Kingmaker through book 5 (Spoilers)

[Crothian]

Crothian, roughly how many BPs does your party earn, on average, each month from their Economy check?

Mine, having spent quite a while building up their score, now reliably earns 12-14 each month as a matter of course, without the automatic selling of magic items.

Now we get about 40. When we had to raise armies though that increased our consumption by like 36 a month. That doesn't include the start up cost of equipping them with better items and getting them mounted. The war for us was over fast because we went after Pitax as quickly as we could. But it took us a while to react to being attacked by Pitax's armies an our DM did not make it obvious Pitax was the one attacking us. So, it took time to get the intelligence to react to.

 

[exile]

Pathfinder: Kingmaker is one of several campaigns I am playing in right now. We just finished book 4. We have been using medium/average advancement and have a large group, sometimes as many as tne players at a time. Our characters range in level from 10th to 13th. Our DM has a definite lethal streak, and we have lost several characters throughout the campaign. Currently, the roster looks something like this...

*Sir Seth; human paladin of Iomedae; king; an original character, but dead as of our most recent adventure; we meet his successor this week.
*Emen; half-orc two-handed fighter; general; mother of twins; replaced my human sword and shield fighter who was killed by trolls.
*Longshot; half-orc ranger; archery fighting style; warden or marshall-- can't recall; Emen's husband and baby daddy; an original character
*Kara; half-elf rogue; spymaster; an original character
*Dominatrix; human wizard; High Arcanist (or something like that); replaced Domino and Dominess, a couple of monks
*Divia; human druid; former High Priestess; player out for health reasons; an original character
*Sir Duff; human cleric; new High Priest; relative newcomer to game
*Alfred Copperworth; dwarven summoner; Grand Diplomat; an original character
*The unnamed monk; replaced the unnamed fighter; position unknown; a relatively new an quiet player.

Our group has/had mixed feelings about kingdom building. One player loves it, a couple dislike it, and the rest of us fall somewhere in between. Because the player who loved it had to miss a long stretch of games, we kind of put kingdom building on the background and are handwaving it from here on out (even though the player who loved it is back).

 

[Crothian]

Do people do Kingdom building during the game sessions or in between?

We started doing it during the game sessions but it was not moving fast and like other groups have seen not all the players are into it. Once we moved it in between sessions that really seemed to help move it along and get it better organized. Now that we are almost into book 6 it seems a bit more like a chore and I'm just pushing to get to 200+ hexes so we can claim the final map all that much quicker.

 

[Alzrius]

Do people do Kingdom building during the game sessions or in between?

We started doing it during the game sessions but it was not moving fast and like other groups have seen not all the players are into it. Once we moved it in between sessions that really seemed to help move it along and get it better organized. Now that we are almost into book 6 it seems a bit more like a chore and I'm just pushing to get to 200+ hexes so we can claim the final map all that much quicker.

My group loves kingdom building during game sessions. They really get into the what's and wherefore's of building and expanding their territory and the ramifications of doing one thing over another. Plus there's always the chance for a kingdom event.

Given that it's such a group-input process (there are seven players, with me GMing), doing it between sessions is fairly impossible, particularly since, while they're the ones keeping the city and kingdom maps, they've let me record their kingdom's stat block. Trying to have all eight of us coordinate between game sessions in a back-and-forth decision-making process is a non-starter.

 

[exile]

When we were doing kingdom building, we did it only during sessions. Some sessions were traditional adventuring sessions, others were all kingdom-building, and others still were a mix of the two. We never attempted to do it between sessions.

 

[Crothian]

Entering book 6 we have almost all the hexes on the first three maps (none on the Pitax map). We didn't take nay of the Brevoy spaces and we did give a number of hexes to the Centaurs. I think that will be the last of the Kingdom building for this group. Our kingdom's population might be bigger then the rest of the River Kingdoms. We are a bit under 200,000 people.

 

[exile]

Spoiler (if needed): Content from Book 5 Discussed

Spoiler (if needed): Content from Book 5 Discussed

My Kingmaker group got together to play again last night. Steven (our DM) had done about three years of kingdom building for us, which nobody minded, but we did another two months for ourselves at the start of the session. By the time we were done, we had claimed around a total of 160 hexes and started finally building an army (having thus far relied only on ourselves and a small militia).

Our new army actually consists of five smaller armies...
first army-- 500 foot (4th-level fighters)
second army-- 500 foot (4th-level fighters)
third army-- 100 cavalry (4th-level fighter with warhorses)
fourth army-- 100 archers (4th-level fighters with ranged weapons)
fifth army-- 250 special forces (4th-level half-orc and orc fighters with masterwork weapons)

Army established, we were called off to nearby Pitax for the Rushlight Festival. Our Cleric (of Iomedae-- sad, sad) killed the messenger bearing the invite, but we chose to attend the tournament anyway. We made no attempt to hide our dislike for the ruler of Pitax.

Our party's half-orc ranger (my character's husband) won the archery contest fairly handily. My character (a half-orc fighter) one the test of the axe by a landslide, splitting eight or nine logs (4 was pretty much the norm for the other competitors). Our paladin-regent took second in the poetry contest. My half-orc fighter failed to place (but was far from humiliated) in the jousting.

The session wrapped up with word reaching us at the end of the tourney that one of our cities had been attackedin our absence.

Can't wait for the next session.

Oh yeah, our population is around 120,000.

 

[fnord72]

We have taken a bit more of a relaxed approach in our game. We are just finishing an exploration of a castle/dungeon in Varnhold. Prior to starting book 3, our Kingdom contained 51 hexes and 6 cities. Our capital has 4 districts, our second and third largest cities each have two districts and the others are at one district each.

We house-ruled that a district could only sell a magic item produced in that district. We also work on making sure the buildings in each city make sense (each city has an inn, tavern, temple, guards, dump, etc). After the first district, the others are usually themed. Our kingdom celebrated it's fifth year just before receiving news of the varnhold vanishing.