new campaign needs help.

[CleanDeceit]

So I am starting a new 3.5 game that will have 3 players. The concept will revolve around the players taking ownership of their own town and making choice on how to govern and develop their city.

I plan to include elements such as war, politics, research and development, farming, entertaining the population, culteral issues and still have opportunity for the players to leave the town for a while to go on short heroic adventures.

I plan to include advisor NPCs to help the players gather info and make choices.

I was hoping some of you may have run a game like this before and might have some advice for me.

[Geddy2112]

It sounds like your running a Kingmaker style campaign. Pathfinder has this as a published module that focuses more on building an empire than your traditional adventure and go do X quests.

http://paizo.com/pathfinder/adventurePath/kingmaker

Make sure you have interesting puzzles and actions the party must do that cannot be minion designated, but also integrate some challenges they can use cohorts/minions on. Its fun to have a few sessions where they can play different characters at a lower level that are followers of their main characters.

[General Sajaru]

As I recall, DMG2 has some good stuff about creating a town or city, as does DMG, if to a lesser extent. Also, DMG2 has information about running a business that might be adaptable to running a small town.

Something to watch out for; it'll be easy for you to overwhelm the players with all of the things they need to do, or for you to become overwhelmed when they all want to be doing something different at the same time. Try to limit them to one or two activities at once, even if all of the characters aren't directly working on something that they're particularly skilled at; after all, even the mayor can help dig a well once in a while.

[Hellborn_Blight]

As far as advice for running the game goes, especially if you are not using a module, I'd say keep things loose and don't over plan. You'll want to make your key political figures, key locations, and some random NPC's for quest hooks, but don't try to make them do to much. In these style of games, if you over plan, it will end in frustration. If you do have a story you want to happen, make it happen in the background and have events affect the party so the want to be involved. You gotta basically make it their idea to move the adventure that direction.

Secondly, make a big deal out of little things. This is especially useful for groups that don't have much motivation to find adventure on their own (so people the opposite of the first group). Turning, "we go to the inn for the night" into an opportunity for adventure is obvious, but what about the trip to the smithy? The inevitable time when one of your players goes to pick up call girl/guy and it's a Succubus/Incubus is always fun, but can lead to a demon subplot. Or the people utilizing their profession skill (yes some people do that) having an interesting client/boss that ends up needing help with something.

I'd also suggest making something home brew to represent the flavor of the game. Like I have an idea for a game where each of the party members are party of a traveling circus so each player gets a bonus skill point to put into the skill involving their act for the circus. Of course the circus is just a front for a secret organization that goes around assassinating corrupt leaders and lending aid to downtrodden citizens but the point is rather than make it harder or make a "tax" for the players because of my setting, I give them something for free to draw them into the game. In your game they will be able to bring to bear a wide variety of skills so maybe a free knowledge skill as a class skill or skill focus feat (since no one likes to take those and they can be nice for prestige class prereqs) would be useful.

[CleanDeceit]

These are great tips guys. Thank you for all the help.

Right now I am trying to organize some of the mechanics of city building regarding the available resources. I want to brake things up into broad categories for easy balancing.
For example, I dont want to have to list the cities stockpile of individual units such as stone, clay, wood ect but maybe just throw all these things into a bucket called "building materials". This also needs to be done for food sources and other such things a city needs to grow and thrive.

Also, I need categories for workers who collect and use these things. I dont want to have to get as specific as listing every possible job class down to basket weiver, but I do need job classes that are specialized enough, that the group can invest in developing one workforce or another to meet their expansion needs.

Any ideas on where to go, to find examples of this that will easily and comprehensively fit D&D?

[Hellborn_Blight]

If you don't mind working within an established city, or being in the Forgotten Realms, do you campaign in the City of Splendors, Waterdeep. That book is great and if you add in this (first link for download) map (http://rpgmapshare.com/?q=node/358) that is one of the most amazing fan made tools for the game I have ever seen. You can zoom from the whole city view down to a five feet grid. Everything you listed in your first post you want for the game can be accomplished here as well.

Or you could take the basic structure from the previous suggested kingmaker module and just use this map as an eventual goal. Downside is it is a little more specific than some people might like if they are making their own city from scratch, but if the players are more hands off on the details then it would work fine. Either way, check it out as it it amazing, and check out Kingmaker, because the other guy was right, it is kinda the be all end all idea of the kind of game you wanna run.

[Yahzi]

Google the West Marches sandbox campaign, and check out The Alexandrian's blog for stuff on sandboxing.