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Hi all,
So I have been gaming my entire life. Over 40 years. Here's some initial feedback since I started my PF2 Kingmaker campaign a few months ago:
First of all, why did you use the same version number for Pathfinder 2 and Remaster? Version numbers are meant to allow you to distinguish between changes such as this. It is very annoying as a new person to have to realize that SOME books are remastered and others are not. Pathfinder 2.5? Why not? I can only assume you didn't because you had already invested in "branding"?
I also paid $49.99 for the Kingmaker adventure path PDF (and $100 for the hardcover) which not only is not remastered, but still has references to Bestiary 6 from the Pathfinder 1 ruleset? In particular I mean things like "elite" monsters which are now on page 6 of the new bestiary but in Kingmaker you have it listed as Bestiary 6? Bestiary 1 came out in 2019?! You don't think you should update the references in the PDFs you charge $50 for?
Kingmaker makes a LOT of references to things that have been changed in remaster. I could live with it if I didn't spend $150 on it. $50 for the PDF, and $100 for the hardcover, and it's not even up to date? Shame! Pathfinder 2 remaster came out in 2023...that was 3 years ago. What's up?
So in short: the game is good, but to a new player, the erratic nature of your ruleset makes it look confusing and of poor quality.
OTOH your support of Archives of Nethys is fantastic and it is an essential resource. Thanks for that site! It is one of the best gaming resources I have ever seen.
Max
The Bestiary thing is not referring to Bestiary 6 the book, it's referring to page six of the first PF2 Bestiary which is where the template is found.
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The Bestiary thing is not referring to Bestiary 6 the book, it's referring to page six of the first PF2 Bestiary which is where the template is found.
That confused me for the longest time, TBH. If you're familiar with Bestiary 6 the book it's very easy to read it that way and it took my brain a long time to stop trying to do that. Kind of glad I'm not the only one, heh.
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The second edition kingmaker AP is definitely an outlier as far as Paizo content goes. If you look into its history, the actual Kingmaker AP was a very popular first edition AP. It was popular enough that they agreed to try something new with it and did a crowdsourced project to convert the first edition AP into a second edition AP. That conversion was very large, and incorporated elements, if I understand correctly, from the Owlcat computer game, as well as other feedback they had gotten from the original printing of the AP. However, all that said, it was an enormous project and was not part of the official AP release schedule, so Paizo had to keep resources committed to the normal APs scheduled, so it kept resources available to the project a bit more limited, which it again was my understanding caused delays.
The AP books are generally really good looking. I haven't had an opportunity to run its second edition, but really hope to at some point. I've heard, just like the original AP, the kingdom building and warfare rules were kind of rough, and there are people who swear by several homebrew solutions for them. I think that this is explained by not really having enough playtesting being able to be done on those relatively significant side portions of the story. However, it is also true, they aren't absolutely critical to be done exactly as is to go through the AP, so skipping them or homebrewing seems perfectly reasonable as decided by the local gm and table.
The controversy over the OGL and the subsequent need for Paizo to go through the Remaster was a big enough event in the whole industry, it seems like people in the industry should have been aware of the existence of the changes. And the remaster really implemented so few actual rule changes (aside from renaming things) that it would have been disingenuous to have named it Pathfinder 2.5 at all. If they had tried to go with a numeric, it would have been far more honest to call it a 2.1 version. I don't think that remaster would be anywhere close to being half-way to whatever would become the future Third edition.
But I agree their support of the Archives of Nethys is quite significant. This is especially good for people who might be trying to migrate things from pre-remastered to remastered, as if you look up an item from a premastered resource, when you are looking at it, it lets you know where there is a newer remastered version of it to look at. Then the GM can choose to use either one, if there are any significant differences in it.
And again, the timing of the remaster was pushed not by Paizo timing but the whole OGL Debacle, and another company that pushed the envelope there, so Paizo had to figure out the most appropriate response to help their business model move forward. What they knew they had to do was move away from the OGL license for all subsequent products as soon as they could reasonably, and that was going to require refactoring a few things on the way. I understand people have specific differences in what they would have done, but overall, they probably did what the needed to.
While it might have been nicer from your perspective, for it to have been named 2.5 so you could have tried to limit yourself to only remastered content (2.5 as you'd suggested) and never picked up the Kingmaker AP, bypassing a classic story. or would have felt like you needed to limit yourself to only pre-remasterd content (classic 2.0 by your nomenclature) meaning you might have limited yourself to only buying old rule books missing out on the newer, fearing it too be too different to use. I think most agree the differences are really not that big of a difference. Off the top of my head the only two things I can think of is Alignment (mostly alignment damage, with holy/unholy), and Spell schools are the items that sometimes confuse people about what exactly should be done. Maybe I am forgetting something?
As an example, I'm currently running the Abomination Vaults from their deluxe compilation. It is a premaster AP, but we are playing it with remastered rules. They would never remaster it, since it contains elements that are just too entwined potentially with OGL content. However running it as a remastered game is not really hard to do on the fly.
I ran the ghouls as their old pre-mastered form because that is the stat blocks I had on me at the time, and I hadn't realized the differences. I think it would have been perfectly easy to substitute the new stat-blocks and abilities in if I'd had the cards, or printed off/accessed them on the fly with the Archives of Nethys without any real concern. Either way they work perfectly fine as creatures.
Sorry that the Kingmaker AP being premasterd through you through some confusion, but I think having thought they were different versions would have been a worse expectation for most people. Hopefully in the end the AP was enjoyable experience for your table. It is certainly good to be aware if any AP or scenario is after the remaster or not, but I don't think you should ever consider a pre-mastered adventure off limits, because of your using the remastered rules.
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The text for Elite Adjustments on page 6 of the Remastered PF2 Monster Core is word for word identical to the text for Elite Adjustments on page 6 of the pre-Remaster PF2 Bestiary.
The bigger issue is that in book publishing, a new edition means minor changes in wording and maybe a few scene changes. In contrast, in game publishing a new edition means significant rules changes but the style and theme of the game has not changed enough to be a different game. The PF2 Remaster is a new edition in the book-publishing sense, but not a new edition in the game-publishing sense.
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Though on the note for Kingmaker, I think I remember hearing somewhere that Kingmaker Remastered was not Paizo directly, but Legendary Games approved by Paizo, sort of a second party deal. Any truth to that?
They were involved. I don't have a reference for exactly which parts, though IIRC it was the kingdom rules (which were not playtested at all). There's a post from James somewhere in the Kingmaker forum about all the problems that project faced. It was a rough one with a lot of stuff going wrong and getting it out the door at all took a pretty incredible effort.
But at the end of the day - we ran it in my group and abandoned it (first DNF for this group and we've been playing weekly for like 14 years). The Kingdom Rules were a major factor in that: people were really excited about the idea of building a kingdom right up until we actually started doing it, and then it just sucked all the energy out of the table. The turns are slow, repetitive, and not very interesting. The rules effectively make your character irrelevant while also not giving the kingdom nearly enough skills, basically ensuring you're going to fail at everything without tricks like Supernatural Solution (and if you don't have one banked when an event shows up, too bad). It really forces you to play it a certain way for it to function. We reached the point pretty quickly where most players didn't want to engage with it anymore and we did it between game nights instead.
But when you remove that and we ran out of explorable areas (because we like exploring), it kind of turned into just doing turns waiting around for the next event to happen so we could do something. Then we had one of those go sideways where we couldn't figure out how to actually fix it (the bloom thing) and I had to dig into my "bag of system mastery" to ask the GM to let us cast Butterfly Bender just to get a hint about what we were supposed to be doing because we were totally lost and people were already frustrated about the other stuff, so adding this frustration really pushed it over the "this is not fun" line.
We quit after that and switched to Spore War (which is awesome, more below). Some of the problem was that it just didn't work for us as a group, but the extra rules this AP piles on being generally so poor was a major source of friction. I also don't think its a great sandbox despite people calling it that because it's still an AP and is still on rails: you just get a bunch of time in between when the next plot shows up to go do kind of what you want, but that next train is coming down the rails no matter what you do.
None of that has to do with the remaster at all (I don't think Kingmaker is that heavily impacted by the Remaster), but PF2 Kingmaker is definitely not one of the better polished APs despite being marketed as a premium thing.
(Spore War starts kind of oddly with the influence at the start, but that is one of my favorite influence sections in all of PF2 as it was organized really well. And then the rest of it absolutely delivers the high level crazy war theme that it promises. Our biggest issue is that since we switched to it from Kingmaker some of us brought our characters over and they're not really well connected to Kyonin. If you're playing an Elf or something else more thematically appropriate the AP has extra stuff to offer, but even without that it's really good. If you like what it promises, it delivers.)
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Though on the note for Kingmaker, I think I remember hearing somewhere that Kingmaker Remastered was not Paizo directly, but Legendary Games approved by Paizo, sort of a second party deal. Any truth to that?
Legendary games mostly assisted with the conversion book for 5e and the companion book.
Kingmaker is a fantastic sandbox, because it gives you a solid skeleton to hang your own player stories on. If the GM doesn't throw in a lot of personal side-quests and homebrew stories, and just runs the book as written then it will feel generic and like waiting for the next plot drop.
I'll always go to bat for Kingmaker, as the additional content I've put into the campaign will attest (check my profile for more), but the complaints about the rules add-ons are fair, and if your party isn't really interested in Civilization: Golarion Edition, instead use the event rolls as session prompts and let your players use their own skills, roleplaying and leadership decisions to solve those events rather than relying on a sub-system.
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Though on the note for Kingmaker, I think I remember hearing somewhere that Kingmaker Remastered was not Paizo directly, but Legendary Games approved by Paizo, sort of a second party deal. Any truth to that?
It was complex and never really well-explained to the public. We initially wanted the 2nd edition of Kingmaker to be a big 1st-year release for 2nd edition, to give players from 1st edition a fun way to get into the new game but also to support the new edition with an all-inclusive 1st to 20th level campaign to buy and start playing.
Turns out, releasing a new edition of a game at the same time we're also launching a new adventure path (Age of Ashes) and a set of new Lost Omens lore books all within a few months of each other was... overly ambitious.
At that time, my primary job was working on Age of Ashes. In order to get a "head start" on the first round of development tasks for Kingmaker, which included manually transposing the 1st edition text from the final files back into word documents and styling them up for easy development and then doing the first pass of the rules updates was outsourced to Legendary Games.
I came in to do the primary development pass for the entire book after that, squeezing in my work there as soon as I could AFTER I finished developing the six volumes of Age of Ashes.
We crowdfunded Kingmaker, and that caused the scope of its products to expand significantly, including a 5E version that Legendary was a LOT more in the "lead the charge" role on.
And then... Covid happened.
Paizo went into remote work mode and the world ground to a halt. I had to come in to help develop Bestiary 2 at about that time as well while the design team was focusing on other content. All of which ended up turning an already enormous development task for Kingmaker into something of a nightmare. Lisa and Vic, the owners of the company, even pitched in to help with editing passes, and we had a lot of struggles as well with folks on staff dealing with what, at the time, sorta felt like the imminent end of the world in that first pandemic year. Some of us caught covid. Some of us had stress-related and other issues. Shipping and paper costs and ink prices and warehousing things all made things pretty topsy-turvy.
It was a mess, and in hindsight there's a LOT we could and should have done differently for this thing, even in a world where the pandemic didn't happen. We learned a lot for sure, but yeah... Kingmaker has some warts. I'm still really proud of the final product, but also can't really regard it without some deep feelings of repressed trauma and distress about the whole thing.
(Side note: This all is why the Absalom book took so long to come out, and also why Dead God's Hand took even longer and is finally coming out later this year. The pandemic was pretty disruptive.)
TL; DR: Kingmaker was entirely a Paizo creation. We had help from Legendary, but this was a project I more or less soloed the primary development tasks for.
It was complex and never really well-explained to the public.<snip>...
Great post, James. I love hearing this level of engagement from your team and getting the scoop on why things developed the way they did. I'm playing through Kingmaker P2 for the first time currently, so it's especially interesting to me to learn this background detail.
From my perspective, the complaints I've heard about these "warts" are undeserved. I love this kind of play, so I think the systems are great especially with V&K's additions. For some folks, simple play is better, so I get the negativity.
Covid was underplayed wild. I ended up moving to another country during it. Unbelievable change for being stuck in the house.
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So, remaster is almost the exact same thing as 2nd edition, just adjusted a bit, mostly due to the ogl issues, but its all entirely compatible, if you file of things like alignment rules.
I also can't recall any "3.5" book ever being printed as such, they were printed as revised third edition.
As to Kingmaker, that came out in 2022 (which is technically pre-remaster), and no, they've never changed things in adventures, other than eratas, they really don't have time to go through and check everything they've ever printed for things like that.
You're also attempting to shame them for not updating the pdf, but you also have the hardcover, which they have no way of updating, they do want things to remain more or less consistent between copies of the same adventure
Also I'd ask if you're sure you're reading that right, does it refrence Bestiary 6, or: Bestiary, 6 as in page 6 of the bestiary, which as you pointed out is the source.
Umm... I have a copy of The Player's Handbook that literally has "3.5" on the cover!
And then... Covid happened.
Paizo went into remote work mode and the world ground to a halt. I had to come in to help develop Bestiary 2 at about that time as well while the design team was focusing on other content. All of which ended up turning an already enormous development task for Kingmaker into something of a nightmare. Lisa and Vic, the owners of the company, even pitched in to help with editing passes, and we had a lot of struggles as well with folks on staff dealing with what, at the time, sorta felt like the imminent end of the world in that first pandemic year. Some of us caught covid. Some of us had stress-related and other issues. Shipping and paper costs and ink prices and warehousing things all made things pretty topsy-turvy.
This is just more fuel for my conspiracy theory that Paizo Inc. is secretly just a bunch of nerds in a corporate trenchcoat.
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It was complex and never really well-explained to the public.<snip>...Great post, James. I love hearing this level of engagement from your team and getting the scoop on why things developed the way they did. I'm playing through Kingmaker P2 for the first time currently, so it's especially interesting to me to learn this background detail.
From my perspective, the complaints I've heard about these "warts" are undeserved. I love this kind of play, so I think the systems are great especially with V&K's additions. For some folks, simple play is better, so I get the negativity.
Covid was underplayed wild. I ended up moving to another country during it. Unbelievable change for being stuck in the house.
Thanks for the kind words! It's important to hear good news on projects and books like this—too often the only voices that we hear seem to be the ones who are frustrated or dissatisfied, and that's not great for morale after spending years working on something to make it as good as you can make it... even if hearing about the places you can improve on and learning about mistakes not to repeat IS still important!
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This is just more fuel for my conspiracy theory that Paizo Inc. is secretly just a bunch of nerds in a corporate trenchcoat.And then... Covid happened.
Paizo went into remote work mode and the world ground to a halt. I had to come in to help develop Bestiary 2 at about that time as well while the design team was focusing on other content. All of which ended up turning an already enormous development task for Kingmaker into something of a nightmare. Lisa and Vic, the owners of the company, even pitched in to help with editing passes, and we had a lot of struggles as well with folks on staff dealing with what, at the time, sorta felt like the imminent end of the world in that first pandemic year. Some of us caught covid. Some of us had stress-related and other issues. Shipping and paper costs and ink prices and warehousing things all made things pretty topsy-turvy.
You misspelled "based in fact and quite accurate" as "conspiracy" there. :-P
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It was complex and never really well-explained to the public.<snip>...Great post, James. I love hearing this level of engagement from your team and getting the scoop on why things developed the way they did. I'm playing through Kingmaker P2 for the first time currently, so it's especially interesting to me to learn this background detail.
From my perspective, the complaints I've heard about these "warts" are undeserved. I love this kind of play, so I think the systems are great especially with V&K's additions. For some folks, simple play is better, so I get the negativity.
Covid was underplayed wild. I ended up moving to another country during it. Unbelievable change for being stuck in the house.
I'm in my second Kingmaker group, first one abandoned it around level 6, current group is 8.
We've almost dropped the kingdom part a few times because it's not fun for most people. A single person can min/max a kingdom turn, so having people want to do other things hurts overall growth and risks having too few RP to build what you need.The idea that the kingdom is a character itself is a big flaw, because one person is far better at running the turn then a group. A group trying to come to consensus on what to do ends up in arguments and a TON of wasted time. We've tried a few fixes and I don't find any of them helpful, even the one we've settled on is still just more of the same.
Leadership turns are just terrible. There's too many required or too good to pass up options so you only have the illusion of choice.
Be a magic kingdom, get magic solutions, get Prognostication then get RP any way you can so you can build in the civic phase and get XP because leveling is painfully slow.
No one gets to play their position within the kingdom, anyone can roll any check. I think if each kingdom position had bespoke actions it alone could take, that grew as you level, and everyone just played their part with the leader filling in the NPC parts, could have made things feel more like your choices matter.
The civic phase should just be the ViceRoy's turn. The army phase should just be the Generals turn. If each position was a subsystem that had interesting options then each player could feel the weight of their choices and be immersed in the building and growing of the kingdom.
I think the reason so many people go into kingmaker wanting to build a kingdom but then get turned off rather heavily by the mechanics is because there's no personal stake or immersion. In combat everyone has their role and contributions, front line, healer, controller, etc. There's none of that in the kingdom rules, but if each kingdom position was its own "class" and built with that mindset I think people would be able to get a lot more immersion out of it.
There's a lot of great ideas, it just feels like it needed more play testing feedback to realize the core flaw of lack of immersion and be able to pivot to ways that empower characters to fulfill their roles within the kingdom.
The rest of it feels great. Exploration could have been tied into finding benefits for the kingdom more, like 4x games, instead of just the interesting encounters and such you discover.
To the OP, Kingmaker isn't something you just buy and jump into as a new GM. The price alone should tell you that.
It might be difficult being new to the system or TTRPGs, but due to the OGL disaster you really need to do research before you start buying into a modestly heavy up front cost to enter hobby. You should always do this before making purchases. I would suggest find a relatively recent list of the most enjoyed APs and pick one of the top 5 or start with some one shots.
As someone who has the original books, I haven't purchased any of the remastered versions of those books, the changes are too minor to bother with, using Pathbuilder and Archives of Nethys fills in the update holes, so to me it's not a big issue.
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Kingdom building for sure could have used more time in the oven... but resources were strained to the breaking point as I'd mentioned, and at that time we were also unsure if folks would WANT a 2nd edition so there was a mandate to make sure that the kingdom building stuff was as system agnostic as possible so that it could be used as-is for whatever system. Be it Pathifnder 1E, 2E, D&D, or whatever.
Fortunately, the campaign is fine to run with the kingdom in the background option. Or if you prefer, any of the various alternate options folks have built as replacements, of course!
Anyway... thanks for the kind words! Very much appreciated.
I ran the game, I initially spent about 20 minutes wondering what it was directing me to, but once I cross checked with my copy of Bestiary 6, I just realized it was referring to what it does, but yes. It does mean Pathfinder 2 Bestiary 1, page 6 and 212. It's awkward formatting, yeah, but sometimes things are poorly formatted. Doesn't change the fact it's referring to the Pathfinder 2E Bestiary.
You can argue what you want, it won't change the fact if you open up PF1E Bestiary 6, you'll get an entry for a CR 13 Protean instead of a level 0 kobold warrior.
But here, have a citation. Check the source section.
https://www.aonprd.com/MonsterDisplay.aspx?ItemName=OshagerosNo, I get it now. I see what you're saying.
But on page 202, under Trollhounds, it says "Pathfinder Bestiary 2 268" so does that mean "Pathfinder Bestiary 1 pages 2 and 268"? No it doesn't because a comma is missing. That's pretty cryptic.
Look, I'm not complaining about the individual little errors. I am complaining that the quality of the product does not meet my expectations. That at the very least it should align with the rest of the core books if you are going to sell them as a ruleset. To me that seems like a fairly reasonable and common sense request.
That's it. I said my peace. Thanks for your time.
It's not obvious at first glance, I had same issue a while back, but look at the italicization of Beastiary 2 vs Beastiary 6. If the number is italicized, then it's part of the book's title, if it's not, it's referring to a page.
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Yes the italic versus non-italic formatting is the distinction Paizo uses for separating the page number list, from the book title. Once you know it, it works, but it is a very frequent point of confusion -- especially in all the elite/weak references since people assume the comma is separating the book title from the page, and don't even think it could be a page list.
Most of the solutions I can think of add a bit too much of extra characters, and over the course of a book could put pressure on their pagination, so I understand why Paizo went with the simplest/most compact approach.
The cleanest option I think, would have been to name each Bestiary with its number spelled out, or in roman numerals, including bestiary one, e.g "Bestiary I", "Bestiary One". This way its obvious that a number in the title (roman/spelled out) is different from a page reference. But this can add a number of characters, and requires a renaming of the first Bestiary/Monster Core.
Using bold, or underline instead of italic for title names could also work, while looking worse, IMO, and being "incorrect" from a general typography standpoint (which Paizo tends to care a lot about). But on the plus side it has the smallest impact on line width/pagination.
Using a colon, ":", between the book title and page list could also have worked, as a colon is often used to introduce lists, so I think would still be standard enough/correct use of typography. But it does still introduce one extra character per book reference, and that adds up.
And the most clear "Bestiary pages 6, 114" requires 6 extra character for a multipage reference, 5 for a single. Using abbreviations "pg/pgs" can reduce that to three/four extra characters Which tends to beat the roman numeral/full spelling option in characters, but I think starts to look a little off for general reading from an aesthetics standpoint.
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The Bestiary thing is not referring to Bestiary 6 the book, it's referring to page six of the first PF2 Bestiary which is where the template is found.Actually that's not correct. It lists a page # in "Pathfinder Bestiary 6". That's actually what it says: "Pathfinder Bestiary 6, 212" - look on page 130 of Kingmaker, for example, and you will see it under "Fanatics".
Look, all I'm saying is that it should not take too much effort to fix things in an electronic document. It's a PDF, and the way it is now makes it a little frustrating for people that do not have their fingers on the pulse of Paizo's releases, like me. I just bought the books and wanted to play. I don't really want to study up on which book is which version, what books have been updated or what powers no longer exist because of the remaster but are still being referenced in the source material. Things like "flat-footed", "lesser thunderstone" and others that no longer exist in the rules. If not for Nethys, it would be very annoying, and it makes the source material, which I paid a lot for, feel difficult and innacurate.
I don't mind things like alignments still being listed, but when I have a group of players in front of me and I'm trying to find "lesser thunderstone" which is now a "blasting stone", it makes it a bit frustrating and makes me feel that maybe I did not get what I paid for. There are other examples of this, but I can't quite recall them right now.
If you search for lesser thunderstone on AoN, it will first show the Remastered version if any, so not that hard to find.