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Hey there!

We don't have a doc of our changes consolidated with the rules we didn't change.

We haven't fully finalized our homebrew stuff yet but whenever we actually do we'll create a document.

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.

Glad you liked the Venture Capital stuff, It was fun to write and my group had a whole session with it that they loved.

I still haven't sat down to hash out Negotiation DCs but probably should.

Thanks, I'll try and type up thoughts on Part 2 tomorrow.

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 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.
Our goal was always to make the rules work as best we could.
I agree they're not all that fun to begin with.
We're working on a set of homebrew modifications that so far look like they'll make things better.

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.

Thanks James!

Unless James Jacobs weighs in you'll just have to pick one. We don't know which one is intended and honestly it's not a big difference anyway. The need to have enough residential structures will make kingdoms try and fill blocks first rather than have multiple blocks with only 1 structure.

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.
Level 20 isn't actually too bad either.

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.
None of our changes increase the Top End Math at all. The max bonus you can have in a skill at a given level doesn't change.

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.

VanceMadrox wrote:

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.

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.

Ultimate Cities has a chart with a set number of months for each structure.

With the homebrewed rules we're testing now I'm using 1 month construction per lot the structure takes up.

In the system as is it's nearly impossible to get ruin anyway. And the little amount of unrest that comes up is easily dealt with.

Leadership activities are generally weak and limited. A large party will have a really hard time finding enough useful things to do with them all in the first place.

Why not have him still rule the Sootscales and be a thorn for th newly founded Kingdom?

No reason they can't meet up with him still.

Seems reasonable.

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)

A lack of useful repeatable Leadership actions was one of the big issues in the base rules as well.

Ultimate Rulership offers a system for Alliances too.

That's the only bonus. Your house rule won't break anything.

I haven't heard of any other groups that are far enough along to be actually running Kingdom turns that are using Ultimate Rulership yet.

Your group might be the first!

Alternate rules for Town Hall/Castle/Palace are likely to be in Ultimate Cities.

No. It only applies to the initial check.
Only the initial check is using the Supernatural Solution action.

The later check is another action that you can use Magic for, but is NOT using the Supernatural Solution action.

UR still uses the same Kingdom DCs so the basic math is mostly the same. In the base rules at higher levels checks that you were only trained or expert it became way too difficult. With UR I'm concerned it over-corrected and will make checks too easy but I have yet to playtest.

Without playtesting I can't yet tell how all of the UR options work together yet.

It's a valid philosophy. It's the Simulationist approach. Many systems follow it. PF1e did.

It's just a philosophy that PF2e has already outright rejected.

Ultimate Rulership for PF2e from Legendary games is now available but it doesn’t look like it has an entry in Paizo’s store. As such I thought I’d create a thread for discussion. I was fortunate enough to be able to help with the editing and development of this book some and even got my name in it!

The book has a lot of ideas and systems for use with the 2e Kingdom Building Rules. It has so much that Legendary Games actually needed to split it into 2 books, with Ultimate Cities likely out sometime this fall. I thought I’d share my initial thoughts on the various sections. Please note that Ultimate Rulership is very Modular, it’s designed for you to be able to use whatever parts you want. That said, let’s dive in!

Kingdom Basics (Page3):
Most of the basics don’t change. I’m personally glad to see Alignment for Kingdoms back. I’ll talk about Focuses in their own section. I’m not sure having a treasury measured in GP instead of RP is really needed.

Attribute checks: (Page 5)
Just a note that PF2e normally doesn’t have attribute checks (which are just untrained checks really), so Ultimate Rulership defines it.

Resource Dice and Resource Points (Page 5):
Unlike the base rules, UR’s Resource System has 4 RP pools, one for each attribute. You assign Resource Dice to each Attribute then roll them. The RP in each of the 4 pools can only be used for Focuses based on that Attribute. You can also hold some Resource Dice in reserve, which can be used for any Focus. The advantage of assigning dice to Attributes is that every single resource dice assigned to an attribute adds the attribute’s modifier to the die roll. So if you have 3 Economy Resource Dice and a +3 Economy modifier, you’re rolling 3dx + 9.
This is quite different from the base system and I’m not sure that I like it. Having to divide Dice into 4 different pools seems like it could take up a lot of real-world time as players debate how to allocate the dice. It’s also a lot more RP than the base system, I’m very worried it will make RP costs trivial. I need to playtest it to be sure though. Also not being able to increase your RP over what you actually rolled for the turn seems unnecessary to me.

Kingdom Abilities (Page 6):
Most of the new Kingdom abilities are related to the new turn sequence and action economy. The abilities are neat. I also like that Kingdoms can now have General feats in addition to regular feats. It makes the Kingdom feel even more like its own PC.

Gaining Kingdom XP (Page 7): Slow leveling of the Kingdom is one of the biggest issues in the base rules, it’s nice to see UR address it. I don’t actually know if UR’s system here provides enough XP in practice, I still need to playtest this. I do know that Ultimate Cities will have more ways of gaining Kingdom XP.

The Kingdom Turn (Page 8):
UR offers a new turn sequence, replacing the Commerce and Activity Phases of the base rules with an Activity Phase with just one step. Leadership, Regional, and Civic are still traits but there’s no set number of actions of each type. Instead, the new system is based on the 3 Actions plus a reaction idea of the base rules. The group as a whole does get more than 3 actions though, don’t worry.
I’m very excited about the new turn sequence and action economy. Having only 1 activity phase instead of a whole bunch of different steps has the potential of removing a good amount of the tediousness of the base rules. It also flat out removes the big issue of there simply not being enough useful leadership actions that the base rules have. I’m not entirely sure how well the number of actions the system gives will work out but I’m eagerly looking forward to playtesting and finding out. Reactions as presented are barely worth using though.

Taxes (Page 9): The taxes system here is similar to how UR did it in PF1e, a welcome return.

Expanded fame and Infamy (Page 10):
The new Fame/Infamy system looks interesting but without playtesting it I can’t tell how well it works in practice.

Leadership Roles (Page 12):
UR offers a new system where a PC’s skills can give them a bonus on Kingdom Skill checks. This is a much-requested feature that was lacking in the base rules. I’m not entirely sold on the exact distribution of Relevant Skills between the 8 roles and will need to playtest it to see if it needs tweaking. Of note here is that the Leadership bonus is a new type of bonus, which has me a bit wary as adding new Bonus Types in Pathfinder 2e throws off the math. This Leadership bonus replaces the Status Bonus for Invested Leadership from the base Kingdom rules though so it might work out ok. It also has the added benefit of fixing the major issue from the base rules of Feats not working right due to Status Bonuses from feats not stacking with Status Bonuses from Invested Leadership. Also of note, each leader (outside of the Ruler) can only make checks in their 2 Key Focus areas. This will make it feel like a given leader is really in charge of their chosen area but does limit what PCs can do some.

Noble Titles and Forms of Address (Page 15):
There’s no mechanical options/rules here so not much to say. Pretty sure this section is a straight cut and paste from UR for PF1e. Still nice to have.

Focus Pool (Page 19): Focuses are the same as Kingdom Skills (but 3 are renamed). I like one of the renames, don’t like one of them, and am neutral on the third. The Focus Pool/Focus Bonus option is very different from the base rules. Essentially, you slowly raise a Skill by using that Skill to do things. You get a Focus Bonus which is another new type of bonus, and you need a certain threshold of Focus Bonus before you can use a Focus Increase (ie a Skill Increase) on that Focus. I like the basic idea but I’m very worried that introducing yet another new type of Bonus will make the math trivially easy. The math getting too hard at higher levels was one of the biggest issues with the base rules though. Ultimately, I need to playtest the UR system to see how it does.

Overspending (Page 22):
Overpsending lets you use RP (of which you’ll have way more than in the base rules) to get an untyped bonus to a Focus check. I think this will turn out to be flat out broken. 8 RP for an untyped +4 bonus to a Focus check is just going to be too much. I like the idea of being able to spend some RP for that check you really want to do, but it needs to be more limited in how often you can use it.

New Activities (Pages 23-25):
The new activities are fairly niche but welcome.

Kingdom Feats (Pages 27-37):
10 pages of new Kingdom Feats are worth buying UR on their own. Not every feat is a winner but there’s so many good new options every Kingmaker 2e campaign could benefit from them.

Advanced Rulership (Page 37):
The new systems for diplomatic relations and trade agreements seem neat. I’ll need to playtest to see if they’re worth the extra complexity over the base rules.

Kingdom Events (Page 44):
Having a different way to organize and generate random Kingdom events is quite useful.

Anyway that’s my thoughts, I’d love to hear yours!

And if anyone is interested in following along with my playtesting of UR shoot me a PM!

No Kingdoms but the PCs kingdom is designed using the kingdom building rules so I'm not sure house useful this is.

Just like in PF2e when NPCs don't follow PC rules.

All those actually sound reasonable to me.

I'll be happy to go over your Revised Rules but it may be a week or two before I can get to it.

I still maintain that any feat that adds numbers is just mechanically best and will be an auto-take.

I highly recommend you only allow it to raise a skill to one level below max level.

(So at 7th level the feat can raise a skill to expert and at 15 it can raise a skill to master).

I like it, but why limit it to just Feats?

You could use it for skill increases too.

It's a little ambiguous in English to whether PCs can mix their activities or each do all of theirs in order.

From my sims I've just had each "PC" do their in order.

By default a specific kingdom action can be done a maximum of once per turn per PC. In other words, yes each PC can do the action.

Note that some actions do specify they can only be used once per turn.

I actually had the opportunity to help edit and develop Ultimate Rulership a bit.

It has a lot of great ideas, I plan on posting a thread with my initial thoughts next week.

I also plan on doing some Kingdom Simulation using it but that will take a while.

I dont honestly think you need Rules for this. If another group is coming to the PCs simply RP it and decide what they want and PCs can decide what to give.

Since no other groups are actually using the Kingdom Building rules keep something like this more abstract.

Only video I know of is the Rules Lawyer's one. He only goes a couple turns in.

Rules Lawyer's Video

This feat is too good. Like the ability boost feat any feat that increases Numbers is just better than other feats and will always be chosen over them.

If you were dead set on this feat I'd make it so that it can only raise a skill to one level below currently available.

So 7th level requirement on the feat and you can take skills to expert with it.
Then at 15th it can be used to take skills to Master.

I'd go with somewhere in 10-12 level range.

9th level is the level where buildings can start giving +2 item bonuses in the 2e kingdom building rules.

Nothing wrong mechanically with the idea.

With the extra boosts from level I'm honestly not sure if this feat is too powerful or not. Limiting it to 1/attribute will probably be ok.

But this feat existing means the Kingdom won't choose any other feat. An Ability Boost is simply the most powerful choice.

Ok I've gotten all my stuff organized and shared it with Legendary games.

Over 21 pages of notes, clarifications needed, and simple corrections for Ultimate Rulership 2e.

I'm looking forward to UR being as awesome as possible!

Ultimate Rulership actually has this feat. it's 11th level there.

I personally think it's too powerful but if you're not increasing the total number of attributes already like our rules changes recommend then it's fine.

I'm still working on typing everything up BUT I'm going to provide my feedback directly to Legendary Games.

v3 won't be the last version and UR should be significantly improved by the time it's fully done.

I'm working on going through v3 of it and typing up all my thoughts. Look for it either later today or tomorrow. I'll create a new thread in this forum.

There will be a print option, I backed the kickstarter for both PDF and Print.

I have the PDF now but I'm very underwhelmed by it.

It's barely useable.

Our intent is to use all of our fixes together.

From the little we know so far it's looking like it'll expand on the base rules but not fix them. Once we have the PDFs we'll know more.

My own party just killed the Stag Lord and will be founding their Kingdom soon.

Next session will be Politicking and Venture capital in Rostland followed by hex crawling with a big caravan and a few fights.