When I first heard of the Kingmaker Path I was ecstatic, and even put aside a very fun Star Wars campaign to DM it. While it's been extremely fun so far and we've all had a blast with the kingdom-building rules in Rivers Run Red, I am starting to have trouble with the Path.
As a DM I do not like to run APs of any sort directly out of the book (and any experienced DM will likely agree with me) because it is not catered to the individual PCs' backstories and goals. This sort of thing has been a bit difficult for me due to the sandbox nature of the AP.
At this point my players are already becoming a little weary of the kingdom-building. I admit, I am as well. The process is fun at first, and the system is very well-built, but at a certain point it just isn't what my group is looking to spend a lot of time in. We already play every other week as it is, so our gametime is limited.
Now that the foundations for the kingdom are built, I'm thinking of not running any more Kingdom-building stuff as we start the next module. I feel like I'm betraying the reason that I was excited about the module in the first place, but I just can't justify running the material when it takes so much time and micro-managing.
Has anyone else dealt with this? I'm thinking of just going with a regular storyline that I direct for the next modules, but with the mass combat tossed in where applicable.
Specifically, I think I'm going to write a storyline of my own for the next four modules, using the skeletal framework of the AP as my backbone. All of the exploration stuff and hex encounters will be there, but just not part of the main plot and most of it will unfortunately be missed by my PCs because they will be going with the story itself.
I don't see how the building interferes with personal goals. The sandbox nature of the game is what makes it easy to mold it to fit whatever stories you want in it, and the game has no timeline so going off on sidequest is no issue.
As for the kingdom building part it is tedious but there are free programs that do most of the heavy lifting, and they save a lot of time. I do admit the nature of the kingdom building is not for everyone, and you can RP certain parts of it instead of doing the actual building.
You can keep the main plot without the actual kingdom building part. Now if you have another story that you would like to do instead of what Kingmaker is giving to you that is another thing altogether, and you should go with whatever storyline is best for the group.
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My players grew weary of the Kingdom building also. We are just restarting the game after a three month hiatus. NPC's have taken over the management of the kingdom and my players are focusing on the adventure portion of Kingmaker (we are a third of the way through Rivers Run Red.)
There are rules for running the kingdom building in the background in each book. That will allow you to focus on the adventure as written or any other stories you introduce.
I can easily see how it could get boring for an entire group. So IMC I have basically taken over the Kingdom building (I am the Ruler/Baron). I will typically send the others off on a short mission/side quest, and while they deal with that, I run a couple of kingdom turns on the side. Kingdom building requires surprisingly little DM input. Aside from events and filling magic item slots, most of the stuff is just numbers crunching. Those can even be, for the most part, player controlled, if you trust your player and the events don't need to be roleplayed. Then after a couple of turns, we will all go exploring or deal with plot related events (trolls, owlbears, etc...).
Letting the npc's/dm handle it (with general player input) seems like a reasonable idea as well, if you don't have a player who likes to do this. I am a Civilization player and find the building part of the game quite enjoyable. It reminds me of Civ.
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Kingdom building can be a double edged blade in any KM campaign.
We also experienced a 'lull' in our game's pacing as a result of the building tasks. Here's how I fixed it. After the first year was under their belts, I asked one of my players to take control of the Building duties. He plots out an entire year of builds in advance, which are (quickly) reviewed by the group. Without serious resistance to the type of structures and their locations, we green light the build and move right into regular play. In between game sessions, he and I resolve all the rolling and map editing. At the start of the next session, we have a Kingdom Building report, covering any details or events that the players need to know. Then on to regular play. Rinse/Repeat.
I would also recommend that building only occur when it makes sense for your story and time line. My group has decided to be in town for the last week of the first month and the first week of the next month. Then Adventuring/Exploring for three weeks at a time. We only build when they are in city.
Lastly, the biggest potential pitfall that I've experienced with the building rules is the withdraw step. I strongly recommend that KM judges NEVER let your players convert BP into gold! If you maintain a hard line separation between BP and GP, you will remove temptation and the headache of balancing yet another factor. The Industry of these building rules are based on magic item creation/selling. This can also create havoc if your players think that they can help themselves to the items that surface in their land. I no longer define the items for my players, only the GP value and if it qualifies to be sold.
Kingdom building can be a double edged blade in any KM campaign.
We also experienced a 'lull' in our game's pacing as a result of the building tasks. Here's how I fixed it. After the first year was under their belts, I asked one of my players to take control of the Building duties. He plots out an entire year of builds in advance, which are (quickly) reviewed by the group. Without serious resistance to the type of structures and their locations, we green light the build and move right into regular play. In between game sessions, he and I resolve all the rolling and map editing. At the start of the next session, we have a Kingdom Building report, covering any details or events that the players need to know. Then on to regular play. Rinse/Repeat.
I would also recommend that building only occur when it makes sense for your story and time line. My group has decided to be in town for the last week of the first month and the first week of the next month. Then Adventuring/Exploring for three weeks at a time. We only build when they are in city.
Lastly, the biggest potential pitfall that I've experienced with the building rules is the withdraw step. I strongly recommend that KM judges NEVER let your players convert BP into gold! If you maintain a hard line separation between BP and GP, you will remove temptation and the headache of balancing yet another factor. The Industry of these building rules are based on magic item creation/selling. This can also create havoc if your players think that they can help themselves to the items that surface in their land. I no longer define the items for my players, only the GP value and if it qualifies to be sold.
I did not ban the BP to gold conversion, which is not a bad idea, but I did tell them of possible revolts if they did it. It has not been an issue, but it is not something that should be allowed for every group.
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My group must be odd, we've had a lot of fun with the kingdom building aspects. I play a Gnome Sorcerer who set out mainly to escape the Bleaching, and as the ruler of a new kingdom I've got no end of new things to experience.
Out of character, we've enjoyed the mechanical side quite a bit. We tend to do a weeks' worth of adventuring for every month that we progress the kingdom, and since we can get quite a bit done in a week we rarely have more than 1 month of progression.
We've also gone beyond what the rules outline in a lot of ways, doing stuff like creating our nation's banner and coat-of-arms, defining the various departments and hierarchy of the parts of the government, as more. We have big plans for our cities, how we want them to look and how they contribute to the overall nation.
If anything, our group has the problem of getting too much into the kingdom building aspect. At level 7, I think we're nearly done with the second part of the AP, and we are badly under-equipped because we keep putting more and more GP into the kingdom to help counteract some really terrible luck we've been having with our kingdom management rolls.
OP I would recommend offlining the kingdom building if your group likes it but they don't want to spend their game time playing pen and paper Civilization II. If they are just burned on the whole concept and want to get back to playing good ol' D&D then you may have to relegate it to "kingdom in the background" to make sure that you and your group don't burn out.
For my group they really dove in headfirst to kingdom building but we only play once a month for a mammoth sized session. When the kingdom building nuked an entire one of our sessions and nothing had been accomplished on the player character end of things, the guys were left with a bit of an "awwww maaaaan" feeling. So we decided to offline the kingdom building through the use of email and a blog. That way we could devote our actual face-to-face game time to playing the game. Kind of a compromise that allowed us to have our cake and eat it too.
The extra bit of work it created on my end was setting up and maintaining the blog, pushing email chains around, and in terms of preparation I had to sit down with my adventure books and lay out a timeline for major events to unfold that I could use to constrain the kingdom building in a way that made sense to me.
The end result is that my group does kingdom building between adventures, not sessions. They are also allotted a chunk of time that their country can wax and wane. So far I've given them 12 months between Adventure 1 and 2 and 42 months between adventures 2 and 3. Then when we get to an adventure the speedy timeline of kingdom building slows down to "real time" and my players focus on adventuring.
So far the country of Rooistad is doing quite well...