“We’re two different beasts, and we just want to make sure that people understand the scope of Solasta 2 and have the right level of expectation around it.”
“We’re two different beasts, and we just want to make sure that people understand the scope of Solasta 2 and have the right level of expectation around it.”
Personally i think Pathfinder is one of the better ttrpgs to make into a crpg. It has meaningful choice at almost every level and during play, while 5e kinda has neither of those. If you’re interested in the Pathfinder games the second one (wrath) is way more polished, but adds the mythic system (basically a powerful extra class) on top of the base character building so it’s a little more complex and difficult.
If you’re interested there is a starfinder game coming out this year based on starfinder 2e (which is just Pathfinder 2e in space). I don’t know much about the developer, but the system is more streamlined than 1e with a focus on mechanical balance and an action point system instead of the old style standard/full/bonus/etc system.
I’m guessing you’re referring to Starfinder: Afterlight. I’ll look into it once it’s released.
As for the action point system, DnD’s action system was one of my favorite parts about it. Most action point based systems I’ve seen so far have balancing issues that seem difficult to get rid of.
For example in Fallout going from 9 AP to 10 AP effectively doubles your damage output, because it lets you attack twice per turn, so anything less than 10 agility is just bad. In Divinity I always felt bad about having to waste AP on movement on melee characters, whereas ranged characters can spend almost all their AP on attacking.
DnD’s system on the other hand is less flexible, but more consistent in that I rarely get into a situation where I can’t do anything meaningful on my turn, because I had to spend all my AP on movement.
I’m just past act 1 in Kingmaker, and even having seen 4 level ups, I don’t think they’ve been noticeably more interesting than 5e, and this is quite similar to the Pillars of Eternity games (I never played 3.5e or Pathfinder tabletop, but I’m pretty sure I understand the lineage there). Plenty of level ups are just putting points into a handful of those skills that, at least in CRPG form, don’t really manifest in interesting gameplay the way they do in Larian’s engine, or even the passive checks that happen in Solasta.
As I see it, 5e’s main advantage is speeding up the math, which matters a lot more when you’re calculating it by hand. The main thing I prefer about it other than that is that it’s a flatter character progression. Using Pathfinder: Kingmaker as an example, a single level up’s worth of to-hit and armor class turned a Bear-Like Ent from “nearly impossible” to “trivially easy”, and I saw the same phenomenon play out plenty of times in Pillars as well. In 5e, you do get more powerful, but not by orders of magnitude like those 3.5-based systems, which makes any given encounter feel more tactical rather than feeling like you should have just gained a level to trivialize it.