Tobold's Blog

Trump’s best idea

2026-09-11T08:59:42.846+02:00

It is somewhat unfortunate that the Trump dividend of $5,000 for every adult American is never going to be paid. First of all it is linked to a condition even Trump knows is impossible, Republicans winning the mid-terms. And then it is just an empty promise, with Americans still waiting for the cheques Trump previously promised and never delivered.

But if the Democrats win the mid-terms, especially if the Democratic Socialists are doing well, the first thing they should do is to pass a bill for the Trump dividend of $5,000 to be paid out. Keep the label on, it makes it harder for Republicans and Trump to block the bill. Of course that will have to be balanced by raising taxes, for example with a “Zucman tax”, a 2% wealth tax on people owning more than $100 million. Okay, that would only bring in $100 billion of the $1.2 trillion cost of the Trump dividend, but other taxes on higher incomes and wealth could be added.

As the Trump dividend is $5,000 “per adult”, and the poorest people in America never pay that much in taxes for the simple reason of not being able to, the Trump dividend balanced by taxes would basically be a huge redistribution of money from rich people to poor people. That should not only appeal to the “social justice” desires of the Democratic Socialists. It is also very good for the economy. Trillionaire Elon Musk would barely miss the 2%, $20 billion. And he is unlikely to ever spend that sort of money on goods and services. But the 4 million Americans for whose $5,000 this would pay for would most likely spend the money, which would give a huge boost to the economy.

We have been promised trickle down economics for decades and they never showed up. Tax the rich, hand out the Trump dividend, and the wealth would finally start to trickle down! This has been Trump’s best idea by far, and the Democrats should do all in their power to make it a reality! Incidentally Democrats promising the Trump dividend if they win would also neatly neutralize the voter bribe aspect of the promise.

Kiting in ZCOM

2026-09-09T09:53:27.637+02:00

I have been playing games, on cardboard and on various computer platforms, for many decades. When I play a new game, and have to come up with tactics, I can fall back on my experience and use tactics that worked in older games, even if those games were not in the same genre. Now one of the first MMORPGs I played was Everquest. And because I liked being able to play solo sometimes, which the game wasn’t really designed for, I ended up playing a particular character with a particular tactic: The quad-kiting druid. Basically that was a tactic in which you aggroed up to 4 enemies, and by being faster than them managed to constantly run away from them. As long as you at least slowly damaged them, and they never damaged you, you would eventually win.

Kiting is not a universally useful tactic. Lots of games have built-in game mechanics that stop kiting from working: Enemies that don’t chase you forever, but run back to their point of origin and regenerate, or, in games with several characters, enemies that change their target if their first target is out of range. Kiting is also often thought of as a tool for real-time games, and plays less of a role in turn-based games.

Having said that, kiting does work in Star Wars Zero Company. Well, taunts only last for one round, so you need to refresh the taunt every round. But enemies do comply strictly with a taunt effect, and will run past another of your characters without attacking, even if they can’t reach the character that taunted them. So I was a bit surprised when watching various tactical and build tips for Star Wars Zero Company (maybe I should call it ZCOM for short), that kiting is not a commonly used tactic in this game.

ZCOM is about 40 cycles (days, battles) long, and around cycle 18 you unlock the ability to add a second specialization to all of your characters. By that time, Cly the Mandalorian already joined your team. So if you add the soldier specialization with the taunt ability to her, you get the perfect kiting character. She can taunt a bunch of characters with the bulwark ability and pistol shots, and then fly out of range with her jet pack. While the enemies fruitlessly pursue her, the other three squad members can shoot the enemies without even needing cover.

A German commenting on German politics

2026-09-08T10:22:18.700+02:00

Germany is a federal republic, consisting of 16 “lands”. You can think of them a bit like the US states, but relatively speaking they have fewer powers and less independence than the US states have. In one of these lands, Sachsen-Anhalt, there was an election this Sunday, and the right wing party AfD got 44% of the votes. Thus you might have seen global headlines about how the Nazis are back in power in Germany. Which is utter nonsense. I have repeatedly said on this blog that if you call everybody slightly to the right of yourself a nazi or fascist, you end up losing all linguistic tools to differentiate between parties on the right.

The AfD occupies a curious position on that right wing spectrum. On the one side they are extreme enough that the German intelligence service in charge of keeping an eye on extremists classifies them as “validated right extremists”, a classification that means that the intelligence service will continue watching them. On the other side they aren’t extreme enough to be declared illegal as a party, as several previous right wing parties in Germany have been. And while of course there are national peculiarities and things aren’t easy to classify, the AfD resembles US MAGA Republicans under Trump a lot more than they resemble German National-Socialists under Hitler.

A few other truths to know to understand the situation is that the AfD did not get an absolute majority in the election, and could only form a local government with the help of others. And even if they managed that, a tenous hold on a single land gives them very little actual power over Germany. If you think that Germany is fascist, you’d still have to admit that it is comparatively less fascist than the USA, which should put things into perspective.

Of course, if you are politically left of center, or center-left as I am, any MAGA-like party taking control anywhere is bad news. But there are 7 European countries were such far right parties are part of the national goverment, and far right parties play a large political role in basically all European countries to some degree. Germany is further away from the far right in national power than for example France is. History and false leaps of imagination might provide sensationalist headlines, but in the end that is just click bait.

The more realistic trajectory has already been observed in the past few years in countries like Hungary or Poland. The growth of right wing populist parties is a consequence of growing inequality, with the “left behind” demographics voting for the populists after feeling left behind by all the other parties. That model then breaks down as soon as the right wing populists come to power, and their voters realize that things aren’t getting any better for them. Viktor Orban lost power this year. In the US the current discussion is not whether the Republicans can win the mid term elections, but only how badly they are going to lose.

If you think that German Nazis will soon invade Russia, you might be in for a strange surprise: The AfD is Russia-friendly to the point of being suspected to be in Putin’s pocket. It is the democratic center-right and center-left parties that changed the German constitution to enable more military spending and increased armament against Russia.

Classic games and cheap tricks

2026-09-04T10:33:18.711+02:00

I am still having a lot of fun on my first playthrough of Star Wars Zero Company. Having said that, being over half through the game, I realized why this isn't going to become a classic game for me like XCOM 2 is. Star Wars Zero Company is using some cheap tricks to evoke a positive reaction from players, but those aren't sustainable, and ultimately hurt replayability. And no, I'm not talking about the cheap trick of calling the archvillain "Fathom", for the sole purpose to be able to name one of your chapters "The Fathom Menace" ...

In XCOM 2, battle maps are semi-procedurally generated. That results in much of your game experience being emergent, like rushing through a door and finding more aliens there than you had thought. In Star Wars Zero Company, battle maps are handcrafted, fixed, and scripted. In one mission you are allowed to control Anakin Skywalker, who is massively more powerful than your regular mercenaries. Cool! But only once. On your second run you'll know that will be coming, and rofl-stomping through the same level with the same overpowered character that isn't yours is already a lot less fun. Another mission has the battlefield exploding behind you, forcing you to move forward. Interesting! But only once. And the list goes on and on.

Basically, in XCOM 2 your "oh shit" moments happen as a result of the combination of the random setup and your decisions. In Star Wars Zero Company those "oh shit" moments are scripted jump scares. They only work once. Even the regular tactical gameplay gets a lot easier if you remember the map: On some maps the danger lies in the large number of small battle droids, and so the next time you'll take blaster pistols that fire a lot of shots. Elsewhere the challenge is big enemies with armor, so a repeater is the better choice of weapon. Some maps have a lot of bridges to shove enemies off, so you better take concussion grenades that do exactly that. I could play this game on the highest difficulty level if I would bother to start every battle, look around, then reload the situation back at the base and choose my team members and equipment in function of the battle ahead. A grenade that only hurts droids, not organic lifeforms, is only useful if you know ahead of time what your enemies are.

Of course XCOM 2 shares the problem with Star Wars Zero Company regarding the main events of the story. The same cutscenes and dialogues are less interesting the second time around, and the same turn of events aren't so interesting if you already prepared for them. Still I think that XCOM 2 has a much better replayability than Star Wars Zero Company, which I don't feel playing more than once.

A small comment about the bond market

2026-09-03T12:46:43.665+02:00

James Carville, a political adviser to President Bill Clinton, famously said: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or as a .400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody".

If you follow financial news, you probably saw a lot of headlines about the bond market these last weeks. If you follow financial YouTube channels, you probably noticed some videos explaining what the heck the bond market actually is, and why it matters. But I think that most of these sources go into too much detail, and then forget to tell you the most important and most fundamental fact about the bond market:

The bond market is extremely hard to manipulate, and is therefore likely to give a pretty accurate economic signal. If, as right now, the signal from the bond market is that interest rates on government bonds are rising to historic heights around the world, the worrying thing is that it is A) a very bad signal for the future of the world economy and global governments, and B) highly likely to be correct. If you don't own bonds, and don't have a lot of debt, you might be able to ignore the bond market itself. But you need to consider the possibility that the bond market is sending a rather accurate signal that bad times are coming.

I'm cheating in Star Wars Zero Company

2026-09-03T10:58:42.804+02:00

I frequently cheat in video games. I am pretty much exclusively playing single-player games, so whatever I do, and whether I call it a cheat or a mod, affects nobody but me. I've been playing video games since the 80s, and I know myself and games well enough to know what I like and don't like. And thus I mod / cheat in order to make games more fun for me.

I rarely use extreme cheats like god mode. Games with zero challenge are often not much fun. I only consider god mode cheats if either the game is far too hard for me, e.g. Elden Ring. In some games, e.g. Valheim, I played most of the game normally, and then used god mode cheats for the boss fights, which are a considerable difficulty spike, and are about combat, while the reason I am playing the game is the resource management and building part. I'm not interested in the combat part, I don't enjoy the challenge of action combat, and so I use cheats to just skip that unenjoyable for me part of the game.

Most of the time, I only use cheats to tinker with minor parts of the game. The latest example is Star Wars Zero Company. That is generally a great game. But the base management and black market part of the game is a lot less fun than it could be, because you simply don't earn enough credits, and can't really do much about it. That is just my opinion, of course, but lots of other players think the same. Fortunately it is just a minor problem, that a cheat can easily solve. I'm using Wand/WeMod to simply add a nice stack of money like 10k or 20k credits at the start of the campaign. That way I can actually use the black market to buy stuff, without having to forego base upgrades whenever I want to buy a weapon mod or utility.

Obviously you can't cheat without affecting the difficulty. I'm playing Star Wars Zero Company on hard, and as I now can afford both base upgrades and some black market purchases at the same time makes that easier for me than for somebody who plays the game on hard without cheats. But I never see these single-player games as a competition, even if there are Steam achievements or something. If Star Wars Zero Company had a better economic system, where I could actually manage my credits better, I would do that. But as credits mostly arrive as mission rewards you have very little control over, the credit constraint isn't much fun to me, and so I decided to alleviate it.

Star Wars Zero Company First Impressions

2026-08-30T09:36:14.431+02:00

I am playing Star Wars Zero Company for a day now, and up to now I am loving it. The tactical combat is excellent, with lots of variety, and the narrative is very well done, giving a solid Star-Warsy feel. But most of all, Star Wars Zero Company solves my problem with other games I played this year, dealing with companions. I don't think I have ever seen a game that lets me respec so freely and easily.

Take for example your starting companion Kabb Uppercut, who starts the game out as a scoundrel. While that isn't a bad class, there isn't much synergy between Kabb's special uppercut ability and the rogue abilities. I could have turned Kabb into a soldier, getting the soldiers melee damage bonus for the uppercut. But instead I decided to turn him into an assault, as the uppercut's refund of AP works really well with the assault's repositioning game. I can turn Kabb into any of the 8 classes, and give him any of the 4 basic weapons, for a huge range of possibilities. And if I wanted, I could have him be a different class in every mission without the slightest disadvantage other than it being confusing to me. I can even get any focus points I specialized him with refunded anytime, and put them somewhere else. So if you and me both do some story mission with Hawk, Kabb, Trick, and Jae, we might be using completely different character classes and loadouts and have a very different experience.

On the negative side, if we both do the same story mission, it will be on exactly the same map. And any triggered events like reinforcements will happen with the same triggers, which can be time or some player action, like reaching an objective. And side missions can actually reuse maps you've already seen in a story mission. The semi-procedural map generation system of XCOM 2 does produce better map variety.

So we can summarize Star Wars Zero Company with having challenges that are relatively fixed, and solutions that are very flexible. With dialogue only happening at the base, there isn't really any practical difference between a companion and a freely created mercenary. It will be interesting to see how much replayability this system produces.

Aurelio

2026-08-29T10:12:44.745+02:00

Being a big fan of the XCOM series of games, I couldn't resist buying the just released Star Wars: Zero Company. It is described as an XCOM game in the Star Wars universe, but that at best describes the gameplay loop and setting; the narrative feel differs a lot from XCOM games, and is closer aligned to typical Star Wars vibes.

As usual, I started the game by playing the tutorial. Even if I am not new to tactical games, and am in fact playing on hard, tutorials are mostly useful to learn about the user interface. Nothing interesting ever happens in a tutorial ... I thought. And then Aurelio, one of my 4 starting characters, died in the tutorial. The tutorial is on rails, you can't actually prevent Aurelio from dying. Even if you turn the tutorial off and set permadeath to off, Aurelio still dies a permadeath. It is start of the "things aren't looking too good" starting situation exposition.

In a way Aurelio's death reminded me of those mobile game ads, where you see somebody playing the game in question deliberately badly, in order to make the viewer think "I can do better than that!" and download the game. Aurelio dies a stupid death, after having been previously wounded as consequence of an equally stupid move. It does somewhat teach the player how not to move your characters forward. Although that is to some degree counterproductive, as moving forward to flank is a very essential part of the tactics of the game.

I saved the game after the tutorial and am now busy downloading the latest Nvidia graphics driver, released a day before Star Wars: Zero Company. Apparently that one fixes problems with stuttering cinematics. Apart from that stuttering, I didn't have any technical problems yet. I liked what I saw in the tutorial, but of course it will take a lot more time to see how solid the gameplay loop and long term motivation is.

Grand Theft Certainty

2026-08-28T12:38:44.810+02:00

I can't drive virtual cars. If you consider the totality of video games, and all the activities there are in these games, there are things I am good at, and things I am bad at. I am bad at driving a car in a video game. I am not bad at driving real cars, but the controls for virtual cars and their behavior in games are very different from reality, and I'm not good at making that jump. Because I am bad at driving in games, I rarely play video games in which driving is a major part. I did play Grand Theft Auto: Vice City on the PS2, but that is about it for the GTA series. I own GTA V, but only because in 2020 I got it for free from the Epic Games Store, and I haven't even found the time to play it since.

Given all that, you can understand that my excitement about the upcoming November release of Grand Theft Auto VI is limited. Netflix doing an exclusive preview of the game baffles me, as I can't remember them having done that for other games. But what puzzles me the most is the general feeling of absolute certainty: Everybody is sure that Grand Theft Auto 6 will launch in November without the slightest technical problem, it will be the greatest game ever, it will immediately sell millions of copies, it will suck all money out of the video game market for weeks, so nobody else can have a successful game launch in November, and shortly after GTA 6 will switch on a live service multiplayer online part of the game that will not have any server problems and somehow not cannibalize GTA 5 Online either.

Personally, I am not so certain that all this will be true. In this day and age, who would believe that a major game studio like Blizzard Activision, EA, Bioware, or Ubisoft could be able to launch a multi-million player, multi-platform game without a hitch? Why would we automatically dismiss this possibility for most game studios, but be absolutely certain that Rockstar will do it? Why are we so certain that GTA 6 will be considered the best part of the series, when we have lots of examples of game series where the latest incarnation is considered less good than previous parts? And why would all our criticism of live service games and all our experience with them failing not apply to GTA 6 Online?

I don't doubt at all that GTA 6 will make truckloads of money. But I am open to the possibility that things could go wrong during launch, or that ultimately GTA 6 will not be considered the best game ever of the series. If parent company Take-Two Interactive would know the recipe of the secret sauce that makes any sequel better than the previous games, why didn't they use that sauce on Civilization VII or Borderlands 4? My general impression of the state of the video game industry is that there is no way to guarantee a surefire success, even for a $1 billion game.

Idiocracy

2026-08-27T11:47:11.778+02:00

The internet promotes simplified extreme views over more nuanced and complicated considerations. Thus you probably have seen somewhere on the internet over the past few years headlines in which the 2006 movie Idiocracy is claimed to have come already true. Or heard about the "reverse Flynn effect", in which Gen Z is the first generation measurably dumber than previous generations, with Generation Alpha doing even worse. Then everybody attaches their own favorite scapegoat to those headlines, and confidently proclaims that it is "social media", or "AI", or "screen time" or whatever that makes young people dumb.

The reality is a lot more complicated. That starts with the question of how you measure how clever and/or well educated a generation is. As it turns out, there is an observer effect, related to the Heisenberg principle, and you can't measure intelligence and education without at the same time affecting it. Thus standardized testing led to schools "teaching to the test", which affected what pupils did and didn't learn to do. But an ever greater problem, unsurprisingly, as it is very often the culprit, is statistics.

Statistics say that by various measures of intelligence and education, the world roughly got smarter in the 20th century, the Flynn effect, and dumber in the 21st century, the reverse Flynn effect. The fundamental problem of headline numbers in statistics is that an average frequently hides the truth. The average wealth between Elon Musk and me is half a trillion dollars, but that simply doesn't tell you anything about my financial situation. Only if you drill a lot deeper and look at more detailed statistical data like percentiles a better picture emerges.

The truer picture about intelligence and education of young people is that even in the latest generations, the top 10% of pupils are better educated and more intelligent than the top 10% of previous generations were, and the Flynn effect continues. But the bottom 10% of pupils today are much, much less educated and are often lacking very basic problem solving skills. The gap between the best and and the worst has gone up very much, and the bottom has sunk so precipitously that the average has been going down.

Now again you can attempt to attach your favorite scapegoat reason for everything to those data. Personally, as I have always been worried about the rise in economic inequality, I can't help but think that a rise in economic inequality also results in a rise in educational inequality. Or to say it differently, the way that things are taught at school are not sufficient for a pupil without additional adult supervision at home to end up with a good education. With the likelihood of a pupil getting adult supervision when doing his homework being very much linked to socio-economic factors. Richer kids have tutors and prep schools, poorer kids are left to their own devices.

Homework in itself is a flawed system. Imagine a page with 20 math problems, all about addition of two numbers between 10 and 99. With some guidance, a kid of the appropriate age could learn a lot about fundamentals of addition from doing those 20 math problems. But chances are that nobody has explained to the kid that the purpose of doing those 20 additions is for him to learn something about additions. He just got handed the piece of paper and been told that he has to return it with the correct results on it. As long as the kid has any access to any electronic device, he'll realize that the fastest way to fill out the results correctly is by the use of anything from a calculator to Google search, without going through the hard and seemingly unnecessary step of learning about addition yourself.

Of course the advances in technology are partially to blame. Calculators existed already when I was young (and led to intense discussion in education). But ChatGPT can also write that essay about "what I did this summer" or do that book summary for a pupil, bypassing the need to develop writing and reading skills. Thus the scary headlines about pupils getting a high school degree without being able to read competently. At the same time another lucky kid is helped to develop skills in reading and writing, PLUS being taught about when to use ChatGPT, and how to competently judge and use the result. Guess which kid will do better in life afterwards.

In summary, if you were to go into hibernation and wake up in the future, chances are that society isn't ruled by idiots then. There will be highly intelligent and educated people around, and they will have most of the power in society. The question is how dumb the least educated people in society are, and that could possibly be some sort of dystopian future. Or humanity learns how to create better education systems, in which pupils aren't left alone with homework and have to decide for themselves whether to use quick fix technology to return it.

Buffed

2026-08-26T10:32:56.287+02:00

In Wrath of the Righteous, I am now level 15, and in the early phases of act 4. As I certainly mentioned several times over the years, I am not a big fan of D&D/Pathfinder systems above level 10. They generally don't scale very well, and tend to get a bit silly. This is even worse in Wrath of the Righteous, where in addition to regular levels you also get mythic ranks, which are even more powerful. Now your mythic path can work more or less well with your class. And every combination can break the game in a different way. If I had for example played a necromancer wizard with a lich mythic path, the story of how I am overpowered would be a different one. But here is my example, of a cleric (crusader) on the angel mythic path.

The idea of the crusader cleric is to have a cleric that is reasonably good at melee combat. Now besides healing, clerics have a lot of buff spells. Those either make you just plain stronger, or they protect you in some way against various negative status effects. In the Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Wrath of the Righteous games that normally results in a game loop where if you unexpectedly encounter an overly strong enemy that does something like poison your whole group and you lose the fight, you will reload and do much better on the second try. Because if you know what that enemy is doing, you can put that specific anti-poison buff on your group. But as there are quite a lot of different status effects you could protect against, and the buffs don't last forever, it is unlikely that you will have the correct protection spell on you when you meet an unknown enemy.

My angel cleric breaks that system. The mythic path allowed me to take the mythic abilities "enduring spells" and "greater enduring spells". That means that any buff with a duration of more than 5 minutes now lasts 24 hours. And the abundant casting mythic abilities increase the number of spells that I can cast every day. Plus the angel mythic path gives even more powerful buffs and increases my cleric caster level, allowing me to cast higher level spells. The overall result is that I can now put a whopping 20+ different buffs on my whole group for 24 hours, increasing their combat stats and protecting them from basically every status effect in the game. And my main character has some additional personal buffs that turn him into a fighting machine. Plus he doesn't have to cast buffs during combat anymore, so he has more turns in which he can hit enemies. And the other group members are also putting out more damage, because it doesn't happen anymore that they are disabled or weakened by some status effect, plus they have some positive buffs making them stronger.

Now act 4 of Wrath of the Righteous is pretty tough in some spots, and being overpowered sometimes actually feels necessary. But personally I don't enjoy that sort of high-level gameplay all that much. At lower levels I used to sneak into rooms to see what enemies were in there, and then cast the right buff for every situation. Now I just have every possible buff on the whole party all the time and just don't care what special status effect attacks the enemies have. So although I very much enjoy playing Wrath of the Righteous and played over 200 hours already, I am still pondering whether I want to finish act 4 and 5 to get to the end of the game, or whether combat at the highest level is just too silly.

Skipping content

2026-08-23T12:22:12.565+02:00

In a game like Wrath of the Righteous, I have a tendency to want to play through all of the available content, including every side quest or companion quest. Experience points are a limited resource, and every side quest you do tends to give you some xp, making you stronger for the main quest line. The disadvantage is that some quests just aren't interesting, or don't really fit with your vision of your character.

Wrath of the Righteous is a very long game, Act 3 is an extremely long part of it, and me playing in turn-based mode isn't speeding things up either. Also the DLC add additional side quests to the game, so that playing through them all might not actually be necessary to have a good level for the main quest. So as I am approaching the end of Act 3, I decided to skip some content.

One series of quests I decided to skip consist of tile-laying puzzles. They aren't very well done, you can't see very well what you are doing, and due to lack of explanation there is a lot of trial and error. On Reddit, a lot of players dislike the puzzles. So I had the option of either stumbling around in the dark, or just following a guide, or skipping the content. As I don't find that gameplay interesting, I decided to skip the puzzles.

Then I skipped a companion quest out of roleplaying reasons: I am playing a good character, a crusader on the angel mythic path, constantly choosing the good options in dialogues. And one of the companions is secretly a serial killer. So at the point where that was officially revealed to me, I fought and killed the companion, instead of sparing her just to have further companion quest content. Maybe one day I'll do another run of Wrath of the Righteous, and play an evil character, like a Lich.

Edge cases of the d20 system

2026-08-22T09:44:05.584+02:00

I am still playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, over 200 hours into the current run and approaching the end of act 3. Now Pathfinder, like D&D, runs on a d20 system. That is to say that the success of an attack, or whether whether a spell is resisted or diminished in effect, is determined by rolling 20-sided dice. At the start of the game you might have an attack bonus like "+5". That means you roll the d20 and add 5. If for example the enemy has an armor class (AC) of 16, you need to roll 11 or more on your d20 to hit, and only if you hit you deal damage. In this example your chance to hit is 50%, because 11 or more is 50% of the results of a d20. This is how the whole game scales. I'm level 14 now, and my attack bonuses are more like "+25". But then the armor class isn't 16 any more but 36, and I still need to roll the same 11 on the d20 to hit.

But in these higher levels I also frequently encounter the two possible edge cases: Enemies with armor class so low, I only need to roll a 2 to hit (a 1 is always a failure, regardless of the math of attack bonus and AC); and enemies with armor so high, I need to roll a 20 to hit, which is always a hit. So the game sometimes puts boss monsters in my way, where the AC is incredibly high for the level. Even with all the optimization of the world and taking the character classes with the highest to hit bonuses, and wearing magical gear, the to hit bonus can only get so high at a certain level. And if the AC of the boss is then higher by 20 than this optimized to hit bonus, my chance to hit goes down to 5%. That ends up being pretty long and miserable fights.

So over the course of the game I collected various means to break that problem: I have now 3 characters in my core team that can apply a -2 to AC onto the enemy. Ember the witch has the Evil Eye hex, which gives -2 AC for at least 1 round, and can then use Cackle every round to keep that debuff going forever. Lann has a relic belt, Malander's Penance, that gives monks the ability to spend a Ki point for a -2 AC debuff. And Arueshalae has the Big Game Gloves, that adds a -2 AC debuff to her quarry ability.

The result is significantly easier boss fights, as long as the main difficulty of the boss fight was the high armor class. If the AC of the boss is 20 above my to hit bonuses, I only have a 5% chance to hit. If I spend one round to apply three times -2 to AC, the AC is now only 14 above my to hit bonuses, and I have a 35% to hit. Making it 7 times more likely for me to hit means the boss goes down quickly.

One tends to think of the d20 system as being linear, with every +1 or -1 changing the probability by the same plus or minus 5%. But if you consider the edge cases, and the absolute chance to hit, if you have only a 5% chance to hit, a +1 bonus to to hit, or -1 malus to AC, doubles that chance to hit to 10%. So I can see why many Pathfinder players are so obsessed with minmaxing their builds. If you have regular enemies which you already hit half of the time, another +1 seems irrelevant. But if boss monsters have too high armor, that +1 might be the difference between being able to beat him or not.

Incompatible loot

2026-08-17T09:58:10.708+02:00

Many computer roleplaying games, or roleplaying-adjacent games, have a constant stream of loot to keep you interested. Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous certainly has a loot stream, but it turns out that the "Pathfinder" part of the name poses a problem: Loot incompatibility.

At level 1, every character class has access to some simple weapons. Monks, wizards, and druids have the most restricted list of access. But typical melee classes like fighters have access to both simple and martial weapons, and with a single feat could get access to exotic weapons. However, characters usually get at least one new feat every two levels, sometimes more. And if you want to make an efficient build, you will have concentrate on a single weapon. There are feats like "weapon focus" or "weapon specialization" or "improved critical" that don't work for all the weapons you are proficient in, but you have to specify which weapon the feat should apply to.

At level 1, there isn't much of a difference between a regular longsword and a regular battleaxe, except for how they handle critical hits. You can perfectly choose either one of them and be fine. But a few levels down the road, you'll be stuck with your choice. If you chose longsword, you might end up having a regular +1 longsword and looting a +2 battleaxe with some interesting additional effect; but because you have specialized in the longsword, you won't switch to the battleaxe now, unless you pay for an expensive respec.

Now Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous has 56 different types of weapon, but you group only has 6 characters. So the chance of any random weapon you find to be completely useless to your group is quite high. The situation with armor is a bit different, but it also happens that an armor has a magic effect that would be good for one of your characters, but its armor type or other stats aren't useful to that character.

In the end, your group in Wrath of the Righteous ends up selling most of the loot. Which is a lot less interesting than finding loot you can actually use. In a pen & paper game, the dungeon master simply cheats and doesn't hand out incompatible loot. But in a computer RPG, the devs don't know which weapon you would specialize in, and so they just sprinkle a bit of everything.

Changing Wrath of the Righteous

2026-08-14T19:28:07.885+02:00

I am 200 hours into Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, and I started some minor use of mods. As I mentioned previously, I am sometimes unhappy with the companions the game gives you. In my game, where I am playing a cleric (crusader), I was especially unhappy with Sosiel, because he is a cleric too, and very similar to my main character. With the main character getting more mythic advantages, Sosiel was just "the same in worse". And you can't fully respec companions.

Well, you can't fully respec companions without a mod. So I temporarily installed the mod, and turned Sosiel into a kineticist. Kineticist is a very powerful ranged damage dealing class. Even with a basic build, Sosiel is now as good as Ember in dealing fire damage at range. And with the Gather Power ability, I can now often start combat by casting a very strong wall of fire into the middle of the unsuspecting enemies at a reasonable burn cost. Burn is the Kineticist's resource, but even when he is out of that, his 0 burn abilities are still very strong. He is a glass cannon, as burn diminishes hit points, but unless the enemies have area damage, that usually doesn't matter.

I wasn't even really aware of the Kineticist class previously. It was one of the classes I tried out in the Treasure of the Midnight Isles DLC, which is good to try out new classes. On the other hand, I now also can access Treasure of the Midnight Isles from the main campaign, and the procedurally generated dungeons feel boring compared to the rest of the main campaign content.

While the mod causes some weirdness on some character screens, I am up to now quite happy with the result. It solves my problem that the companions you bring for story reasons aren't necessarily the classes and builds you would want them to be.

Wrath of the Righteous - Start of Act 3

2026-08-12T13:28:30.197+02:00

So I ended my excursion into the Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous DLCs, and went back to the main game, where I was at the very start of Act 3. That turned out to be a slow and confusing start. In Wrath of the Righteous you are playing a Heroes of Might & Magic -like game in parallel with a roleplaying game. And in Act 3, the map for both of these parts is huge, much bigger than in Act 2. Now I started Act 3 at level 10, which is normal if you don't do some special trickery in Act 2. But I found it hard to reach level 11, which many locations being small and not giving much xp, or feeling a bit out of my level range. If I need to roll a 20 to hit a monster, I probably shouldn't be there at that level.

The solution turned out to be waiting, as at some point my Mythic Quest suddenly appeared one day. For me playing on the Angel mythic path that involved visiting a temple and its surrounding lands. And one quest there, collecting 21 special daggers, rewarded me with 23040 xp, which is about half a level at this point, and made me reach level 11.

A bit of research revealed that I should now first do the continuation of that mythic quest instead of all the other quests. Because that will get me to mythic rank 4, which is another huge boost to my power. And the crusade management part of the game goes in parallel to that, and sometimes provides me more power boosts, for example by doing decrees that repair relics. Only then should I return to the quest locations that were available earlier to me, like Whitesun, and with all this added power I should be more easily able to deal with that.

The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles

2026-08-06T12:25:07.939+02:00

I am still working my way through the DLCs for Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, which I bought for cheap in a bundle in a recent Steam sale. I finished both Through the Ashes and The Lord of Nothing, and now started The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles. Which is a bit of a weird one when you play the standalone version, as it turns the game into a roguelike dungeon crawler. And that brings me to some thoughts about the dual nature of roleplaying games in general.

What I mean by the dual nature of roleplaying games is that they are both tactical games and narrative games. "I rolled a 20 and my barbarian deals 24 critical damage to the orc" and "Thrud the barbarian rushes forward, swinging his battleaxe, splitting the orc's head in two" are actually both describing the same event. While Wrath of the Righteous has lots of tactical combat and character build optimization, there is also a large story spanning five acts, plus numerous side quests and companion-specific quests. And the two parts can get into each other's way, when for example you play with a group of companions who aren't exactly the classes or builds that would have chosen if you had made the full party from scratch.

In The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles you make your whole party from scratch, starting with two characters and gaining more until your group is full over the course of the game. There are no companions, and there is only a very thin story leading your through a series of procedurally generated dungeons full of random monsters and treasures. So if in the main game you never got the party of your dreams, if you play this DLC standalone, you can build this dream party and try it out against various combat challenges. Or you can build various parties with the more exotic classes and builds that you never had the opportunity to try out in the main game.

The downside is that other that combat there isn't much to see in The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles. There are a few token opportunities to use skill checks, but succeeding a Lore skillcheck rewards the party with a buff instead of giving you any actual lore. At the end of each 5-dungeon run is a boss fight, but you've never heard of that boss before, and he is just a final, harder challenge for each run. You don't have history with the bosses, like you often do in the main game. And that makes the DLC a bit more boring than the main game, because the narrative of the main game is a motivating factor in the game.

I don't think I will play The Treasure Of The Midnight Isles very long. I'm trying out some character classes and builds for fun, but I will probably only do a handful of runs before returning to the main game. I am happy that I can try out some things, but after a few dungeons a character build without a story isn't enough to carry the game for me.

What is the purpose of holidays?

2026-07-31T13:30:14.465+02:00

Let me show you my holiday selfie:

As you might have guessed, this image was created with AI (ChatGPT). If I actually wanted to visit the Greek island of Santorini with the famous blue roofs, that would probably be a rather horrible experience. Every day, thousands of people disembark there from their cruise ship, only to stand in line for hours at the best spots to make holiday selfies. The purpose isn't to actually have a good time, but to produce an image for Instagram or some other social media platform. Producing the same image with AI to me seems the better solution. At least it was a lot faster, cheaper, and less unpleasant.

At this time of the year, end of July, I always used to be on summer holidays. Europeans have up to 6 weeks of holidays per year, and taking something like 3 weeks during the summer is very common. As many people have children, they take holidays during the summer school holidays. And although I don't have children, the absence of so many colleagues meant that there were few meetings at work during the summer. So it was better to take your holidays during this time where there wasn't much going on at work anyway.

If you had asked me a few years ago what the purpose of holidays is, I would have said rest and relaxation. We used to go to the seaside, stay for 3 weeks in a vacation rental, and not do very much at all other than taking walks and going to the beach. But then I retired. And out of habit we tried the exact same type of holiday again, and neither I nor my wife liked it anymore. It turns out that retirement has a lot of rest and relaxation and doing not much every day of the year, and a holiday to do nothing isn't really a break anymore. So we now take shorter holidays, and rather go to places where we can have some activity visiting things, cultural or historical. We also take holidays in June or September, rather than July/August, to avoid the rush. And we rather visit places that few people want to make Instagram holiday selfies of. There are a lot of beautiful spots within a few hours drive from where we live, in Belgium, Germany, or France. We take the plane to go on holidays a lot less than previously.

Despite the permanent narrative of a cost of living crisis and how badly everybody is doing, in 2025 global tourist arrivals hit 1.52 billions, breaking the pre-COVID record of 2019. As these tourists aren't evenly distributed, there are spots that you simply can't visit anymore in comfort, as they are completely overcrowded. Spain now has a number of tourist spots in which the local population stages massive protests against tourism, despite the economic benefit. But then, some forms of tourism, especially cruise ships, do not benefit the visited locations all that much, with most of the profit going to large corporations instead of local population.

European holidays are further complicated by climate change. Here is Belgium, yesterday it was 34°C or 93°F. Large swathes of Spain and southern France have been hit by huge wildfires this month. While previously there was a clear motivation to leave rainy Belgium during the holidays and visit a place in the sun, that motivation goes away quickly if the sun comes to Belgium and the place you wanted to visit is burning. And even if there aren't any wildfires, I wouldn't want to go somewhere where it is 40°C or more during the day. My preferred holiday weather would be 25°C and sunny, but these days this is more likely off season than during the summer months.

The Lord of Nothing

2026-07-30T09:04:31.231+02:00

I finished the Through the Ashes DLC for Wrath of the Righteous, and started playing the next DLC, The Lord of Nothing. And I was able to import my whole party from the former DLC into the latter, with all their gear, xp, and levels untouched, and a direct story continuation. A bit further in the DLC I picked up a mandatory new group member, and thus had to kick out one of my three mercenaries, but other than that I was able to keep my group from one DLC to the next, which was nice.

In many aspects The Lord of Nothing is more pleasant to play than Through the Ashes. While Through the Ashes was an attempt to make a survival RPG, The Lord of Nothing is a lot closer to classic heroic fantasy. I am gaining levels quickly, and loot is plentiful. Furthermore playing level 5 to 11 is more fun to me than playing levels 1 to 5, because characters have more options, spells and powers. In my personal opinion both D&D and Pathfinder are actually best around levels 5 to 10, and get a bit silly at higher levels, especially the spellcasters.

Having said that, Through the Ashes was somewhat original as a story of non-hero "civilians" fighting for survival during a catastrophe. The Lord of Nothing has a far less original story, which is actually rather stereotypical: You need to collect a set of shards, and each shard is in a different location, held by a different boss mob. Conveniently, teleportation portals open always to just the place where you need to go next. And while your characters are still weaker than the characters of the main game, due to having fewer points for attributes at creation, and no mythic powers, they are a lot stronger than they were in the previous DLC. They have much better gear, and they gain shard powers instead of mythic powers.

In summary, The Lord of Nothing plays very much like a classic D&D/Pathfinder game. I read that if you play the DLC at high difficulty, it adds some content to the main game, but I am playing on medium difficulty, so I get nothing. You can't import characters from the DLC into the main game, and you probably wouldn't want to, due to them being weaker. The DLC isn't particularly long, around 15 hours if you do everything, same length as Through the Ashes. At full $12.99 price per DLC I would have wondered whether these DLCs are worth it, but I only paid $12 for *all* Wrath of the Righteous DLCs together in the "Game of the Year Edition" bundle during a sale, so I can't complain about the price. In the end the two DLCs were an opportunity to try out some different character classes than I have in the main game, and were fun enough.

Everquest for wimps

2026-07-28T17:18:26.027+02:00

Around the year 2000, after The Ruins of Kunark expansion was released, I played Everquest for 18 months. I never even reached the level cap in that time, only getting to level 42 with my druid. And I was playing a druid because that was at the time one of the classes that could at least get some xp soloing, by a technique called quad-kiting. But in general, Everquest was brutally hard, you had to be in a group even for killing regular open-world monsters, xp gain was slow, and you got brutally punished when things went wrong; that included xp and level loss, and the possibility to lose all of your gear if you died in a too dangerous spot and couldn't get your corpse back.

Today Everquest Legends releases. It is an officially licensed, authorized commercial product, based on the original Everquest. But it is far, far easier: You get to play initially 2, later 3 character classes in the same character, allowing you to solo as your very own mini-group. There is no more xp loss if you die, no more corpse runs, no more getting thrown back to a bind point several zones away if you die. It is Everquest in easy mode, for people who are at the same time nostalgic, but not willing to play the original, which still exists.

Twenty years ago I might have been interested. Today I'm not playing any MMORPGs anymore, and I'm not tempted by Everquest Legends. Although Everquest is only 5 years older than World of Warcraft, its graphics haven't aged as well. And although I liked soloable World of Warcraft much more than I liked forced grouping in Everquest, I don't think you can "fix" Everquest by making it casual and solo friendly. Those of us who played EQ do remember it *because* it was brutally hard and slow. Somebody who never typed "camp check" in the commonlands zone chat will probably not understand, but Everquest had its own very peculiar culture due to it being so hard. Strangers approached my druid to get a taxi service, because my class was one of the few who had access to limited fast travel. Necromancers were approached for their corpse summoning services. People typed "HG" in zone chat to warn you of the Hill Giant. If you wanted to trade, you had to meet in the East Commonlands tunnel. You would chat with the people you met while waiting for the boat. Everquest was an extremely social game experience, and I don't think Everquest Legends will be.

Through the Ashes

2026-07-26T09:47:03.702+02:00

I am half way through the Through the Ashes DLC of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. There are parts of it that I enjoy a lot, as I generally think that D&D/Pathfinder games get a bit silly beyond level 10; especially due to spellcasters that get both stronger spells and more spells with level, leading to extreme power levels. And thus, playing Through the Ashes from level 1 to now level 3 was a nice change.

Having said that, the concept of Through the Ashes isn't really working. You are playing a group of "non-hero" civilians, which are in fact just regular Pathfinder characters with 15 instead of 25 points to put into abilities, and basically no equipment. You're supposed to avoid combat to a maximum, and combat doesn't give xp, but many combat encounters are still unavoidable, and you'll need the loot they give. Parts of it don't work well in turn-based mode: You need to switch to real-time mode to aggro different groups of enemies to lead them to each other, so they kill each other while you run away. Sometimes you can defeat enemies by dropping something from the environment on top of them, but that usually needs items like ropes and tools, and you don't find that many of these.

In the second chapter, sick NPCs are introduced, and they get sicker and die if you rest. You are supposed to find ways to heal them, but there is only a single cure disease scroll on the whole map, and very few lesser restoration potions. You are playing level 2 characters that don't have many spells, abilities, or healing, and you can't get those powers back through healing. The whole thing feels extremely punishing. And that is not just to me, I watched a streamer with tons of playthrough and guide content on YouTube try to tackle Through the Ashes at highest difficulty, and he was basically reloading every 5 minutes.

I would definitely recommend lowering some difficulty settings for this. The settings where your group members get back up after combat when killed, and get healed of negative conditions on a rest are pretty essential to playing Through the Ashes. It also helps to be aware that there isn't much gear around, and play classes that do well without, for example every class that gets animal companions. I have both a druid and a nature oracle, with two wolves being my frontline tanks. And even with all that, some fights are just hard and tedious. I spent an eternity on the last boss of chapter 2, using multiple grease spells to keep him down, and then rather ineffectively reducing his health with cantrips and ranged weapons to which he was mostly resistant. I also used spoilers like the Survivor Guide, because in the text sequences where you need to assign NPCs to tasks it isn't really obvious who would be suited for which task, so it is either looking that up or trial and error with save scumming. Or letting the survivors die and enjoy the ability to rest as much as you want, in exchange for getting a "bad" ending.

On the positive side Through the Ashes pushes you to use every scroll and every potion you find effectively and get creative to play around the severe limitations of your group. Tactics like kiting help, but aren't usually used in the Pathfinder games. I kited a necromancer in circles, because his animate dead spell only lasts one round per level, which takes a very long time if you do it in turn-based mode. The maps in Through the Ashes have more narrow paths, which works great for spells like grease and AoE effects like alchemist's bombs. Unfortunately the engine used for the Pathfinder games makes blocking a narrow path with a tank much harder than it is in Pillars of Eternity, which I played previously.

Overall, Through the Ashes is a very different experience despite using the same rules and engine as the main game Wrath of the Righteous. But I still think that the follow-up DLC The Lord of Nothing might be a bit more enjoyable, being less punishing.

The Resting Game

2026-07-24T09:06:33.575+02:00

In Dungeons & Dragons, spellcasters have a certain number of spells (based on their level) "per day". They recover their spells when they take a long rest. The result of that is that a group of adventurers is strongest right after a rest, when they have everything, and are weakest just before the next rest, when they have spent most of their spells and other "daily" abilities. Clever players thus ignore the implied day / night cycle and rest frequently. As many other RPG and CRPG systems have been heavily influenced by D&D, this recovering spells and powers by resting is a feature in many of these games.

In Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous I just finished Act 2, after about 40 hours in the game. And the last 10+ hours of Act 2 are spent at a large event, called the Siege of Drezen. While in most of the game you can usually rest as much as you want (there is a section with time pressure at the start of Act 1), in Drezen a different rule applies: You need to find a location of crusader supplies to rest, and resting consumes those supplies. That forces the player to make do longer between rests, which is an interesting twist.

Having said that, how much you want to rest depends a lot on your party composition. If you have mostly non-magical melee and ranged characters, maybe supported by a healer/buffer or two, you don't consume a lot of spells in each combat. With the help of alternative healing methods, like potions, you can last very long without needing a rest. My current Wrath of the Righteous party has several spellcasters. My main is a crusader, a hybrid melee / healer, and I have both a witch and a wizard in my group. So I used nearly all the crusader supplies I found during my Siege of Drezen. And the limitation forced me to watch my "daily" powers and not waste them, as a wizard throwing fireballs and a wizard ineffectively shooting a crossbow from behind are not the same power level.

I will now take a break from the main campaign of Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, but only to play the separate DLC stories Through the Ashes and Lord of Nothing. In an unusual design decision, it isn't the main campaign which affects the DLCs, but the other way around. I already "missed" some minor content in Act 1 and 2 because it would have appeared after playing Through the Ashes. So I want to play the DLCs now, so I don't miss whatever else they add to the main story.

And as far as I know before starting, especially Through the Ashes is a story in which your group is more resource constrained than in the main story. So it will be interesting to see how resting is handled there. What are the restrictions put into place to prevent the player from resting after every fight?

Barrier to Entry Games

2026-07-22T09:43:11.294+02:00

For Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, I have the "Devoured by Darkness" achievement, which you get if you finish the tutorial. Only 59% of players have that. I also have the "Burning City" achievement, which you get at the end of Act I, and only 40% of players have that. In other words, of all the people who actually launched Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (Steam doesn't count owners, but players for achievements), 40% didn't make it through the tutorial, and 60% didn't make it through the first chapter out of six. The game has a high barrier to entry in the form of the very complex Pathfinder ruleset, and that drives people who try it away.

But as JFK once said, we don't play highly complex games because they are easy, but because they are hard. Which is why I for example increased the difficulty level of my Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous run after overcoming that barrier to entry. Creating one character in Pathfinder is hard, creating a whole group of 6 that works well together is extremely complex. I am now at the end of Act II, which is 15 hours of battle in the Siege of Drezen, and there is joy in finding that you built a group that is able to handle the various different combat situations that arise in that huge battle sequence.

As a consequence I ended up buying all the DLC content for both Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. That adds other, smaller campaigns to those games, and things like a rogue-lite endless dungeon crawl mode. In short, more content to play without having to replay the same main campaign again.

I was especially interested in the modes which let me actually create my whole party from scratch. I do understand why with the given barrier to entry to just creating one single character and then adding companions to the group, the developers didn't want to force players to create six characters. But once you understand the Pathfinder system better, there is interest in exactly that from me. And the main campaigns are very much linked to the companions, so playing it without companions and using self-created mercenaries instead would actually make some story lines go very weird, like the Lost Chapel sequence.

So I am finding a lot of depth and fun behind that barrier to entry. I am happy the two games, Kingmaker and Wrath, are implementing the full rules for maximum depth. But I do see how a lot of players don't make it over this barrier to entry and to the fun point, which is kind of a shame.

Using AI to play complex games

2026-07-20T09:27:47.842+02:00

I am currently playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Great game once you understand it, but with a huge barrier to entry from the highly complex Pathfinder ruleset. It is the Paradox of Choice turned into a videogame: A CRPG with too few choices for classes and skills would be boring, and more choice would improve the game, but at some point adding too many choices just produces overload and makes the game less fun.

So it regularly arrives that I have questions, e.g. "for companion X, what would be the best feat to choose at level Y". Back in the days, a Google search for "companion X build guide" would direct me to one of several possible websites that would have the answer for that. But over the years these websites became less and less pleasant, due to the use of search engine optimization (SEO). The useful information would be buried way down, so the reader has to scroll through a maximum of advertising.

The solution to that today is AI. I can simply type my question into Google, and get an AI answer directly, without having to follow a link. Wrath of the Righteous is already 5 years old, and reasonably popular, so there are a bunch of guides as well as discussions on Steam and Reddit available. If AI is good at anything, it is at sifting through a multitude of text sources and summarizing the answer. If I want to know the best feat for my companion, Google will now give me a list of recommended feats immediately, with some explanation of why I should choose them.

This is far from perfect. Sometimes the AI hallucinates, for example recommending me a feat that is in the Pathfinder ruleset, but not in the Wrath of the Righteous game. So sometimes I have to rephrase a question, or follow a link to double check a suspicious answer. But hey, it's for a game, not for anything professional, so I can live with a certain amount of errors. Often enough the answer is good enough on the first try, and having an answer quickly without having to read too much is an advantage in itself.

Of course that completely destroys the SEO business. If the AI gives me an answer which a game guide carefully hid way below the advertising, I am taking a shortcut and never see the advertising. Which reduces the revenue of the owner of the game guide website, and ultimately leads to there being fewer game guides available. There is a sort of poetic justice to that, that an AI algorithm ends up defeating the SEO, which was created to abuse the search algorithm.

Gaming Status July 2026

2026-07-15T09:54:35.632+02:00

I am now 20 hours into Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, reached the end of Act 1, and am enjoying myself a lot more than I did in Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. While Wrath of the Righteous sure is to a good extent scripted, it gives you a lot more freedom to play, you're not just watching the story in cutscenes. I increased the difficulty level of the game to core, but modified that with a few quality of life options, like turning permadeath for companions off. Realistically, all permadeath does is to force you to reload an older save game and try the combat again. With the increased difficulty I am now also leveling up my companions manually instead of automatically, but I am not overly optimizing that. I think I got the difficulty about right now, because it happens that I lose a harder fight and have to retry. Which then usually isn't a problem, because knowing how the lost fight went helps a lot doing better next time.

I am also enjoying Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous a lot more than I did Pillars of Eternity. While both games are isometric, with similar controls, the ability to turn the camera and have real 3D environment instead of pre-rendered 2D is a lot better. There are details I preferred in PoE, like the better zones of control that enable you to block the enemy from passing through a doorway, but in general the gameplay flow is better in Wrath of the Righteous. The looting and crafting systems are also better, and the army management part is much superior to PoE's management of the keep.

Having said that, Wrath of the Righteous suffers from the same, previously mentioned problems of you having to choose between a selection of companions. As I am playing a cleric destined to become an angel, I am choosing my companions based on their alignment. That works out nicely, because the best healer in the game is evil, but I don't really need him due to my own healing powers. And by playing a tanky crusader cleric, I have room in my group for all those squishy ranged and magic companions. Overall I would have preferred being able to create all group members, as many classes simply don't exist as possible companions in the game, and sometimes you find loot specialized for a class you don't even have. But that is more of a replayability problem, and my previous run never got past Act 2 and was 5 years ago, so for my current run I am fine as it is.

In board games my campaign group is playing Stonesaga, in which we are playing a tribe of stone age people. The game is a bit more open world than our previous campaign games, with the story a bit more emergent through the challenges the game gives you, and how you overcome them, rather than being strictly scripted. We are still relatively early in the game, we'll have to see how long this game system remains interesting. Other than that, I'm still going to board game nights twice per week to play shorter games, that fit into a 3-hour window and don't require having the same people around the next week.