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I've been playing the Pathfinder: Kingmaker computer roleplaying game and I think it just has to be said: Second edition is going to be crazy amenable for turning into a CRPG. Not just to faithfully re-create the game, but to provide an enjoyable experience for non-ttrpg players.
You have:
1. Straightforward ABC character generation that's easy to code and walk through.
2. Separate pools of feats, obtained in a predictable progression that can be easily visualized over a 20 level spread
3. Opt-in mechanics to limit cognitive overload and let subsystems be independently excluded or modified
4. 3 action economy for straightforward turn based combat
5. High skill floor, allowing a narrower band of game difficulty options
6. Fewer build options that require pre-planning many levels in advance
7. Easier monster customization, to make more interesting monsters that are enjoyable to face, and also easier to scale slightly up or down for player level wiggle room
8. Better defined out of combat rules for searching, sneaking, traveling, etc to help spice up the time walking between encounters or through the world
9. Refocus feature allowing extension of adventuring days without encouraging players to retreat and spam rest for a better overall gaming experience
10. Easy to code and parse conditions, which stack or cancel in obvious ways
11. Scaling cantrips providing consistent magical blasting to avoid fatal encounters with non-obvious threats like swarms, which are highly intolerable to inexperienced gamers
12. Sensible experience system with meaningful numbers for new players
13. Opportunity to provide new kinds of hidden rewards, like bonus feats, without destroying game balance to cater to non-loot motivated players, or fans of "use a skill to improve it" systems.
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Yeah. This is (yet another) thing it has in common with D& D 4th edition. That was quite easy to codify in a CRPG, for much the same reasons PF2e is.
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Yeah, the system should work very well for this. I really hope we see a PF2 CRPG soonish
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It may not be everyone cup of tea but I would love some Xcom tactical style game with PF2 fantasy setting and rules, the 3 action economy makes it perfect.
Instead of shooting an mutton in the face you stab an orc in the guts.
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It may not be everyone cup of tea but I would love some Xcom tactical style game with PF2 fantasy setting and rules, the 3 action economy makes it perfect.
Instead of shooting an mutton in the face you stab an orc in the guts.
Completely agree. I loved Mario+Rabbids, which is an xcom style turn based grid tactics game, so this is very much my thing and something that's easy to envision working for PF2.
Wouldn't even need to be a big open world or narrative game kind of thing. Just make it a series of missions. Town is home base from which you go out on set adventures. Downtime (at base between missions) + exploration (within dungeon) + encounter modes would work great.
(Honestly, PFS is kinda already this and it works just fine. The set downtime between adventures rules they've mentioned for PF2PFS would be super easy to implement in a tactics game, too. You could even just go ahead and make it as Pathfinder Society Tactics, give 'em Absalom + the Great Lodge as a home base and a built in excuse to go out on random missions.)
Simplify some of the rules here or there, perhaps, or don't develop the whole core at first to lighten the development load. Always easy to add on new missions, feats, monsters, classes in dlc.
Might even be able to make this work with roguelike aspects, depending on how you generate the missions. I've been enjoying Slay the Spire recently, e.g.
Reactions might be tricky to implement is one of my concerns. Especially if you're a fighter or paladin with mutliple reactions per round.
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Reactions might be tricky to implement is one of my concerns. Especially if you're a fighter or paladin with mutliple reactions per round.
Yeah, there will always be problems like this to solve.
But since each reaction has pretty clearly defined triggers you can always pause and query whether the player wants to spend her reaction here. (Assuming a single player game. If a multiplayer game it would be trickier but you could probably come up with some simplified system to get most of the value there.)
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Reactions might be tricky to implement is one of my concerns. Especially if you're a fighter or paladin with mutliple reactions per round.Yeah, there will always be problems like this to solve.
But since each reaction has pretty clearly defined triggers you can always pause and query whether the player wants to spend her reaction here. (Assuming a single player game. If a multiplayer game it would be trickier but you could probably come up with some simplified system to get most of the value there.)
Or you go with the "Overwatch" route for readied actions reactions and just assume the first enemy to trigger the opportunity attack gets hit.
Or you go with the "Overwatch" route for readied actions reactions and just assume the first enemy to trigger the opportunity attack gets hit.Reactions might be tricky to implement is one of my concerns. Especially if you're a fighter or paladin with mutliple reactions per round.Yeah, there will always be problems like this to solve.
But since each reaction has pretty clearly defined triggers you can always pause and query whether the player wants to spend her reaction here. (Assuming a single player game. If a multiplayer game it would be trickier but you could probably come up with some simplified system to get most of the value there.)
Yep! That's exactly what I was thinking about for one way to make it work. Pick which of your reactions you want "prepared" and it automatically triggers when appropriate.
To keep spinning out ideas: if you have a tactics game and want multiplayer, you might try out an asynchronous option: enemies & pcs move in blocks, each player has X amount of time (from minutes to days) to enter their orders for the turn, the game executes when the last player confirms her orders. You'd have to have some protocols for evaluating potentially conflicting action (could be as simple as displaying other players' already-entered actions), but it would be manageable.
Not sure the would work for, say, a champion that has to pick between shield block, retributive strike, or attack of opportunity. And if you ask the player which action they want to take after each potential trigger, it could get annoying real fast.
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Oh man, I would love a PF2e game in the style of XCom. I'm playing Warhammer: Mechanicus right now and loving it; a similar experience but with Pathfinder rules would be amazing.
Just whatever CRPG experience we end up with, please please please make it turn based... I'm replaying Kingmaker with the turn based mod and my experience is 300% improved.
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Please make it more like Divinity and less like Baldur's Gate. I really like my Tactical RPGs to be turn based.
Baldur's gate is turned based, it just does not auto pause between turns by default. It is a setting you can change in game :)
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Baldur's gate is turned based, it just does not auto pause between turns by default. It is a setting you can change in game :)
Yeah, and it plays terribly like that since it is not built for it.
Either go all the way with turned based or don't bother. My vote is for turned based.And yeah, I'm super excited for any potential 2e game. Apparently when they first started developing the king maker game they argued whether to go rtwp or turned based and I think the changes to 2e will go a long ways to then going turned based off they have that discussion again for a next game(here's going there is one!).
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Let's steer away from that particular flame war for now though.
Regarding reactions; I could see a setup where you choose to be asked each time or assign a priority list to automatically take reactions as they're triggered.
I'd also like to point out that if it's easy to make into a CRPG, it's also easier to code into character gen software or virtual table tops like Fantasy Grounds.
Would love to see a turn-based CRPG implementation of PF2e. I actually have very little TTRPG experience, but have followed D&D and PF mostly due to CRPG adaptations over the years. One of the first things I thought of reading through the playlets material was how much more straightforward converting the rules to a computer game would be, relative to PF1 or D&D in general (other than 4E, as has been mentioned already).
Baldurs gate ia a good point here
I really hoped that Larian would make a pathfinder rpg, would surely have been better then the game we have to make due with now...
So either DoS Style or X-Com Style would work pretty good (I think)
Actually, considering what I've seen done with mods, it probably wouldn't be that hard to make a mod that largely converts Kingmaker to 2e... the action economy would be the tricky thing, but should be possible. I mean fundamentally you just take the turn based mod and instead of move/standard/swift you give everyone standard/standard/standard...
The only thing I don't know if would be possible is changing the "feats at odd levels" progression, since I've never seen a mod alter that. Making each class give class feats at appropriate times is relatively trivial. Making the math line up with monsters would be tricky but not impossible.
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I like the XCOM comparison and I think it could work really well with a downtime system as well. I would love a game where, rather than an epic quest, you are working Joe adventurers taking care of monsters and bandits.
Really, building the kind of game we're discussing around the Pathfinder Society would make a lot of sense. Hope somebody does it!
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Oh, I would LOVE a full on XCOM-style tactical Pathfinder game! With downtime used for base building.
D&D Tiny Adventures was the best D&D game of all time.
I'll be very glad if I get another CRPG done well for the current edition of my pen&paper games. Hasn't happened since Toads of Elemental Evil.
It may not be everyone cup of tea but I would love some Xcom tactical style game with PF2 fantasy setting and rules, the 3 action economy makes it perfect.
Instead of shooting an mutton in the face you stab an orc in the guts.
Paizo GET THIS DONE ! Contact the makers of Xcom and have them do this. Make a Kickstarter, I'd so contribute to this.
All I ask is uh other writers than Kingmaker. Couldn't play the game because dialogues were so clunky.
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I didn't find the dialog that bad...
Then again, I played through the original NeverWinter Nights, so maybe I'm just desensitized to terrible writing. :P
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Yeah. This is (yet another) thing it has in common with D& D 4th edition. That was quite easy to codify in a CRPG, for much the same reasons PF2e is.
People said that (and say the same for 5th), but in practice there was a distinct lack of 4e computer games, and the one that does exist (Neverwinter, the pseudo mmo) changed a lot. Larian is already talking about the need to make changes to the 5e rules for Baldurs gate 3.
In practice computer game conversions aren't as simple and straightforward as people like to think.
To make it XCOMier, let the player build up a stable of adventurers, and have a tracker for total damage taken. This second tracker is reduced by days spent recovering at base, instead of normal healing. Either only characters that have reduced this "trauma damage" (or whatever) to 0 are available for missions, or to make it more organic, for every 3 multiples of your max hp you have of trauma damage, you are wounded +1 and can't go below that level until you clear your trauma damage.
It's just PF 2e Xcom! PF 2e Xcom and their adventures, Jason! PF 2e Xcom forever and forever 100 years PF 2e Xcom some things! Me and Jason and Mark runnin' around and... PF 2e Xcom time all day long, forever, 100 days! PF 2e Xcom forever 100 times!
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I didn't find the dialog that bad...
Then again, I played through the original NeverWinter Nights, so maybe I'm just desensitized to terrible writing. :P
I mean, me too! But I got spoiled by Obsidian and Bethesda, I guess.
I'll leave this conversation for another time.
I didn't find the dialog that bad...
Then again, I played through the original NeverWinter Nights, so maybe I'm just desensitized to terrible writing. :P
I mean, me too! But I got spoiled by Obsidian and Bethesda, I guess.
I'll leave this conversation for another time.
Has no one introduced a dialogue mod?
I didn't find the dialog that bad...
Then again, I played through the original NeverWinter Nights, so maybe I'm just desensitized to terrible writing. :P
I mean, me too! But I got spoiled by Obsidian and Bethesda, I guess.
I'll leave this conversation for another time.
Has no one introduced a dialogue mod?
What is and isn't moddable is I think still being discovered.
So far I haven't seen any mods that modify dialog or add new events, so I'm not sure if it's technically infeasible or just no one has tried yet. I've been meaning to look into that myself, because I want to make Happs a potential companion.
On the flip side, we have a full turn-based combat mod. XD
Reactions might be tricky to implement is one of my concerns. Especially if you're a fighter or paladin with mutliple reactions per round.Yeah, there will always be problems like this to solve.
But since each reaction has pretty clearly defined triggers you can always pause and query whether the player wants to spend her reaction here. (Assuming a single player game. If a multiplayer game it would be trickier but you could probably come up with some simplified system to get most of the value there.)
Rather than query, you have (forgive the wording here) quick-time events. Several games already do this, like Hand of Fate. If you press Q at the right time you block an attack with your shield. If you don't, nothing happens.
Generally means people will only get one type of reaction for any given trigger, but it works well (assuming a more real-time action context).