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I plan to change the proficiency bonus of Untrained Kingdom skills from a flat 0 (at all levels) to Level -2 instead.
In the early game, this will have almost no impact, but at higher levels this will prevent scaling Control DCs from making a substantial percentage of checks effectively impossible.
Kingdom rules are kind of like an alternate PF2e universe where:
- There were only 4 attributes
- Each one tied to 4 skills, for a total of 16 skills
- Every check uses one of the skills
- Almost every important check was tied to a DC based on the PC's level (almost, but not exactly the table in PF2e's default level-based DCs)
- There was only a single PC in the party, so no way to get someone else to cover the skills
- The single PC got 6 trained skills, but could give up feat slots or skill increases (gets 9 of each) to become trained in more
And as a result:
- Untrained skills gradually become catastrophically bad, and at higher levels gradually become guaranteed fail/crit-fails. The PC is forced to become trained in those skills, giving up feats or other proficiency increases, or accept terrible results on 10 of 16 skills.
I did some quick math, assuming the use of control DC, that size bonuses to those DCs increase (at levels 5, 10, 14, and 18), with the maximum attribute bonus (+4 to +6 at 20), with full status bonuses from leaders, with maximum item bonus for level (often not even possible, since they tend to be for specific uses of a skill), with no circumstance bonus, and with no penalties of any kind.
- The required roll to succeed on an untrained check goes from 8 to 32 (at levels 1 and 20, and again, this is mostly best case scenario). At level 10 you only succeed (with a crit) on a nat 20 (and you crit fail on a 10), from levels 11 to 17 a nat 20 only gets a success (crit fail from 12 to 18), and from 18 to 20 a nat 20 is the only way to not crit fail.
- The impact of this is that things that were pretty possible untrained (like Establish Farmland or Go Fishing) gradually become impossible (and you usually trigger the crit fails for a Crop Failure or lost fishers to tragic accidents).
- The simplest to implement (and what I plan to do) is to change Untrained to scale with level, e.g., "level -2." DCs scale faster than level, so untrained skills will still gradually get harder to succeed with but generally still be possible under good conditions. They'll still lag behind trained (effectively at a -4), and will still be unable to do anything that requires trained. It's also very slightly worse at level 1 versus the base rules (proficiency gives -1 total instead of 0), but that's very minor.
- A harder approach would be to manually determine which specific kingdom skill use cases should use non-scaling DCs (there are a few in the story, but really the only thing in the kingdom rules that doesn't is construction of specific buildings). This would also have an impact that higher-level kingdoms basically autosucceed at stuff that was possible for low-level kingdoms.
- Somewhere in the middle is granting extra trained skills (maybe one for each leader role filled simultaneously), which still has catastrophic outcomes for some skills later, but just those specific skills (I'm not really a fan of this).
- Add an alternate use for fame/infamy points, maybe for a guaranteed success
- Add ways for the party to deal with the problems outside of the kingdom turns (which is called out for on a bunch of events as areas where the GM could add a quest)
- The players are less likely to spend kingdom feats/skill increases on new trained skills. This seems fine, generally. It's still going to be tempting as the jump from untrained to trained is still +4.
- The players might want more feats to pick from - they get 1 free, can pick 9, and there are only 17 in the book, so I might homebrew up a few more.
- The kingdom is more likely to have a couple of skills it's just great at, as the players can spend them boosting skills up to legendary if they want. This mostly just keeps them at the same spot on the treadmill they were at level 1 if they were trained in the skill, anyway, due to the increased scaling for DCs.
– They could spend a bunch of kingdom feats/skill increases on getting skills trained, but it feels almost forced. Probably mostly burning feats is the smarter call (even if it takes nearly all of them); since DCs scale, the only way to keep your top skills as easy at endgame as they were at the beginning is by boosting them up toward Legendary. There's also a bunch of buildings that require trained/expert/master to build at all.
- They can do a lot of "Focused Attention" to get +2 circumstance bonuses. This is basically "aid" without penalty for failing the initial aid roll. The DC stays at 20 so it can become very reliable for trained skills. The Cooperative Leadership feat makes the benfit a +3, and when the kingdom reaches level 11 you can't crit fail at the aided check.
- They could get a few other feats that make dealing with bad skills easier, like Practical Magic (making it cheaper to hire adventurers to solve problems + letting you roll magic for engineering) or Pull Together (flat check to turn critical failure into failure, not quite as effective when you're critically failing checks often).
- They could embrace Magic and Supernatural Solution as the cure to all issues, prepping those in advance for skills that you know you'll roll, and trading Resource Points for competence elsewhere. This is still really good with non-catastrophic Untrained proficiency, but not as necessary.
- Feats tend to give status bonuses of +1, despite it being trivial to start even your first Kingdom turn with +1 status bonuses to all skills (from 4 invested leaders across one role for each attribute). So for a lot of feats the math increase is useless out of the gate; it's probably worth changing those to circumstance bonuses
- Kingdom size DC increases mostly negate the automatic increases in status bonuses from invested leaders
- Assurance mostly won't succeed against control DCs due to DCs outscaling trained proficiency and size DC increases affecting the DC, not the roll
- Kingdom events almost exclusively require a single skill to resolve (there are basically two story ones that have alternatives)
- For random events, they're basically not going to benefit from item bonuses (from structures) because they won't be the specific skill use
- Random events are also harder to plan for, since you didn't know they were going to come up so you probably didn't use Focused Attention or Supernatural Solution for the skill earlier in the kingdom turn.
- Event DC modifiers range from -1 to +2 for random events, but are almost all +0 or +1
- Story events change the Event DC modifier range to -2 to +4 (!!!) but are more likely to have alternate resolutions (like "go do a thing")
- Even a single point of unrest gives you a -1 penalty to every kingdom skill check; if you're at war, for instance, you get these every turn
- Bad things that happen tend to give unrest/ruin, making further bad things more likely, so presumably kingdom roll penalty death spirals are a real possibility
- Random events can give circumstance bonuses if a specific leader is a PC - for a party of 4, it can be a little better/worse than 50/50 depending on which 4 roles are filled by PCs
- A bunch of buildings require trained/expert/master to build (none require legendary), so spending skill increases on just "trained" can cut off some options
- Skills aren't created equal, but some of this is hidden from players (for example, 4 of the 16 skills are not used by random or story events)
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Another option is to use the option of removing Level from DCs and skills.
So proficiency provides a bonus, but there is always a chance of success. It does mean there's a few specific DCs that need to be reverse engineered, but overall it should be a smooth experience all the way through.
The same could be done with Armies as well.
Another option is to use the option of removing Level from DCs and skills.
That's true, and it didn't occur to me despite literally checking the Proficiency Without Level alternate rule to see what the Untrained penalty was there.
It might be preferable for players in 5e, using the 5e conversion Bestiary or something. The lower DCs would be more familiar for those players.
Ironically, you might also want to still add the -2 for untrained just to make a bigger difference between untrained and trained, as recommended by the Gamemastery Guide for Proficiency Without Level.
It would add more work in that you'd need to manually convert all the building construction DCs, and consider adding arbitrary level limits on when you could build them.
But the control DCs would be a quick conversion, since you only need to rebuild the table once.
I'll likely stick with scaling skills, but you've given me something else to think about. For armies, I'm not sure I want to mix/match the impact of level differences in characters versus the level differences on armies.
I think at least some consideration will be in what tools I eventually use to track/automate things. Just scaling proficiency is likely going to be the more surgical approach.
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It would add more work in that you'd need to manually convert all the building construction DCs, and consider adding arbitrary level limits on when you could build them.
Structures already have levels independent of their construction DC and can't be built until a Kingdom is at least that level.
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I'm curious, how well does raw rules provide options for using alternate action(and ratio of whether that is another kingdom action or players doing something in encounter mode) to help deal with situation?
Like I think ideally system should work like this: by time PC kingdom can't make some untrained checks anymore they should use their main skills to work around it. Like instead of agriculture they instead trade for food or get help from ally they are allied with instead. I'm not particularly surprised to hear that some skills don't ever get called out by random events table or adventure itself, but then again I'm secretly hoping that we will get another expansion to kingdom rules eventually in ap generic book because this ap is good playtest for it and I really do want to run my homebrew kingdom building campaign ;D
But yeah profiency without level or untrained scaling profiency(whether +0 plus level or -2 plus level) should also work, maybe some additional ways to get trained skills would also work? (like no need to go as far as rogues and give skill every level, there could be like quest to improve your country's agriculture through help of importing in experts and get trained profiency as reward)
It would add more work in that you'd need to manually convert all the building construction DCs, and consider adding arbitrary level limits on when you could build them.Structures already have levels independent of their construction DC and can't be built until a Kingdom is at least that level.
I wasn't 100% sure this was the case (from memory), but thanks for confirming that's built in and would still be fine if level was removed from DC.
I brought this up here. You can see James Jacobs' responses to this exact concern. Essentially, my read is that the intent is that you either always prep Supernatural Solution or Creative Solution to allow you to use a skill you are actually trained in in order to deal with Events for skills you aren't Trained in.
I do think there should be other ways to train additional skills, but that is how the system is designed.
Thanks for pointing at James's take.
I had read it before, actually, and decided I needed to make my own post. I think I came at the issue from a different perspective - it's systemic with the design, and not something that is best solved by tweaking the number of trained skills.
PF2e's untrained proficiency math is best understood through the context of its playtest. It was really important for a few system design pieces in the original playtest (like always using skills as DCs for maneuvers and the basics of the +10/-10 crit rule) that no one was ever well below achievable results with their proficiency. So from the outset, an untrained proficiency bonus was equal to the level of the character -2.
This was really important. But some people hated it. They didn't want their high-level wizard to be able to effortlessly climb a cliff or grapple mid-level foes just because their wizard was level 17. The designers tried making the untrained proficiency bonus level -4, but that was not enough for folks who had a specific character idea that depended on selective incompetence.
And so for the release version, level to untrained proficiency was removed, a few important tweaks were made, and things went fine outside of a few specific pain points where level-based DCs reign supreme (like recall knowledge). They made sure things almost exclusively target AC/saves, because everyone is guaranteed to be at least trained there (barring wearing the wrong armor).
This isn't that, though. It makes no sense for a kingdom to gradually lose the ability to establish a farm, just because there are more people. When there are tens of thousands of people, it should be easier to find someone capable of succeeding on the basic tasks to maintain a kingdom, not literally impossible.
This is a surgical change that brings the numbers into a playable band (regardless of level), keeps the benefits of proficiency by allowing choices to still matter, and keeps every skill viable, though not necessarily reliable. Untrained skills will still be scary to roll, because crit fails will still be very easy. Just not almost guaranteed. Things like supernatural solution remain extremely powerful, but not literally the best option for half or more of your skills, with 95% percent of rolls for those skills otherwise resulting in a fail/critical fail for more than half your levels.
As written, there's not the safety net of "another PC" having the skill you're trained in, because there are no kingdoms. You can't trade being good at skills with having fantastic hit points, or attack rolls, or anything, because kingdoms only have skills.
Kingdoms are different. But the math isn't, and so this isn't a new fix. It's the very original approach, and it's just the simplest approach to balance everything for most GMs. There's no real downside to using it.
Unless your players really, really want their kingdom to auto-fail boating rolls or something.
I'm curious, how well does raw rules provide options for using alternate action(and ratio of whether that is another kingdom action or players doing something in encounter mode) to help deal with situation?
Like I think ideally system should work like this: by time PC kingdom can't make some untrained checks anymore they should use their main skills to work around it. Like instead of agriculture they instead trade for food or get help from ally they are allied with instead. I'm not particularly surprised to hear that some skills don't ever get called out by random events table or adventure itself, but then again I'm secretly hoping that we will get another expansion to kingdom rules eventually in ap generic book because this ap is good playtest for it and I really do want to run my homebrew kingdom building campaign ;D
But yeah profiency without level or untrained scaling profiency(whether +0 plus level or -2 plus level) should also work, maybe some additional ways to get trained skills would also work? (like no need to go as far as rogues and give skill every level, there could be like quest to improve your country's agriculture through help of importing in experts and get trained profiency as reward)
They mostly can't use alternate skills as direct substitutions. The one really reliable way is with Magic, using the Supernatural Solution action. Scholarship has Creative Solution, but that makes you reroll the same check with a bonus. You can also use Exploration to Hire Adventurers to end ongoing effects.
For alternate approaches (like trade) there are ways to avoid agriculture or wilderness to get food on the regular, but establishing farms scales in a way that buying food doesn't. And that's just one example, the real danger is someone running the rules as-is, getting to level 8 or so and having their kingdom essentially fall apart due to ever-increasing failures on every random event.
I would much rather spend my homebrew energy on more events or kingdom feats or skill actions that do new things instead of spending it patching the number of skills or adding a network of alternatives for each skill outcome my players can't achieve. Fixing the fundamental math frees up all that design space, because there aren't so many paths to failure to worry about.
As a quick run through how I guessed my players might make their first kingdom based on the options, without first reading what everything did. I ended up with a -1 modifier with a Culture of 8. As I looked over the rules afterward, I realized I would have instead focused on getting Culture to 18, because Magic is truly the most important skill if you want to compensate for untrained skills later. Like, as-is you could totally justify throwing every point you could into Magic, including keeping Culture maxed despite the opportunity cost to other skills, and your kingdom would probably be better off for it.
I just don't want the best solution to every problem in the kingdom to be "a wizard did it" (unless my players choose that route anyway - it will still be pretty good).