Downtime in lieu of kingdom-building?


Kingmaker


Has anybody considered scrapping the kingdom-building rules and going with a sort of enhanced Downtime system? For my new campaign, I'm playing with the idea of letting my players set general directions for their kingdom (which I as GM would then implement), and instead of crunching through all the kingdom-building turns, instead letting my players use buildings and teams to represent their individual holdings (their lands, farms, etc.) and income. Thoughts?


Sure, that could work, I guess. Sort of a middle ground between the full on kingdom-building rules and just hand-waving everything.

Things to think about:

How will you integrate kingdom events?

How do you translate teams into armies?

If an event in the AP would cause unrest, how does that translate into downtime penalties?

Downtime buildings have random event tables associated with them -- are you going to use those, and if so, are you going to adjust the frequencies of events? There's nothing quite like having your house burn down two months running.


A couple of us used downtime a lot in one of the non-Kingmaker adventure paths. It was great fun, but on a Kingmaker scale, would make even a Kingdom building fanatic wince! If the players were to "OWN" a town the size of Sandpoint, the daily return would cripple the money per level of any adventure path. Also the farmland part of downtime is absurdly small for the return it brings. Covering just one Kingmaker hex in farmland lots of max size would result in (rough calculation) over 11,000 farmland lots or over 11,000 GP per day! Admittedly that would mean forking out between 3,300,000 and 6,600,000 GP for that hex.


While it isn't quite polished yet, I am using a home brew set of Kingdom Building rules that might help. My payers soon got bored with the full on kingdom rules, and the Downtime rules are even worse for player management. So I rolled the two together and simplified ...

http://rp.baileymail.net/doku.php?id=pathfinder:campaign_systems:start

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