict how different challenges would be met by such a being.
For my own character, I was going to use a reformed Half-Fiend Wizard/Bladebound Kensai Magus in the Pathfinder fashion. A beast of a character I think. Not exactly a perfect optimization as gestalts go, but should be extremely strong.
Here's the question: will a single powerful arcane spellcaster with some melee prowess, and a nigh-unhitable warrior with divine spells be enough to tackle this game? The mythic tiers will of course make them even stronger, but that much is already accounted for by the AP. Or will gestalts with such powerful templates prove too much for the game? Despite the lost action economy of only having a two person party, would I need to take action to increase they difficulty? Of course this is all speculation since you don't know our play style, but if there's anyone out there who has played through the AP and has tweeks, advice, or general finger wagging to offer, I'm listening. Any other suggestions about the game are also appreciated.
To spare you the inevitable repetition, there are a grand many threads in this forum regarding this AP, and the majority of them are complaining that just as-written, using bare-bones 15-point-buy not-exceptionally-heavy-optimized Pathfinder characters, once they acquire Mythic they still start breaking everything because the AP itself is not written to handle characters of that power level, despite advertisements to the contrary.
For a solo-ish game those two characters - being heavily optimized by the looks of them, with a full hors d'oeuvres plate of 3.5's best cheese AND Gestalt, plus Mythic sauce on top - will probably be able to decimate just about everything they encounter.
Interesting. Should I dial it back a step do you think? Just allow him as a solo superhero to go about putting the Worldwound in its place? Or perhaps just have a single-class sidekick as a partner?
Is there a different AP that sounds fun that wont cause so many traumatic headaches re-building nearly every encounter in the last 5 books or so:)
less work, more fun WotR is not:(
I'm actually kind of curious how a single character would fare. Even with Mythic I think action economy would just slaughter them, but with all the tricks a 3.5 druid can pull plus Gestalt... you might just survive, if not thrive.
But yeah if he makes it past the first couple of books and establishes a successful rhythm, he'll probably be able to flatten the later encounters, save a handful, once he start getting into the higher Mythic tiers.
It's more a matter of the concept being appealing to my friend, Captain. He's that guy who just has to be the most important person in every game, play the worlds nicest Lawful Good, and be a hardcore powergamer. Essentially, if he's not Goku, he's unhappy. I figured I could give him an opportunity to unleash all his cheese nonsense in a setting designed for very powerful characters. And if I have to edit things so that he ends up fighting two Balors instead of one in a given scene, I think I can handle that ;)
And I think I'll let him give doing it solo a shot. You start out with some NPC pals anyway, and if he starts getting his butt whuped constantly, I can always give him more backup later. Thanks for the advice!
First thing first, to the OP: I get it I just wanted to point it the flaws, you guys should do fine with Wrath:)