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I'm currently running Chapter 8 (War of the River Kings), albeit with several modifications farmed from these forums. We started in late December 2022 and took a six-month hiatus this time last year, as one player became a new parent. Some general thoughts:
1. I find some of the monster stat blocks a bit bland in comparison to their PF2 counterparts, but I think that's as much a symptom of 5E monster design as anything else. They're still a good starting point for my own modifications, though.
2. For DCs, my general rule is to leave DCs below 20 untouched. For DCs higher than 20, I take half the Pathfinder DC and add 5 or 7, depending on what feels right.
3. We used the Kingdom Rules largely RAW (with the exception of giving Untrained skills a boost to keep them somewhat viable), but after Chapter 4 and running one in-game year, the players felt they had placed a good foundation and didn't need to micromanage things. We've switched to "Kingdom in the Background" and left most of it to roleplay.
4. I haven't used the mass combat rules, opting instead for a homebrew system with the army unit rules in the book as a rough guide. It's a marriage of Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Unicorn Overlord, and the players have enjoyed it more than I expected!
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Hello there!
My group just finished the Kingmaker AP that we started in December 2020 and we went all the way playing with DnD 5E rules (2014 edition). We discovered the rules with this campaign (coming from DnD 3.5 initially). As a DM, I started the AP by converting the encounters more or less on-the-fly (before each session) using 5E bestiary resources available on the web (https://5e.tools/bestiary.html). I switched to the Kingmaker Second edition in the middle of Drelev chapter and found the 5E bestiary really helpful. As James Neal mentionned, DnD 5E monsters are quite simplistic and lack versatility when playing them RAW but it's a DnD 5E thing. Combining the Second Edition Kingmaker storyline with the 5E bestiary worked really neatly (and was much easier than doing it myself).
For skills and other DCs, I used the resources found on the web to do the conversion from PF1E to DnD 5E (https://samhaine.wordpress.com/2018/07/16/pathfinder-to-5e-setting-dcs/) and later to convert from PF2E to PF1E to make the bridge with the new edition (https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/i4u2yl/i_made_a_complete_1e _to_2e_skill_dc_conversion/).
Narratively speaking, I had played one or two chapters of the video game when we started and I made my own mash-up scenario by mixing the original AP (PF1E) with elements of the video game and some homebrew stuff. I also included several treasured scenario ideas found on this forum (Redcelt's Game of Thrones in Brevoy, Erik Freund's Venture Capital, Dudemeister's Hargulka's Monster Kingdom, pennywit's Spring Feast, ...) and we loved all of these. I included several third party content in the campaign in-between main chapters (Carnival of Tears, Cold mountain, Horns of the Hunted). When we switched to the Kingmaker Second edition storyline, I somehow kept a few ideas from Dudemeister's Clockwork Kingdom to add in Pitax (mainly for changing Irovetti's background because I had planned for it in advance).
For the kingdom management rule, I screwed up a bit. I did not like the old edition ones and I did not see the new edition ones (they did not exist at the time we needed them) so I went with a remix of the 'Fate-based realm building rules' found on this forum that I tried to combine with 5E stats. This ended up being terribly unbalanced and later became very time consuming. We played this part of the campaign on our own Discord channel and it expanded the world dramatically, which was very nice from a RP perspective, introducing new characters, organizations and small sub-plots, but it quickly took too much time and investment. We dropped it before starting the Blood for Blood Chapter and played the mass combat part mainly RP. I have no idea what the Second Edition rules look like and how they could translate to DnD 5E stats. If I had to do it again, I would probably replace all that kingdom management stuff by homebrew ad-hoc non-combat encounters with skill checks based on their RP decisions, and that would influence where the kingdom is going through the years. That is the most innovative and fun part of that AP and it is important to make it memorable in a good way. I did not like when my PCs took meta decisions on where to allocate kingdom resources based on the balancing of the kingdom rules I gave them. They should feel the consequences in a roleplaying way with less number crunching.
For the magic loot, I just waved it out of the equation. At first, I spent time converting the values of loot at each level from PF1E to DnD 5E. Quickly I simply gave magic items to my PCs like I would have done in a homebrew campaign. Money makes no sense for kings and councilors anyway so it was all about balancing encounters versus players power. At the end, I just went 'yeah you got lots of treasures from the dragon's hoard but you just don't care, your kingdom is in danger'. DnD 5E remains balanced even if you give them no magic item. I only gave them the really iconic items of the campaign and balanced them in function of my needs.
I put pretty few restrictions on the races/classes/skills, mainly standard balancing stuff to avoid some OP subclasses. The 'Oath of the ancients' paladin was a paladin of 'Erastil' and that's the only adaptation we had to look at for all the builds my players experimented. At the end of the campaign, I also let some players respec in DnD 5.5 (oneDnD) and it had no impact story-wise.
I just remember saying 'no' to Aarakokras at the beginning of the campaign because I saw no equivalent in Golarion universe at the time. Thinking back on it, Kenkus are a thing. I also was not at ease with warlocks at first (that was new to me) but thinking about it retroactively that would be very fitting to have a character's patron to be one of the Ancients or maybe even big N herself.
All in all, the campaign was the greatest I ever DMed and DnD 5E rules were totally compatible with the setting. I hope you'll enjoy it when you get to playing it :-D .
Good to have some free links to convertin' PF-to-D&D5e (samhaine.wordpress.com) and convertin' PF1e to PF2e+ (Dogs_Not_Gods) stuff out there, Banedon_421. ;)