Adventuring during Kongdombuilding

[Geralt_Bialy_Wilk]

Anyone did not go by the book and allowed players to adventure and explore in the first year of the Kingdombuilding? It would feel a bit restraining to just tell them not to do it. Ideas? :)

[JohnB]

They should be doing RRR while they are kingdom building.

First time I ran Kingmaker (TableTop) I gave the party advisers and assistants to carry out the day to day management for them - thus releasing the PCs to go play :)

This time around (Play by Post) the players will be doing bits of kingdom building from halfway through The Stolen Land. Again they will have NPC assistants to do the donkey-work.

My players will design their strongholds and cities - which means they will <i>own</i> and feel responsible their strongholds and developments - but won't get bogged down in the administration.

Sometimes running a kingdom / stronghold can feel a bit like playing a game of 'Bankers and Bureaucrats' when we should be playing pathfinder :)

[Geralt_Bialy_Wilk]

Yeah, I need to mix all the aspects well, as I've got a group of 6 very diversified people. Not all will like constant Excell Sheet sessions, not all will like dungeon crawling all the time etc. I will have to tailor some small events to make them explore a bit, but to not drop the Kingdom on NPCs and vice versa :)

[Gargs454]

I think a good mix is pretty key. I plan to have the PCs run about the first year or so of the Kingdom Building before setting out adventuring in RRR, but, I may well be doing 3 month kingdom turns rather than 1, etc. A lot of it is simply a) gauging your players' interest in the kingdom building and b) looking to see how much time it is taking at the table. I doubt that my players will want to go multiple sessions in a row of doing nothing but kingdom building, especially since that sort of thing, in my opinion, often ends up in a situation where one or two people are really directing the action so to speak while the others more or less tag along. That's a great way to get your players to simply tune out.

Ideally, I'd love it if a kingdom building session never really took more than half of a play session so that the party could get a sample of both types of play each session. Depending on how things go, we may even handle a lot of the kingdom stuff over email/forums, etc.

[pennywit]

You need a good mix. According to the books, kingdom-building requires six days of commitment per month from the kingdom's rulers. Generally, I handwave the six days per month, but if the group is adventuring more, I note when they need to return to avoid Unrest.

In terms of running sessions and narrative, the players are kingdom-rulers, not adventurers. While there is a place for adventuring, their primary goal is to keep their kingdom running smoothly and defend it from dangers.

At my table, I started twining together the kingdom and "adventuring" from about the middle of RRR onward. (And we're currently in the middle of Courts of the Shadow Fey, subbing in for much of Blood for Blood). My players don't go out randomly exploring and "adventuring." If they did that, their kingdom would revolt. But they do explore and adventure in service to the kingdom. This means that if they go into a ruin, for example, they're looking for a threat to the kingdom to vanquish it, not just exploring for treasure and adventure. "Adventures" include such pleasant things as foiling a plot to assassinate Noleski Surtova and stir tensions between their kingdom and Brevoy, complex diplomatic dealings with King Irovetti and Baron Hannis Drelev, and exposing an ancient undead cyclops' plot to destabilize their kingdom.

That said, for sessions when one player is absent and to scratch their adventuring itch, my players have a second group of PCs they created to have adventures in the kingdom. That's actually worked out pretty well.

[Geralt_Bialy_Wilk]

Yeah, I'll allow my players to take over some of the NPC explore expeditions or, if they want, take over NPCs that are ordered to take care of an event they didnt want, or couldnt, resolve themselves. I might just change that idea and allow them to create the "B Team" for such tasks :)

[Spatula]

I did not follow the book's recommendation to not let the party adventure for a year. But I kept the planned events as happening in the 2nd year, which was a mistake since the party had out-leveled those encounters by that point. So if you let them go out into the wild right away, also have the planned events (the werewolf, Grigori, and the cult) also happen right away.