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(Assume for a second, all you had to focus on was the narrative and roleplaying aspects)
How would Kingmaker work if each player wanted their own kingdom to run, yet still work as a team over-all?
Like; Each player runs their own minor nation within a loose alliance, fostering both shared adventuring and individual kingdom management.
Maybe those "named" NPC companions would all of a sudden, be WAY more valuable to help avoid vacancy penalties.
Any suggestions on how the GM can help prevent it from spiraling into a friendship ending, game of thrones style, last man standing scenario? keep the focus on fighting outside threats?
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IF it’s more narrative & roleplaying aspects, then I assume it’s forgoing the number tallying & mechanics of the base kingdom management system. Less about “how much ore & lumber the nation gets per turn” & more about “negotiating mining privileges with the Sootscale Kobolds that reside on a silver mine spot” or “fostering compromise between your lumbermills & the local faeries”. To that end, the base assumption of a single nation is that resources, laws, & alliances are shared across the kingdom. But if you have each player controlling their own portion, that isn’t necessarily the case anymore. An Alliance with the lizardfolk near Candlemere lake makes more sense for the neighboring barony rather than who’s ever far away busy in the mountains. But that isn’t necessarily a bad thing either, as it would foster unique qualities to each mini nation.
But to prevent conflict, because players WILL find differences in opinions to things in-game, it would most likely help to have a shared agreement of chivalry or unity, to foster peaceful accord for centuries. Something like a list of core edicts that each nation promises to uphold, similar to how the River Kingdoms operate with their "River Freedoms". The consequences of breaking the code leading to kingdom events like public outcry, scandals, cult activity, etc. Speaking of which, I’ve seen a lot of people recommend for those that choose to simplify kingdom management to keep using the random kingdom events, because they really do add a lot of fun narrative.
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Maybe those "named" NPC companions would all of a sudden, be WAY more valuable to help avoid vacancy penalties.
Wait, you're not going to try to actually run the full kingdom system for all of them, are you? Because that sounds like an absolute nightmare. Kingdom turns are slow for one kingdom, it'd take forever with four of them.
Any suggestions on how the GM can help prevent it from spiraling into a friendship ending, game of thrones style, last man standing scenario? keep the focus on fighting outside threats?
The obvious answer is "don't do it". If you want everyone on the same team, put them on the same team.
If you put people onto separate teams with their own interests to look out for, at some point someone is going to do that. Like, I don't get what the reason for making this change is unless you want to give them the ability to pursue diverging policies and plans, which might come into conflict at some point.
So you want to do that but you also don't want them to actually do that in any major way? I guess if you throw enough external problems at them that require them to band together to cope with, they'll never actually diverge enough for it to become an issue... but that's effectively just a more complex version of having one kingdom anyway.
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One slightly less stressful idea you might try is giving each player their own settlement. That's how our group did it. There was one kingdom ruler, who obviously ruled the capital, and then as the kingdom expanded to encompass more settlements, each PC was given a settlement to run as they saw fit. When conflict came up between the settlements (over where to spend gold for new buildings and what not), the ruler would arbitrate fairly.
This worked well for our group especially since we had a couple players that weren't interested in ruling a whole kingdom, but they did like having their own small village or town. And everyone was working towards the success of the kingdom as a whole, so that kept inter party conflict down to a minimum.
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Yeah, you could let each PC be mayor of a given settlement and make the building decisions there (and narratively be in charge of it), while still part of the same kingdom.
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for more context, I'm using automation to manage all of the kingdom meta and turns, etc ... which in theory, makes these questions possible ;)
When playing around with the idea, it has pros/cons ... we put together the idea that from past failed attempts, the Swordlords wanted to break the stolen lands up into allied "states", each ran by a PC lord.
Mechanically, this means managing a few low level kingdoms ... which actually, is a positive since lower level == lower DCs for all checks. levels 1-4 kingdom management is actually super easy (starts with a DC14 control check).
We came up with a set of amulets that lets the players teleport to their capitals once per month to perform their kingdom checks. Then they meet back up to pursue adventures as a group.
But it feels like there are a lot of potential ways to play this out.