It's also worth noting that the gap in difficulty with what they call "Normal" is enormous. You go from being constantly one step from being destroyed to barely even needing to pay attention in a fight.
Probably on account of the fact that the "normal" difficulty has weaker criticals. So you don't get hit for, um 60+ damage by level 6-8 enemies who for some reason have their Str in Dex in their twenties? When one hit from a random troll sends your barbarian into negative HP, something is clearly not right, and it would also seem that Challenging and higher add to their critical confirmation rolls/critical threat, because boy do they land them often.
I've played tabletop Pathfinder, and apart from the usual early-level D&D displays of myopia on characters and an occasional unlucky roll, it flows well enough and is about as close a thing to 3.5 apart from 3.5 itself that you get these days (except I've heard that the second edition apparently changed a lot of things?). Kingmaker is like having a DM who has the local steroid-fiending heavyweight champions be your level 1 party's opponents in an inn brawl.
