Comfortable standard of living & the camping rules


Kingmaker Second Edition


About to enter the hexploration portion of the campaign, and our party druid combines Forager, their coyote cloak, and the elven feat Woodcraft to rather casually provide a comfortable standard of living to ridiculous numbers of people in the wild (I'm taking care not to stack degrees of success, but Forager increases the payout of a success and critical, coyote cloak doubles the benefits of a critical success, and Woodcraft upgrades the degree in forests). I must be going blind in my old age; are the various standards of living on the chart in the equipment section of the core book actually detailed anywhere? And, more importantly, how would a standard of living interact with the camping rules?
I'm thinking of providing 1 basic ingredient in addition to each provision provided, in order to facilitate better meals, but would assume that comfortable living is about what you'd get with a private room at an inn, so there's more to it than food. Any suggestions? Maybe a status bonus to some of the checks, or accelerated natural healing?


Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

I have not yet been able to understand how the forager feat interacts with the camping rules. It seems impossible to survive without rations, which seems at odd with the basic Subsist rules.

(I'm a player, so no spoilers please.)


If you're using the full camping rules from the Companion Guide then in stage 3 - Eating, folks either use rations, eat a prepared meal or Subsist.

The big thing is that Subsist means you don't need rations but also you don't get the benefits of the prepared meals.

As for any benefits of standard of living, for me that's a RP thing more than anything.


There's no actual codified mechanical benefits, they're just for RP benefits

A suggestion I've seen is giving a hero point for someone going out of their way for a better standard of living since Hero Points are on average supposed to be given out for every 1 hour of play

So I think it'd be sensible, they dropped 2 feats and bought an item to specifically be good at providing a comfy life on the road not just for them but everyone, and in Kingmaker you can have loads of people at a time in your group

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For when your in civilization, i've also seen suggestions like making it so that NPCs from certain walks of life respond better or worse depending on on your standard of living, i.g urchins like you more of your on Subsistence, working folks like farmers like if you live a comfy, well of folks like Fine, and nobles love extravagant

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I think just giving only 1 basic ingredient is fine as is, a status bonus to checks I feel can be fairly strong for something someone can do pretty much automatically and then further bolster at higher levels, and accelerated natural healing I feel could step on one of the abilities a companion could provide, otherwise I think it'd be fine

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Also, the camping rules can be really confusing, and the fluff can make it really hard to parse while your mid session, I made a camping rules clarification here.


Chris_Fougere wrote:

If you're using the full camping rules from the Companion Guide then in stage 3 - Eating, folks either use rations, eat a prepared meal or Subsist.

The big thing is that Subsist means you don't need rations but also you don't get the benefits of the prepared meals.

As for any benefits of standard of living, for me that's a RP thing more than anything.

Ye spot on the rules

I will say it's weird because it honestly seems like there's supposed to be some decision making behind doing Basic Meals or Rations or Subsist, since Basic Meals is more efficient ration wise, but subsist is just really easy to augment and rations are cheap as hell and weigh nothing

Like, Basic Meal, it's only a fail on a meal just satiates you, a fail on Hunt and Gather to get basic ingredients gives you 7 days worth of ingridients, minimum, and it becomes 20 days worth by end game locations, and a basic meal always costs 2 basic ingredient + 1 ration, and a weeks worth of rations is just 4sp, assuming a 4 person party in the span of a week, making a basic meal for them only expends 7 days worth of rations, while eating rations only expends 28 rations in a week

But downsides is you attract more encounters, (Hunt & Gather in general is a camp trait activity so it naturally attracts encounters), but because rations are so efficient, theres no point in trying to risk encounters to make a Basic Meal (all of this null for Special Meals cuz the buffs they can give are crazy)

I wish Kingmaker had some optional rules that went 100% instead of being on the fence and shipped with more harsher rations and nerfed to survival stuff since it seems like the Kingmaker wants to have more of a survival feel and it would give Step 3 more weight than it actually does currently to make resource management more of a thing, but

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