Kingdom Rules

[dmchucky69]

So everywhere I look, it’s all doom and gloom with the Kingdom subsystem. Leveling is too slow, not enough ability score increases, skill checks are slanted against the players, etc.

But we all know that complainers are always louder.

What I want to know, are there folks out there that LIKE the rules as is? Are there any fans of running the rules without alteration?

Does anyone have a positive view of the 2nd Edition Kingdom rules out of the box?

[VanceMadrox]

I've probably actually tested the rules more than anyone and I've never heard anyone say they like them as written.

James Jacobs has said they weren't playtested and it really shows once you try and use them.

The basic ideas are solid though, they just needed a few rounds of playtesting, not a full rework. Kerenshara and I spent months doing sims and playtesting before we shared our fixes, I'd recommend doing a sim and testing them out yourself to see how you feel about them.

[demlin]

The kingdom rules are mostly fine math wise and I think the complaints are widely overblown. I run no adjustments, no additional ability score/skill increases nor do I give out extra skills. Only thing that I adjust is the XP gain which is truly broken.

Skill checks are not slated against the PCs, there's always a way out with Supernatural Solution. That means you need to skill into Magic, much like everyone needs to skill into Medicine. Remember, if you don't fail, you can't accrue unrest or ruin and then there's no point in removing them using Leadership activities.

The real big issues are:

* Structures are extremely hard to calculate. I can't fathom doing them by hand.
* The rules are not fun: they are hard to balance (time wise), don't offer fun strategic choices yet take a lot of time.

Ruin does not work (threshold is way too high). You've got 12 actions to take leadership activities. There are only so many things you can do and almost none of them have a real big impact. You can grow your kingdom but there is no pressure or goal.

In a way it's similar to simple hazards: if you run into a simple hazard, you spend some time healing the damage with treat wounds afterwards, then continue. Now imagine a 1 hour dungeon filled with simple hazards.

Armies come way too late and sort of justify getting more settlements up. Then again, it takes 2 months to deploy and attack with an army (if you beat the rolls) and combat consists mostly of rolling attack rolls that deal 1 damage.

By default, each army can move, flee or attack. That's it. Everything else is baked into tactics. No strategic positioning, not a lot of fun choices. No real guidelines of how long you should let PCs recruit them, or how many armies you should throw at them.

The good parts: Kingdom Events. Great thing, easy to flavor. You can also easily move those into the Kingdom in the Background type of game by replacing kingdom skills with PC skill checks. That's about it.

[VanceMadrox]

Demlin, I'm curious, How high a level have you gotten to in Kingdom Building?

Our tests found the math is fine at lower levels, it only breaks down at higher levels for non-invested skills.

Also even without adjusting the math it's hard to accumulate unrest and ruin, most of the time simply failing doesn't get any, only crit failing.

I also wish the rules were more fun. Kerenshara and I are currently working on some full blown house rules taking elements from Ultimate Rulership and Ultimate Cities.

[Phntm888]

My plan for running this was 1 year of downtime for Kingdom Building in between chapters. Since the events of Blood for Blood aren't supposed to start until the Kingdom is level 4, I decided to sim one year of Kingdom Building from founding. After 9 turns, I estimated that it would take 4-5 in-game years of Kingdom Building before the Kingdom gained enough XP to be level 4. The XP gain was seriously lacking. This ties into the next two problems directly.

Because you can't grow settlements beyond a Village until you get to Kingdom Level 3, you'll run out of things to build in each of your settlements fairly quickly.

Tying into that is the fact that you can only build Farms within a settlement's area of influence, which settlements don't have until they become Towns at level 3. That means you need to continually either spend RP to pay Consumption or use a lot of gather food commodity/trade commodities actions every turn until you can grow your settlements to Towns. Which is good because a lot of Leadership Activities aren't always useful or can only be used if you are at least Trained in a skill.

Ultimately, the most egregious issue with the Kingdom Building Rules as written is the XP gain is far too slow. This is also easy to solve by increasing the amount of XP gained for unused resource points (RP) to 5 or 10 XP per RP, or by using milestone leveling on the Kingdom itself.

I also have lots of opinions about the limited number of skills Kingdoms get, but the rules are playable without any changes there. As demlin said, just make sure your players choose Magic as one of their Kingdom Skills and do a Supernatural Solution Leadership Activity every turn.

[demlin]

VanceMadrox wrote:

Demlin, I'm curious, How high a level have you gotten to in Kingdom Building?

Our tests found the math is fine at lower levels, it only breaks down at higher levels for non-invested skills.

We're currently level 12, but still, the higher you level, the more skill trainings you can use to train skills and there's always supernatural solution available. Invested skills balance the kingdom size penalty plus you can very easily gain +1-+2 circumstance bonuses in many cases to even cancel the -4.

[Gristoufle]

Correct me if I'm wrong but investing a leadership role doesn't given you any skill training (except at kingdom creation), just a flat status bonus on the relevants kingdom ability scores modifiers.
Plus using your rare skill increases to get skills to trained means you don't increase other to expert/master, so you'll eventually fall behind the control DC math since it is expected you're basically master in everything to have the slightest chance to succeed at some point.
V&S did a marvelous job when calculating this, and I thank them for this work cause I've used it instantly and extensively (I even flavored the changes to come from various kingdom NPC offering their expertises for the bonus skills for instance)
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GCf0OA9Ajdb5PWw0IbHU36ebMxmpNLzFbXVA2HO Uzog

[VanceMadrox]

demlin wrote:

VanceMadrox wrote:

Demlin, I'm curious, How high a level have you gotten to in Kingdom Building?

Our tests found the math is fine at lower levels, it only breaks down at higher levels for non-invested skills.

We're currently level 12, but still, the higher you level, the more skill trainings you can use to train skills and there's always supernatural solution available. Invested skills balance the kingdom size penalty plus you can very easily gain +1-+2 circumstance bonuses in many cases to even cancel the -4.

Our main goal was simply to make the math match regular Pathfinder 2e Math. Not changing things means you wind up a few points behind but that's not insurmountable.

I don't consider circumstance bonuses making up the difference as valid way to offset things simply because in regular PF2e you're also meant to be able to get circumstance bonuses.

Rerolls are vastly easier to come by in the Kingdom Building rules though and we're curtailing that a little in our homebrew.

[VanceMadrox]

Gristoufle wrote:

Correct me if I'm wrong but investing a leadership role doesn't given you any skill training (except at kingdom creation), just a flat status bonus on the relevants kingdom ability scores modifiers.

Technically invested Leadership gives you a Status Bonus to any skill that uses a Kingdom Attribute that's associated with the key attribute of an Invested Leadership roll.

This maxes at +3 and roughly counters the Size Increase to Control DC (which maxes at +4)

Our math fixes are ultimately fairly small.
None of our changes increase the Top End Math at all. The max bonus you can have in a skill at a given level doesn't change.

Our changes just allow you to have more skills reach a higher proficiency.

In the base rules you can still succeed with Trained Skills at higher levels, it's just harder than success with a Trained Skill would be in Regular PF2e.

I also stand by more Skill Increases simply for being able to unlock more Structures. A given group is likely only going to play Kingmaker once. A given group should be able to unlock whatever they want, in the base rules Skill Increases were few enough you really needed to use them for the most important Skills.

[Phntm888]

VanceMadrox wrote:

I also stand by more Skill Increases simply for being able to unlock more Structures. A given group is likely only going to play Kingmaker once. A given group should be able to unlock whatever they want, in the base rules Skill Increases were few enough you really needed to use them for the most important Skills.

This was one of my biggest issues with the Kingdom Skills as written, especially if the players don't know the rules well enough to know what skills they need to have in order to build the structures they want to build.

[demlin]

Gristoufle wrote:

Plus using your rare skill increases to get skills to trained means you don't increase other to expert/master, so you'll eventually fall behind the control DC math since it is expected you're basically master in everything to have the slightest chance to succeed at some point.
/d/1GCf0OA9Ajdb5PWw0IbHU36ebMxmpNLzFbXVA2HOUzog

That's not really true. Proficiency bonus combined with ability bonuses, guaranteed item and circumstance bonuses grows faster than a level based DCs. Again, failing skill checks is fine.

If you hand out too much, you won't be able to make use of many Leadership activities.

[demlin]

Regarding DC math:

Level based DC at level 1 is 15:

1 (level) + 1 (ability) + 2 (trained): succeeds on an 11 or higher -> 50% chance to succeed

Level based DC at level 20 is 40:

20 (level) + 4 (ability) + 2 (trained) + 3 (item): succeeds on a 11 or higher -> 50% chance to succeed

So no, the system is not built to force you into proficiencies higher than trained. Granted it takes some juggling around regarding ability modifiers, but those sort of cap out at 18. At least for the kingdom I think it's a bad idea to go for anything higher than 18 since you can't really specialize.

Proficiency requirements with regards to buildings (as mentioned before) is the biggest offender in that regard.

[VanceMadrox]

Pathfinder 2e is designed so that your chances of success at an on level DC increase as your Proficiency goes up. I'll also argue that if you're leaving a skill at trained you're highly unlikely to get a +3 Item for it. So your chance of success does go down. Expert is much closer to the break even point than Trained.

For Kingdom Building I agree level 1 isn't a problem on the Math.
Level 20 isn't actually too bad either.

In our Problem Discussion document though I've shown that in the Teens Kingdom math for lower skills is about 3 points behind basic Pathfinder 2e Math.

That's 15% overall. With the reroll tools in the Kingdom Building rules this probably isn't insurmountable but our goal was to make the Kingdom math match base PF2e.

Even if you don't change the Kingdom Math you'll find there aren't enough always useful Leadership actions.

[Deriven Firelion]

I prefer the PF1 kingdom building rules. I can see what James was trying to do, but it got to be too much rolling and minutiae for not much benefit. The PF1 rules were more fun and the PCs received more of a benefit for building.

I know some wanted character abilities divorced from the kingdom building rules this time, but I'd prefer they mattered more.

I found the redundant, non-stacking bonuses from feats problematic as it made the feats unattractive. A status bonus from a feat doesn't stack with the PCs investment status bonus, so why bother to pick up a feat.

The kingdom building rules need some testing and more feedback to make them more fun. Buildings shouldn't be tied to skills. It's a bad idea given how few skills you end up with as a kingdom, especially skills that aren't increased.

It really irritated my players needing things like boating for a waterfront or needing some high skill for a palace then another for an embassy knowing you would never have both skills that high. A real kingdom doesn't work like that at all. You have an embassy because you're a kingdom, not because you have a particular skill.

It was harmful to verisimilitude as well as an excess of rolls that became very tedious.

Rolls should be focused on important things like kingdom events or battle. Kingdom building should just work like it did in PF1.