Hi,
Our group has played in other 'empire building' rpgs (Pendragon, Runequest empires, etc).
Running Kingdoms in games like these slowly becomes a lession in accounting: keeping track of budgets, serf's happyness, tracking resources, etc.
Initially, this stuff is pretty fun, but after awhile it really starts to bog-down play. Players tend to focus more on how to keep serfs fed or how to pay for the next farm instead of the main story.
How much effort/time will the 'kingdom tracking' need in Kingmaker? Is it abstract and streamlined?
Players tend to focus more on how to keep serfs fed or how to pay for the next farm
That sounds fun to me- a very difficult and worthy challenge; reminds me of Congress (or for students- a Model UN; or for gamers the NSDM simulations). Amazing that your group was able to get into the nuances of supply/demand and economic logic in those games-- sounds like your GM was really good.
Contributor, RPG Superstar 2008 Top 4, Legendary Games
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The AP is designed to run with the "Kingdom in the Background" and there are sidebars in each adventure describing how to handle it that way.
It is also set up as a monthly management roll (or a handful of rolls), and you can take several months in a row to do nothing but manage, or you can deal with random events (or scripted events in the module) that give (or force) a break from the routine kingdom management.
So, to answer your question, you can really spend as little or as much time running the kingdom as you and your players want.
Creative Director
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The actual adventures themselves have actually relatively little dependency on the kingdom building rules. As Jason mentions above, each adventure will have a short sidebar that talks about the Kingdom in the Background if you want to de-emphasize the kingdom building aspect... or if you start with the kingdom building and decide later that it's too fiddly and distracting.
The adventures are built to be a sandbox, so that each group can tackle them as they wish; this extends to the level of integration to the kingdom-building rules.
What about simultaneous "sub-kingdoms"? I'm currently thinking of having two groups running through the path at the same time, as part of the same chartered expedition but tackling different areas (which will likely require some xp jiggling down the road, but that's a different discussion), and later building separate settlements within the same over-kingdom. How might that work with the Kingmaker rules?
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Creative Director
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What about simultaneous "sub-kingdoms"? I'm currently thinking of having two groups running through the path at the same time, as part of the same chartered expedition but tackling different areas (which will likely require some xp jiggling down the road, but that's a different discussion), and later building separate settlements within the same over-kingdom. How might that work with the Kingmaker rules?
You can certainly run multiple kingdoms. Just like you can run multiple PCs in a game. They'd just not be able to share hexes.
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Creative Director
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I've got a question. How 'downtime friendly' are the kingdom rules? If you were running the game in person, say, every other week, would it be viable to have the players who are interested in them hash it out over email and report the results to the group when everybody is back together? This assumes, obviously, that only some players at a given table have an interest in mixing 4X strategy into their roleplaying.
The kingdom rules should work PERFECTLY for this. Assuming you have some way that folks can roll dice over the email exchange that everyone's cool and comfortable with.