Thread by @patio11

Since my reward for successfully shipping a newsletter is more game time, I'd recommend Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous to anyone who wants that classic D&D experience of having a sadistic DM destroy your hopes and dreams while the rest of your party are absolute lunatics.

It's a follow-on to Owlcat's earlier Pathfinder game (Kingmaker) and ditches the worst system from that game (kingdom management) in favor of a mechanic I haven't experienced yet.

I haven't experienced it yet because this continues a fond tradition from the earlier entry:

(No spoilers.)

There is a set-piece fight relatively early in the game. It is a mechanically demanding, story-driven, tactically brutal fight, particularly if you're going for achievements or on a higher difficulty.

It also functions as a progress check for the party.

The game tells you that you're on a clock prior to this fight happening, but doesn't tell you what the clock actually is, and unless you read spoilers you might not know how absolutely critical it is to not have a party of 6 adventurers 200 freaking XP from level 4 when doing it.

After *six hours of work* on this one fight, with many restarts, I finally beat who I thought was the Big Bad of it only to be introduced to Much Bigger Bad in an appropriately cinematic fashion.

My exhausted paladin charged him shouting "Righteousness is my shield!" and it turns out righteousness makes a poor shield against a Natural 20 straight to the face.

So, trying again. But kind of loving it.

It makes some interesting story decisions which have fun mechanical consequences (no spoiler: if you've played an RPG you've been The Chosen One before, but Pathfinder has a deep system for building your Chosen One and you get access to it *early*).

Also has some interesting characterizations for other party members.

To avoid spoilers, I will note that (as someone who inevitably plays some flavor of good most of the time) all the interesting characters are evil and they're still interesting and still very, very evil.

Me to Lillian: "I hope I don't have to kill too many of my friends in this game."
Lillian: "Why would you have to kill your friend?!"
Me: "Erm, tough topic and maybe better saved for when you are older. Just happens in video games; don't worry."

(Lillian knows enough about video games to understand good guys / bad guys and also asked, confusedly, "Why does one of your friends look like Obviously A Bad Guy?" "Well he is a bad guy." "Then why is he your friend." "... Complicated but the world basically depends on it.")

(Lawful good characters with high int are allowed to be consequentialists with a splash of virtue ethics, darn it. ;) )

I ended up having to discard an hour of playtime, replay it more optimally so I dinged level 4 right before the battle, stack my casters with spells I’d never otherwise use but had foreknowledge of utility, and still needed three more hour-long attempts… but I did it.

So fun.