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I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Preferably vaguely modern. I've played BG and IW before. Turn based or rtwp is fine, but if turn based I think I prefer maybe 3 or so party members. Games I know exist but haven't tried: The Pathfinder ones, BG3, that's it basically?
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Aug 4, 2022 12:54
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Encased is a Falloutlike that might fit the bill, its setting is 70's sci-fi inspired by Roadside Picnic (the book that the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games are based out of). It is turn-based, a bit old fashioned (all its systems feel like an iteration on Fallout 2), with a party limit of exactly three. There's a fair amount of jank, but you have freedom of travel and the quest design is very open with a good variety of approaches and meaningful reactivity to your actions. Writing and world building are very good and to the point, which feels refreshing given how often WRPGs fall into the "I didn't get to write my fantasy novel, so here's 10k words from every NPC".
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Aug 4, 2022 13:14
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Have you tried Shadowrun: Dragonfall or Shadowrun:Hong Kong from Harebrained Schemes? Turn-based, less freedom to move around than Pillars, 4 member parties on missions, and options to bypass problems on certain missions through dialogue, skills and Decking (hacking). Designed around User Generated content, so there are a lot of campaigns people have made, more on the Steam Workshop than on the Nexus.
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Aug 4, 2022 13:20
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Tyranny is an obvious recommendation. Same engine, same developer but a different team. It's good. I liked a recent game Encased. It's eurojunk so it's not as polished as some other RPGs but it's decent. I think it's underrated. Has a lot of variety in ways you can approach any given situation, and it's less combat-heavy than PoE2 if you want it to be. I mean in PoE2 you can skip a lot of fights and still have a good time, but your character differs from any other mostly by the way they fight, all the peaceful skills are a sideshow. In Encased you create, say, a high-intelligence character with knowledge in science in mechanics allowing you to evade enemies by using defense systems, opening new paths and also using high-tech weapons and gadgets if need be. It still has OK turn-based combat, you only control a couple of companions in combat. ilitarist fucked around with this message at 13:27 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 13:23
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ZearothK posted:Is there a handy link for this alpha release? https://d1079ywfijtdjs.cloudfront.net/deadfire/media/downloads/eternity-pen-and-paper-guide--alpha.pdf
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Aug 4, 2022 13:43
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I've been enjoying Gloomhaven lately. It's the same as the board game. It doesn't have the level of writing or story of a game like Pillars and it's more of a light hearted adventure game in the style of the Divinity games but if you enjoy tactical combat it's pretty fun. The mechanics are pleasingly simple while allowing for a good level of tactical complexity despite that. It is turn based. I played the board game before they came out with the steam version and I gotta say the steam version is a really good port of that.
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Aug 4, 2022 14:40
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Ginette Reno posted:I've been enjoying Gloomhaven lately. It's the same as the board game. It doesn't have the level of writing or story of a game like Pillars and it's more of a light hearted adventure game in the style of the Divinity games but if you enjoy tactical combat it's pretty fun. Gloomhaven digital is fuckin fantastic, highly recommend
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Aug 4, 2022 14:54
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Gonna second Encased and add Wasteland 3. If you like turn-based isometric post-apocalypse rpgs they're both great. Ok, Encased isn't techynically post-apocalyptic but it's got the feel.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:01
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. I would say try pathfinder WoTR - I liked it a lot more than the divinity games or Kingmaker, all of which I also bounced off. Has an RTwP combat option, good character creation with a ton of classes, and lots of cool story choices. There’s also Black Geyser which is a fun Pillars-like on steam, though not quite as polished or balanced. Solasta is also pretty popular but I personally haven’t played much of it, seemed to be more like DOS than Pillars.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:38
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I played through all of Divinity 1 and I gotta say the sing-song ding-dong goofy-land vibe was really bad to the point that I skipped 2. The mechanics were alright, but not enough to make me want more. Shadowrun: Dragonfall was really fun to play through once, and pretty cheap these days I'm sure.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:52
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How are u posted:I played through all of Divinity 1 and I gotta say the sing-song ding-dong goofy-land vibe was really bad to the point that I skipped 2. The mechanics were alright, but not enough to make me want more. You should consider trying DOS2. I know exactly what you're talking about in terms of vibe. While DOS2 is still a very lighthearted and whimsical game it's no longer a clown who sometimes asks to be taken seriously. Less Monty Python and the Holy Grail, more Princess Bride. Mechanics are also refined and not everyone likes the changes except I think everyone will agree that the freaking crafting was rightfully toned down. Putting 9-inch nails in the boots is the only good part of the crafting system.
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Aug 4, 2022 15:58
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I love that Pathfinder lets you switch between turn-based and rtwp at any time.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:05
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Try Disco Elysium if you haven't already. It's a masterpiece and immediately leapt up to one of my top 5 favorite games of all time. It has some very cool and innovative RPG systems, excellent writing and wordbuilding, and the music rules. It only has two member party since you are joined by your partner but he's one of the best characters in an already strong cast of memorable characters in the game.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:35
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Seconding Wasteland 3 and Disco Elysium. The latter is more a hybrid RPG/point-and-click adventure, but if you like reading in games it's second to none.
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Aug 4, 2022 16:58
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rope kid posted:https://d1079ywfijtdjs.cloudfront.net/deadfire/media/downloads/eternity-pen-and-paper-guide--alpha.pdf Danke!
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Aug 4, 2022 17:12
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Seconding Pathfinder WotR. I didn't like kingmaker enough to even finish it, but I couldn't put the sequel down, it's a big improvement. The Mythic path system really encourages you to roleplay a character in a way that I think a lot of CRPGs miss; I want to replay the game to see more of those paths, but it is like 100 hours long e: also yeah tyranny is basically mandatory if you liked pillars
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Aug 4, 2022 17:47
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I wasn't impressed with Tyranny but it's got some nice visuals and cool lore, even if the combat did nothing for me. Get it with the DLC
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Aug 4, 2022 17:52
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A funny little note about Wrath of the Righteous: my friend who finished Kingmaker but didn't really like it tried it for awhile. His character was a multiclass between some kind of fancy swordfighter who could do some kind of flourish action to apply 'shaken' (some kind of small stat penalty) to everyone around him with an intimidation check., and thug rogue. Thug rogue passively had 'you inflict running away in terror and enemies take no actions whenever you would normally inflict shaken' and enemies rolled low enough, so with minmaxing his flourish became 'high chance of 90% of enemy types run away from his sword swooshing'. Then he got a mythic path that made him apply shaken to every enemy at the start of combat. Because he had a level in thug rogue, that shaken got upgraded to running away in terror. The purest essence of one level of thug who is so notorious at swording that every single demon spends the first 20 seconds of combat running away in terror. He found the game was a little too easy after that and put it down. I watched him play Solasta, as well, but to me it looked rather uninteresting - 5e is a lame system when you're not playing it on tabletop and have the freedom to ignore all the really broken stuff or create your own fun characters or homebrew. It had the neat idea that your party was comprised of adventurers you had built who all chimed up in conversations and had a couple of personality traits they could add to conversations, but overall I didn't think the story was very interesting, and the visuals and animations weren't very impressive. Overall competently executed original 5E game and story, but doesn't stand out. Captainicus fucked around with this message at 18:08 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 18:05
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2house2fly posted:I wasn't impressed with Tyranny but it's got some nice visuals and cool lore, even if the combat did nothing for me. Get it with the DLC PoE2 spoils RTwP combat. Tyranny is more typical: after the first act the game basically plays itself, but you have to oversee the battlefield, heal people, renew buffs etc. You're like a movie sports trainer, sometimes shouting at players when they do dumb stuff. I think people who like RTwP like this sort of gameplay and don't want to be bogged down in combat details. But usually those RTwP games like Infinity Engine games have relatively quick combat resolution (if you don't count prebuffing) and Tyranny combat just drags on, so I think no one likes it. No matter how onesided the fight is you're spending several minutes on an enemy that heals, stuns you, soaks damage and so on. I've played Tyranny once on PotD and thought it's a bad difficulty balance but I'm replaying it now and it's the same gauntlet. But the world is cool. Choices are cool.
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Aug 4, 2022 19:29
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The main problems with Tyranny combat are that 1) there are basically only what, three enemies? That repeat ad nauseam 2) the cooldowns on character powers are absurdly long, as I remeber it. And it plays more like an action RPG with cooldowns than a Baldur's Gae-like.
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Aug 4, 2022 19:59
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In my experience the problem with Tyranny combat is that it's far too easy and there aren't any real tactical decisions, but I might have broken it by noticing that you can make as many custom spells as you have variations and they'll each have their own cool down, so every fight was: 1. Omni lightning blast 2. Omni fire blast 3. Omni ice blast 4. Lightning ball 5. Fire ball 6. Ice ball 7. Go back to 1 because the cooldown is done Throw in a round of magic heals when health gets low.
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Aug 4, 2022 21:01
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Captainicus posted:A funny little note about Wrath of the Righteous: my friend who finished Kingmaker but didn't really like it tried it for awhile. His character was a multiclass between some kind of fancy swordfighter who could do some kind of flourish action to apply 'shaken' (some kind of small stat penalty) to everyone around him with an intimidation check., and thug rogue. Thug rogue passively had 'you inflict running away in terror and enemies take no actions whenever you would normally inflict shaken' and enemies rolled low enough, so with minmaxing his flourish became 'high chance of 90% of enemy types run away from his sword swooshing'. Is WotR separate from Kingmaker in terms of continuity? I might pick it up next time it's on sale since that kind of character building sounds like it is extremely my jam.
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Aug 4, 2022 22:28
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moot the hopple posted:Is WotR separate from Kingmaker in terms of continuity? I might pick it up next time it's on sale since that kind of character building sounds like it is extremely my jam. There are a few references to Kingmaker in WotR, but they take place in separate parts of the world and are unrelated in story.
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Aug 4, 2022 22:38
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moot the hopple posted:Is WotR separate from Kingmaker in terms of continuity? I might pick it up next time it's on sale since that kind of character building sounds like it is extremely my jam. Wrath and Kingmaker are in the same setting, just different parts of the world. It's not a direct sequel though if that's what you're asking.
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Aug 4, 2022 22:39
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I never finished kingmaker and never felt like I was lost about anything that was going on in WotR, so you're good to skip straight to it.
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Aug 4, 2022 23:06
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WrightOfWay posted:There are a few references to Kingmaker in WotR, but they take place in separate parts of the world and are unrelated in story. Captain Oblivious posted:Wrath and Kingmaker are in the same setting, just different parts of the world. Ainsley McTree posted:I never finished kingmaker and never felt like I was lost about anything that was going on in WotR, so you're good to skip straight to it. Good to know, thanks. I've mostly fallen out of love with the D&D system in my CRPGs these days, but I think a lot of that is me being bored of the Forgotten Realms setting. Maybe Pathfinder will click with me instead.
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Aug 5, 2022 01:40
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I'm doing my first PoE2 playthrough and just making almost random choices which is fine. I'm really struggling to get to grips with the mechanics though. I can take out 1 3 skull guy ok, but when 5 of them come running in I'm really lost with what I should be trying to do to hold them back.
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Aug 5, 2022 01:48
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What level are you now and what's your party composition and their classes?
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Aug 5, 2022 02:05
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Aware posted:I'm doing my first PoE2 playthrough and just making almost random choices which is fine. I'm really struggling to get to grips with the mechanics though. I can take out 1 3 skull guy ok, but when 5 of them come running in I'm really lost with what I should be trying to do to hold them back. If you're running into whole mobs that are 3+ levels above your party, you're probably doing the quest too early (not that it can't be done, just not ideal for a first playthrough). Check the journal and see how many skulls your current quest is, and consider an easier one for now. My first playthrough I banged my head against the catacombs under the Temple of Berath for way too long before realizing I was out of my level depth.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:08
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That's exactly where I am haha. The archmage tablet quest at least had a way to disable the enemies haha. I guess I'll go progress some of the other big quests I've been given and come back later.
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Aug 5, 2022 02:26
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It can also really depend on who you're bringing along. I had a similar situation where I was getting absolutely rocked by the Berath temple catacombs with a Fighter|Soulblade Watcher with an Eder/Serafen/Xoti/Maia party. Couldn't make any headway at all. Then I switched one of them out for Herald Pallegina and just smashed the place flat because her high defenses defenses and strong passive healing gave my party the endurance it needed to trade shots with the skeletons.
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Aug 5, 2022 04:02
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I've got Pellegrina and Eder tanking, I know Maia is useless because she can't shoot them at range rn. I'll bash my head against it a little longer and then move on.
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Aug 5, 2022 04:24
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I always thought that the animancers' attempt to put animal souls in human bodies in PoE 1 was obviously a bad idea (admittedly, one born of desperation), but just for fun I started a new PoE 2 campaign and chose the Wheel instead of participating in Berath's plan. I was immediately reincarnated as an animal, an amusing non-standard game over. I guess the fate of the dwarves in the White March was also kith->wilder, but langufeth struck me as sentient. Just how fungible are souls anyways? Could you make a new god without killing sentient beings, or would the resulting god be animalistic in nature if you sacrificed a million cows or something?
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Aug 5, 2022 05:04
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The general impression I got is that souls take on the characteristics of what they're incarnated into and are otherwise just a kind of energy floating about. Mass sacrifices of people were necessary for the gods to be made because they'd otherwise be lacking in the intelligence and drive that are the trademark of kith souls.
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Aug 5, 2022 05:38
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Based on the DLC, not just people but specific types of people were considered necessary when making the gods. I imagine souls are plenty fungible (souls of plants, animals, people and gods are all made from the same stuff and all break back down into it) but if you want to use a soul to do X your job is probably a lot easier if you can get a soul that's already on the way to X
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Aug 5, 2022 05:41
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2house2fly posted:Based on the DLC, not just people but specific types of people were considered necessary when making the gods. I imagine souls are plenty fungible (souls of plants, animals, people and gods are all made from the same stuff and all break back down into it) but if you want to use a soul to do X your job is probably a lot easier if you can get a soul that's already on the way to X I wasn't quite sure how to interpret the dissidents->Skaen thing. I thought it could be that (taking the aspects of the souls themselves) or it could have just been an ironic and cruel punishment (turning those who opposed the Engwithans into their most wretched god). Given that the Watcher is said to have survived their encounter with Eothas due to the unusual strength of their soul, I figured Soul A does not necessarily equal Soul B, but that it might be possible to make up the difference with sheer quantity (say, 10 or 100 pigs to one human, etc.)
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Aug 5, 2022 06:08
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Ainsley McTree posted:I never finished kingmaker and never felt like I was lost about anything that was going on in WotR, so you're good to skip straight to it. Things like that encourage me to try WotR. I was in love with Pathfinder for the first chapter, but then I became extremely bored with it. After the director's cut 2 came out I've tried again and still couldn't finish it. I think I've burned out on the disappearance of Varnholdt. There's an Enhanced Edition of WotR coming in September, I'm waiting for that.
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Aug 5, 2022 09:31
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DJ_Mindboggler posted:Could you make a new god without killing sentient beings, or would the resulting god be animalistic in nature if you sacrificed a million cows or something? I suppose you could do it using a technology similar to the one that caused the Hollowborn crisis. Engwithians ripped the souls out of the whole nation in an instant, they could maybe do it slowly taking the souls of the dead. It would probably take a long time and result in more Hollowborn. Presumably, when the nation died and stopped giving birth to children it helped with the balance of souls. Also new-formed gods helped with maintaining the Wheel. It's still baffling that the whole nation agreed to this plan. Trust me, it will work, I have my calculations peer-reviewed! But I understand that going slowly about it could cause all kinds of trouble. It's also not clear how do the souls keep up with the amount of life, which, presumably, is growing in this world as science and society advance. Maybe all those monsters that go extinct as the kithkind advances hold a lot of souls.
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Aug 5, 2022 09:41
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Phosphine posted:I know there's a big huge RPG thread but I figure this thread is likely to hit the right people: Anyone have tips for other RPGs I might enjoy if I really liked pillars 1 and 2? I bounced off Divinity (1 and 2) pretty hard, freedom overload probably. To me Pillars hit just the right levels of freedom, where you have some ability to go to different places (more in 2, ofc), and solve quests with violence, sneaking, talking, etc. Tyranny, all the new Shadowrun games and Wasteland 3 sound like you'd like them. WL3 is a bit janky though.
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Aug 5, 2022 11:26
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ilitarist posted:It's also not clear how do the souls keep up with the amount of life, which, presumably, is growing in this world as science and society advance. Maybe all those monsters that go extinct as the kithkind advances hold a lot of souls. Souls build up energy by being alive, then when they die Rymyrgand tries to rip them apart. Some of the little shreds of soul nourish the gods, while the rest forms new souls. When these new souls are born they start building up energy as they live, to be shredded and produce new souls when they go back to the wheel. The exceptions are the souls of Watchers. Watchers are greedy fucks who don't shed soul energy when they go through the wheel, not producing new souls. They just build up energy across the generations until they get weird powers to go along with lifetimes of trauma. At least that's my understanding. I could be wrong.
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Aug 5, 2022 11:39
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