Hey guys,
I've seen some disccusion on the forums about each set of rules and was wondering whether I should run the AP with the rules that come with it OR whether I should convert over to the River Kingdom's rules.
Now we are about halfway through AP2 and I'm not sure its worth the headache to use the other rules, I've seen people mention that the high end mass combat is going to be wonky. I absolutely intend to take this game into the level 20 region with some post-AP Runelords stuff. My party completed that AP previously and I want to do something with it.
So:
Question 1: Should I bother with it?
Question 2: In the future when running homebrew games, would it be my best option to use the Kingmaker rules, the River Kingdom stuff, or just hand waive it? My players really enjoy the kingdom building so this is an important topic for me.
Question 3: I've heard stuff about the magic item selling becoming a real problem later in the adventure. I don't let my players munchkin the game to death so will this be a problem? Has it been a real problem for non-munchinkin groups?
Question 4: The Kingmaker Mass combat rules, do they work? I've seen some discussion about whether they are workable or not, opinions/discussions?
The River Nations rules (not River Kingdoms) for kingdom building are about 95% expansion on the base rules, and 5% modifications to include errata or logical fixes. It's easy to make the switch: You just say "Oh, these buildings are now available, these two positions swapped names (but kept the same mechanics), and lets recalculate your kingdom stats just to be safe." There's a new event table, but you can just start rolling on it instead of the old table. Especially if you're still in the second book, it won't be hard to change.
For mass combat, the River Nations book diverges a bit more from what the core rules have, but a lot of it is filling in gaps the core rules left. I wasn't particularly impressed by mass combat at low levels (as per the "Hargulka's Monster Kingdom" thread) and I'm probably going to re-shelve those rules until they'd come up normally. I think that's a flaw in the core mechanics, though, rather than in anything River Nations adds.
Also, the River Nations book expands the exploration rules to cover terrains that don't show up in the Kingmaker modules.
For $5, the PDF is certainly worth picking up. At that price, if you get one good idea out of it, it'd have been worth the money (extremely limited budget constraints aside).
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1: The PDF (agree with Bobson) is worth it. We invested in the River Kingdom because I didn't want to carry around an "errata" sheet.
2: River Kingdom contains the fixes, so seems a better option.
3: We're starting kingdom making and I'm hoping my players will be mature about not manipulating sales of magic items. Of course, I'm not quite sure wizards would stick around making magic items if the party is just going to confiscate and sell them. Some DM discretion advised.
4: Can't answer.
The problems I have seen are as follows:
The "magic item industrial engine". I would re-tool these into mundane concerns that can potentially generate generous taxes for the kingdom's treasury (instead of magic items). Changing the flavor text in this way eliminates the aggravation of tracking potentially thousands of magic items over the course of the campaign.
Mass Combat I attempted to address on the mass combat sticky. After "live testing", I add the following recommendations:
* do not permit armies comprised of anything (a) extraplanar, (b) greater than CR 8, (c) with anything that would *drastically* alter battlefield events [medusae, rust monsters, oozes] and (d) that you don't believe they could recruit into service. Planar bindings permit armies of high-CR extraplanars that will utterly decimate the enemy en masse.
* set the speed at which battle turns occur to something that suits your tastes - several hours works well, as long as armies cannot move very far before or after.
I highly recommend "play testing" your own version of the kingdom, using that to set the pacing of game time for your campaign. While it starts out small, it snowballs after 5 years or so, with the pace of expansion outstripping believability not long after. Play testing will let you see first hand how it can go. And it can get nasty in a real hurry...
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The problems I have seen are as follows:
The "magic item industrial engine". I would re-tool these into mundane concerns that can potentially generate generous taxes for the kingdom's treasury (instead of magic items). Changing the flavor text in this way eliminates the aggravation of tracking potentially thousands of magic items over the course of the campaign.
Mass Combat I attempted to address on the mass combat sticky. After "live testing", I add the following recommendations:
* do not permit armies comprised of anything (a) extraplanar, (b) greater than CR 8, (c) with anything that would *drastically* alter battlefield events [medusae, rust monsters, oozes] and (d) that you don't believe they could recruit into service. Planar bindings permit armies of high-CR extraplanars that will utterly decimate the enemy en masse.
* set the speed at which battle turns occur to something that suits your tastes - several hours works well, as long as armies cannot move very far before or after.I highly recommend "play testing" your own version of the kingdom, using that to set the pacing of game time for your campaign. While it starts out small, it snowballs after 5 years or so, with the pace of expansion outstripping believability not long after. Play testing will let you see first hand how it can go. And it can get nasty in a real hurry...
Thanks for the advice Turin! :)
Yeah, I'm going to require them to have a logical reason for their being abnormal races in their armies, even then its going to be tough to get the numbers to fill those kinds of ranks.
I'm dropping the summon monster army rules out of the game, I felt it was already covered in adding spellcasters bonuses. I didn't want caster armies to be severly overmatching the martial armies. Just my preference to keep magic a little more rare than armies of wizards.
Looks like in the next two weeks we are going to do some small scale army battles, I'll let ya'll know how it goes.
I'd think it would be hard to find any creatures to fill an army to CR 8. I'm sticking pretty realistically to what they can find in the area. Plus I'm probably going to cap out how high level they can train their armies.