Kichwas
Half-breed, still living despite WotC racism
That's a subject of open debate rather than consensus. On both points. I see people argue over these two things often.
Our group is rather enjoying the kingdom building rules in Kingmaker 2E.
Abomination Vaults does not have any major sub systems.
Gatewalkers uses the deviant abilities introduces in the Dark Archive book. I guess people would argue over whether or not these count as a subsystem or as regular rules. But they are one of two things I don't like about Gatewalkers. The other being that part of it takes place off planet.
Stole Fates and Kingmaker both use the Influence rules that are now also present in GM Core. For Kingmaker these were used in the very first scene without enough context so it was the only part of Kingmaker that felt awkward to me. Unfortunately it was also the intro so it leaves you worried about the rest of the adventure, but at least for us has yet to come up again (and now we have context for what's going on so it would work better).
Stolen Fates flips the order of Kingmaker. In Kingmaker you start in a meeting and then go into combat. Influence is used to give you come context for portions of the fight, and some later subplots - but it's so thin it's hard to put together.
Stolen Fates starts with a fight, and you get some clues, and then use influence to figure out those clues and move yourself into the main plot. Unless one of the players gets into a fight with another player about cover rules that don't even matter because that NPC crit fumbled anyway... but yeah - the Stolen Fates game I was playing in broke up in session 3 because 2 players refused to stop arguing about how to determine cover when shooting an arrow from a rooftop at someone under a cloth awning in front of an apple stand - because that really matters... After an hour or so the GM just ghosted his own game. The rules cover this - the argument was over the angle of attack and if a GM should rule it partial, no, or full cover. And nobody else cared because the die roll was a 1... I will say that Stolen Fates looked like it had a lot of potential and it had a very good opening... so the game ending because we had two idiots in the group was frustrating. It's on my list to play or GM later.
At least for the opening, Stolen Fates is a murder mystery. An Investigator PC might actually have fun in story arc one. I didn't get far enough to see if that would hold true. My own PC was a gunslinger with Investigator archetype (you start at level 11), and her "I was a cop in Absalom, but left to solve the case of my father - who was also a cop killed by cultists" background was extremely handy even in just the roleplay.
- She was originally meant as an Abomination Vaults PC who's father was killed by her cultist kinfolk as she was a descendant of the villain of AV. So I retooled that for "her cousin cultists" - and handed that as a thread for our GM but the campaign didn't last.
But it leaves Stolen Fates very high on my list of "I want to play that" APs.
There is a second subsystem in there: the fate cards. They give each player a power. You might have some trouble picking the right card for your PC. We did - none of the perks seemed useful to us. Maybe they will be. They're mostly random feats and a roleplay hook so it's not invasive like some subsystems can be. At least not early on.
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