The King of Brevoy: we are sponsoring this august body of adventurers in establishing a new settlement to build new allies and commerce opportunities! Adventurers: yay! Lets go! *grabs the map with the route to the Stolen Lands* The King: *gives the party the side eye as they proceed to set up Ronville in Brevoy*
Tried this last night in my Kingmaker game and one thing I do not like is how PC skills don't have a factor in anything. Players didn't like that either.
Thanks for the video. I had my first session for my group two weeks ago (next session on Monday), I know we're still a along way off from the kingdom portion, but definitely like seeing some sample turns. Some of the other take-aways I saw: 1) Feels like maybe too many choices per turn (compared to the 1e rules). I agree that the system as a whole seems better, but each turn does feel slower and that was with you going relatively fast. 2) Lots of opportunities for little mistakes -- you called out most of them, but I think I saw at least 3 more that weren't called out -- even with the spreadsheet helping you. I'm hopeful by the time I get to my table's kingdom, the tools (either the spreadsheet you showed, others, or the Foundry premium module) have been more fully developed/debugged. 3) The verdict is still out for me, on some of the changes you were thinking about. My going in assumption was similar to what you found -- too few trained skills with the "single character" kingdom party model and DC scaling feeling a little out of place. Compounded by the choice of which 7 activates are trained only -- with some of those feeling foundational, I'll need to do a full review and see if there's any untrained I'd want to pull to trained to balance it out better, if not yup, going all untrained makes sense to me. I think I'm more leaning towards doubling the initial number of trained skills, but not making untrained have + level. Feels like between skill-ups or kingdom feats that makes the choice of expanding more skills at a better balance point. 4) The low level influence/radius problem, doesn't look as troublesome as I thought it might be. My 1e run of KM, tried to handle most kingdom turns offline/between sessions since only some of the players really cared. But with how automatic much of 1e's rule set was (aside from typically handwaving the kingdom events to the end of the block of time -- ie "you'll have 6 months of kingdom turns to spend before next session, assume no kingdom events" and then I add 1-2 new kingdom event hooks at the start of the next session), that could work fairly well. This system doesn't appear as friendly to offload to out-of-session player run w/ little GM involvement. I think that's a good thing from a narrative involvement, but a bad thing from how complex it ended up being. I think I'd want the "mechanics & book-keeping" portion of a kingdom turn to be around 5 minutes/turn. I'd like the ability to run a 6-12 month block of kingdom turns between major adventure bits, (since that's often what you want to do in the AP), but keeping that under an mechanical updates would be important to me. If that expands to 3 hours because of role play between the characters that's fine, but if it expands to 3 hours because of analysis paralysis or constantly having to correct minor errors, that's not.
On pacing, yeah I prefer the "more checks" approach here but run as RAW, it is too many turns to level up. Hopefully pacing kingdom level advancment so that your table is only doing 1 turn every session (or every few sessions even) might be the way to go. I had been considering allowing a Skill Training at every kingdom level, but I kind of like your solution, too. One thing I don't like is that I really had to read ALL the activities, and do some actual turns, before getting a sense of what skills were essential. So the system isn't newbie-friendly. There should've been a section explaining each ability score and what types of checks they enable, just as the CRB does for the 6 ability scores for PCs.
Another thought besides the editing of the rules is with how book heavy they appear is doing 'kingdom keeping sessions' to where you'll be devoting a whole session to roleplaying and exploring what is going on in the kingdom. I also think conferring training or bonuses based on the PC/NPC handling a task or the role they inhabit. For example if the Marshal is going to deal with a warfare based activity they are always trained in warfare, even if the kingdom isn't or the emissary is always trained in statescraft. It incentives and gives reason for some characters to do things VS others.
I really wanna use these rules in my game but it looks very daunting, I don't even know how you managed to remember them all, kudos to you! Maybe I'll simplify them so I can handle it.
Party: Can found a new nation to increase their own wealth and prestige. Party: Makes a liberal democracy... New Nation: Votes the party out of power. GM: Welp, looks like it's back to dungeon crawling.
An Interesting approach to Domain level Play. Thank you for the demonstration. Building an holding and starting to develop it, whilst schemes and politicing was fantastic fun in BX and AD&D so cool to see a method for the moderns systems
Goblin allies because the free shrine you got was a shrine of Lamashtu (Nok-Nok is among the goblins u would have allied with. Thus the real hero would have appeared, but instead they shoved off for the Stolen Lands, leaving your realm permanently broken - thus we can call your realm the Broken Lands).
I do wish Kingdoms got more Skill Increases. It's one of my complaints with pf2 default is that you're very skill increase starved and often feat starved unless you play one of 2 classes.
@@kendallcarlson5502 Who says they won't use it? I know I'm interested in using the rules and I don't play PF2e (I ran it and me and my players had the same issue with feats). It just might require a small bit of conversion to what ever system they are using.
Thank you for the very helpful rundown and review of how this worked! Reading the PDF is pretty confusing due to how dense everything is. I really wish it was laid out better. Thank you very much though for your suggestions of hacks that can make the game playable!
The solution for the Boxes showing "N/A" is thet you need to do the kingdom creation in the Tab "Creation" not filling the "Kingdom Sheet" by hand. did the same mistake yesterday during the game and noticed later after looking into that issue.
I can somewhat forgive slacking off on playtesting adventure paths, simply because the encounter and monster building rules are already so tight - the rigorous playtesting has already been done while developing PF2e itself. But yeah. Brand new kingdom management system that’s 100 pages long? Absolutely should have been playtested. Super shocking it was just tossed out with zero balancing.
Here is the link to the channel on my Discord server where we'll have a community of people working on making the rules more workable/fun (you need to join the server of course): discord.gg/cVBdFZxspH (Other mentioned links are in the video description.)
Anyone who's tried to play Skull & Shackles knows Paizo's AP playtesting leaves a lot to be desired. RAW the pirate drinking game Heave ends with every participant, except one, dead of Constitution damage, because the rum has no mechanical way of knocking you out. You just drink the rum for 1d3-1 Con damage, add 1 additional Con damage if you fail your Fort save, and keep going. If that had been playtested even once, it would have been caught.
A possibility to resolve the Kingdom size and skill accumulation (time stamp about 58 minutes), is the "contracting out" by granting baronies, then counties and duchies. This builds the kingdom area through the efforts of your subjects and by holding court to borrow skills from lower levels of nobility/government to establish a collective kingdoms' skill base. There would, of course be the overhead maintenance of good government through the overlord's obligation to periodically bail out baronies or cities from various events (call it game balance). This utilises the fealty required in the noble patent, city charter, or constitution of the nation. Based on this review I anticipate this would require a degree of rule expansion as I don't have a copy of these rules yet.
Great review! I created a luck economy to allow PCs to reroll failures & power certain feats. There are a few ways to get them, but one idea i had was for players in between adventures to play nobles (not their PCs) who are managing their lands, going to war with each other, etc. And somehow this would produce points they could transfer to their PCs as luck. This way, the players would effectively be creating the higher-level events that act as background for their adventure-play. I’m afraid this rule set might be too crunchy for their tastes, but maybe i could adapt parts of it.
Building item bonuses can stack in certain ways (as noted in the pdf), including capitol Buildings with those in active settlements. This is certainly strange, to say the least. The rules for such are definitely strange, and may encourage having a broad capitol, with most important actions set in specific specialized other settlements.
Interesting. I'm already considering how to condense these rules down into a simplified/even more system-agnostic version. Has James Jacobs seen this yet? Also, I feel like who's in charge of what should have more mechanical impact than it does. I think PCs should be able to provide some kind of bonus to certain checks or something, like an Aid action equivalent.
I don't know if he has seen this yet. Having PCs impact kingdom checks is one of the discussions on my server atm. I think they decided not to do it, to make it system agnostic. But it seems like something that can be fixed.
By listening to this, I feel there is maybe too much rolls going on. I get that they tried to move from the "no rolls, just spreadsheets", but the opposite extreme isn't good either. Also, it might just be me, but it seems like the kingdom has way too many stats. Not to mention some things seem really weird as skills, like wilderness. Or things that should probably be one skill, like politics and intrigue. I get that it's an attempt to describe the kingdom various aspects... but it seems that collapsing those skills to lesser number (lets say 7 and allowing becoming trained in all of them.. just not in single kingdom) could clear things up.
I agree that the skills feel like a lot. I personally would appreciate there being more clarity on "Loyalty lets me be better at these kinds of checks." For PCs, when you have a Strength you know what it makes you good at. Not so much here. There is no section, like there is in the CRB, explaining what your ability scores generally do for you. I don't know if reducing the # of skills is the answer, but it IS difficult to parse how your ability scores help a "department" of your kingdom. There is a chart of all the skills + their related stats and what activities they enable, but it's hard to parse things like "which ones help us deal with Unrest"? Having an ability score be your "way to deal with Unrest" stat would be nice. It MIGHT exist here, but if it is it isn't clear!
I notice that your discord has gone silent on the Kingdom rules for a while. Has there been any consensus on good changes to make to smooth out the first few kingdom levels? I'd comment there, but don't have permissions.
Interesting video. I think that I agree that you should be skilled in some skills in order to do it, like trade. Sure, anyone can barter with the local smith to get a deal on a new cast iron pot, but setting up trade between countries is more than bartering on a large scale. There's diplomacy involved and the understanding of what your kingdom can produce and what your entire kingdom needs in a very large scale, so that makes sense to me. You probably don't want to send your pc's nephew Carl to go deal do kingdom level trade, you want to send someone who knows what they're doing.
I liked with 1e how the units basically worked more like a strategy game and you could convert any NPC from the bestiary straight to a unit. Where these rules are very rigid also the units level with your kingdom so it really wouldn't work in like a sandbox game or outside of the campaign it's very specific to this campaign and the flow of this campaign specifically.
This system is antithetical to roleplaying. I can't think of a worse RPG system that creates a series of mechanics where the character has no impact to success or failure for a given action. 0/10 Someone fell in love with the idea of making your Kingdom a character class and never bothered to test if the idea worked. Your kingdoms Ancestry is the government type, your background is the charter, the Kingdom progression chart is your class. It doesn't work, it is asinine and you can tell it was the result of a "brainstorming" session and the developers make the cardinal mistake of falling in love with their own idea and were unwilling to test or admit their failure. There are 14 skills and you only get 6 skill trainings at the start of the Kingdom progression, pick the wrong skills and you ruin your Kingdom. You get 9 skill increases so if you used these skill increases to fill in the gaps you would have 14 skills that were trained and one that was expert. And given fast your DC's increase you can't afford to be unskilled in any skill otherwise you can't do much at all. Buildings you say! Buildings give you the bonuses to compensate. Nay. The max item bonus is +3 and it scales up to three. The first 8 lvls of your kingdom can only have a +1 item bonus, 9-14 you can have +2 and finally at level 15 you can have +3. But when your Base DC is 34 minimum more likely it will be 37 or 38 because of control modifiers. That +3 makes no difference doing an action with an untrained skill at higher levels can be impossible you are literally rolling to see if you fail or critically fail. Second we saw on this video that even basic Kingdom actions like establishing relations can be impossible if you didn't pick the skill training for that skill. Idiocy. Not in failing to pick the skill but that such a basic action is banned from players who didn't know. This is not how you make engaging rules for Kingdom play. The whole bloody purpose of the campaign is to create a kingdom and Piazo didn't even bother to see if their rules worked? What the fuck was that all about? Lets talk about the idiocy of a skill check to build basic structures. I want to build a dump and it costs 4 resource points which is idiotic, you are literally just setting aside land for people to dump their rubbish into. There is no "building" for a medieval dump. No environmental impact studies. Nothing is done but telling the citizens this is the area to dump your crap into. And it cost this many resources? And the DC is 16! WTF were these developers smoking? But the greatest part is that you can't build one until you are a level two Kingdom. That's right no matter how skilled you are in industry you can't figure out how to tell people to walk over to an assigned spot to dump their rubbish into because that is beyond your ken until level 2. You can build houses which are are lower DC but the knowledge of the Dump is beyond you and is more difficult than building Houses once you do get to level 2. Again we see developers becoming in love with an idea skill checks for building with level restrictions and no stopping to think does this really makes sense? Will this make building a kingdom fun? NO it doesn't. Telling players you can't build something because they haven't "Leveled up their kingdom" is idiotic. Countless rolls to build structures over and over again isn't gameplay it is asinine drudgery that does nothing to eliminate the micromanagement of settlement building. At least in the old system it was simply a matter of resource management. So a player could do this by themselves for the next session. Now it is a skill roll in skills you are statistically more likely to be unskilled than skilled in and thus failure is the most common outcome, making the whole "gameplay" of bookkeeping a lesson in frustration. This added layer doesn't remove the bookkeeping, doesn't add drama, it just forces banality of countless rolls that WILL hurt enjoyment because of how the system works. RNG shouldn't be a factor in the BOOKKEEPING of you kingdom. The fatal sin of the system They have removed the character from the rulership of the kingdom. Sure the player is part of the drudgery but your "CHARACTER" has no impact. They bring no skills, ability bonuses nor feats to the table. They bring NOTHING to the role as a "leader." RPGs are about CHARACTER involvement and separating the character from the Kingdom management is beyond a simple whoopsie. It is a fatal flaw. Short demonstration of what is so shit about these rules Player 1 "We need the Emissary position filled." Player 2 "Pick the fighter he doesn't have a leader position, yet" Player 1 "But he has an 8 wisdom, 10 in charisma and intelligence plus he isn't skilled in intimidation, stealth, deception, diplomacy, society or thievery. He is the least qualified person for the position his idea of intrigue is stick a sword in it. What about that Rogue we saved and pledge his undying loyalty to us? He has all the skills plus multiple skill feats that make him the obvious choice for a leader in charge of the Kingdom's intrigue." Player 2 "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! you can't put an NPC into that position! the PC gets a bonus to all checks the NPC gets nothing. Besides none of our skills, ability scores or feats impact any aspect of the role as leader." Player 1 th-cam.com/video/uSvJaYxRoB4/w-d-xo.html This entire system is shit, it is a lesson in idiocy. Nothing about the new system works. It doesn't actually address the drudgery of book keeping of settlements, adds hurtles to settlement booking making it MORE time consuming, not less. The skill system is broken. Characters have ZERO impact on success or failure regardless of their suitability for a given position. There is NO integration between character and kingdom. Why rule a Kingdom when nothing that makes up your character has any impact on the Kingdom rules? I will end this how I began, this system is antithetical to roleplaying. I can't think of a worse RPG system that creates a series of mechanics where the character has no impact to success or failure for ANY given action. Imagine playing pathfinder where every action you make in the game is not impacted by any skill, feat or ability score of your character. Would that be fun? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! There is nothing to salvage from this system.
You mention other AP subsystems being a bit lackluster. What are your thoughts on the subsystem for rebuilding and maintaining the fortress in Age of Ashes book 1?
More input after 3 weeks of playing Kingmaker. The kingdom turns are REALLY slow. And that's with it being partially automated in Foundry. The game also expects you to do a TON of these turns you get little XP and it wants you to get your kingdom up to the player's level. We would have to spend MANY MANY hours to do that. Probably multiple sessions to get from level 1 to 4 on Kingdom level just doing king turns nothing else. I'll be doing your milestone idea
You want Paizo to make an errata on these rules? Edit Lore: Brevoy doesn't have a king... the king, and his family, disappeared around the beginning of Pathfinder 1e. What it does have are two competing sub-nations (the ones conquered by Choral the Conqueror and "unified" under his Reign into the nation of Brevoy). However, a ruling noble is able to give away lands they have a title to worthy people who then become minor lords. So, it's possible that the Sword Lords decided to build a new fort near a settlement that has exploitable resources in preparation of the impending civil war, and the aspiring sword lord being chosen would become that settlement's new "Lord" when they prove they are able to build and maintain the fort, expand the settlement, etc. It might have been better if you found a map of the Sarkoris Scar and attempted to make a "Kingdom" there as it's one place on Avistan that no one has any claim on... other than all those high CR demons...
Yes, but we are way early in the process. (Maybe some hotfix errata for the moment? Idk.) There needs to be a whole period of people trying out the rules, experimenting with fixes, and sharing their experiences with each other and that will take a long time.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG The AP has already been shipped and the money come in…. Unlike classes or the CRB itself, this material is unlikely to be continuously used by players beyond this adventure path and will not affect future sales. I doubt Paizo is going to make effort to do an errata at this point… we the community will need to fix it by hacking it ourselves. It’s D&D 5e all over again. I would be pleasantly surprised if Paizo actually did a balance errata though!
I don't know how many fokes will read this comment because of how old the video is this. I think how the "skills" are gained are the major flaw in this system I would propose as a fix you would have special buildings that do not exist on the grid that represent skills, or perhaps they're rooms in your town hall or palace or whatever. you would start with 5 slots for your built buildings or "trained skills", as your capital city gains levels you can add more buildings/rooms etc. In order for you to upgrade a skill to expert and beyond you need to have another settlement that has the same equivalent building constructed in that settlement. new settlements start with 2 slots for skill buildings and gain up to a maximum of 5 as they level up. when you have more than one of the skill buildings in your kingdom you can choose to upgrade the skill building in your capital and go to expert and beyond. I think this new skill system will be cool in two main ways because one... your gm can decide how many settlements you can have which will give them a tap on how powerful your kingdom is as the game progresses. And two once your kingdom gets big enough ideally you'd be trained in most of those essential skills.
How about adding buildings that provide makes a specific skill trained when built? E.G. an embassy building might enable the statecraft skill to become trained.
I am a bit shocked about how this AP seems to turned out. Huge errors have already be found in the print version. Maps seems to be not of great quality. Rules not playtested enough. I hope this isn't such a big of a deal and all if that will be fixed till the AP will be released for Foundry next year. Can't verify because I don't have the books yet.
I agree with both of you lol. I think this AP came about a year or 2 years after its initial intended release. And from one of the Paizo employees' post on Reddit recently, it sounds like Paizo had a hump to overcome when the pandemic hit and overseas shipping costs increased that was legitimately perilous for the company.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG It felt like Paizo made many of the normal crowd-funding mistakes of not really estimating how much time all their stretch goals would require to fulfill when offered; and once met, it didn't feel like the adjusted their normal production flow/cadence to account for it. Ie all of KM sounds like it was effectively overtime work on top of all their normal planned releases. From the brief bits posted online that offer insight into the workflow it really feels like it was basically only JJ working on it (despite what the credits page looks like) and any help received from others was outside/above normal job/task assignments. A bit of over-promise/underdelivered. I'm still happy with it, I think its worth what I spent and I look forward to running it multiple times. But I think they left a lot on the table of possibly improvements.
@@martinjrgensen8234 To be honest, I am brand new to Pathfinder - haven't been able to play or gm a single game - just reading the books until our Curse of Strahd Campaign wraps up and we switch systems. So all the drama about this AP went right past me. I only heard good stuff about paizo, this is why I am shocked to see the opposite now. I hope all the money I spent wasn't for nothing / false promises. As long as it's better than 5e in regards of rules and amount of time spent homebrewing stuff that's just not there it still should be fine right?
@@maxmusterspace6037 This is the first I’m hearing about this either. Paizo APs have been historically excellent. This one was just exceedingly tumultuous probably because the pandemic + Kickstarter pipeline disrupted the workflow
Hi, Where is the link for the automated Kingdom sheet? I did not see in the above links. Thank you for doing this as it is helping me to understand this process.
Hello! Thank you for making these videos. They are tremendously helpful. Can you tell me where I can find the 2nd Edition Editable PDF for the Kingdom? My Google Fu has failed me. Thank you.
Ouch, it's $100 on roll20? The hardback is that price... (I'm more familiar with Foundry VTT) Tbh the value is mostly in the adventure rules as the kingdom rules are still a work in progress with the community hacking it to make it work. There is material however for a fun system with the GM making adjustments.
Where is the link to the rules from Piazo? I see the link for the spreadsheet but I would like to read the rules as I use the spreadsheet so I understand what is going on.
I don't think the kingdom rules are in the SRD/Archives of Nethys... they're in the free Kingmaker Player's Guide: paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si5a?Introducing-the-Kingmaker-Player-s-Guide
I tried following along with all of your steps but every one of your kingdom skills modifier is 2 higher than mine. Where are you getting the +2 across the board to all skills from?
I don't need them, already have and easy enough to find, but you said at the start of the video you'd put a link in the description to the players guide.
I use the map from this website: lostatlases.blogspot.com/2018/02/map-pitax-mivon-and-stolen-lands-at.html And I think this is the software they use: www.hexographer.com/
Ah, I'd forgotten to credit the mapmaker! Adding it now to the video description. It was made by Lost Atlases and I found it at: lostatlases.blogspot.com/2018/02/map-pitax-mivon-and-stolen-lands-at.html
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Hello, Thank you so much for the swift reply! May I ask what the hex settings (size and background image scale) you were using in FoundryVTT so it fits? I can't seem to get it just right. Thanks so much for your time!
@@EdernFGC Oich, I looked up what I did: background image scale - "1" grid size - "50" so it seemed design for easy scaling? btw the little Ruler symbol in Foundry gives you a "live" updating of the grade as you tweak it, plus you can adjust it with your arrow keys then!
the part where you were talking about the DC getting insane is actually a problem in the base game as well. i also despise the proficiency tiers. the game feels like it was Dev'd as a video game. PF1e Kingmaker was interesting and fun, this looks like it needs a lot of house rules and isn't really fleshed out all the way. maybe they should have spent a couple hours playtesting.
Proficiency tiers are fine in the base game because as Ronald mentioned, you have multiple PCs. It is expected that the evolving DCs would be able to be met by the PCs that specialize in specific skills to keep up in tiers, instead of spreading increases around and duplicating skills already shared with other PCs. But in Kingdom Management this is not the case. You only have 1 “PC”. The old math expected you to specialize in specific skills, but at the same time rules pull you into spreading out your skill increases in order to engage in other kingdom activities. It’s a lose-lose situation. Ronald’s suggestion of (1) removing activity training requirements and (2) allow even untrained skills to add kingdom level to proficiency fixes this problem, and let’s you continue to specialize in skills to keep up with the evolving DCs.
@@jltheking3 I don't like them because the difference between minimal training and max is inconsequential. You'll have 6 less in a roll than a legend. It's like a someone that took an art class once (trained) can create a a masterpiece with only slightly better luck than someone who that is their life's work (legendary). Their should be a much larger gulf between them. They had to make everyone too close together because they made the margins too tight. You can be legendary in a skill and that gives you an about 60/40 pass rate on an at level check even for things a master should auto pass and a novice can't even begin to know but still has a decent shot of doing. This is a failure of the crit failure, failure, success, crit success mechanics. Forcing the devs to make everything tighter, so the die roll is far more impactful than a characters skill at a task.
@@nevyns9285 This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone complain that the gulf between trained and legendary being +6 as being too *small*. Usually, the complaint is that it’s too *large*. In the playtest, this difference was only a +3, and the game had to be significantly shifted in many ways to accomodate the larger gap, and arguably it made the game worse in various ways. If you think a +6 is too small a gap, then clearly you have no idea how PF2e’s math works, where even a +1 is a big difference due to how degrees of success works. A +6 bonus is not just a 30% increased chance to succeed. It’s also a 30% increased chance to critically succeed, and a 30% reduced chance to critically fail. This difference is ENORMOUS.
@@nevyns9285 If you actually do the math, a +2 bonus in Pathfinder 2e is roughly equivalent to granting advantage in D&D 5e for a Strike. That’s all I’ll say on the matter. A +6 bonus is enormous but it does take an understanding of the game’s math to realize this.
I cannot believe how you are completely not critical of the lack of playtesting. If this would have been a 5e mechanic that was released without play testing you would have been very critical. This really demonstrates how one-sided you are. You should have been critical of this. No game publisher should be pushing out non-play-tested content. That is straight-up terrible. I am very disappointed in the quality of this particular video.
Played it and feel it needs some tweaks. For instance when building armies, seems you would need a fletcher for recruitment of archers and a stables for recruitment of calvary units, etc. Also irrigation and rivers should increase agriculture in hills and plains, not just allow farming in deserts. Also I think the number of Regional Activities should increase from three to four at perhaps level 10 or so. I can also think of a few buildings that should be added or adjusted for upgrades.
The King of Brevoy: we are sponsoring this august body of adventurers in establishing a new settlement to build new allies and commerce opportunities! Adventurers: yay! Lets go! *grabs the map with the route to the Stolen Lands* The King: *gives the party the side eye as they proceed to set up Ronville in Brevoy*
Ok
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What does Brevoy do on their Kingdom turn?
Tried this last night in my Kingmaker game and one thing I do not like is how PC skills don't have a factor in anything. Players didn't like that either.
Thanks for the video. I had my first session for my group two weeks ago (next session on Monday), I know we're still a along way off from the kingdom portion, but definitely like seeing some sample turns.
Some of the other take-aways I saw:
1) Feels like maybe too many choices per turn (compared to the 1e rules). I agree that the system as a whole seems better, but each turn does feel slower and that was with you going relatively fast.
2) Lots of opportunities for little mistakes -- you called out most of them, but I think I saw at least 3 more that weren't called out -- even with the spreadsheet helping you. I'm hopeful by the time I get to my table's kingdom, the tools (either the spreadsheet you showed, others, or the Foundry premium module) have been more fully developed/debugged.
3) The verdict is still out for me, on some of the changes you were thinking about. My going in assumption was similar to what you found -- too few trained skills with the "single character" kingdom party model and DC scaling feeling a little out of place. Compounded by the choice of which 7 activates are trained only -- with some of those feeling foundational, I'll need to do a full review and see if there's any untrained I'd want to pull to trained to balance it out better, if not yup, going all untrained makes sense to me. I think I'm more leaning towards doubling the initial number of trained skills, but not making untrained have + level. Feels like between skill-ups or kingdom feats that makes the choice of expanding more skills at a better balance point.
4) The low level influence/radius problem, doesn't look as troublesome as I thought it might be.
My 1e run of KM, tried to handle most kingdom turns offline/between sessions since only some of the players really cared. But with how automatic much of 1e's rule set was (aside from typically handwaving the kingdom events to the end of the block of time -- ie "you'll have 6 months of kingdom turns to spend before next session, assume no kingdom events" and then I add 1-2 new kingdom event hooks at the start of the next session), that could work fairly well. This system doesn't appear as friendly to offload to out-of-session player run w/ little GM involvement. I think that's a good thing from a narrative involvement, but a bad thing from how complex it ended up being. I think I'd want the "mechanics & book-keeping" portion of a kingdom turn to be around 5 minutes/turn. I'd like the ability to run a 6-12 month block of kingdom turns between major adventure bits, (since that's often what you want to do in the AP), but keeping that under an mechanical updates would be important to me. If that expands to 3 hours because of role play between the characters that's fine, but if it expands to 3 hours because of analysis paralysis or constantly having to correct minor errors, that's not.
On pacing, yeah I prefer the "more checks" approach here but run as RAW, it is too many turns to level up. Hopefully pacing kingdom level advancment so that your table is only doing 1 turn every session (or every few sessions even) might be the way to go.
I had been considering allowing a Skill Training at every kingdom level, but I kind of like your solution, too. One thing I don't like is that I really had to read ALL the activities, and do some actual turns, before getting a sense of what skills were essential.
So the system isn't newbie-friendly.
There should've been a section explaining each ability score and what types of checks they enable, just as the CRB does for the 6 ability scores for PCs.
Another thought besides the editing of the rules is with how book heavy they appear is doing 'kingdom keeping sessions' to where you'll be devoting a whole session to roleplaying and exploring what is going on in the kingdom. I also think conferring training or bonuses based on the PC/NPC handling a task or the role they inhabit.
For example if the Marshal is going to deal with a warfare based activity they are always trained in warfare, even if the kingdom isn't or the emissary is always trained in statescraft. It incentives and gives reason for some characters to do things VS others.
I really wanna use these rules in my game but it looks very daunting, I don't even know how you managed to remember them all, kudos to you! Maybe I'll simplify them so I can handle it.
Party: Can found a new nation to increase their own wealth and prestige.
Party: Makes a liberal democracy...
New Nation: Votes the party out of power.
GM: Welp, looks like it's back to dungeon crawling.
An Interesting approach to Domain level Play.
Thank you for the demonstration.
Building an holding and starting to develop it, whilst schemes and politicing was fantastic fun in BX and AD&D so cool to see a method for the moderns systems
Goblin allies because the free shrine you got was a shrine of Lamashtu (Nok-Nok is among the goblins u would have allied with. Thus the real hero would have appeared, but instead they shoved off for the Stolen Lands, leaving your realm permanently broken - thus we can call your realm the Broken Lands).
I love that the kingdom does function like a pf2 character
No, they don't. They aren't splattered with pointless feat choices to fill out levels.
@@TexasFriedCriminal if you don’t like PF2e, why are you watching a 1 hour video about a supplement you won’t use?
I do wish Kingdoms got more Skill Increases.
It's one of my complaints with pf2 default is that you're very skill increase starved and often feat starved unless you play one of 2 classes.
@@kendallcarlson5502 probably because its also for D&D
@@kendallcarlson5502 Who says they won't use it? I know I'm interested in using the rules and I don't play PF2e (I ran it and me and my players had the same issue with feats). It just might require a small bit of conversion to what ever system they are using.
Embrace the broccoli, become Leshy.
this is definitely the video i have been waiting to see. thank you for making it
Thank you for the very helpful rundown and review of how this worked! Reading the PDF is pretty confusing due to how dense everything is. I really wish it was laid out better.
Thank you very much though for your suggestions of hacks that can make the game playable!
The solution for the Boxes showing "N/A" is thet you need to do the kingdom creation in the Tab "Creation" not filling the "Kingdom Sheet" by hand. did the same mistake yesterday during the game and noticed later after looking into that issue.
Oh my god, your Videos are god send. I was just trying to understand the system, thank you so much!
Great review - shocked paizo have a slacker playtest policy on adventure paths and this particular publication.
Especially given how long it was in development.
@@kindred84 Still, PF2e still head and shoulders above the rest in my book.
@@dylanhyatt5705 I'm just talking about the kingdom and army rules right now. No excuse to not have been play tested
@@kindred84 i agree
I can somewhat forgive slacking off on playtesting adventure paths, simply because the encounter and monster building rules are already so tight - the rigorous playtesting has already been done while developing PF2e itself.
But yeah. Brand new kingdom management system that’s 100 pages long? Absolutely should have been playtested. Super shocking it was just tossed out with zero balancing.
Here is the link to the channel on my Discord server where we'll have a community of people working on making the rules more workable/fun (you need to join the server of course):
discord.gg/cVBdFZxspH
(Other mentioned links are in the video description.)
Anyone who's tried to play Skull & Shackles knows Paizo's AP playtesting leaves a lot to be desired. RAW the pirate drinking game Heave ends with every participant, except one, dead of Constitution damage, because the rum has no mechanical way of knocking you out. You just drink the rum for 1d3-1 Con damage, add 1 additional Con damage if you fail your Fort save, and keep going. If that had been playtested even once, it would have been caught.
A possibility to resolve the Kingdom size and skill accumulation (time stamp about 58 minutes), is the "contracting out" by granting baronies, then counties and duchies. This builds the kingdom area through the efforts of your subjects and by holding court to borrow skills from lower levels of nobility/government to establish a collective kingdoms' skill base. There would, of course be the overhead maintenance of good government through the overlord's obligation to periodically bail out baronies or cities from various events (call it game balance). This utilises the fealty required in the noble patent, city charter, or constitution of the nation. Based on this review I anticipate this would require a degree of rule expansion as I don't have a copy of these rules yet.
Great review! I created a luck economy to allow PCs to reroll failures & power certain feats. There are a few ways to get them, but one idea i had was for players in between adventures to play nobles (not their PCs) who are managing their lands, going to war with each other, etc. And somehow this would produce points they could transfer to their PCs as luck. This way, the players would effectively be creating the higher-level events that act as background for their adventure-play. I’m afraid this rule set might be too crunchy for their tastes, but maybe i could adapt parts of it.
This looks awesome. I played the original kingmaker for first edition and had a lot of fun with it.
Watching all these rolls makes me think that I would just hack up a mini-game in Fate for the kingdom-level activity.
Building item bonuses can stack in certain ways (as noted in the pdf), including capitol Buildings with those in active settlements. This is certainly strange, to say the least. The rules for such are definitely strange, and may encourage having a broad capitol, with most important actions set in specific specialized other settlements.
Interesting. I'm already considering how to condense these rules down into a simplified/even more system-agnostic version. Has James Jacobs seen this yet?
Also, I feel like who's in charge of what should have more mechanical impact than it does. I think PCs should be able to provide some kind of bonus to certain checks or something, like an Aid action equivalent.
I don't know if he has seen this yet. Having PCs impact kingdom checks is one of the discussions on my server atm. I think they decided not to do it, to make it system agnostic. But it seems like something that can be fixed.
By listening to this, I feel there is maybe too much rolls going on. I get that they tried to move from the "no rolls, just spreadsheets", but the opposite extreme isn't good either.
Also, it might just be me, but it seems like the kingdom has way too many stats. Not to mention some things seem really weird as skills, like wilderness. Or things that should probably be one skill, like politics and intrigue. I get that it's an attempt to describe the kingdom various aspects... but it seems that collapsing those skills to lesser number (lets say 7 and allowing becoming trained in all of them.. just not in single kingdom) could clear things up.
I agree that the skills feel like a lot. I personally would appreciate there being more clarity on "Loyalty lets me be better at these kinds of checks." For PCs, when you have a Strength you know what it makes you good at. Not so much here.
There is no section, like there is in the CRB, explaining what your ability scores generally do for you.
I don't know if reducing the # of skills is the answer, but it IS difficult to parse how your ability scores help a "department" of your kingdom. There is a chart of all the skills + their related stats and what activities they enable, but it's hard to parse things like "which ones help us deal with Unrest"? Having an ability score be your "way to deal with Unrest" stat would be nice. It MIGHT exist here, but if it is it isn't clear!
I notice that your discord has gone silent on the Kingdom rules for a while. Has there been any consensus on good changes to make to smooth out the first few kingdom levels? I'd comment there, but don't have permissions.
Interesting video. I think that I agree that you should be skilled in some skills in order to do it, like trade. Sure, anyone can barter with the local smith to get a deal on a new cast iron pot, but setting up trade between countries is more than bartering on a large scale. There's diplomacy involved and the understanding of what your kingdom can produce and what your entire kingdom needs in a very large scale, so that makes sense to me. You probably don't want to send your pc's nephew Carl to go deal do kingdom level trade, you want to send someone who knows what they're doing.
IIRC 1st edition Kingmaker was a playtest for the kingdom system while the finalized version was released in Ultimate Combat or Ultimate Campaign.
I liked with 1e how the units basically worked more like a strategy game and you could convert any NPC from the bestiary straight to a unit. Where these rules are very rigid also the units level with your kingdom so it really wouldn't work in like a sandbox game or outside of the campaign it's very specific to this campaign and the flow of this campaign specifically.
This system is antithetical to roleplaying. I can't think of a worse RPG system that creates a series of mechanics where the character has no impact to success or failure for a given action. 0/10
Someone fell in love with the idea of making your Kingdom a character class and never bothered to test if the idea worked. Your kingdoms Ancestry is the government type, your background is the charter, the Kingdom progression chart is your class. It doesn't work, it is asinine and you can tell it was the result of a "brainstorming" session and the developers make the cardinal mistake of falling in love with their own idea and were unwilling to test or admit their failure.
There are 14 skills and you only get 6 skill trainings at the start of the Kingdom progression, pick the wrong skills and you ruin your Kingdom. You get 9 skill increases so if you used these skill increases to fill in the gaps you would have 14 skills that were trained and one that was expert. And given fast your DC's increase you can't afford to be unskilled in any skill otherwise you can't do much at all. Buildings you say! Buildings give you the bonuses to compensate. Nay. The max item bonus is +3 and it scales up to three. The first 8 lvls of your kingdom can only have a +1 item bonus, 9-14 you can have +2 and finally at level 15 you can have +3. But when your Base DC is 34 minimum more likely it will be 37 or 38 because of control modifiers. That +3 makes no difference doing an action with an untrained skill at higher levels can be impossible you are literally rolling to see if you fail or critically fail.
Second we saw on this video that even basic Kingdom actions like establishing relations can be impossible if you didn't pick the skill training for that skill. Idiocy. Not in failing to pick the skill but that such a basic action is banned from players who didn't know. This is not how you make engaging rules for Kingdom play. The whole bloody purpose of the campaign is to create a kingdom and Piazo didn't even bother to see if their rules worked? What the fuck was that all about?
Lets talk about the idiocy of a skill check to build basic structures.
I want to build a dump and it costs 4 resource points which is idiotic, you are literally just setting aside land for people to dump their rubbish into. There is no "building" for a medieval dump. No environmental impact studies. Nothing is done but telling the citizens this is the area to dump your crap into. And it cost this many resources? And the DC is 16! WTF were these developers smoking? But the greatest part is that you can't build one until you are a level two Kingdom. That's right no matter how skilled you are in industry you can't figure out how to tell people to walk over to an assigned spot to dump their rubbish into because that is beyond your ken until level 2. You can build houses which are are lower DC but the knowledge of the Dump is beyond you and is more difficult than building Houses once you do get to level 2. Again we see developers becoming in love with an idea skill checks for building with level restrictions and no stopping to think does this really makes sense? Will this make building a kingdom fun? NO it doesn't. Telling players you can't build something because they haven't "Leveled up their kingdom" is idiotic. Countless rolls to build structures over and over again isn't gameplay it is asinine drudgery that does nothing to eliminate the micromanagement of settlement building. At least in the old system it was simply a matter of resource management. So a player could do this by themselves for the next session. Now it is a skill roll in skills you are statistically more likely to be unskilled than skilled in and thus failure is the most common outcome, making the whole "gameplay" of bookkeeping a lesson in frustration. This added layer doesn't remove the bookkeeping, doesn't add drama, it just forces banality of countless rolls that WILL hurt enjoyment because of how the system works. RNG shouldn't be a factor in the BOOKKEEPING of you kingdom.
The fatal sin of the system
They have removed the character from the rulership of the kingdom. Sure the player is part of the drudgery but your "CHARACTER" has no impact. They bring no skills, ability bonuses nor feats to the table. They bring NOTHING to the role as a "leader." RPGs are about CHARACTER involvement and separating the character from the Kingdom management is beyond a simple whoopsie. It is a fatal flaw.
Short demonstration of what is so shit about these rules
Player 1 "We need the Emissary position filled."
Player 2 "Pick the fighter he doesn't have a leader position, yet"
Player 1 "But he has an 8 wisdom, 10 in charisma and intelligence plus he isn't skilled in intimidation, stealth, deception, diplomacy, society or thievery. He is the least qualified person for the position his idea of intrigue is stick a sword in it. What about that Rogue we saved and pledge his undying loyalty to us? He has all the skills plus multiple skill feats that make him the obvious choice for a leader in charge of the Kingdom's intrigue."
Player 2 "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! you can't put an NPC into that position! the PC gets a bonus to all checks the NPC gets nothing. Besides none of our skills, ability scores or feats impact any aspect of the role as leader."
Player 1 th-cam.com/video/uSvJaYxRoB4/w-d-xo.html
This entire system is shit, it is a lesson in idiocy. Nothing about the new system works. It doesn't actually address the drudgery of book keeping of settlements, adds hurtles to settlement booking making it MORE time consuming, not less. The skill system is broken. Characters have ZERO impact on success or failure regardless of their suitability for a given position. There is NO integration between character and kingdom. Why rule a Kingdom when nothing that makes up your character has any impact on the Kingdom rules? I will end this how I began, this system is antithetical to roleplaying. I can't think of a worse RPG system that creates a series of mechanics where the character has no impact to success or failure for ANY given action. Imagine playing pathfinder where every action you make in the game is not impacted by any skill, feat or ability score of your character. Would that be fun? NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!! There is nothing to salvage from this system.
There is a kickstarter coming out on Monday October 24 on expanded rules on kingdom building.
Oh? This is my first time hearing about this. Do you have a link to this Kickstarter?
@@jltheking3 Legendary Games, Ultimate Faerie Kickstarter
Please create a Kingmaker AP Playlist.
I look forward to more content on this adventure.
Alright!
You mention other AP subsystems being a bit lackluster. What are your thoughts on the subsystem for rebuilding and maintaining the fortress in Age of Ashes book 1?
More input after 3 weeks of playing Kingmaker. The kingdom turns are REALLY slow. And that's with it being partially automated in Foundry. The game also expects you to do a TON of these turns you get little XP and it wants you to get your kingdom up to the player's level. We would have to spend MANY MANY hours to do that. Probably multiple sessions to get from level 1 to 4 on Kingdom level just doing king turns nothing else. I'll be doing your milestone idea
You want Paizo to make an errata on these rules?
Edit Lore: Brevoy doesn't have a king... the king, and his family, disappeared around the beginning of Pathfinder 1e. What it does have are two competing sub-nations (the ones conquered by Choral the Conqueror and "unified" under his Reign into the nation of Brevoy). However, a ruling noble is able to give away lands they have a title to worthy people who then become minor lords. So, it's possible that the Sword Lords decided to build a new fort near a settlement that has exploitable resources in preparation of the impending civil war, and the aspiring sword lord being chosen would become that settlement's new "Lord" when they prove they are able to build and maintain the fort, expand the settlement, etc.
It might have been better if you found a map of the Sarkoris Scar and attempted to make a "Kingdom" there as it's one place on Avistan that no one has any claim on... other than all those high CR demons...
Yes, but we are way early in the process. (Maybe some hotfix errata for the moment? Idk.) There needs to be a whole period of people trying out the rules, experimenting with fixes, and sharing their experiences with each other and that will take a long time.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG The AP has already been shipped and the money come in…. Unlike classes or the CRB itself, this material is unlikely to be continuously used by players beyond this adventure path and will not affect future sales.
I doubt Paizo is going to make effort to do an errata at this point… we the community will need to fix it by hacking it ourselves. It’s D&D 5e all over again.
I would be pleasantly surprised if Paizo actually did a balance errata though!
@@jltheking3 it's what Legendary Games is for (fixing APs) 😜
I don't know how many fokes will read this comment because of how old the video is this. I think how the "skills" are gained are the major flaw in this system I would propose as a fix you would have special buildings that do not exist on the grid that represent skills, or perhaps they're rooms in your town hall or palace or whatever. you would start with 5 slots for your built buildings or "trained skills", as your capital city gains levels you can add more buildings/rooms etc.
In order for you to upgrade a skill to expert and beyond you need to have another settlement that has the same equivalent building constructed in that settlement. new settlements start with 2 slots for skill buildings and gain up to a maximum of 5 as they level up. when you have more than one of the skill buildings in your kingdom you can choose to upgrade the skill building in your capital and go to expert and beyond.
I think this new skill system will be cool in two main ways because one... your gm can decide how many settlements you can have which will give them a tap on how powerful your kingdom is as the game progresses. And two once your kingdom gets big enough ideally you'd be trained in most of those essential skills.
Sounds like an an extra character that actually needs to eat 😁
The Foundry module for Kingmaker is coming out in two weeks!
How about adding buildings that provide makes a specific skill trained when built? E.G. an embassy building might enable the statecraft skill to become trained.
I am a bit shocked about how this AP seems to turned out. Huge errors have already be found in the print version. Maps seems to be not of great quality. Rules not playtested enough.
I hope this isn't such a big of a deal and all if that will be fixed till the AP will be released for Foundry next year. Can't verify because I don't have the books yet.
How can you be shocked. It has had a trouble some development from the get go, and it made primarily during the pandemic.
I agree with both of you lol. I think this AP came about a year or 2 years after its initial intended release. And from one of the Paizo employees' post on Reddit recently, it sounds like Paizo had a hump to overcome when the pandemic hit and overseas shipping costs increased that was legitimately perilous for the company.
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG It felt like Paizo made many of the normal crowd-funding mistakes of not really estimating how much time all their stretch goals would require to fulfill when offered; and once met, it didn't feel like the adjusted their normal production flow/cadence to account for it. Ie all of KM sounds like it was effectively overtime work on top of all their normal planned releases. From the brief bits posted online that offer insight into the workflow it really feels like it was basically only JJ working on it (despite what the credits page looks like) and any help received from others was outside/above normal job/task assignments. A bit of over-promise/underdelivered. I'm still happy with it, I think its worth what I spent and I look forward to running it multiple times. But I think they left a lot on the table of possibly improvements.
@@martinjrgensen8234 To be honest, I am brand new to Pathfinder - haven't been able to play or gm a single game - just reading the books until our Curse of Strahd Campaign wraps up and we switch systems. So all the drama about this AP went right past me. I only heard good stuff about paizo, this is why I am shocked to see the opposite now. I hope all the money I spent wasn't for nothing / false promises. As long as it's better than 5e in regards of rules and amount of time spent homebrewing stuff that's just not there it still should be fine right?
@@maxmusterspace6037 This is the first I’m hearing about this either. Paizo APs have been historically excellent. This one was just exceedingly tumultuous probably because the pandemic + Kickstarter pipeline disrupted the workflow
this is where proficiency without a level would be good and have a static dc mb increase it every couple of lvls
Hi, Where is the link for the automated Kingdom sheet? I did not see in the above links.
Thank you for doing this as it is helping me to understand this process.
Hello! Thank you for making these videos. They are tremendously helpful. Can you tell me where I can find the 2nd Edition Editable PDF for the Kingdom? My Google Fu has failed me. Thank you.
In future videos like this, could you zoom the browser window a bit to make the text more legible?
If I am dealing with a web page like that again, yes, I'll see if it's possible without messing things up
wait.. this costs $100 on roll20 and it isn't tested?
Ouch, it's $100 on roll20? The hardback is that price... (I'm more familiar with Foundry VTT) Tbh the value is mostly in the adventure rules as the kingdom rules are still a work in progress with the community hacking it to make it work. There is material however for a fun system with the GM making adjustments.
Did the Warfare rules example ever come out?
Where is the link to the rules from Piazo? I see the link for the spreadsheet but I would like to read the rules as I use the spreadsheet so I understand what is going on.
I don't think the kingdom rules are in the SRD/Archives of Nethys... they're in the free Kingmaker Player's Guide: paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si5a?Introducing-the-Kingmaker-Player-s-Guide
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Thank you
Link for the spreadsheet?
I wonder if Paizo will be updating the past adventure paths to respect the remaster's ability modifier emphasis.
Looking forward to the warfare rules video.
I tried following along with all of your steps but every one of your kingdom skills modifier is 2 higher than mine. Where are you getting the +2 across the board to all skills from?
Are you adding the bonus from being Trained in a skill? This vid's from a while ago and perhaps I didn't mention it?
From where or how can I also get such an editable pdf?
Are you talking about the kingdom sheet? It's not editable - I just have a version of Acrobat that lets me edit a PDF by adding text
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Yes I was and thanks for the answer
I don't need them, already have and easy enough to find, but you said at the start of the video you'd put a link in the description to the players guide.
Looks like you can't use Quell Unrest with the same skill on consecutive turns.
Your new haircut looks nice.
Thanks! I just looked in the mirror and snipped away! lol
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG I hope this isn't a Brittney moment!
Thank you for making these videos, they are very helpful! What editable map software are you using in the background?
I use the map from this website: lostatlases.blogspot.com/2018/02/map-pitax-mivon-and-stolen-lands-at.html
And I think this is the software they use: www.hexographer.com/
How would this change for a 5e version of KM?
I believe it’s system agnostic. Nothing changes
Hey, could you please share what hex map you're using in the background?
Doesn't look like the one from the AP
Ah, I'd forgotten to credit the mapmaker! Adding it now to the video description. It was made by Lost Atlases and I found it at: lostatlases.blogspot.com/2018/02/map-pitax-mivon-and-stolen-lands-at.html
@@TheRulesLawyerRPG Hello,
Thank you so much for the swift reply!
May I ask what the hex settings (size and background image scale) you were using in FoundryVTT so it fits?
I can't seem to get it just right.
Thanks so much for your time!
@@EdernFGC Oich, I looked up what I did:
background image scale - "1"
grid size - "50"
so it seemed design for easy scaling?
btw the little Ruler symbol in Foundry gives you a "live" updating of the grade as you tweak it, plus you can adjust it with your arrow keys then!
Great content, ty!
this really makes pf2 like civ 6. ha ha.
hmmm I dont see how this could be fun for a party of 7 people. it's like you have a character being controlled by multiple individuals. am I wrong?
Arts Check to quell unrest = propaganda campaigns
👏👏👏👏
the part where you were talking about the DC getting insane is actually a problem in the base game as well. i also despise the proficiency tiers. the game feels like it was Dev'd as a video game.
PF1e Kingmaker was interesting and fun, this looks like it needs a lot of house rules and isn't really fleshed out all the way. maybe they should have spent a couple hours playtesting.
Proficiency tiers are fine in the base game because as Ronald mentioned, you have multiple PCs. It is expected that the evolving DCs would be able to be met by the PCs that specialize in specific skills to keep up in tiers, instead of spreading increases around and duplicating skills already shared with other PCs.
But in Kingdom Management this is not the case. You only have 1 “PC”. The old math expected you to specialize in specific skills, but at the same time rules pull you into spreading out your skill increases in order to engage in other kingdom activities. It’s a lose-lose situation.
Ronald’s suggestion of (1) removing activity training requirements and (2) allow even untrained skills to add kingdom level to proficiency fixes this problem, and let’s you continue to specialize in skills to keep up with the evolving DCs.
@@jltheking3 I don't like them because the difference between minimal training and max is inconsequential. You'll have 6 less in a roll than a legend. It's like a someone that took an art class once (trained) can create a a masterpiece with only slightly better luck than someone who that is their life's work (legendary). Their should be a much larger gulf between them. They had to make everyone too close together because they made the margins too tight. You can be legendary in a skill and that gives you an about 60/40 pass rate on an at level check even for things a master should auto pass and a novice can't even begin to know but still has a decent shot of doing. This is a failure of the crit failure, failure, success, crit success mechanics. Forcing the devs to make everything tighter, so the die roll is far more impactful than a characters skill at a task.
@@nevyns9285 This is the first time I’ve ever heard someone complain that the gulf between trained and legendary being +6 as being too *small*.
Usually, the complaint is that it’s too *large*. In the playtest, this difference was only a +3, and the game had to be significantly shifted in many ways to accomodate the larger gap, and arguably it made the game worse in various ways.
If you think a +6 is too small a gap, then clearly you have no idea how PF2e’s math works, where even a +1 is a big difference due to how degrees of success works. A +6 bonus is not just a 30% increased chance to succeed. It’s also a 30% increased chance to critically succeed, and a 30% reduced chance to critically fail.
This difference is ENORMOUS.
@@nevyns9285 If you actually do the math, a +2 bonus in Pathfinder 2e is roughly equivalent to granting advantage in D&D 5e for a Strike.
That’s all I’ll say on the matter. A +6 bonus is enormous but it does take an understanding of the game’s math to realize this.
Yeah, another way to put it is that's a 60% chance of increasing the degree of success
I cannot believe how you are completely not critical of the lack of playtesting. If this would have been a 5e mechanic that was released without play testing you would have been very critical. This really demonstrates how one-sided you are. You should have been critical of this. No game publisher should be pushing out non-play-tested content. That is straight-up terrible. I am very disappointed in the quality of this particular video.
You had my interest until I found out this was for the second edition rehash.
Played it and feel it needs some tweaks. For instance when building armies, seems you would need a fletcher for recruitment of archers and a stables for recruitment of calvary units, etc. Also irrigation and rivers should increase agriculture in hills and plains, not just allow farming in deserts. Also I think the number of Regional Activities should increase from three to four at perhaps level 10 or so. I can also think of a few buildings that should be added or adjusted for upgrades.