Seerow
2015-04-04, 01:12 AM
Okay, Kingmaker is the first module I've actually bothered with in a long time, but the central premise ("Go out and start a kingdom!") is one that resonates well with my group, and I've heard good things both about the module and with the Kingdom Building rules. So I decided to invest in it and try it out with my group.
First thing I did was grab a copy of Ultimate Campaign (where the kingdom building rules from Kingmaker got updated to get rid of some weird loops, or so I've heard), and picked up the Kingmaker PDFs. I've been reading through them, currently done with Ultimate Campaign and the first 3 parts of Kingmaker. I actually am liking a lot of what I'm seeing (there is an unfortunate trend towards single monster encounters and one encounter work days, which probably need some tweaks here and there, but nothing I'm too worried about).
But I keep running into problems with the Settlement rules.
They're an abstraction. I get that. My first thought on reading them was "okay so you buy one building, and that is what is noteworthy on that block, you get a bunch of other unimportant buildings surrounding it". This is supported by the idea that every building you buy gets you 250 population, regardless of what it is, and the size of a single building plot is 750ftx750ft, way larger than you could possibly need for something like a brewery or a shop. In fact, when you compare that size to the buildings described under the Downtime rules in Ultimate Campaign, it's absurd. 750x750 translates into 22,500 squares. A typical room takes up around 5-10 squares and most of the sample buildings are like 5-10 rooms, so you're looking at 25-100 squares for a typical building range... so you can fit better than 200 buildings into each "plot even when allowing for space for roads, alleys, etc, and without accounting for buildings using multiple floors. So yeah, you build a brewery plot in your town, and that gets you the benefits of brewery because it's particularly noteworthy compared to a normal building, and it's one among a lot in that same area. This also helps to explain the huge jump in cost (most buildings in downtime rules were listed in the 2000-5000gp range... that's 1-2 BP, but when you get to settlement building typical buildings are more like 10-20BP!) since you're building out a lot more than just the one building.
Okay so that justification in mind... enter Kingmaker. As a big plot point we go exploring through the village that was started up by someone else around the same time as our Kingdom. This village explicitly is home to around 100-200 residents. The whole place is about 600-800ft across according to the scale of the map you are given. So knowing this, I expect the village to be a single plot, and even as we go exploring and find a tannery, a brewery, an inn, a half dozen personal homes, and so on, I am expecting that this is showing us a detailed look at the village that gets abstracted if/when we eventually absorb it, at which point it will be something like just 1 house plot.
But then at the end of the adventure, we annex the village and lo and behold, Varnhold has a city grid that includes the following free buildings: a brewery, an exotic craftsman, a garrison, a granary, an inn, a smith, a tannery, a temple, 3 tradesmen, and 8 houses. Yep. A full building for every building displayed in this tiny 200 person village! That's 19 total buildings, so as soon as you annex it and translate those stats, Varnhold transforms from a tiny middle of nowhere village to a full settlement of 4,750 residents, registering it as a large town, borderline small city.
And okay. This population and size makes more sense given the context of the adventure (it was supposed to be another rival kingdom set up at the same time you start your own. I fully expected a large town rather than a small village).... but why then was the population and scale of the village so limited in the adventure? Just so the players could have a smaller area to explore, or so they could provide a detailed map of every building that was noteworthy? It's just such a jarring disconnect I can't get over it.
And if it was just one time, I'd chalk it up as a mistake. But then in Part 4, the very first thing I am seeing is a description of the town Tatzlford, which one again is being given a map and population in line with around 200 people, but when it is awarded to the PCs via plot has 14 buildings, one settlement building for every building on the map, and supposed to be able to support a population of 3,500gp!
I just feel like either I'm missing something huge or the developers missed that they were working with an abstracted system. Because seriously if the intent is that the PC invests 500BP (worth 2million gold pieces!) into building 15-20 buildings, and what they get for their trouble is a village that nobody will care about, I am speechless. And I even checked, these weren't things that got changed in Ultimate Campaign, in Kingmaker 2 all of the population and settlement size rules are pretty much the same. Am I crazy? Are the developers incompetent? Is there something major I'm missing? I don't know!
But I am done ranting now. Sorry for the rant.
Okay so I just did my big rant on what I can't wrap my head around, but I do feel like I should point out it's not all doom and gloom.
First, I really like UC's downtime building rules. They let you build cool customized buildings for personal use relatively cheaply. The income from it is ridiculously low (to the point where if you hire a manager you will literally not make a profit), but being able to build your own custom place for a few thousand gold is really nice. Especially coming off of the Stronghold Builder's Guide where making your own personal place without blowing a feat for Landlord, because otherwise it's stupid expensive. And no commoner should ever be able to afford even a crappy wooden shack. By comparison, in UC you can get a crappy shack for under 100gp, and a slightly less crappy shack for like 150. Untie gold gains from profession skills (or make running a business get a multiplier on the returns) and I'm totally happy with that section.
The Kingdom building rules I actually like in general. They are mostly abstracted enough to make it not a giant headache. I am not sure how much I like the Control DC's scaling vs stat scaling, but it looks like it encourages the players to build up hexes they have before expanding out further, and also encourages them to diversify investments to get strong bonuses to each area, so it is all right... but I also foresee players building a LOT before expanding outwards, to try to keep their checks out of failure range.
I am not sure how I feel about the size of the kingdoms generated. Each hex is ~200 square miles, 81 hexes makes you an official King, but that's only 16,200 square miles. That's an area slightly bigger than the area of Maryland. You go off the grid in terms of size at 201 hexes, but that's still only getting you to around the size of Tennessee. So we have decent rules for province building, but for real kingdoms/empires it seems like we need another layer of abstraction above (simply because dealing with a multi-thousand hex kingdom is totally unwieldy and unreasonable), or each individual hex being much larger.
Oh right, I was being positive. Um positive note I actually really dig the mass combat rules, with the addendum I haven't done anything with them yet. I like that you can have a level 20 character as a CR19 creature function as an ACR11 army all by themselves. Or more relevantly that a level 7 character as a CR6 creature can function as a ACR1/3 army by themselves, and thus is roughly on par with (or possibly better than thanks to special abilities) a unit of 100 warriors.
But also I like that numbers are generally kept pretty sane (top end of HP is under 200. Aforementioned unit of 100 warriors is 5hp), and there's just enough tactics/commander boons to keep things interesting... though unless you have a sufficient number of soldiers any character high enough level to serve as a competent commander is probably better off being sent out as an army by himself.
Lastly on the AP itself, I like that Kingmaker is largely open. I like how each portion of the AP gives a new section of the map with fresh stuff that can be but doesn't have to be explored. It probably means players can end up wildly over or under leveled depending on how completionist they are, but there are ways to deal with that. There was a thread recently about really bad preset loot in AP's, so I was keeping an eye out for that here and was surprised to note almost no exotic weapons, several notes of "adapt the weapon here to something the player will want to use", and loot that actually helps significantly against later enemies that show up (as opposed to the "screw you" of giving a ghost touch weapon after killing the only incorporeal in the adventure that was complained about in the other thread).
Finally while some of the encounters are pretty lazy/boring, others are really cool. Especially in part 3 there were several rooms in the big dungeon that surprised me and seemed interesting. Speaking of interesting encounters, in part 1 there are two fey who take turns pranking the party for a few days until they get caught. Anyone have particularly interesting/outlandish pranks they have seen while running this AP? Or just thought of independently really.
First thing I did was grab a copy of Ultimate Campaign (where the kingdom building rules from Kingmaker got updated to get rid of some weird loops, or so I've heard), and picked up the Kingmaker PDFs. I've been reading through them, currently done with Ultimate Campaign and the first 3 parts of Kingmaker. I actually am liking a lot of what I'm seeing (there is an unfortunate trend towards single monster encounters and one encounter work days, which probably need some tweaks here and there, but nothing I'm too worried about).
But I keep running into problems with the Settlement rules.
They're an abstraction. I get that. My first thought on reading them was "okay so you buy one building, and that is what is noteworthy on that block, you get a bunch of other unimportant buildings surrounding it". This is supported by the idea that every building you buy gets you 250 population, regardless of what it is, and the size of a single building plot is 750ftx750ft, way larger than you could possibly need for something like a brewery or a shop. In fact, when you compare that size to the buildings described under the Downtime rules in Ultimate Campaign, it's absurd. 750x750 translates into 22,500 squares. A typical room takes up around 5-10 squares and most of the sample buildings are like 5-10 rooms, so you're looking at 25-100 squares for a typical building range... so you can fit better than 200 buildings into each "plot even when allowing for space for roads, alleys, etc, and without accounting for buildings using multiple floors. So yeah, you build a brewery plot in your town, and that gets you the benefits of brewery because it's particularly noteworthy compared to a normal building, and it's one among a lot in that same area. This also helps to explain the huge jump in cost (most buildings in downtime rules were listed in the 2000-5000gp range... that's 1-2 BP, but when you get to settlement building typical buildings are more like 10-20BP!) since you're building out a lot more than just the one building.
Okay so that justification in mind... enter Kingmaker. As a big plot point we go exploring through the village that was started up by someone else around the same time as our Kingdom. This village explicitly is home to around 100-200 residents. The whole place is about 600-800ft across according to the scale of the map you are given. So knowing this, I expect the village to be a single plot, and even as we go exploring and find a tannery, a brewery, an inn, a half dozen personal homes, and so on, I am expecting that this is showing us a detailed look at the village that gets abstracted if/when we eventually absorb it, at which point it will be something like just 1 house plot.
But then at the end of the adventure, we annex the village and lo and behold, Varnhold has a city grid that includes the following free buildings: a brewery, an exotic craftsman, a garrison, a granary, an inn, a smith, a tannery, a temple, 3 tradesmen, and 8 houses. Yep. A full building for every building displayed in this tiny 200 person village! That's 19 total buildings, so as soon as you annex it and translate those stats, Varnhold transforms from a tiny middle of nowhere village to a full settlement of 4,750 residents, registering it as a large town, borderline small city.
And okay. This population and size makes more sense given the context of the adventure (it was supposed to be another rival kingdom set up at the same time you start your own. I fully expected a large town rather than a small village).... but why then was the population and scale of the village so limited in the adventure? Just so the players could have a smaller area to explore, or so they could provide a detailed map of every building that was noteworthy? It's just such a jarring disconnect I can't get over it.
And if it was just one time, I'd chalk it up as a mistake. But then in Part 4, the very first thing I am seeing is a description of the town Tatzlford, which one again is being given a map and population in line with around 200 people, but when it is awarded to the PCs via plot has 14 buildings, one settlement building for every building on the map, and supposed to be able to support a population of 3,500gp!
I just feel like either I'm missing something huge or the developers missed that they were working with an abstracted system. Because seriously if the intent is that the PC invests 500BP (worth 2million gold pieces!) into building 15-20 buildings, and what they get for their trouble is a village that nobody will care about, I am speechless. And I even checked, these weren't things that got changed in Ultimate Campaign, in Kingmaker 2 all of the population and settlement size rules are pretty much the same. Am I crazy? Are the developers incompetent? Is there something major I'm missing? I don't know!
But I am done ranting now. Sorry for the rant.
Okay so I just did my big rant on what I can't wrap my head around, but I do feel like I should point out it's not all doom and gloom.
First, I really like UC's downtime building rules. They let you build cool customized buildings for personal use relatively cheaply. The income from it is ridiculously low (to the point where if you hire a manager you will literally not make a profit), but being able to build your own custom place for a few thousand gold is really nice. Especially coming off of the Stronghold Builder's Guide where making your own personal place without blowing a feat for Landlord, because otherwise it's stupid expensive. And no commoner should ever be able to afford even a crappy wooden shack. By comparison, in UC you can get a crappy shack for under 100gp, and a slightly less crappy shack for like 150. Untie gold gains from profession skills (or make running a business get a multiplier on the returns) and I'm totally happy with that section.
The Kingdom building rules I actually like in general. They are mostly abstracted enough to make it not a giant headache. I am not sure how much I like the Control DC's scaling vs stat scaling, but it looks like it encourages the players to build up hexes they have before expanding out further, and also encourages them to diversify investments to get strong bonuses to each area, so it is all right... but I also foresee players building a LOT before expanding outwards, to try to keep their checks out of failure range.
I am not sure how I feel about the size of the kingdoms generated. Each hex is ~200 square miles, 81 hexes makes you an official King, but that's only 16,200 square miles. That's an area slightly bigger than the area of Maryland. You go off the grid in terms of size at 201 hexes, but that's still only getting you to around the size of Tennessee. So we have decent rules for province building, but for real kingdoms/empires it seems like we need another layer of abstraction above (simply because dealing with a multi-thousand hex kingdom is totally unwieldy and unreasonable), or each individual hex being much larger.
Oh right, I was being positive. Um positive note I actually really dig the mass combat rules, with the addendum I haven't done anything with them yet. I like that you can have a level 20 character as a CR19 creature function as an ACR11 army all by themselves. Or more relevantly that a level 7 character as a CR6 creature can function as a ACR1/3 army by themselves, and thus is roughly on par with (or possibly better than thanks to special abilities) a unit of 100 warriors.
But also I like that numbers are generally kept pretty sane (top end of HP is under 200. Aforementioned unit of 100 warriors is 5hp), and there's just enough tactics/commander boons to keep things interesting... though unless you have a sufficient number of soldiers any character high enough level to serve as a competent commander is probably better off being sent out as an army by himself.
Lastly on the AP itself, I like that Kingmaker is largely open. I like how each portion of the AP gives a new section of the map with fresh stuff that can be but doesn't have to be explored. It probably means players can end up wildly over or under leveled depending on how completionist they are, but there are ways to deal with that. There was a thread recently about really bad preset loot in AP's, so I was keeping an eye out for that here and was surprised to note almost no exotic weapons, several notes of "adapt the weapon here to something the player will want to use", and loot that actually helps significantly against later enemies that show up (as opposed to the "screw you" of giving a ghost touch weapon after killing the only incorporeal in the adventure that was complained about in the other thread).
Finally while some of the encounters are pretty lazy/boring, others are really cool. Especially in part 3 there were several rooms in the big dungeon that surprised me and seemed interesting. Speaking of interesting encounters, in part 1 there are two fey who take turns pranking the party for a few days until they get caught. Anyone have particularly interesting/outlandish pranks they have seen while running this AP? Or just thought of independently really.