Is it me, or are the Kingdom rules just... useless? Even basically playing with it on a scratch pad makes it obvious how off they are. And then I see threads about the feats all being broken, and others agreeing with how math gets out of whack.
I'm playing this AP, the Kingmaker 2e revision, but with PF1e for all the characters/combat/normal Pathfinder play. I decided to go with the Kingmaker 2e rules since it was one less thing for me to convert and I thought, "well, they'll have improved it, right?" -- having heard about some or problems the 1e version had and liking the expanded events list.
But my players are already boring of it. The kingdom is still level 1 after 2 sessions. They're maybe half-way to 2nd level, and most of that is only because I moved Grigori to a 1st level encounter (and considerably dropped his DCs -- not that even a 4th level kingdom has a reasonable chance of winning the DC 22 trial [minimum it can be dropped to by the rules, itself a huge endeavor] when you're going to have about a +8 to the check if you're lucky and have one of the relevant skills for that trial. (Extraordinary unlikely to have boosted one of those to Expert by 4th level).
The town can't grow beyond the first 4-squares until kingdom level 3. Which is forever away.
Adventuring doesn't really give kingdom XP enough to make up for it. But even if it did, it's just making it so in the future they'd have to sit back and wait for the kingdom to catch up.
Kingdom XP sources are basically non-existent (1000 XP to level up; 10 XP per turn claiming a hex -- they'll sooner have claimed every hex on the map than having leveled up much) and 30 XP per event (50% chance a turn). They're basically out of things they can spend RP on for any benefit at this point, so let's assume that all goes into XP too so about 10+15+16 (that's +1 hex, 50% event -- sometimes it goes longer, but then there are a couple hexploration ones that give it, and 4d6 RP, plus 4 from sold commodities every turn, minus a couple from incidental expense)... so about 41 XP a turn.
That's TWENTY FIVE turns to level up. There are a couple trickles of XP from "firsts", but they're effectively inconsequential, especially in the grand scale of things. EDIT: We get about 5 turns in per session, in between actually playing Pathfinder, RPing the events ever so little, and how much overhead there is for this.
The math of DCs going up while your ability to do things don't really go up much. Other threads fix this by throwing away kingdom checks and having PCs and NPCs count as having the skill. You *need* most of the skills too, since untrained checks are total wastes. Even at 1st level.
What should I do? Doing the "Kingdom Building" was part of why we wanted to play Kingmaker. But it's extraordinarily badly done, from the XP/leveling, the skill limitations, to the DCs, and the town development too. And it's a bore since it's not involving the characters (let alone the players except the one who's managing the constant erase-rewrite).
Do I read, learn, and convert to the 1e rules (and convert the 2e AP stuff to appropriate... so much conversion already! Any fixes to the 1e rules somewhere?) Is there enough of a fix to stick with these somewhere? Anyone else annoyed that no only were they not playtested, but they weren't even "napkin math" tested?
