Advice for KingMaker.


Advice


Our group has a Gnome Wizard, an Oread Magus, a Drawf Rogue, a Human Cavalier, a Human Bard, and (probably) a Fletchling Monk. No one has played KingMaker before so we are going blind. Any advice for the inexperienced?


Your general book 1 premise is that you will be exploring the Greenbelt (plains/hills/forests) mapping the regions and dealing with a bandit problem and any other issues that rear their heads. I think you will enjoy it more if you don't 'read ahead' as it were, but steering clear of that i will mention that in Book 2, you start with founding a settlement and dealing with shepherding that as it grows.


okay you just gave a rough explanation of the first two books I wanted advice if this is a good group and or avoid certain things and do certain things.

Sovereign Court

Since the book is designed for 4 PCs any limitations your group may have should be overcome by this bonus. Collectively you may want to pool resources for restoration efforts with no divine but with careful adventuring this group should be quite viable.


we are going to have our bard focus on healing spells and have the magus(me) try to help if possible.


what i really want help to decide is who should lead the group. everyone play by how their character would do things. my character would be an Oread Magus till 5th LvL then become a Dragon Disciple till I hit max LvL in that. everyone else is going solo classing so I'm the only one going duel classing. I believe I would make the best leader/king for the group but the GM believes that the cavalier would be a better leader although he plans on playing a pretty greedy character and try to hog the glory which I think would make him a good General for the Kingdom.


Honestly, as long as the stat fits and they have the proper skills (strong diplomacy, bluff, sense motive, maybe knowledges) and corresponding attribute to make the most out of the bonus given to those in said position of power (I think its either Charisma or Intelligence), any character could be the King.

The way our party had done it, was basically people chose the position they wanted and that fit the character. Heck. Most of us didn't want to be King save for 2 and the party voted on those two (I abstained as my vote wasn't necessary). If it lands between you and this Cavalier and you both want to be king, I might suggest the same thing. Or, if you're feeling lucky, suggest the townsfolk vote. Maybe you'll have more noticeable exploits in terms of glory and they'll choose you.

As for general Kingmaker advice. Knowledge Nature is very big. As is of course Perception. Pick your extra languages (if you get any) wisely. I'd suggest Sylvan, Draconian, Giant and Undercommon if you can manage and have a reason for them knowing such languages.

Also, there may be times in the early game where you suddenly come across something bigger then you can handle. It's the luck of the dice in this case, as it may happen that a random encounter could involve your lv. 1 or 2 party facing off against say 2 shambling mounds or a troll if you're unlucky. In these cases... run. There's no legends of heroes, when they all die and no one is left around to tell the tales.

Anyways, hoped this helped.


Third Mind wrote:

Honestly, as long as the stat fits and they have the proper skills (strong diplomacy, bluff, sense motive, maybe knowledges) and corresponding attribute to make the most out of the bonus given to those in said position of power (I think its either Charisma or Intelligence), any character could be the King.

The way our party had done it, was basically people chose the position they wanted and that fit the character. Heck. Most of us didn't want to be King save for 2 and the party voted on those two (I abstained as my vote wasn't necessary). If it lands between you and this Cavalier and you both want to be king, I might suggest the same thing. Or, if you're feeling lucky, suggest the townsfolk vote. Maybe you'll have more noticeable exploits in terms of glory and they'll choose you.

As for general Kingmaker advice. Knowledge Nature is very big. As is of course Perception. Pick your extra languages (if you get any) wisely. I'd suggest Sylvan, Draconian, Giant and Undercommon if you can manage and have a reason for them knowing such languages.

Also, there may be times in the early game where you suddenly come across something bigger then you can handle. It's the luck of the dice in this case, as it may happen that a random encounter could involve your lv. 1 or 2 party facing off against say 2 shambling mounds or a troll if you're unlucky. In these cases... run. There's no legends of heroes, when they all die and no one is left around to tell the tales.

Anyways, hoped this helped.

Thx for that information its going to really help us out but a problem has come up of that the Dwarf Rogue wants to duel class as some kind of Assassin and be able to take out certain townsfolk that could threaten us but many dislike it

Sovereign Court

General advice:

Try to arrange to do kingdom book keeping out of session over email or something. There can be a lot of arguing there and it can cut out some time in session. Though I suggest doing the first lot in session so you can see for yourself how it all flows.

In the end having the right stats in nice but if your GM is flexible and you role play well enough I don't see why any person can't be the leader even an npc.

Remember you will be out in the wilderness a lot. Survival is a good skill as well as keeping track of how much stores of goods you have. The nearest shop might be 4-5 days travel away.

You are in for the long haul here. The game could take years of in game time to complete. Keep track of your age especially with animal companions. Your cavalier might need to switch mounts depending on how long the campaign goes. But it also means you have a lot of time for item crafting.

In keeping with that last piece. You are in for a long haul so your characters will have downtimes to pursue their own interests. Try to have a few non combat things your character likes doing. I had a bard who was writing the tale of the kingdom. He had two versions one with the full real accounts which was kept under lock and key as it contained state secrets and one 'bardic' version. It gives the dm more plot hooks to keep the game alive


If a mount needs to be replaced after a good amount of time what about a familiar such as a Small Cold Iron Elemental?


plan ahead. there are other adventuring parties making their own kingdoms. Get to know them and make friends. Friends now = allies later


yea that would be good since the last thing we wanted to have was a war


our cavalier has been saying he will only need one mount (a war horse) throughout the entire campaign and that he will just kill anyone would say other wise before they could do it


We ran the Kingmaker campaign for a long while and at first it was great. After a time though it began to drag on. There are two main issues with the campaign that we ran into:

1) Heroes as leaders of the kingdom
2) Kingdom building taking up too much time and generating too much wealth

Firstly, to have the PC's as the actual rulers of the kingdom seems cool but after a while it becomes increasingly awkward. For example, to have the King and all the high positioned officials vanish off into the wilderness all the time to go adventuring is encumbersome. Also, to be given quests and to be rewarded by regular townsfolk seems to be a disconnect...

"Hail King, in thoust wanderings outside of our domain please keep thine eyes open for this particular brand of berry I need for my soup. I shall reward you heartily for each bunch of berry that you return to me!"

As to the second point, the Kingdom building portion has the potential to turn into a real monster. If you have someone in your group (as we did) who really likes to min/max this can take up alot of time and in time can yield some pretty crazy levels of wealth and majic items (being automatically generated by the kingdom).

What we ended up doing (and I wish we had done this from the start), was that each player created two characters. One was their main character and adventurer. The other was a ruler or administrator, often with some sort of connection to the other character or party (my older brother is the king!). When the adventuring crew was off in the wilderness doing their thing, the other group of characters were busy running the Kingdom. Essentially the ruler PC's would assign missions or tasks to the adventuring PC's as required. We could also break the action and jump from the field back to the kingdom to resolve some important event for example. Sort of a "Meanwhile, back in the capital...". The alternate PC's could also be built from the ground up as the rulers of the kingdom, and didn't need to focus on combat effectiveness for example.

If I was to run this AP again I'd be tempted to skip the kingdom building stuff altogther and simply have the kingdom grow and evolve as time goes by. The rulers would be NPC's and the fates and fortunes of the kingdom would still be shaped by the PC's efforts.


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

Don't be fooled by the 15-minute nature of adventuring days - every book has at least 1 extended scenario where nova builds won't be as useful. Have a plan for those situations. Also, it may be worthwhile to have everyone travel by horse in book 1 - the high move speed will let you travel faster and avoid random encounters you don't wish to risk.

Scarab Sages

Really the only thing you need to decide in advance is who is going to be the ruler. That being said, I think the bard and cavalier will enjoy the game and the rogue may struggle at times to be relevant. No main healer may hurt you if you run into tough encounters early on. Lack of a druid/ranger/barbarian type with survival and knowledge nature may be felt also early on.


The way I would recommend approaching a Kingmaker party is start from the approach of: You are a group of adventurers that have a charter to explore and tame an unmapped area, then carve out your own kingdom. Make characters that can cover what you can imagine would be issues with that (Survival?)

When it comes to Kingdom Building, it's useful to have a varied party that has different specializations. The "leader" is probably ultimately going to be the best "face" or whomever has the highest charisma (the bard?) But whoever is best suited to particular tasks can take point.


The other thing to remember is that the players will often be travelling long and far between encounters on the map. This means that, generally they are fresh going into each combat encounter. My players soon learnt to go all in early on during each encounter and dropped all of their best resources as soon as possible.

It's much different than a standard adventure (eg: dungeon crawl) where the group carefully rations their daily powers and abilities.


GM Holden wrote:

We ran the Kingmaker campaign for a long while and at first it was great. After a time though it began to drag on. There are two main issues with the campaign that we ran into:

1) Heroes as leaders of the kingdom
2) Kingdom building taking up too much time and generating too much wealth

Firstly, to have the PC's as the actual rulers of the kingdom seems cool but after a while it becomes increasingly awkward. For example, to have the King and all the high positioned officials vanish off into the wilderness all the time to go adventuring is encumbersome. Also, to be given quests and to be rewarded by regular townsfolk seems to be a disconnect...

"Hail King, in thoust wanderings outside of our domain please keep thine eyes open for this particular brand of berry I need for my soup. I shall reward you heartily for each bunch of berry that you return to me!"

As to the second point, the Kingdom building portion has the potential to turn into a real monster. If you have someone in your group (as we did) who really likes to min/max this can take up alot of time and in time can yield some pretty crazy levels of wealth and majic items (being automatically generated by the kingdom).

What we ended up doing (and I wish we had done this from the start), was that each player created two characters. One was their main character and adventurer. The other was a ruler or administrator, often with some sort of connection to the other character or party (my older brother is the king!). When the adventuring crew was off in the wilderness doing their thing, the other group of characters were busy running the Kingdom. Essentially the ruler PC's would assign missions or tasks to the adventuring PC's as required. We could also break the action and jump from the field back to the kingdom to resolve some important event for example. Sort of a "Meanwhile, back in the capital...". The alternate PC's could also be built from the ground up as the rulers of the kingdom, and didn't need to focus on combat effectiveness for...

This is a pretty good idea. I'll see if I can talk them into this.

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