Around 2007-2009, a major schism occurred in the world of pen & paper fantasy roleplaying games. Dungeons & Dragons was in edition 3.5, and had accumulated a lot of rules baggage. Some people loved that, others feared that the game would become increasingly inaccessible to new players. So Wizards of the Coast decided to launch the 4th edition of D&D, with the goal to streamline the game and make it easier to understand, and more similar to popular computer RPGs like World of Warcraft. While the 4th edition sold well, lots of people disliked the more procedural and balanced rules approach of that edition. So Paizo published Pathfinder, a game that went in exactly the other direction, taking the already very detailed rules of D&D 3.5 and added another layer on top of it. For a time, Pathfinder was more popular than D&D, until D&D released the 5th edition, which was more true to the original D&D while still being more accessible. But Pathfinder retained a lot of fans, especially those who liked theorycrafting, finding the best combinations of classes and abilities in a huge selection of options.

Wrath of the Righteous is based on Pathfinder rules. For a computer RPG it is extremely complex. People have been known to start the game and not make it all the way through the character creation process, as that is so scary. The game has 25 base classes and 160 subclasses, which you then combine with over 200 feats, over 500 spells, and a range of other game subsystems. If you have any ambition of creating the "best" possible character, you are in for hours of work.

I never played the pen & paper version of Pathfinder, as it was just too much work for me. I don't enjoy theorycrafting all that much; I always fear that rules overload distracts from the narrative and roleplaying aspects of a game. But Pathfinder: Kingmaker is an excellent CRPG, which I played for over 180 hours. And the only reason I stopped playing Wrath of the Righteous was that at release it was still a bit half-baked, an experience I had again with Rogue Trader. I now know that games from Owlcat are good, but need several years of work after release before playing them.

So, if you don't theorycraft, how do you play a computer version of Pathfinder? The trick is simply to realize that theorycrafting doesn't change the fundamentals of the game, it just modifies the statistical probabilities to succeed in rolls, and thus the survivability and damage output numbers. If you don't want to do the theorycrafting work, you can achieve the exact same result by simply modifying the difficulty level. So I am now playing Wrath of the Righteous at "normal" difficulty, and not at a higher difficulty like "core", which is very explicitly for experts in the Pathfinder system. Putting in all the work to deal 10% more damage, and then increase the difficulty by 10%, didn't appeal to me. For my own character I'll choose abilities by what looks fun, and for my companions I use automatic leveling.

Instead of minmaxing and optimizing, I based my choice of character on my experience with the previous, partial run. I went for a character which fit perfectly in the story, a cleric crusader with an angelic background. Unlike Kingmaker, Wrath of the Righteous has later game "mythic paths", where I can actually become an angel. In a game that is all about the battle between demons and angels, I found that very fitting. There are other fun classes in Pathfinder, for example the bomb-throwing alchemist, but that wouldn't have related to the main story that much.