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I'm going to toss these on here as this is the best I could come up with given the structure of the rules.
My goals with these house rules:
1. Streamline kingdom building.
2. Enable players to build an interesting and involved kingdom that can roll to do anything. Kingdoms should not be limited like players. They should have access to every skill and be able to roll to do everything. Kingdoms are thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of people. Limiting skills like you are regular character is not a great way to simulate this.
3. Make tasks that shouldn't be so difficult easy. If you've claimed a hex before, it shouldn't become nearly impossible to claim at high level. It should become easier to do simple tasks.
4. I provided skill ups every level. Limited skill ups combined with high DC rolls was such a bad way to do kingdom building that I'm not sure how it wasn't seen as a problem. For example, my players' kingdom is level 14 and put no skill ups in agriculture which gives them a bonus roll of +18 with a DC of 36 for level 14 Dominion.
That means they would need to roll an 18 or better to Establish Farmland, something they've been doing since the early levels is now nearly impossible due the way the kingdom building rules are made. If they don't spend multiple skill ups to obtain a Master level in Agriculture, this simple task is nearly impossible. Even if they spend to obtain a Master level, their roll would be +24 with a 14 stability. That means they need a 12 or better at level 14 to Establish Farmland, an over 50 percent failure rate.
You couple this with all the different skills you need to conduct warfare and industry and negotiation and the like, you have kingdom rules that set the players up for a lot of failure and frustrating kingdom building that makes everything far too complicated, difficult, and gives the feeling of a nearly impossible task of building up a successful kingdom.
If they decide to redo the kingdom rules, please get rid of the idea a kingdom should be like a character and focus on making it fun, fulfilling, and far, far simpler like they did in PF1.
I did as much as I could to make kingdom building something the players can enjoy and feel good about. This is what I came up with after trial and error trying to make the kingdom building usable.
Kingdom Building House Rules
KINGDOM CREATION
1. Start all statistics at 12 instead of 10 before applying modifiers during kingdom creation.
2. The kingdom starts with trained proficiency in every skill.
3. Choose Leaders: Each PC provides the kingdom with a skill increase to a Kingdom Skill of their choice increasing the skill to expert proficiency. This is in addition to the stat increases you receive from the other choices made during kingdom creation.
4. All starting choices that provide trained in a skill instead provide a skill increase to a maximum of expert.
INGDOM LEVELING
SKILL INCREASES: Your kingdom gains a skill increase every level starting at 2nd level.
LEADERSHIP ROLES
Key Ability This lists the kingdom ability score that is most impacted by the leader. When this role is invested, all Kingdom skill checks based on this ability gain a +1 leadership bonus. This bonus increases to +2 when the kingdom reaches 8th level, and then to +3 when the kingdom reaches 16th level.
KINGDOM SKILLS
BASIC SKILL CHECKS: Many activities call for a basic skill check—a skill check where the DC is your kingdom’s Control DC.
SIMPLE SKILL CHECKS: Some skills maintain their level of difficulty regardless of your kingdom’s level. These skill actions require a DC 15 skill check modified by the Kingdom Size Modifier.
Simple Skill Actions: Abandon Hex, Build Roads, Celebrate Holiday, Claim Hex, Clear Hex, Demolish, Establish Farmland, Establish Settlement, Establish Work Site, Harvest Crops, Gather Livestock, Go Fishing, Harvest Crops, Irrigation.
KINGDOM FEATS
Kingdom Feats: Special: All kingdom feats that provide a status bonus to a skill stack with the leadership bonus provided by Invested Leadership roles for a skill, but do not stack with other feats that provide a status bonus to the same skill. The additional status bonus for a given skill can only be provided by a single feat.
RUNNING A KINGDOM
Kingdom Level: The Kingdom level equals the PC’s level.
Resource Points: Any remaining resource points can be saved for future use.
SETTLEMENTS
Influence: Villages: 1 Hex. Town: 2 Hexes. City: 3 Hexes. Metropolis: 4 Hexes.
STRUCTURES
Buildings: Keep, Castle, and Palace: Add Residential tag to these buildings.
Buildings: All structures are based on Engineering skill or any skill that acts as Engineering such as Magic if you have the Practical Magic feat. You can also use the listed skill if it is higher than your Engineering or equivalent skill.
This is about as simple as I can make it while enabling players to build a robust, powerful feeling kingdom that enables them to feel like they're not overly limited.
It took quite a few modifications and much testing. I finally hit a tolerable spot for myself and the players.
This looks pretty good! You hit a lot of my pain points.
That means they would need to roll an 18 or better to Establish Farmland, something they've been doing since the early levels is now nearly impossible due the way the kingdom building rules are made. If they don't spend multiple skill ups to obtain a Master level in Agriculture, this simple task is nearly impossible. Even if they spend to obtain a Master level, their roll would be +24 with a 14 stability. That means they need a 12 or better at level 14 to Establish Farmland, an over 50 percent failure rate.
This in particular drives me nuts. I'm literally at a point right now where I'm looking at our kingdom's situation and thinking "we don't actually want to gain a level", which is an absolutely ridiculous thing to say with how PF2 is normally structured.
But that's where we are. Gaining a level will raise every DC by 2, and we will not get enough gains to compensate. We'll become actively worse at doing things than we are right now, even things we've done multiple times already. Considering we've already had a couple of bad turns because we're already struggling with DCs vs our skills (especially if we don't have Supernatural Solution), another DC hike is just going to be painful. With the base rules, going from level 4 to level 6 with a size increase in there causes the DCs to go up by 5. There's just no possible way to keep up with that in the standard rules.
Establishing a Farm should not be harder the 10th time you do it than it was the 1st time you did it, especially when it's the same hex.
I felt some of this stuff should have used the zone DC, which would make building in some areas quite difficult but would never get harder because you levelled and would at least have some kind of logical consistency. But "you gain a level and are now suddenly worse at farming in the area you're already farming" is totally baffling.
Influence: Villages: 1 Hex. Town: 2 Hexes. City: 3 Hexes. Metropolis: 4 Hexes.
This one also bugged me. How can villages not have farms? Farming villages were extremely common. This is a good change.
1. Start all statistics at 12 instead of 10 before applying modifiers during kingdom creation.
2. The kingdom starts with trained proficiency in every skill.
3. Choose Leaders: Each PC provides the kingdom with a skill increase to a Kingdom Skill of their choice increasing the skill to expert proficiency. This is in addition to the stat increases you receive from the other choices made during kingdom creation.
4. All starting choices that provide trained in a skill instead provide a skill increase to a maximum of expert.
This is clever. Might want to set a limit on it, since a group with 6 PCs will get more starting expert skills than a group of 4.