Search Posts
Join us at Reliquary Gaming, 1585 South Calumet Road, Chesterton, IN on Sunday, August 17 2025 We will have the following adventures run by Venture Lieutenant William Ronald. PFS2 Quest (Series 2) #24: Tanuki Trouble for Levels 1-4 at 1:30pm SFS2 1-01: Invasion's Edge for Levels 1-2 at 4:00pm Pregenerated characters will be available for players who wish to use one.
Every group will be different, and I promise we HAVE playtested this a lot. For some of your points: * I don't think phases added too much too the overall complexity. In fact it reduced the amount of actions that you were able to take, thereby reducing analysis paralysis; the changes to the commerce phase lead to additional book keeping while basically keeping the outcome the same Reducing the number of actions you could take is definitely a bad thing for us! With GM Guidance we don't think AP will be a big deal. * Region activities were almost always way more powerful than Leadership activities; this problem is exacerbated when adding more players since that allows them to expand quicker; were 3 region activities too few overall? yes; but we fixed that with an additional leadership activity, that allowed you to gain more of those. IMHO cutting down on Leadership activities while slightly increasing region activities would have been better Our system doesn't allow that many more useful Region Activities actually. The limit on Hexes claimed per turn is still in place so the Kingdom cannot add more hexes any faster. What it can do is get more roads/worksites/farms faster, but even that not until mid to high levels. Our system also gives the option to take more useful Region activities over less useful leadership activities. * Construction phase: only adds book keeping, no fun mechanics This was something a few people specifically asked for and existed in 1e expanded Kingdom building rules. This one is definitely just a matter of taste though. It's easy to just not use this part :-) * Settlements generating resource dice will greatly affect balance without counter balancing it by some negative modifier The amount of RP added overall is still quite low. RP also doesn't carry over from turn to turn. So the net result is maybe a few more things done in a turn, and more RP left over to turn into XP. And I'll gladly take that over having no mechanical benefits for additional settlements at all. * I've been critical of letting invested bonuses stack with feats since feats that give bonuses to rolls make them a must pick. Furthermore, skill training is so impactful that there is basically nothing that competes... We agree that Skill Training is the best feat. In our new rules Invested Bonus doesn't need to stack since we've replaced it with Leadership Bonus instead. Overall our rules might make things a little easier, but certainly not a cake walk. All that said, thanks for the comments!
Hello everyone! It's been two years since we released our initial patch to make the Pathfinder 2e Kingdom Building rules work and we're back! Our original intent was to do as little as possible to make the Kingdom Building Rules work, and while we succeeded, we weren’t really happy with some of the basics of how the Kingdom Building rules worked. We’ve spent the last two years off and on working on changes to the Rules and some of the underlying assumptions to address issues we felt were too different from the base rules to get into previously. Once again, we've posted our changes in 2 Google Docs, one with discussion, and one's that just the changes. You can find the docs here:
We hope our work is useful to you. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or comments, either in this thread or through a direct PM. Happy Kingmaking!
Our goal was always to make the rules as written work without making too many changes. We feel we've accomplished that. Nice to know someone else did encounter the same problems. For what it's worth, I think the REAL issue for your group is that you're hitting the 3rd size category while only level 5. If the Kingdom leveled faster things are more manageable. I highly recommend using our XP fixes or just using milestone leveling for the kingdom.
Do these 2 feats stack? Nomadic Halfling says:
Gnome Polyglot says:
What order do you apply these in?
Part 2: Leadership Roles: Leader Actions: The Ruler gets 3 actions and each other Leader gets one. The overall number of actions did work out ok but I don't like one player getting more actions than the others. It also says Resource Dice can be split up and assigned to specific Leaders but unless you plan out your whole Kingdom turn ahead of time this is silly. Extra Leader Actions: Any leader that spends the entire month of downtime ruling gains an extra kingdom action. I actually liked this even if we didn't use it too often. Leader Statistics: Key Attribute: As long as you have a PC leader in this role, rather than gaining a status bonus for investing their role as in the official rules, your kingdom increases this attribute by 1. Increasing an Attribute by only 1 point is silly in a system where odd numbers in attributes don't matter. In practice it's way easier to just give a few extra Attribute Boosts. Key Focus: Each Leadership Role has a few specific Focus Areas that are Key Focuses for them. They must spend one of their kingdom actions each turn within these Focus Areas. This is a great idea thematically but in practice the Key Focus Areas are way too narrow. 6 of the 8 Roles only get 2 Focus Skills while the Ruler and the Warden get 3. While the Focuses as assigned were Thematic, in practice there was often no useful action at all for some Leaders. For example the General only gets Defense and Warfare. If the Kingdom doesn't have Unrest and isn't building a Military themed Structure, there's simply NOTHING for the General to do. In addition, every focus is covered by only a single Leader with 2 out of the 16 focuses also covered by the Ruler. The Skills/Focuses are not created evenly in terms of useful actions tied to them. The Treasurer is the only one with Industry and Trade as Focus Skills. The Treasurer only gets 1 action. This means that you can't collect Taxes and build a House on the same turn and get the Leadership Bonus for both. Great idea but unusable execution as written. Relevant Skills: A Leader's Skills can give a new Bonus type, called Leadership Bonus, on any checks they make within their Key Focus Areas. This bonus replaces the status bonus for invested leadership from the base rules. The Bonus can get up to +4 total while the Base rules only went to +3. in practice, this bonus perfectly counteracts the DC Increase due to Kingdom size. Once again it's a great idea but too limited in practice. Each Leadership role only has 3 skills plus Lore and it's just a bit too limiting. As an example, look at the General. The General's relevant skills are Deception, Diplomacy, and Intimidation plus Lores. This means a Fighter who hasn't invested in Charisma doesn't make a good general. While not unusable as written, expanding the Relevant skills a bit would make it way better. Noble Titles and Forms of Address: Nice to have but no mechanics here.
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.
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 otherwise it could take 4 or 5 turns. It's not a bad change, just resulted in uneven leveling. Having more total Milestones, but with smaller XP rewards works out better. Building Kingdom XP: UR also adds XP for building things. I think this is a great idea though UR only includes XP for Regional Improvements. Ultimate Cities has the XP rewards for building Structures. One minor nitpick though, I don't think Roads and Roads with Bridges need to be separate entries. The Kingdom Turn: Ultimate Rulership removes the commerce phase and separate Leadership/Regional/Civic action phases and replaces it with a single action Phase. UR gives the Ruler 3 actions and each other Leader 1 action, adding more actions and improved action economy as the Kingdom levels. I really love removing the different phases and having only a single activity phase. This is UR's single best idea. I don't really like the Ruler having more actions than the other Leaders in a game where party members are supposed to be equal. UR's rules also give the Kingdom a Reaction but gives barely any reactions to use so is an after-thought at best. Unrest and Anarchy: UR says that if your Unrest gets really high you can lose points of your Kingdom Attributes. In practice it's really hard to even get Unrest and functionally impossible to get Ruin. Collecting Taxes: UR offers an alternate version of Collect taxes that generates GP instead of RP. This GP cannot be used directly by PCs so I'm really not sure what the point is. Taxation Levels: UR tries to bring Taxation Levels from Kingmaker 1 back but doesn't really provide enough information on how to use them. For example there's nothing about what Tax level you start at. It's also tied to the new Collect taxes action which is pretty pointless already. Changing Government: The Regime Change action is fine but will likely never be used. Expanded Fame and Infamy: UR replaces the Fame/Infamy system. Fame is now a score that increases and can be spent with no limit of 3. Infamy only goes up. I like the idea of the Kingdom having Fame that can simply increase but in practice the bonuses it gives don't matter much. UR's system allows fame to be spent in a few ways but in practice only using it for rerolls is actually worthwhile.
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.
No worries on tangents lol.
Anyone who wants to help out is welcome to DM me for Discord information.
Love to hear about your experiences! I honestly suspect things would still be too easy even without our skill increases. The difference is with the base rules People will always use Skill Increases on the Skills that matter the most, leaving no room for increases to something like Folklore, even if the Kingdom wants to go in that direction. I completely agree that even with the RAW rules unrest and ruin doesn't happen enough. The homebrew rules we're working on will help with the action issues.
There's plenty of events that say the event can also be dealt with by the PCs in game. Beyond that there's not much else. Legendary Games's Ultimate Rulership allows PC Skills to give a bonus to Kingdom Skill checks. The homebrew rules we're currently working on use this idea but change some of the specifics.
Pathfinder 2e is designed so that your chances of success at an on level DC increase as your Proficiency goes up. I'll also argue that if you're leaving a skill at trained you're highly unlikely to get a +3 Item for it. So your chance of success does go down. Expert is much closer to the break even point than Trained. For Kingdom Building I agree level 1 isn't a problem on the Math.
In our Problem Discussion document though I've shown that in the Teens Kingdom math for lower skills is about 3 points behind basic Pathfinder 2e Math. That's 15% overall. With the reroll tools in the Kingdom Building rules this probably isn't insurmountable but our goal was to make the Kingdom math match base PF2e. Even if you don't change the Kingdom Math you'll find there aren't enough always useful Leadership actions.
Correct me if I'm wrong but investing a leadership role doesn't given you any skill training (except at kingdom creation), just a flat status bonus on the relevants kingdom ability scores modifiers. Technically invested Leadership gives you a Status Bonus to any skill that uses a Kingdom Attribute that's associated with the key attribute of an Invested Leadership roll. This maxes at +3 and roughly counters the Size Increase to Control DC (which maxes at +4) Our math fixes are ultimately fairly small.
Our changes just allow you to have more skills reach a higher proficiency. In the base rules you can still succeed with Trained Skills at higher levels, it's just harder than success with a Trained Skill would be in Regular PF2e. I also stand by more Skill Increases simply for being able to unlock more Structures. A given group is likely only going to play Kingmaker once. A given group should be able to unlock whatever they want, in the base rules Skill Increases were few enough you really needed to use them for the most important Skills.
We're currently level 12, but still, the higher you level, the more skill trainings you can use to train skills and there's always supernatural solution available. Invested skills balance the kingdom size penalty plus you can very easily gain +1-+2 circumstance bonuses in many cases to even cancel the -4. Our main goal was simply to make the math match regular Pathfinder 2e Math. Not changing things means you wind up a few points behind but that's not insurmountable. I don't consider circumstance bonuses making up the difference as valid way to offset things simply because in regular PF2e you're also meant to be able to get circumstance bonuses. Rerolls are vastly easier to come by in the Kingdom Building rules though and we're curtailing that a little in our homebrew.
Demlin, I'm curious, How high a level have you gotten to in Kingdom Building? Our tests found the math is fine at lower levels, it only breaks down at higher levels for non-invested skills. Also even without adjusting the math it's hard to accumulate unrest and ruin, most of the time simply failing doesn't get any, only crit failing. I also wish the rules were more fun. Kerenshara and I are currently working on some full blown house rules taking elements from Ultimate Rulership and Ultimate Cities.
I've probably actually tested the rules more than anyone and I've never heard anyone say they like them as written. James Jacobs has said they weren't playtested and it really shows once you try and use them. The basic ideas are solid though, they just needed a few rounds of playtesting, not a full rework. Kerenshara and I spent months doing sims and playtesting before we shared our fixes, I'd recommend doing a sim and testing them out yourself to see how you feel about them.
We didn't consider any for our basic rules as we wanted to add as little as possible. For future expansion we're considering having more settlements reduce the effective size of the Kingdom for Size Penalty to DC. (reducing the Kingdom size based on some formula related to Hexes that are in a settlement's Influence)
|
