I'm sure it's not like this with most people, but how would you deal with this situation? Right at the start of the second book, I fully expect my players to start running sim city and go into full town managing roleplay, leaving the adventuring business pretty much for good.
I do have some good ideas planned to force them to go explore, such as the first werewolf encounter, turning more into a werewolf *plague* where they will need to work with the other npcs and nameless guard npcs to find the problem and eradicate it, with that I'l have them look at the tracks left by the wolves and lure them trough a couple of event hex's. And of course when they return, deal with Grigori.
Half of the npc's needed for leadership position are available in the first book, however some needed are in the second book and the players don't want to start with a vacant post anywhere. One is obsessed with scouring the land to find a worthy Magistrate or Grand Diplomat, saying it's what he wants to devote months until he can find someone that can take the job. With the Spymaster job going to Mikmek, I was instead thinking of having the *flirt* girl at the back of the book make for a good Diplomat, using her excessive charms and allure to manage against some of the high social skills she might lack.
tldr; New npc's introduced, quest reworking and custom quest thread.
Honestly, I'd actually downplay exploration in favor for more urban adventures in their city. I found that my players felt like their city was just this far off place for a backdrop and they had too many adventures in the wild. Throw in some adventures that has them in the city they've built.
Nobility is good, but nobody will do their jobs for them. Let them hear the pleas of their people, in need of saviours! :-)
And don't worry about sim city, they'll grow bored rather quickly. My money is on someone saying "Guys, i'm bored, when are we going to go out again?"
If your players get bored of exploration, allow them to send out explorers and adventurers of their own out to look at new lands (for a fee of course). This is actually a good way to introduce adventures, such as the explorers stumbling onto a ruins and letting loose something into this world that should not be.
They are not bored, they are just thinking what their characters would think.
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Figure out what's most important to them, and put it at risk. If all they want is to retire in comfort as bureaucrats, then have something put their social status in peril.
Fair enough. RDN has a good idea there. They can only live comfortably if life is comfortable for them. With attacks from outsiders, or insurgency from within, they'll be expected to take a more hands on approach, especially since they are fledgling kingdoms and not more established like, say, Brevoy.
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Make sure they know that bad stuff could be lurking around the corner in areas they have not explored. More to the point, in areas they pass through but don't explore (my PCs did this a LOT) things change over time. Any hexes not claimed, I don't let the PCs know what is happening there unless they specifically keep tabs on it.
I also use renown to enhance or detract from diplomacy, revenue, trade, and other negotiations. A big part of renown is how much you play the role of epic battle leader, defeater of dragons and demons, and not just how many settlements you build.
Here are a few examples of changes that happened because my PCs stopped exploring:
- dwarves migrated down and settled in the gold mine area and starting developing it. Because the PCs skipped settling this hex, they had only a small percentage chance to notice it. They now have a dwarven independent settlement in a claimed hex, and receive only 60% of the profits instead of all of them.
-Enemy of the PCs kingdom built a "rogue" settlement just outside their kingdom borders on a side they stopped exploring and never went back to. They had problems with it and ended up under attack from this group.
- Lumber consortium from Brevoy built a logging community on the other side of the narlmarches and has been harvesting and selling wood to Brevoy, driving down the PCs trade BP revenue and also taking resources inside their charter.
- They have failed to meet and befriend several useful allies until just recently. Given all the obstacles they have faced, several of them, like Melianse and Tiressia would have been extremely helpful.
If they hired low level adventurers to map out these hexes, whenever they hit a decent strength set encounter, the group just disappears, victims of the Stolen lands.
I will say that it is probably not a bad thing to transition your game away from PC exploration by at least 9-10th level though, as they have bigger fish to fry after that.
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We faced a similar situation in Kingmaker. Perhaps if I give a bit of background it will help inspire you:
1) PCs stayed in town and hired folks to go exploring for them - a month later, we hadn't heard from them and when we were about to send others out, their bodies were discovered. PCs investigated and explored.
2) When we returned to our town, it was in turmoil as some mercenaries showed up and declared themselves the new rulers of the town. PCs took care of that and organized the town folk into a "rebellion" of sorts. At the tail end, we heard that another town had been settled (varnhold) and they were quickly expanding into to territories they'd recently explored.
3) Not wanting to be out done, we explored and claimed more territory, too.
Any way, you get the idea. Allow the PCs to shape the story and adapt the Adventure path to suit their play style. When we explored Candlemere Island, our GM replaced it with the "Isle of Dread" (an old 1st edition -X1- D&D module) and we ignored, bypassed, or heard about someone else in our town who had dealt with about 50-75% of the encounters in the AP.
Develop encounters for both exploring and urban adventures. Something as simple as digging a well and it spills into an old crypt or a goblin treasure horde can create many memorable game sessions.
Good luck to you and have fun!
RPG Superstar Season 9 Top 16, RPG Superstar 2015 Top 32
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The PCs in my game have decided they love exploring, but hate the travel. Their answer to the issue is establishing a Hippogriff ranch, buying hippogriffs, and enchanting wagons to fly. This has made travel more luxurious, faster, and safer (for the most part.) they see exploring as fun outings where they learn the lay of their kingdom, hunt strange creatures, and do PR with those soon to be part of their kingdom. They also do not enjoy putting their citizens in danger, so any threat, no matter how small, is investigated personally with great interest.
Calling it a Kingdom in Book 2 is a bit of a stretch, it's a settlement at best, and a small one.
People will want to see their rulers out there doing things for them, finding the resources, exploring and claiming land, dealing with threats.
Later on, when the population grows, the villages and towns start up, that's when a full time ruler is needed.
Our party went to the end of Book 3 then decided that full time leadership was needed.
Two players retired their characters, one to be the ruler, one to be the magistar, and rolled up new characters.
The other two players decided their characters were more interested in adventuring and not becoming bureaucrats and kept on happily exploring and claiming.
DBH
(...) I fully expect my players to start running sim city and go into full town managing roleplay, leaving the adventuring business pretty much for good.
I think the BIG problem is: Don´t waste to much time with the "sim city" aspect of this campagne and stay on roleplaying.
It feels like spending to much time on management - and we have just started to build our kingdom. So we said: "Let´s do this management per email."
btw.: Our "werewolf encounter" was "save the werewolf" because, we - the players - like the werewolf more than his hunter(s) and saved him (until today) 2-3 times his life and the hunter(s) still working on killing him.
That's pretty much what I did as well, regulated the kingdom building to our group's forum and left game time for RP and adventuring and combat. We'll occasionally have a "kingdom building session" from time to time though.
I worked out the situation of "we have a kingdom to run, we should retire from adventuring" with my players in advance, and was quite pleased to learn it wasn't going to be a problem, none of my players were interested in taking that particular turn of events and were quite happy to remain active and frequently traveling Royals That Actually Do Something.
Well I managed to roll 1/4 of the entire quest right into the werewolf attack. Instead of making it 1 guy, I had 8 werewolf attack, something which they investigated and prepared for.
The alchemist prepared some alchemical silver on the double, coated some arrows and divided 50 arrows with the PC ranger, his crew of lowbie rangers (he's the marshall) Akiros and the town guard working under him. Dividing the people into 3 groups scouting the place of town near the tavern were the barbarian werewolf hung out, they initiated the fight at night.
The pc's (plus Mikmek) spotted 4 werewolves sneaking into town and fought them, likewise the rangers spotted 2 and fought. The guards were surprised and almost decimated but 1 managed to survive, bitten and having contracted the curse. Same thing for the PC ranger, who also got bit. This led me to remind them of the old swamp witch, a rumor they had heard in the random rumors I rolled. Since no one that they know can cure curses in the area, maybe this powerful swamp witch can.
Travelling back across the Tatzlwyrm den they met with the other group of settlers and quickly offered to give them aid, they will work asap to integrate them into the barony as a future second city. Starting from the A section on the new map, they met the Dryad, killed the evil tree and then finished by assaulting the Dancing Lady's keep at level 4, having a rough time in each fight but managing. They won beat the dancing lady with the sorcerer's smart idea to not go upstairs and safely stay in the lower room, summoning a new critter each round, eventually overwhelming the boss.
All of which fits perfectly fine with meeting Grigori back when they return to the town in what I expect about 1-2 weeks. The rumor telling them to look in the swamp was of course bad, since she lives more in the plains and is simply next to the lake, 1 hex away from the town's folk. If they keep exploring *too* many swamp hexes however I'll have them find someone who will know where the witch actually is and point them in the right direction.
They won beat the dancing lady with the sorcerer's smart idea to not go upstairs and safely stay in the lower room, summoning a new critter each round, eventually overwhelming the boss.
Doesn't she have a hole in her roof that, with the aid of the Grimstalker's ability to control plants, they could have just escaped through and climbed down into the courtyard or something? Or just gone out a window?
Grimstalker died the day before a short while after Grigg died, the Dacing Lady was alone, seeing as she doesn't leave her little room. The combat was heating up however, she managed to persuade the Alchemist to help her (whtout hurting his friends) and dazed the ranged. Then she waded trough 5 summons with her ridiculous acrobatic skill and went for the sorcerer down the stairs, but she was offed by his last spell, cursing him with -6 charisma.
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My players have finished book 2 and have 10 hexes in their nation. It's like pulling teeth to get them to develop their land. But they don't want the kingdom building to take place in the background.
Building the nation is a key component to the Adventure Path. I'd encourage kingdom building. As others have said there are lots of ways to get them back out adventuring when needed.
We do things differently. The NPC magister, stays home and runs the country - according to the wishes of the PCs. I let the PCs give me broad direction - then the NPC magister prepares a report with a number of options - and the players choose the option they want :)
It is still their country, they decide the priorities, someone else does the dirty work /....
The Sorcerer baron wants to take leadership, taking Mikmek as his main guy along with a small cohort of bodyguards. Adding 2-3 lvl 1-2 guys won't be much of a problem, I'l simply buff encounters and that will be it.
Our group has pretty consistently just continued going out to deal with threats we've heard about. We come back to stabilize the kingdom regularly, but for some reason, we've remained certain that our group is the best (or possibly only) decent response to danger. We've actually run into a minor problem trying to stop adventuring - we're actively trying to spend more time running the kingdom, but we keep having to run out and deal with monsters and cursed castles and whatnot.
There's a way to engineer this attitude, if you think it might help.
Tell them that their kingdom's guard patrols, or scouts, or prospective settlers, or whatever, have been bringing in reports of X threat, or Y mysterious circumstance. They will probably ride out to deal with it, but if they don't, have it start impacting morale in the kingdom, or ramping up the threat the longer it goes unhandled until it becomes a serious danger to the city they're so intent on building up ("Remember those reports of trolls to the west? Well, in the absence of any royal response, they've grown bold, and are now attacking your farms.")
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Forgot if she did Orthos, but the fight was memorable and they had to use everything they had on it, so I say a job well done.