I recall an old thread where someone asked "why don't the PCs send someone else to do it" when it came to all the fetch quests and such starting from the second book of Kingmaker. So, if you don't mind sharing, what drives the players in your table to still doing quests despite them owning the land? I recall someone making mentions of merchant guilds, but my memory on that is hazy...
Greetings, fellow traveller.
My players' motivation is three-fold. For one the kill&fetch quests usually come to their attention via their councillor arguing it is much in the interest of their people to not be eaten by a green dragon etc.
As the ruling body of the realm, my players see it as the right thing to do going on a quest and helping the land and their people to prosper.
Then, I have pally (currently) running the realm, together with his LG cleric buddy it is pretty simple to nudge them towards doing the right and the good thing.
I've also more or less removed the anonymous posting style of many quests and created a short backstory, attaching the quest giver somewhat to the PCs or the council with which they interact heavily.
Ruyan.
The main one is that they enjoy playing their characters :)
However :-
* Their characters don't get XP if they don't go - and I don't give them freebie levels.
* If they don't go, they don't get the treasure or reward. Either their staff expect to keep that reward (as any adventuring party would) or someone else completed the quest before the 'employees' got there.
* Let someone else get too famous and they may well have a revolution on their hands.
I told my group up-front that they're a fledgling new colony/kingdom, they're going to be expected to get off their butts and get their hands dirty from time to time, and that the majority of the kingdom's fame will be based on what they personally have done rather than things their army, their citizens, or their markets do or make, at least in the early years the campaign represents. Basically, force them to be Royals who Actually Do Something.
All of my players seemed perfectly okay with that and a few later questioned me about why would players want to just sit on their thrones and order underlings to do quests for them, what's the fun in that?
That said, between general disinterest on everyone's parts and my group being several levels ahead of the expected curve, a lot of the mundane, minutia-laden, or uninteresting secondary sidequests are getting dropped/ignored and presumed to be handled by a lesser party offscreen.
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This came up in my group recently in the handling of Crackjaw the evil giant turtle (hey i don't make this stuff up). 2 of the players just wanted to send some of the Marshall's men to handle it while they went and explored some more. When they got back they found out the troops (rangers mostly all 1st level of course) had had their asses handed to them and 2 didn't make it back. They told horror stories about this enormous beast none of them could even scratch (I had upped Crackjaw to a large turtle with improved AC, hps, BAB and damage - I generally have to do this with every solo monster otherwise they are dead in the first 1/2 of round 1). The players took it very seriously then and, despite the Druid still insisting that the turtle should be left alone and 'nature take its course' went out and took care of the problem with extreme prejudice.
So my advice would be to make the side quests a little more urgent and/or dangerous. Have people complain about Shambling Mounds harassing hunters or wolves killing livestock that sort of thing - and make it sound like it is more than their regular troops can handle (a party of beaten and bloody soldiers limping into the council chambers carrying their dead should do the trick - if it doesn't smack your players on the head and ask "Are you heroes or cowards??!")
if you want to rule, you have to lead from the front.
This pretty much sums it up
The other thing to keep in mind, as a DM, is that it's very easy to change sidequests, or come up with your own, that are more tied to the player's interests. (This is one reason that I really enjoyed DMing Kingmaker.) If something is silly or stupid or won't interest the PCs, switch it to something else that does.
Or have the quest be the same, but the quest-giver someone whom the PCs might want to pay attention to. For instance, one of my characters ended up with a Taldan knight as a cohort -- and he had the most epicene tastes imaginable. Everything that was remotely a food-related quest (eels, roc eggs, whatever) ended up coming through him. And Lily Teskerkin turned into a gold-digging Galtan refugee who's played a major part in the politics of the kingdom since then.
On the other hand, I skipped Timmy altogether, and the hodag thing.
My players (and by extension characters) are restless. They really don't want to sit around ruling a kingdom when there are adventures to be had.
I don't think it's a matter of the player's preferring to have their characters sit around and do nothing; it's more that the players are looking for realistic motivations to better immerse themselves in the game.
That said, none of my players have yet questioned why they don't just send their minions to do all of the dirty work. If they ever do, I'll be interested to see if they come up with their own justification. If not, I'll certainly drop a few in-character "if you want to rule, you have to lead from the front" hints. I'll probably use the adventuresome Aldori swordlords as examples. Most of the citizenry has come from Rostland, in fact, and would expect a similar attitude.
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I have enough menial tasks and mind-numbingly boring administrative stuff going on in the PCs kingdom that keeps most of the NPCs busy all the time (like it probably would be). This means the players get to do stupid stuff if they want to send the NPCs into battle in their place. So far, they have never selected the "fill out these forms in triplicate" and "listen to the little old lady's complaints" options. :)
In our campaign 2 pc's dropped out to run the kingdom full time, while the others, with the 2 new pc's kept going as the kingdoms elite trouble shooters.
By book 4 we felt the kingdom had developed enough that full time leadership was required, as was a full time adventuring group that worked for the kingdom.
DBH
In our campaign 2 pc's dropped out to run the kingdom full time, while the others, with the 2 new pc's kept going as the kingdoms elite trouble shooters.
By book 4 we felt the kingdom had developed enough that full time leadership was required, as was a full time adventuring group that worked for the kingdom.
DBH
So they had to stop playing by book 4 and it turned into administration?
I recall an old thread where someone asked "why don't the PCs send someone else to do it" when it came to all the fetch quests and such starting from the second book of Kingmaker. So, if you don't mind sharing, what drives the players in your table to still doing quests despite them owning the land? I recall someone making mentions of merchant guilds, but my memory on that is hazy...
In the second book PCs still are only petty lords, and don't have money to support capable warriors or mystics other than themselves. Running around and fixing shit is their actual duty. Starting from book 3 I expect to either drop fetch quests or reflavor those I like, so they won't seem like fetch quests. To be honest, very few things PCs do until book 6 are worthy to be high-level content (taking on Hargulka, Vordakai and "Armag" are reasonable plot ideas for levels 7-8 or so, everything else is basically E6 content, if you look past arbitrarily assigned statbloks - fighting bandits, various local tribes, petty lords and wandering predators), and I'm not even sure if I'm going to run book 6, so fetch quests seem to me to be just needless padding to provide XP that is mostly extraneous anyway.
To expand on reflavoring, while many fetch quests are described basically as "go grind the monster X for its drop", they often can be very easily presented more gracefully. Like, "The monster X is eating our peasants, please help, o mighty lords!". Meanwhile, people who are supposed to ask you to fetch things or other people, might instead plead to save their friends or relatives from probable peril or come with their kingdom-benefitting ideas, that, however, require some help.
So they had to stop playing by book 4 and it turned into administration?In our campaign 2 pc's dropped out to run the kingdom full time, while the others, with the 2 new pc's kept going as the kingdoms elite trouble shooters.
By book 4 we felt the kingdom had developed enough that full time leadership was required, as was a full time adventuring group that worked for the kingdom.
DBH
My Cleric became Ruler and being the responsible type felt it was a full time job, I replaced her with a Druid looking to work for the crown and get some of the Greenbelt granted to her as a preserve for her services.
Another player had his wizard become the Magister, he also felt it was a full time role and rolled up a Sorcerer looking to make his fortune in the new kingdom to replace him.
This was more for role playing than admin, I kept the kingdom building and politics as a background thing, none of the players were too interested in it, and as the DM my characters are nearly NPC's anyway.
DBH
Something I learned from Kingmaker is that there is a point where the players are going to want to adventure in their city(ies). I kept throwing them out on exploration missions out in the wilderness and after awhile, it felt more like their city was just some far away place they'd never actually adventure in. So I'd suggest throwing in a lot more city encounters. Assassination attempts, thieves' guild stuff. Although that'll be fairly tricky to do with the PCs since they are the rulers and would be recognizable somewhat by the time book 3 rolls around.
Use the random events table for inspiration -- if a monster attacks, maybe it attacks one of the cities, or pops up therein. (You could get a whole session out of one random monster, its minions, and finding out what's going on.) Assassinations are obvious. What are the PC's precautions? Foreshadow something, develop something with Pitaxian spies or Surtova agents or fey infiltration.
That never came up with my current group, oddly enough.
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Use their fears against them: Paladin as baron > Guild of Thieves
Druid as baron > Settelements around are chopping like mad.
...
Not every "encounter" should be "Roll initiative and kill it".
I actually thought about it since I might get a new group to run the game with.
The third book has a literal fetch quest involving a roc egg. There's little to no benefit to the country from fetching an egg to make an omelette. What could possibly be made to make this quest seem more attractive, instead of me having to use the metagame reason of "well if you don't you won't get the EXP"?
Is it so bad if a group declines to do some quests?
In our game we discussed the roc egg quest ingame and up until now it seems much more likely that the group will try to hatch the egg should they ever get one.
Making omelette from it seems such a waste of potential.
I don't want the players to be denied EXP when they need it.
The lethality of many encounters increases if they go to it underleveled.
I wonder why there were little to no mentions of local cyclops tribes despite their prevalence in the area.
I was under the impression the cyclopes were something that had previously inhabited the region and they were all moved out or long dead (except Vordakai and his undead) by the time KM rolled around.
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I actually thought about it since I might get a new group to run the game with.
The third book has a literal fetch quest involving a roc egg. There's little to no benefit to the country from fetching an egg to make an omelette. What could possibly be made to make this quest seem more attractive, instead of me having to use the metagame reason of "well if you don't you won't get the EXP"?
Instead of the omelette king, eel, and manticore quill quests as written, I made all three things that the PCs needed to do to impress the centaurs and get them to move up the scale from hostile to friendly.
First I used the "kankerata run" proposed in another thread, then the centaurs challenged the PCs to bring back both a roc egg and the manticore quills as needed components for very special tribal tattoos. One of the friendlier centaurs (who the PCs had helped during the kankerata run) quietly mentioned to the PCs that if they also brought a bunch of eels from Lake Silverstep, they'd win some popularity as the eels are favorites of many of the centaurs.
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Omelette? How about Roc Cavalry? Just sayin, you know...
While my group went to collect the egg - the more important element is that there is still a wild Roc hunting in that area - and with a new road opening up to Varnhold and, unless the threat is eliminated, people and their pack animals will need protecting.
The Quills became a side issue, because they were burying a couple of centaur hides (as a way of getting on good terms with the Nomen) when they ran into the Manticores :)
They had to explore the hex with the Eels - they saw it as a day off fishing - Until they met the Peluda :)