Vance & Kerenshara's Remastered Kingdom Building Rules

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:
Changes with Discussion

Changes only

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!

Hi Vance,

We finished the AP quite some time ago with your homebrew at that point and while I think there are some great ideas in this homebrew, there are also quite some things, that IMHO make it worse.

The Positive:

* XP from structures is a great idea
* Fortify Hex changes make sense
* Decoupling the capital from stacking with settlements is a great idea; it never made sense to build anything in a settlement other than utility buildings
* Retraining is a great thing
* The boating structure is a nice addition; I added an activity in my home game that allowed players to gain 1-2 additional region activities using boating

The Negative:

* 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
* 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
* Increasing civic activities with the added benefit of getting more resource dice will grind games to a halt in the late game; this was an issue in our game as well and we only had 8 settlements
* Construction phase: only adds book keeping, no fun mechanics
* Settlements generating resource dice will greatly affect balance without counter balancing it by some negative modifier; Civ 5 for instance used Happiness to prevent settler spam
* 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 with them
* Specialized skills will lead to massive analysis paralysis
* Tieing PC skills to kingdom skills just shuffles modifiers around and locks PCs into skills they wouldn't have chosen otherwise; I think the general complaint wasn't really about PC skills not translating to kingdom skills but more that choosing a leadership role overall was pointless; it might make more sense to follow Cyberpunk RED's model and add a special, powerful activity or skill that only a leader can take; the CRPG solved this by excluding a leader from participating in dangerous or beneficial events if they chose their specific action

Ideas & Feedback from my players

* Leadership activities: Too many to choose from, too many duplicated effects like reducing unrest, too little impact
* Ruin thresholds were too high to ever matter; we reduced it down to 3 which fixed it
* Unrest seemed to be balanced to counter a consistent source of unrest like the bloom; rather than always acruing it, rolling more than one event per turn and/or involving armies during Hargulka seemed to fix it
* Players liked building structures, but they didn't like micromanaging 8+ settlements; I think the obvious solution was to only allow players to build structures in the capital (with additional space and activities of course) while having a separate system for settlements that give you a fraction of those options:

--> additional spots for farms and worksites
--> additional storage and shopping capabilities (3 levels below the capital)
--> options for fast travel using portals and easier construction of roads between settlements
--> defensive properties
--> slighly increased consumption

Overall, I think you've identified a lot of issues, but I think more playtesting would be beneficial :)

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!

PS: something that your homebrew doesn't touch, but just for completeness sake: armies also have the issue that time spent in kingdom turns blows up because you get more actions the more armies you amass.

How we solved that: armies are grouped together to form divisions and per army actions like healing, attacking and moving are performed for all units. That way we were able to cut down army actions to around 3 per turn.

In general we tried to get more meat out of the fun stuff which are kingdom events and expanding your kingdom, so at least in my opinion kingdom rules need to trim down the fat and emphasize the parts that require interesting decisions (which leadership, commerce, and most army and civic actions definitely aren't).

I'd agree that Leadership and Commerce activities aren't as interesting.

I'll heartily disagree about Civic Actions in Settlements though, building Settlements is a lot of fun for us.

We've been using your kingdom rules changes since we first started and really liking them, and we'll probably switch to these too. I did have two questions about how army actions should work.
Right now, there are in their own phase. Should they be kept as their own phase still or added as separate turns into the Activity phase? Also, which leader (and leadership bonus) should be used to do them. Should they be a specific leader, player's choice or just the army commander (like an NPC mayor)?

We actually haven't done anything with Army Actions or Warfare really.

I'd keep them in their own phase and use the Leadership Bonus of whichever Leader makes the most sense.