Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Post
  • Reply
Ichabod Tane
Oct 30, 2005

A most notable
coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.


https://youtu.be/_Ojd0BdtMBY?t=4
You need to make optimal characters in this dumb game.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Rascyc
Jan 23, 2008

Dissatisfied Puppy
Looks like 1.3 went live. If you were using EA I think your saves are going to be busted until someone fixes the mod.

Wizard Styles
Aug 6, 2014

level 15 disillusionist
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure I bypassed all skill checks during Amiri's quest just by playing in what I felt was the most Amiri-like way possible.

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

ilitarist posted:

I haven't played tabletop game. So I may misunderstand the situation.

The whole situation in the videogame was a little confusing to me. You get reports that trolls pillage and kill. Then you walk around the place and see trolls attacking travellers, as well as Kobolds attacking that Gnome writer. Then you come to their stronghold and eloquent troll tells you to not go further. Then he's pissed and you don't have any real way of telling him that you're only doing it cause they're destroying your people. And near the final fight kobold and troll kings ask you why are you doing this and your "good" answers sound as if it's a preemptive strike cause you know they're evil. But they're murdering people left and right! I don't see a moral dilemma here! Maybe they don't eat people but I don't care as much as long as they don't want to talk and just attack instead. And so I doubly confused about @Bikindok annoyance with colonialism/genocide (though he has changed his mind, but not sure to what extent) because it didn't look like you're selling them whiskey and stealing their land, you defend your people from the enemy who only attacks and starts talking only after you clear out their fortress.

Was it different in tabletop? I haven't visited lizardmen yet. Maybe it makes the issue clearer.


I think I might have confused you. The lizardmen scenario is recognizably the same in the tabletop. Many other scenarios have been shuffled around, melded together, cut away, and/or thoroughly expanded upon on PF:K compared to the original AP. One whole book of the AP and the commensurate stretch of land is almost entirely gone, although cutting it makes sense pacing-wise.


You get two different conversations upon the final fight in Troll Trouble, depending on whether Hargulka goes down first or whether Tartuk does.

If you take down Hargulka first, Tartuk explains his motivations - he hated the fact that he was a fool and got no respect, and as a kobold his whole race gets no respect. He wanted to change that - he latched on to the fact that trolls were one of the only creatures who treated him and his kobolds with any respect and listened to him, and the trolls were willing to work with and protect the kobolds - especially when he was able to start branding the trolls with "immunity" to fire. He wanted to educate and civilize the kobolds and trolls as citizens of his kingdom, but the kingdom concept and message is brand new, and most of the trolls are slow to come around to the idea of peaceful coexistance and are instead continuing to behave like regular trolls instead of following the party line.

When you first make it to Trobold, Jazon the polite troll (who is one of the ones who has fully come around to Tartuk's ideas) tries diplomatically to get you to go away and come back later, because he believes in the dream but also knows that right now most of the trolls aren't behaving and are still going around killing and eating people. HE doesn't do it anymore, and he thinks that given time the rest of them will come around, but of course you showed up and possibly even convinced him that you weren't there to fight. He still tells you to go away because if you show up, a fight is inevitable, and the only way to avoid it is if you leave. This is why he's pissed when you meet up again, because from his perspective, you just did what stupid adventurers always do, which is show up and start slaughtering all the monsters, even when they're trying to better themselves. He wants the opportunity to prove you wrong, and hopes that if you go away Tartuk and Hargulka can get the rest of the trolls to LISTEN already and then they can do their dog and pony show - invite representatives of the neighboring kingdoms and show them how peaceful, how civilized Trobold is, and wouldn't it be great if you traded with us instead of attacking us on sight?

They try and set up this moral dilemma but yeah, the problem is Jazon and Tartuk are demonstrably wrong. You can actually walk away and weather the storm for a while, but no matter how much time you give them, the problem with the troll attacks will only get worse until your kingdom inevitably collapses and there's no diplomatic solution - Tartuk can't reform all the trolls into model citizens and making some of them immune to fire only increases their attacks against "borba", so stepping in and crushing them is your only actual option to protect the kingdom.

As far as the rest of your party is concerned, there's no real confusion to be bad - these are historically well-known monsters who eat people, are currently raiding and eating members of your kingdom, and have been doing this sort of thing basically for as long as they've existed as a race. Intentionally letting them live is basically making you complicit in all their future murder, which is why the party views it as such a heinous act - it's tantamount to shrugging and accepting that some of your future citizens will be eaten when you could instead be preventing it.

Poil
Mar 17, 2007

Bolivar posted:

But sure it's worrisome if the loading times get worse towards the end. I've started noticing (now in chapter 4) that a simple quick save is not as quick as it used to be. Is there any way to affect that, does deleting old saves have any relevance?
I'm no programmer but is the game storing every single thing you've done, looted, killed, visited and so on in the save file? Could be it just bloats up and the added time is from compressing the entire thing. Just a guess so it's likely to be wrong.

Dallan Invictus
Oct 11, 2007

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

Rascyc posted:

Looks like 1.3 went live. If you were using EA I think your saves are going to be busted until someone fixes the mod.

If this happened to you (or if you just were in a hurry like me), someone has forked and released an update to EA for 1.3 here until the dev gets around to doing it herself.

grah
Jul 26, 2007
brainsss

Rascyc posted:

Looks like 1.3 went live. If you were using EA I think your saves are going to be busted until someone fixes the mod.

Yeah the Craft Magic Items mod also seems to have broken and taken my saves with it, I forgot I even still had it installed cause I haven't actually used it for anything in quite a while, but, lol, woops.

Bikindok
May 3, 2012

ilitarist posted:

And so I doubly confused about @Bikindok annoyance with colonialism/genocide (though he has changed his mind, but not sure to what extent) because it didn't look like you're selling them whiskey and stealing their land, you defend your people from the enemy who only attacks and starts talking only after you clear out their fortress.

Olesh posted:

A good and informative post that explains the situation as it is better than I could
Within the context of the Pathfinder universe, murdering trolls on sight without talking to them and ignoring any pleas to the contrary is safely a Good action, because they're monsters in both the literal and figurative sense. It just annoys me that this is so, because "Oh, well they're just savages. They can't help themselves, we have no choice but to put them down." has been the reasoning behind some dark poo poo IRL and the fact that this setting makes it literally true doesn't make it feel any better.

Like I get that it's just so players can murderhobo through them without feeling bad but it doesn't work for me, probably because of the outliers that are actually, like, people and just have to get mowed down for practical reasons like Jazon.

Bikindok fucked around with this message at 03:46 on Apr 2, 2019

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Bikindok posted:

Within the context of the Pathfinder universe, murdering trolls on sight without talking to them and ignoring any pleas to the contrary is safely a Good action, because they're monsters in both the literal and figurative sense. It just annoys me that this is so, because "Oh, well they're just savages. They can't help themselves, we have no choice but to put them down." has been the reasoning behind some dark poo poo IRL and the fact that this setting makes it literally true doesn't make it feel any better.

Like I get that it's just so players can murderhobo through them without feeling bad but it doesn't work for me, probably because of the outliers that are actually, like, people and just have to get mowed down for practical reasons like Jazon.

Yeah, that's the thing. If you have to put why you're doing a "justified" genocide into words, you sound like you're holding a copy of Mein Kampf, and that hits MAYBE A LITTLE close to home.

Bikindok
May 3, 2012
Also, just to expand on what Olesh posted about Tartuk's motivations, if Hargulka is the one that lives:
He talks about how he also genuinely planned on getting Trolls to stop with the whole eating people thing, he just thought though organizing them into a city had to come before that because he just didn't know how to make the trolls stop fighting/eating people, and grimly comments that Tartuk's priorities were clearly the correct ones in hindsight. If allowed to leave, he resolves to try again where there just aren't any civilized races around so he won't have to find a solution and the trolls can finally have their homeland. But even then it's doomed, because what happens when humans show up wherever they've settled? The whole premise is about how human nations will constantly seize more land! So the whole endeavor is impossible.
It's all very depressing. I resolved to keep the Kobolds around this playthrough, but if I playthrough again I'm absolutely sparing Hargulka, companion complaints be damned.

On a lighter note, if you talk to him, and then resolve to kill him anyway he regenerates to full health during the conversation and calls you a moron for forgetting he can do that. So that's fun.

Bikindok fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Apr 2, 2019

Ichabod Tane
Oct 30, 2005

A most notable
coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.


https://youtu.be/_Ojd0BdtMBY?t=4
Holy poo poo you fools just kill the goblins and don't worry about the ramifications in Pathfinder the video game

Eox
Jun 20, 2010

by Fluffdaddy
This game doesn't have much else going for it if you don't engage with the haphazard moral choices.

Zane
Nov 14, 2007
the heterogeneity of the narrative itself (kobolds sometimes sympathetic, trolls often misguided, companions frequently at odds) makes it difficult to accuse the game of deliberately perpetrating some kind of imperialist fantasy. at the very least: the kobolds/trolls would have to more concretely symbolize identifiable colonial peoples rather than more abstractly symbolize 'evil' and 'badness;' and the narrative would have to be far more coherent and deliberate in the way it went about things.

fun fact: kobolds autotranslates to cuckolds.

Zane fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Apr 2, 2019

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist
Thanks Olesh, it was very informative.

Bikindok posted:

Within the context of the Pathfinder universe, murdering trolls on sight without talking to them and ignoring any pleas to the contrary is safely a Good action, because they're monsters in both the literal and figurative sense. It just annoys me that this is so, because "Oh, well they're just savages. They can't help themselves, we have no choice but to put them down." has been the reasoning behind some dark poo poo IRL and the fact that this setting makes it literally true doesn't make it feel any better.

With that approach, it's hard to find a story that doesn't have some dark mirror in the real world. Indiana Jones steals the cultural heritage of various nations. A bad cop who has to do the right thing to get to an evil man ignores human rights and represents a huge IRL problem. Agatha Christie detective often beats the confession out of a person by using illegally collected flimsy evidence and lies. Comic book superheroes reinforce the idea that greatness comes with genetics, inheritance or by pure luck and you're nobody without it. Romance novels create unrealistic expectations starting with their covers.

In Pathfinder we have a world where *evil* is an objective term. Would be a pity if someone looks at it and decides that it's true for real world as well or if someone is hurt by this world cause it reminds of something. But it's a price of art, it's not real and sometimes it hurts.

Random Asshole
Nov 8, 2010

ilitarist posted:

Thanks Olesh, it was very informative.


With that approach, it's hard to find a story that doesn't have some dark mirror in the real world. Indiana Jones steals the cultural heritage of various nations. A bad cop who has to do the right thing to get to an evil man ignores human rights and represents a huge IRL problem. Agatha Christie detective often beats the confession out of a person by using illegally collected flimsy evidence and lies. Comic book superheroes reinforce the idea that greatness comes with genetics, inheritance or by pure luck and you're nobody without it. Romance novels create unrealistic expectations starting with their covers.

In Pathfinder we have a world where *evil* is an objective term. Would be a pity if someone looks at it and decides that it's true for real world as well or if someone is hurt by this world cause it reminds of something. But it's a price of art, it's not real and sometimes it hurts.

I think you'll find it's actually really easy to create a work of fiction, even in the D&D mold, that doesn't justify and in fact glorify the genocide of a monstrous, marauding and inherently evil Other, an ideology which is thriving in the modern day and inflicts far, far more real-world harm then, say, unrealistic standards set by romance novels.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Random rear end in a top hat posted:

I think you'll find it's actually really easy to create a work of fiction, even in the D&D mold, that doesn't justify and in fact glorify the genocide of a monstrous, marauding and inherently evil Other, an ideology which is thriving in the modern day and inflicts far, far more real-world harm then, say, unrealistic standards set by romance novels.

Almost every living person will have a lot of relationships with other people and can have his life ruined by stories that look as if they are explaining how relationships are supposed to work. They're doing far more harm than anything short of Mein Kampf.

And again, Pathfinder doesn't glorify genocide, it presents a situation where you either defend yourself or perish. And it does so with a certain naivety which is lost in most modern fantasy worlds like Witcher or Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity. It's fine that most of the fantasy today is about everybody being wrong and about subverting expectations of what is good and what is evil. But allow other stories to exist too, the ones where there's evil that you valiantly slay or turn good.

Bikindok
May 3, 2012

ilitarist posted:

And again, Pathfinder doesn't glorify genocide, it presents a situation where you either defend yourself or perish. And it does so with a certain naivety which is lost in most modern fantasy worlds like Witcher or Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity. It's fine that most of the fantasy today is about everybody being wrong and about subverting expectations of what is good and what is evil. But allow other stories to exist too, the ones where there's evil that you valiantly slay or turn good.
On your first thought, "presenting a (false) situation where you either defend yourself or perish" is kind of what glorifying genocide looks like in the modern day. That's what the rhetoric looks like, nasty people going to overrun your nation blah blah shithole countries blah blah I know you've heard this stuff dude it's 2019.

On the second, that's uhm. Kind of my complaint! I'd love to turn them good! I'm not allowed! There's a goddess devoted to redemption and I have one of her priests in my party and he's against it! If you want me to treat them as fundamentally evil, you can't make the plot "This faction is actively trying to be better!" because if some of them have the potential to be good, then they all might! If you want me to just kill 'em all, might I recommend zombies, evil cultists, people without interesting arcs, Will o' Wisps, or apparantly Pitaxians because they're the worst (except you Linzi you're one of the good ones (whoops see how easy that is?)).

Bikindok fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Apr 2, 2019

Zane
Nov 14, 2007

Random rear end in a top hat posted:

I think you'll find it's actually really easy to create a work of fiction, even in the D&D mold, that doesn't justify and in fact glorify the genocide of a monstrous, marauding and inherently evil Other, an ideology which is thriving in the modern day and inflicts far, far more real-world harm then, say, unrealistic standards set by romance novels.
is there a primary antagonist you can think of in a work of popular fantasy/sci-fi genre fiction who isn't an 'inherently evil Other'? in which the morale of the story is actually that heroic conflict is a fundamental psychological/narrative falsification of a more complicated socio-historical situation -- and that no one is 'good' or 'evil' to begin with? because if not: this isn't actually easy to do; and everyone is part of the problem.

Grinning Goblin
Oct 11, 2004

It is worth pointing out that the pantheon of gods is actually good in Pathfinder/D&D and it even transcends the alignment system a bit, as you can have one Lawful Good god that wants to show mercy, foster redemption, and keep everyone alive while you have another Lawful Good god that just sorta wants to stick a sword and burn everything that happens to born with an evil tint. I just think the alignment system should have been tossed a long time ago but hasn't been because it is just another bit of baggage that has to be carried on because the predecessor did it.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!
This conversation would make a lot more sense if the game didn't try to present "no dude they're totally trying to be Good" as a thing, but like...it does. The game sets up it's own grey morality, then judges you for actually taking it on it's word. That's lovely.

Like if trolls and kobolds are just all evil all the time, they should be that. But they aren't. They're trying to give you a vague moral choice...except they've already decided what the correct answer is, they just aren't telling you. This game has many times before been described as "imagine the Pathfinder adventure path as a video game, but with an absolute rear end in a top hat as your DM," and throwing in completely fake moral choices is part and parcel of that.

EDIT: Like what's the ACTUAL moral choice here? It's not "will you defend your people," because that's not how it's presented. It's "do you think these guys can be redeemed? What a dumb motherfucker! Why would you ever trust those people to actually be better?" That's garbage.

Bolivar
Aug 20, 2011

Grinning Goblin posted:

It is worth pointing out that the pantheon of gods is actually good in Pathfinder/D&D and it even transcends the alignment system a bit, as you can have one Lawful Good god that wants to show mercy, foster redemption, and keep everyone alive while you have another Lawful Good god that just sorta wants to stick a sword and burn everything that happens to born with an evil tint. I just think the alignment system should have been tossed a long time ago but hasn't been because it is just another bit of baggage that has to be carried on because the predecessor did it.

A lot of the "lawful good" selections feel borderline evil and Regongar as my general feels actually pretty fine and close to my "neutral good" Queen even though he's supposed to be chaotic evil. Good thing in this game is that it has a better immersion in terms of alignment and choices than what I usually experience in these kind of games. I've noticed that my "real" alignment at least in the context of this game is a lot more complex than just the usual goody-good person.

Bikindok
May 3, 2012
In the game's favor, it's absolutely willing to give Kobolds the benefit of the doubt. The immediate reactions to sparing/vassalizing the Kobolds are relatively minor, confined to your team being skeptical but willing to see how it pans out. I haven't really played far enough ahead to see the consequences but it doesn't feel like a fake choice the way the Trolls do. Hell, maybe I'm entirely wrong and the Trolls also pay off in the long run. I'll probably see that later if so. I'll cheerfully eat crow if that turns out to be the case.

Random Asshole
Nov 8, 2010

Zane posted:

is there a primary antagonist you can think of in a work of popular fantasy/sci-fi genre fiction who isn't an 'inherently evil Other'? in which the morale of the story is actually that heroic conflict is a fundamental psychological/narrative falsification of a more complicated socio-historical situation -- and that no one is 'good' or 'evil' to begin with? because if not: this isn't actually easy to do; and everyone is part of the problem.

I think you misunderstand what I'm saying here: the typical antagonist in a fantasy or sci-fi series (at least, good ones) is evil because of their actions, had they made different decisions they would not be evil, therefore they are not inherently evil. The trolls in this game are evil because they are trolls, an inherently evil race; trolls are stupid, verminous savages who exist only to menace their racial betters, and their destruction is a moral necessity. Trolls aren't shown to have any real culture or achievements of their own, they have no positive traits, the game dismisses both the notion that humans and trolls can live together peacefully and the notion that they can live separately in peace; they have to be destroyed in order for the 'good' races to be safe. Sadly, this kind of lovely thinking is somewhat common in fantasy and scifi, but while it might have been acceptable when Nazism (and White Supremacy in general) was seen as a vanquished ideology*, now that it's clearly resurgent (and in fact dominant in many parts of the globe) I think we can just sort of reject this particular brand of bullshit outright.

I do want to say thanks, though. I was writing up a list of series that I thought would be a counterpoint to your original argument, but after looking some of them up I realized that they're a lot more black and white then I remember. Just to name one example, I was going to name Mass Effect as a good example of a series that plays around ideas like 'necessary' genocide while ultimately concluding that it's wrong and unnecessary, but that's actually a terrible example because of the Reapers, who exist only to threaten the protagonist-races, or the Vorcha who are almost literally Trolls In Space. I'm a big fan of series with no over-the-top evil characters and antagonists with rational, relatable motivations, but upon reflection they're sadly much rarer then I realized.

*hint: it wasn't

Roadie
Jun 30, 2013
That makes me think of Animorphs of all things, where the Yeerks are the villains throughout but still get enough attention to show that they're people collectively dealt a really lovely hand and overreaching to counteract it rather than monsters.

ilitarist
Apr 26, 2016

illiterate and militarist

Random rear end in a top hat posted:

Just to name one example, I was going to name Mass Effect as a good example of a series that plays around ideas like 'necessary' genocide while ultimately concluding that it's wrong and unnecessary, but that's actually a terrible example because of the Reapers, who exist only to threaten the protagonist-races, or the Vorcha who are almost literally Trolls In Space. I'm a big fan of series with no over-the-top evil characters and antagonists with rational, relatable motivations, but upon reflection they're sadly much rarer then I realized.

*hint: it wasn't

Another problem with Mass Effect - and many other modern games that want you to have hard moral choices with no black & white decisions - is that all of the decisions are forced. That's part of why I'm tired of it: it's hard to botch a story about genociding evil orcs, but when you try to present each side of the conflict as not without their point it can be screwed up a lot. Dragon Age 1-2 and Mass Effect 1 weren't that bad about it; Loghain's betrayal, troubles with mages and Genofage problems were all interesting problems - and I'd argue that they were interesting partly because they weren't allusions to anything IRL or metaphors of known problems. Like, say, DAO Elven problems - it's boring. Elves are clearly direct metaphor of indigenous people who are suppressed or enslaved, you don't sit there and think whether it's good to enslave people and steal their land. Later in Dragon Age Inquisition they sorta try to make this problem interesting but it's two games later.

Even those games that are known for interesting decisions have huge problems. Like we're talking about genocide here so remember ME1 Rachni Queen dilemma. You meet a captured bug lord who once was close to conquering galaxy but is now almost extinct and promises to be good. Your choice is either to set it free or kill it. First, the choice is false: in ME3 we learn that Rachni survive either way. More importantly, you lack the sane choice here: say that it's not a place of a professional soldier to decide the fate of a species and you have to delegate this decision. Just leave her contained here. Or at least let me read my codex on Rachni and galactic laws on war crimes so that I know what am I doing. Later in ME2 it all becomes much more evident. You're working for Cerberus and devs embrace how it's all ambiguous and complex. Is Cerberus evil? Do they do the right thing? And the game doesn't know, it doesn't have a consistent vision of Cerberus. All we actually see Cerberus do is saving human colonies and supporting the hero of humanity. Your old pals like Joker and doctor have just signed up to Cerberus and have no problems with it while your old human companion calls you space Hitler for placing your logo on your ship. And then in ME3 it turns out that Cerberus is completely evil, no shades of gray. We also have Reapers who are always a clear evil beyond any redemption.

Why am I throwing this wall of text at you? Because I'm tired of those stories that try to be complex and then reduce your choice to red and blue. This makes every choice boring, every situation predictable. Oh, I see that guy mugging an old lady, my chance to be a hero! But this is a game about complex moral decisions so of course this old lady is war criminal who killed the family of the mugger. I can save a kitten from a tree - but we can't have that simple act of heroism, this kitten probably has some transmittable decease and will kill the whole city.

Pathfinder looks like a fairy tale game and it plays that way. It has its own dilemmas but they're happening within its framework. It's a world where you solve a problem of lawless land of outlaws and poor by sending a squad of murderers to kill the most prominent figure in the land. It's a story in another world. Often fantasy and sci-fi are used for allegory, but using it as escapism is just as valid. Here's a world where evil is quantified. And even when we talk about evil it's not real-life evil you may see in Mass Effect or other *mature* games - corporations with unethical scientific experiments, mind control, rape, exploitations - but a fairy-tale evil. Here evil is a murderous monster or selfish vampire or tyrannical king. When you talk about slavery to your companions it turns out to be the kind of slavery where you send to learn from a great wizard and then work as a steward. It's a kind of world that you want to get into to forget about all those controversies and complexities of real life. Give me the complexity of finding three parts of an artifact to remove the curse of Evil Wizard over allegory on whatever BS we deal in real world.

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.
This is one of the things I actually like most of the time in PF:K that I think maybe I'm interpreting more favorably than it deserves - yes, you have specific dialogue choices labeled "Lawful Good" or "Chaotic Evil", but for the most part (there are exceptions) those labels exist to inform you that those choices represent an action of that alignment, not as a restriction against taking the choice because you're the wrong alignment. Sometimes, your dialogue options are limited to different alignment flavors, none of which may precisely match your alignment - because your alignment more properly represents your general tendencies, it isn't a problem for your Neutral Good character to sometimes pick the Lawful option and sometimes pick the Chaotic option. At least once, I was faced with a dialogue branch where the only way to get what I actually wanted had all the dialogue options that looked like they'd get me there labeled as different flavors of evil.

In fairness, this was the agreement to allow the unscrupulous wizard living in the woods to continue owning and torturing the troll he had purchased and kept imprisoned, in exchange for said wizard's continued assistance. That troll which, if you speak to it, begs for death.

In PF:K, though, that's just one decision out of many, and unless you're advancing in a class with an alignment restriction, your actual alignment throughout the game is less a set of restrictions on what actions you CAN choose, and more of a barometer keeping track of and showing you what actions you DID choose. Again, I'm probably giving the game more credit than it deserves, but I appreciate how the game makes it clear that "Lawful" and "Good" aren't always on board with each other, and the Evil option isn't always the mustache twirling one, but the game makes it clear what it thinks about the choices it's presenting to you when you make them in advance.

Chairchucker
Nov 14, 2006

to ride eternal, shiny and chrome

THUNDERDOME LOSER 2022




On the other hand, watch your paladin fall because you didn't genocide the trolls enough.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

Olesh posted:

I appreciate how the game makes it clear that "Lawful" and "Good" aren't always on board with each other, and the Evil option isn't always the mustache twirling one, but the game makes it clear what it thinks about the choices it's presenting to you when you make them in advance.

Except again, as the argument above goes, morality isn't supposed to be grey. It's supposed to be supernatural and absolute.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker tries to play it both ways and frankly it fails at it miserably. Either alignment is divine and absolute, or it's not and there's a lot of wiggle room. What they've done is tell you there's wiggle room, and then punish you for actually taking them at their word.

caedwalla
Nov 1, 2007

the eye has it

Olesh posted:

In fairness, this was the agreement to allow the unscrupulous wizard living in the woods to continue owning and torturing the troll he had purchased and kept imprisoned, in exchange for said wizard's continued assistance. That troll which, if you speak to it, begs for death.

It's possible I'm remembering incorrectly but to your wizard doing experiments in the wood example,

I remember telling him to stop torturing trolls and half my party got upset and I may have shifted towards a chaotic alignment. Especially funny was Valerie throwing a fit about how I was breaking the law, despite the fact that the PC is the lawful lord of the region.

That encounter was when I decided/realized the game wasn't well written or internally consistent even with the silliness of PF's alignment system.

grah
Jul 26, 2007
brainsss

Chairchucker posted:

On the other hand, watch your paladin fall because you didn't genocide the trolls enough.

Thankfully they added scrolls of atonement which set your alignment back to it's extreme and restore abilities.

DnD alignment doesn't lend itself to complex grey area storytelling well because it is kind of absolute and predetermined. Kobolds are evil even though they're sentient.

Given that, I think the troll decision is better than people are giving it credit for here.


Hargulka and Tartuk want something better for their people, which is commendable but they've made their own moral choice that some humans getting eaten along the way is alright. And so you have to come into conflict with them, but once you've won you can allow them to continue their experiment in your lands, to try it elsewhere, or to kill them.

And if you let them stay, yes, even the companions that support the idea (just Octavia, really), think you're a little insane. Because this is a completely radical notion even in the River Kingdoms. But with more incentive not to kill humans, Trobold will expel their borba eating cousins, and their experiment will largely succeed. You can build them housing and they'll assist your nation and boost your stats, and they'll offer direct aid in your hour of greatest need.

Yes, Ekun leaves forever but the "my whole family was murdered by trolls" guy understandably isn't charitable about trolls.



If the game tries to push any alignment as "right" it seems like Chaotic Good is the preference. Chaotic and Good choices frequently (though not always) yield the easiest solutions to problems, and are often things like "don't do torture and slavery" and "don't execute people for insulting you. "

corn in the bible
Jun 5, 2004

Oh no oh god it's all true!

ilitarist posted:

Almost every living person will have a lot of relationships with other people and can have his life ruined by stories that look as if they are explaining how relationships are supposed to work. They're doing far more harm than anything short of Mein Kampf.

And again, Pathfinder doesn't glorify genocide, it presents a situation where you either defend yourself or perish. And it does so with a certain naivety which is lost in most modern fantasy worlds like Witcher or Dragon Age or Pillars of Eternity. It's fine that most of the fantasy today is about everybody being wrong and about subverting expectations of what is good and what is evil. But allow other stories to exist too, the ones where there's evil that you valiantly slay or turn good.

actually when you do a genocide you get a morality bonus towards lawful and good hope this helps

Dallan Invictus
Oct 11, 2007

The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes, look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.

grah posted:

Given that, I think the troll decision is better than people are giving it credit for here.

Yeah, I haven't played out the decision to ally with Trobold (and I doubt I will because I do not expect to replay this enough times to roll a PC who would be personally okay with it) but from what I've been spoiled on about it it doesn't seem like "the game punishes you for not doing genocide" unless you consider "the few other people who the game gives a voice on your decisions are skeptical-to-outraged based on their lived experience" or "your alignment score changes" to be punishments. Or am I missing something? In terms of narrative consequences it seems a neutral to good (small letters key) outcome.

Yes, the Standard D&D-Style Narrative can be problematic in a lot of ways and this game does not depart very much from it, but hyperbolic criticism is another way in which Alignment Debates Are Bad.

Dallan Invictus fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Apr 2, 2019

Rascyc
Jan 23, 2008

Dissatisfied Puppy

caedwalla posted:

It's possible I'm remembering incorrectly but to your wizard doing experiments in the wood example,

I remember telling him to stop torturing trolls and half my party got upset and I may have shifted towards a chaotic alignment. Especially funny was Valerie throwing a fit about how I was breaking the law, despite the fact that the PC is the lawful lord of the region.

That encounter was when I decided/realized the game wasn't well written or internally consistent even with the silliness of PF's alignment system.
You must've picked something else, like maybe threatened him or something, because I just told him to stop and nobody got upset with me except for him. I thought that encounter went pretty much how I expected with my choices in D&D land.

Really I've encountered no surprises or very deep storytelling in my alignment picks. Feel like once you've seen a few D&D stories, you've seen them all and that's been the same here. What I didn't expect were just how many people are just liars or completely mistaken about everything when telling you about their problems.

Bolivar
Aug 20, 2011

I don't know about "troll genocides" but generally speaking it seems to help if you accept that sometimes the devs are just trolling with you. I just finished a session where my kingdom dropped from "serene" to "stable" because I didn't want my warden (Ekun) to authorize killing an endangered species. Luckily I happened to notice the drop (which the game doesn't exactly be very clear with) and reloaded and oh well, looks like my hunters are killing those bulettes now. Had to google what that even is, kind of nasty I guess but we've seen worse.

Also, yesterday I got some screen that made fun of my save-scumming when I got a "disaster" roll for arcane event and reloaded. The screen was clearly loving with me so my natural response was to select "nah I'm good", what would have been the result of the "yes" choice? That was their april fools easter egg I suppose :regd09:
edit: stumbled on it myself actually: https://clips.twitch.tv/TacitShakingHorseKAPOW

Bolivar fucked around with this message at 17:53 on Apr 2, 2019

Midnight Voyager
Jul 2, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Bolivar posted:

I don't know about "troll genocides" but generally speaking it seems to help if you accept that sometimes the devs are just trolling with you. I just finished a session where my kingdom dropped from "serene" to "stable" because I didn't want my warden (Ekun) to authorize killing an endangered species. Luckily I happened to notice the drop (which the game doesn't exactly be very clear with) and reloaded and oh well, looks like my hunters are killing those bulettes now. Had to google what that even is, kind of nasty I guess but we've seen worse.

Also, yesterday I got some screen that made fun of my save-scumming when I got a "disaster" roll for arcane event and reloaded. The screen was clearly loving with me so my natural response was to select "nah I'm good", what would have been the result of the "yes" choice? That was their april fools easter egg I suppose :regd09:

I feel like easter egg April Fool's events added in a patch are a bad idea when your game is known to be very buggy.

Bolivar
Aug 20, 2011

Midnight Voyager posted:

I feel like easter egg April Fool's events added in a patch are a bad idea when your game is known to be very buggy.

Speaking of which, I ran into that bug where the party size gets upped (party of 7 here talking with an NPC)


I didn't try if I can get a bigger one going, I just re-loaded and returned with 6...someone in Reddit is at 9 though.

Bolivar fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Apr 3, 2019

Lord Koth
Jan 8, 2012

Bolivar posted:

I don't know about "troll genocides" but generally speaking it seems to help if you accept that sometimes the devs are just trolling with you. I just finished a session where my kingdom dropped from "serene" to "stable" because I didn't want my warden (Ekun) to authorize killing an endangered species. Luckily I happened to notice the drop (which the game doesn't exactly be very clear with) and reloaded and oh well, looks like my hunters are killing those bulettes now. Had to google what that even is, kind of nasty I guess but we've seen worse.


Gee, I can't even imagine why your citizens might be unhappy that you've prioritized the safety of a highly aggressive, burrowing predator with what is effectively armor plating and is THE SIZE OF AN ELEPHANT that will attack anything it runs into over them. And given it's not even a loving native creature - it was literally created by mages, almost certainly as a living weapon - spare me the "it's an endangered species" line, even if it were true (it's not).

"But we've seen worse" is basically dragons, which are more closely classified as natural disaster in the minds of people. Like, if you want to RP your character as thinking along those lines, that's perfectly fine, but don't whine that it's the dev's fault your average citizen might have something of a problem with that.

caedwalla
Nov 1, 2007

the eye has it

Rascyc posted:

You must've picked something else, like maybe threatened him or something, because I just told him to stop and nobody got upset with me except for him. I thought that encounter went pretty much how I expected with my choices in D&D land.

Really I've encountered no surprises or very deep storytelling in my alignment picks. Feel like once you've seen a few D&D stories, you've seen them all and that's been the same here. What I didn't expect were just how many people are just liars or completely mistaken about everything when telling you about their problems.

I think I told him to stop and kill it, judging by some other forum posts on the topic. Valerie was definitely unhappy.

I generally disliked the setting and how generic fantasy nonsense everything felt to me.

Olesh
Aug 4, 2008

Why did the circus close?

A long, chilling list of animal rights violations.

ProfessorCirno posted:

Except again, as the argument above goes, morality isn't supposed to be grey. It's supposed to be supernatural and absolute.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker tries to play it both ways and frankly it fails at it miserably. Either alignment is divine and absolute, or it's not and there's a lot of wiggle room. What they've done is tell you there's wiggle room, and then punish you for actually taking them at their word.

What are you talking about?

The wizard in question asks you, bluntly and directly, if you're going to give him problems over the troll he's been experimenting on. He points out that he acquired it in a perfectly legitimate manner and there's nothing illegal about what he's doing. No matter which choice you make, somebody is going to be upset by it, but Valerie being disappointed in your willingness to trample the wizard's legal rights or Octavia being unhappy with your decision to allow the enslavement and torture to continue doesn't penalize you in any way*. The game isn't "punishing" you by having your companions express their displeasure with your actions, so I'm at a loss as to how you think the game punishes you for listening when the game says there's wiggle room in your alignment.

* Unless you have some kind of alignment restriction, for example because you're a Paladin, and this causes you to temporarily lose class abilities because you've been taking too many non-Good actions. But this is true of any action that affects your alignment and isn't the consequence of any single action but your own pattern of behavior, so the point still stands.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kalas
Jul 27, 2007
You guys should play a LE or better yet CE character and just enjoy the bodies-on-spikes adorned capital city you'll have and the lack of hard ethical decisions you have to make. Also some really funny dialogue options.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
  • Post
  • Reply