In most computer games, a good strategy is to start combat by summoning creatures near the enemy.
In BG1 there is a simple way to deal with the basilisks: animate dead. The skelletons are immun to petrify and your chars attack from the distance.
In pathfinder there were the following problems for me:
- Early in the game you have only a few spells, so it is hard to keep your party healed.
Things get easier when you can give your party immunity to poison or resistance to an element plus you have several heal and restore spells and of course more buffs to use before combat that also last longer
- Later one problem was large numbers of enemies where it is almost impossible to prevent your weaker party members from being attacked. You cannot give super high defense to everyone. Well, at least I could not.
- The worst thing are enemies with touch attacks and enemies that lower stats. Its even worse when both things are combined, like some ghost like enemies that drain your stats with touch attacks. Sorry, but I am still not sure what helps against those.
At the moment I am not so much worried about BG3.
But Pathfinder is the most complex rule set I have ever seen.
For expert players its easy. They know when they face an enemy that against this type of enemy helps feat A combined with Spell B and C.
Players new to this system (like me) die 10 times in an encounter only to learn that it would have been useful to learn a different spell at the last level up some hours ago.
The problem with complexity is that first you have to make an enormous effort to understand the system.
Until you understand the system good enough it is just frustrating. You fail all the time and you have to figure out why.
And when you realize your mistakes it often means you have to start again because you have made this mistake many hours ago.
So the problem with complexity is that you have to get over a giant mountain of frustration before you can start having fun.
I totally respect people who can do this, but I can also understand why the percentage of people who finish those games is rather low.
OK, you can use respec, mercenaries and difficulty settings to deal with the problem.
I think the purpose of these things is not that expert players optimize their char for the next dungeon or they increase the challenge when the hardest difficulty setting is still too easy.
The purpose is to give new players a chance to finish the game at all.
Learning new stuff is good, but most people have only limited time and they want to spend this time playing a game.
I know it is a different genre, but Portal is a great example where you learn the rules of the game while playing and you have fun doing so.
When you play it the first time you enjoy it because you learn a lot and you move forward.
When you play it again you have fun because you know how to do some crazy things and find shortcuts or hidden areas.
If ( and thats a huge if) somebody manages to make an RPG similar to Portal, so that the process of learning itself is fun, it would be fantastic.
The fact that you can do crazy things if you know the system well is already present in complex RPGs.
Prof. Dr. Dr. Mad S. Tist
World leading expert of artificial stupidity.
Because there are too many people who work on artificial intelligence already
