For Kingmaker more then any other campaign I can only said:
be prepaired
Kingmaker have a lot of additional rules (kingdombuilding/mass combat) where you have to keep track with. I suggesting using a laptop by the table.
1. Full HDs: Yes, it affects the game. No, it doesn't irretrievably break the game. Your combats are going to last longer, that's for sure.
Characters with full HP at every level by 14th level have almost twice the HP expected in the CR assumptions. Not only does it make the players harder to defeat, it makes them harder to scare. CR is balanced so that enemies with big scary attacks take a good portion of your HP in one turn — if they have twice the HP then that amount is effectively half as much.
How to fix it? If you pull punches at all you need to stop right now. Unleash everything you can on the players when it comes to HP damage (which is not always the best way to challenge them, but definitely don't hold back now).
You could go "old school" and have the players gain a fixed number of HP (1 or 2) per level from now on, to bring things back into the average range.
In future, let me recommend letting the players take the average result instead of the max result, or they can still randomize if they want to. That way you can be assured that you're sticking to the CR assumptions, which makes your life easier as GM.
2. Magic Items: Is crafting overpowered in the RAW? Doesn't matter. It's either helping your game or hurting it, which depends on your goals as a GM. So let's dodge the talk of "OP" and "broken" and move right on to the solution.
Audit the party wealth. Use the full market value of all the items, including self-crafted items. If they're wealthier than they ought to be on the Wealth By Level chart, you need to starve them for treasure for a while. Try to be artistic about it, don't seize treasure (unless it's cool), and don't cut off all treasure rewards... just lighten the package for the next few sessions.
Party wealth is a guideline for the GM to bring the game into balance with the CR assumptions. It works whether or not you have crafters in the party. Crafting confers many nice benefits to the party, but you control the flow of wealth into the campaign and therefore you can always ensure the party isn't becoming overpowered.
Basically, if the craftsman is converting all of the party's wealth into items at half price, you give half as much wealth over the long run. Is this fair? Yes. Crafting has advantages of selectivity and convenience. A more powerful party needs more difficult challenges, and a wealthy party is likely to become bored if their APL isn't adjusted.
Don't punish the craftsman for trying to get an edge on wealth, but don't let the edge destroy your encounter balancing tools. If you want to let them "be rich", use the WBL rules to increase the effective APL.
3. Kingmaker.
I'm told there are exploits involving the city magic item system. I don't know what they are first-hand.
I also think the scale of the armies skews a little large for my taste.
Best thing to do is start running it, and secure your players' patience early on when it comes to ad hoc rule changes.
Crafting has no effect on wbl unless used during character creation since in order to craft an item they need to sell another expensive item they sold at half price. However it is easy for a new gm to fall into the shiny toys trap and givd pc's too much stuff so an audit is a good plan.
For pre written ap's you may need to tweak your encounters depending on how effective your pc's are, for example the alchemist master chemist you mentioned who hates optimisers and metagaming has probably built an optimised character. I normally add more things to an encounter or pop a template onto something if the fight seems like it will be light.
Kingmaker is all about preperation, pre roll random encounters, tweek a few challenges, read the kingdom building rules as many times as you can stand before you run them and buy jon brazer entdrprises players guide to kinfdom building for your players to read since its a godsend, there is an exploit where kingdoms with very high loyalty and a lot of magic item shops can pawn many magic items per month and the players can withdraw the cash but you can fix that by gm fiat.
The magic item exploit begins around book 2 & 3. What happens is, each city district is allowed a roll every month to sell a magical item which generates cash. The amount of money that can be made might unbalance the entire game if not curtailed.
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
|
1. My first question is about HDs. In the first two adventures of this campaign I was a player and I took over as the GM in the third adventure. I followed the previous GM's lead and let the players have full HDs with every lvl.
Does this make for OP PCs?
I don't like the idea of rolling your HD either as it feels like a bad roll could really put you in a bad spot so my current thought is to let the players have full HD first lvl then 0.5HD every lvl. Currently it feels like my PCs have hp to spare but this could be because of other factors making them unbalanced.
Are full HDs not actually a problem if characters remain balanced for their lvl?
2. Magic item creation, I've seen this one thrown around on the board. The sorcerer in the party can create wondrous items as well as arms and armour. His skill is really good so it's hard for him to fail at crafting stuff. It could be that there's something in the rules I'm missing that's making this easier for him than it should be but as it stands now it just seems OP. ~50% discount as long as you know the spell/can hire a spellcaster, have some time and can pass a skill check. The cost of one or more feats doesn't feel proportional to the massive gain for the party.
Is magic item creation OP in RAW?
Is there a simple fix?
If no, what's the complicated fix?3. Moving on to actual Kingmaker stuff. Kingmaker has a lot rules not commonly seen in APs, kingdom building, army combat and such. I'm trying to fix problems before they occur so I'm wondering which, if any, of these rules are easily exploitable or unbalanced.
1) To be honest, HP is probably not going to be too much of an issue in Kingmaker, as the game's encounter pace is easily controlled by the players. They can expect to keep their encounters for the day to around two at most if they really want to. That means, that unless an encounter is really deadly, the players can stop, rest, and heal whenever they want. If you feel that the players need to have a better chance at gaining good HP rolls you can always do what my GM does. They roll in the open and you roll privately. If they don't want their result, they can take yours but they must take yours even if it is lower. More often then not the player will take the higher roll, and this method does tend to create higher HP totals.
2)You have it right on how it works, but I would suggest you read and become more familiar with item creation rules. Knowing them better then the player will help you feel better about allowing them. Also, you should be checking the math on all of the details. Chances are he has it all right, but you never know. As for cost to the player, feats are a limited resource and taking a craft feat means they can't take feats that help them in combat, like Combat Casting, Spell Focus, or a metamagic feat. It isn't really OP to allow crafting, and if you feel it is you can just cut down on the amount of treasure given to them. I wouldn't do that in Kingmaker though, as treasure can be converted into resources that build the kingdom.
To answer your specific questions:
No
Just adjust the amount of treasure given.
If there is it isn't worth it.
3) Go to the Kingmaker forums and look there. Spend some time just reading through everything you can there and you will find resources and help. There are issues with the kingdom building rules, but they are addressed in many threads there and don't need to be addressed here.
Don't worry about things being OP, just worry about having fun, helping the players having fun, and telling a good story. If you feel that the players are going to walk all over something, handle that in prep time. Advance a few monsters, give them a few tricks, plan an ambush.
If you want some tools, help, advice on specific encounters for Kingmaker, shoot me a note here on the forums and I will be happy to help out.
1. My first question is about HDs. In the first two adventures of this campaign I was a player and I took over as the GM in the third adventure. I followed the previous GM's lead and let the players have full HDs with every lvl.
For Kingmaker specifically this is a bad idea, as the PCs will average 1-2 fights a day making their HP total count even higher when they know they don't need to worry when they can just rest after battle..
Does this make for OP PCs?
In short, yes. To bring up a few other points that I didn't already see... There will be a large gap between your spellcasters and melee brutes (d6 vs d12 or d10). For example by level 10 your barbarian would have 60 more HP... before even bringing Con or favored class bonus in. At this point it becomes hard to make a threat to your melee that won't just simply one-shot your casters should they get into range.
2. Magic item creation
To be honest, it could be a little overpowered. Especially in Kingmaker where the players can take their time and just sit back crafting things. If you don't like the "free items" model and don't want to worry as hard about WBL issues, just re-instate the 3.5 model used for crafting that requires XP to be spent (I suggest allowing the craftee to pay a portion of the price of items so that the crafter doesn't lag too far behind the party).
3. Moving on to actual Kingmaker stuff. Kingmaker has a lot rules not commonly seen in APs, kingdom building, army combat and such. I'm trying to fix problems before they occur so I'm wondering which, if any, of these rules are easily exploitable or unbalanced.
Check out Paizo's Kingmaker AP forums, there are TONS of threads on kingdom building, mass combat, etc.
Kingmaker will be fun for you to run right after a high level campaign.. The party will be feeling tough after all the encounters they wiped the floor with. I recommend taking a read through the Kingmaker Obituaries thread as well to get an idea of how tough it can be on low level PCs :)
|
1) Max HP per level: Yes it will skew the party and/or make it harder for you to GM. Recommended on level up is to take average HP rounded up - as per Pathfinder Society.
2) Magic items: Kingmaker is one of the campaigns that really benefits from Magic item creation as they are miles from anywhere and can't buy the gear they need to balance/fit their character. As long as the majority of treasure you are providing them is in magic item form and you are enforcing the sell at half rule then it balances out.
Sell at half/make at half allows them to recycle the stuff they get into useful items while still maintaining wealth by level. Only if a lot of treasure is in cash does it become unbalancing. So as soon as someone has item crafting scale back the cash side of treasure.
Note also that Kingmaker is written for 4 players so book treasure plus crafting likely works out anyway for a larger party.
As mentioned it doesn't hurt to occasionally audit and adjust the flow of treasure cash/items to compensate.
Note also if you don't let players craft/buy the items they need then replacement characters will come in "fully loaded" causing resentment - PC death is common in Kingmaker.
3) Kingmaker stuff: Read my Overlords Guide to Kingdom Building so that you can help the players when they go astray at the beginning (which they will) or their kingdom starts to fall apart (which it might) and you can decide in advance which bits you like, what exploits to look out for, and what house rules to impose.
4) GM NPC: watch out for that becoming a party de-risker/attention hog/fun remover.
Something I like for making encounters feel harder without making them that much harder is to add some minimum damage, or increase the frequency of smaller damage amounts. The smaller damage is easier for the GM to add and increase while keeping control of it.
On the other hand, a power attacking Hill Giant might seem like not a huge deal to add to a CR 12 encounter, but he can still crit for 4d8+32 (average ~50), which can put a serious dent in most of the d6/d8 HD classes. If you're not careful with adding high damage monsters, you can accidentally kill the softer players when you just want to spice up a medium encounter a little bit.
(This happened to me in a RotRL game, the GM added an extra Rune Giant that came from behind and killed my ranger in a single full attack)
Experiment with high attack values, but low damage. Then I would lean towards adding more attacks over increasing the damage. It gives you the GM more control over the flow of damage to the players.
Something else I like to do is add battlefield effects that deal small amounts of damage. 3d6 damage to everyone at level 10 isn't that much, but the party is going to have to come up with a solution if the fight goes for more than 2 rounds.
I finished GMing Kingmaker a couple months ago. It was fun, but as people have said you need to be prepared.
I made some mistakes in allowing the PCs too much power, and didn't see the pitfalls of overcrafting, one-monster-a-day, or the army rules until it was too late. I made some retroactive changes but I wasn't happy with the way things went.
Kingdom-building is not to everyone's taste. The first session got everyone interested, but later sessions became dominated by the story-driven players while the others dozed in the corner who weren't really interested in why the town didn't have a dump or a graveyard. As the campaign went on, we started to gloss over a lot of the Kingdom Building. I think, if I were to run Kingmaker again, I'd run it with the advice from the 'Kingdom in the background' sidebars and probably take the army building rules out of the players' hands too. I'd describe things more at the character level than an arbitrary third-tier metalevel.
I'd also advise being aware of the whole story (i.e. read all the adventures or at least teh backgrounds/synopses) before starting Adventuer 1. Liberally sprinkle more hints of the BBEG plot throughout the campaign so your players aren't surprised when Adventure 6 comes along. While the plot clues are there in the adventure, they are easy for players to miss or see the connections.
Enjoy!
After playing the entire Kingmaker i have the following advice to give you:
1) Ban money withdrawl from the kingdom.
2) Ban Leadership.
3) Ban Antagonize.
4) Ban item creation feats* (you can give spell focus instead of the feat for the classes and PrCs that give them for free).
5) Crank up the adventure, the adventure is quite easy so if your players are quite good you might want to make it a little more difficult.
6) Avoid the 15 minute work-day that Kingmaker suffers from.
7) Use either 15 or 20 point buy, nearly anything else (including most rolling methods) bring greater results.
8) Don't let your players simply take or "borrow" magic items from their kingdom just because they are the rulers.**
9) At later books be sure to use bestiary 2 and 3 for monsters.***
10) About the HP, yes it does make them more powerful, i suggest giving them the average.
*The Kingmaker AP doesn't have a time limit AT ALL, this results to players with crafting feats to have both the perfect equipment and more than they should have gear.
**When that issue was being with James Jacobs in the Kingmaker forum i remember him saying that the players shouldn't do that and the game assumes that they won't, after all the AP is called Kingmaker and not Tyrantmaker.
***When Kingmaker was released only the first bestiary was out, that had the result of making a few monsters (specifically fey) appear over and over in the AP, now that we have bestiary 2 and bestiary 3 we have a lot more fey to work with.
Ran the kingmaker campaign and there have already been alot of good suggestions. The first thing is the HD. Full HD is a bad idea as well explained by other posters'. Stick with making them roll for hit points. A few bad rolls can happen but good rolls should balance them out. Use 20 point buy to ensure the characters are equal and none of them have stats of through the roof across the board. Points (1) and (8) from leo1925. I wouldn't ban item creation but let them know that crafting whatever mystical belt or ring may not be the best idea. Encoourage them to think outside the box of crafting and selling loot just to upgrade their equipment. For the adventure I ran, one player wanted to do the mercantile thing. "The accounting chronicles" I call it. He'd adventure a bit and then head for restov to sell and buy stuff. On the way back from Restov, he ran into a wyrm of some sort. It was snoozing. He decided to scorching ray it as opposed to just passing it by. He didn't die but lost his stuff and the horses. He got annoyed. This was because the other player was spending his wealth and loot on actually building the comunity. Hiring mercs, cooks, farmers, builders...etc. There was a discrepancy in reputation between them. The determined up and coming heroic ranger was more looked up to than the half-hearted wizard. Won't describe any more of the adventure but thankfully the appropriate people were hired early on. Prevented a potential disaster.
2) Ban Leadership.
I forgot to mention this in my post above.
Definitely. When my players weren't crafting items themselves, they had their cohorts crafting for them. Sometimes they were both crafting at once.
Kingmaker is a different type of campaign, and if you aren't careful your players will find all kinds of ways to take advantage of the (possibly long) periods of downtime which will mean that they can even more easily overpower the encounters than they would without those advantages because of the 15-minute work day.
Down time is the what make crafter so strong/dangerous in kingmaker.
Since there is large amouts of it pluss path gose as fast as your party dose.
Simple at hac rule for kingmaker let them craft only between mods.
2. Magic Items: Is crafting overpowered in the RAW? Doesn't matter. It's either helping your game or hurting it, which depends on your goals as a GM. So let's dodge the talk of "OP" and "broken" and move right on to the solution.
Audit the party wealth. Use the full market value of all the items, including self-crafted items. If they're wealthier than they ought to be on the Wealth By Level chart, you need to starve them for treasure for a while. Try to be artistic about it, don't seize treasure (unless it's cool), and don't cut off all treasure rewards... just lighten the package for the next few sessions.
Party wealth is a guideline for the GM to bring the game into balance with the CR assumptions. It works whether or not you have crafters in the party. Crafting confers many nice benefits to the party, but you control the flow of wealth into the campaign and therefore you can always ensure the party isn't becoming overpowered.
Basically, if the craftsman is converting all of the party's wealth into items at half price, you give half as much wealth over the long run. Is this fair? Yes. Crafting has advantages of selectivity and convenience. A more powerful party needs more difficult challenges, and a wealthy party is likely to become bored if their APL isn't adjusted.
Don't punish the craftsman for trying to get an edge on wealth, but don't let the edge destroy your encounter balancing tools. If you want to let them "be rich", use the WBL rules to increase the effective APL.
As an alternative to cutting into the treasure awards if you find the PCs vastly above WBL, you could require them to spend a portion of their incoming gold on noncombat things. This allows them to remain wealthy, but keeps them from pouring it on with regard to magic items.
The PCs in my current game for instance are required to fork over 1/2 of the wealth they gain as a result of selling magic items to noncombat goals. This means when they sell things they effectively get 1/4th value for the purpose of crafting.
The upside here is that it lets PCs that have goals that don't involve jacking their bonuses as high as they can get them have money for those pet projects. The wizard in my current game is trying to set up a shipyard for instance, have a scholarship fund set up for street urchin children, and build a tower. Instead of eating into combat wealth she's got a dedicated portion of her wealth set aside for that - as does everyone else.
It also tends to encourage PCs who aren't big on world involvement to get involved, because they have extra wealth they want a place to spend.
Kingmaker can have huge amounts of downtime... and that's not necessarily a bad thing. IMC I had weeks passing between encounters and a couple of years between the first two modules. This really gave a different flavor to the campaign -- "Okay, it's now summer of Year Three. The collection of cabins that started to grow up around Oleg's trading post after you defeated the bandits is now a proper village, and there are flecks of grey at Oleg's temples..."
Doug M.
From a story pot of view it good. Form Crafting balance a year or two down time to craft what ever you want. Is way to strong.
This it the one game that would want leadership in to help fill roles on the console.
Crafting isn't broken.
1) don't allow them to withdraw money from the kingdom
2) keep track of how much money you give them from treasure
Crafting is only as good as your available source of money. If you have 1 gp, crafting feats are worthless. While normally time is the enemy of crafting, in Kingmaker it has to be money. Keep track of the players WBL, if you are uncomfortable with it, just stop giving them money until you feel it's under control again.
Another trick (that's pretty much a house rule) is to specify the components that the GP pays for in the crafting process. We call these "spell anchors", it's basically the eye-of-newt and all that stuff that the GP is used to procure for crafting an item.
Enshrining concrete objects as crafting components helps the GM control the availability of certain items. You can give players a price break on items you want them to have by letting them scavenge components (a red dragon's claw if they killed a red dragon, etc). Want to make certain items out-of-reach? Those components are unavailable and require a side quest or some other thing.
It requires a little more involvement and creativity from the GM, but grants a little more flavor and control.
|
|
I'm in Kingmaker right now, and my understanding if unless you allow them to withdraw money from the kingdom, they will not have even remotely enough money to come close to WBL.
We're near the end of book 3, and unless I am mistaken, we would not even be at 5000GP without withdraws.
With semi-regular withdraws, I have these items. Level 8 cavalier.
+1 full plate
+1 scimitar
+1 buckler
+4 belt of STR (this is a special case, we withdrew money to pay for all members of the ruling council, which is all the various roles in the kingdom).
I think since book 1, we've only pass probably less than 5 years total.
We know the system, but we're not exploiting it. The GM has put some restrictions on what we can build to make is more logical from fluff point of view.
Wizard and oracle does not craft, except for arcane scrolls. GM has not banned anything that I am aware of other than firearms (he hates them).
So the answer is, as usual, it all depends on your group of players.