Gwynevra's page

Ultimate Rulership Part 1: Kingdom Basics

Alignment: UR adds Alignment back in which I'm fine with but others might not like.

Focus: Ultimate Rulership uses the term Focus instead of Kingdom Skill and renames 3 of the Skills. I do like the UR names a little better but this is minor regardless.

RP & Attributes: In UR, instead of having a single pool for RP, you have 5.
4 of the pools correspond to one of the Kingdom's 4 Basic Attributes. Each Focus is tied to a specific Attribute and any Focus check that involves spending RP spends it from the appropriate Attribute Pool. In addition there's a 5th Reserve attribute Pool that can be spent freely on any Focus check.

When rolling resource die, each individual die is assigned to a specific pool. Resource Dice assigned to an attribute pool add that Attribute's modifier to the RP gained for each die assigned to that Pool. Dice assigned to the reserve pool do not add the attribute modifier.

In practice having 5 different RP pools to keep track of was annoying and adding unnecessary complexity. The Kingdom Rules are tedious enough as is, having to keep track of 5 different RP buckets just made it worse. Even worse though, the amount of extra RP generated this way by adding the Attribute Modifier to RP gained was simply astronomically too much RP. In our sim we had enough RP to do absolutely everything we want and it made development go way too fast. The base rules have room to add a little more RP but UR's system here was just way too much.

New Kingdom Abilities: I didn't have an issue with any of the new Kingdom abilities specifically but didn't really like the way UR implemented actions.

Gaining Kingdom XP: Ultimate Rulership replaces the Base Rules Kingdom Milestones with a smaller list with bigger XP rewards. Adding more milestones to the base rules is a good idea but UR's XP rewards being so large resulted in uneven leveling. In our sim when we got UR's milestone rewards the Kingdom sometimes leveled in only 2-3 turns whereas...

Thank you for the detailed analysis!

It's really helpful to get an opinion from someone who actually playtested those rules and I'll take it all into consideration while figuring out which changes to implement in my campaign.

Oh, I guess I never did report back here, sorry.

We did a sim using all the Ultimate Rulership rules except for Section 4's diplomatic systems (which just couldn't be used that well in a simulation).

The short of it is it has some great ideas but almost none of it actually works well in practice with most of it being close to outright broken.

Ultimate Cities is in slightly better shape but a lot of it is tied to Ultimate Rulership options that don't work.

I'll try and post more specifics later today if work allows.

I would greatly appreciate if you share more details about your experience with UR/UC in terms of what is broken and is it possible (or worth it) to fix it!

My party has just started getting involved in running their Kingdom and I'd like them to gave the best experience. For now we are playing vanilla with your Kingdom Building Rule Changes.

Thank you for your contribution to the community!

Hey folks!

I grabbed Ultimate Rulership and Ultimate Cities some time ago and managed to study them a bit, but haven't yet applied any of the changes to the current Kingmaker campaign.

And I'll greatly appreciate if someone who played or playtested those rules for some time could share their opinion: is it worth applying all of the changes at once, totally relying on the Ultimate books or should I exclude some changes?

I'm very eager to hear some advice and opinions on those rules, thanks in advance!