Pathfinder 1E Do we care about what it's doing? Ultimate Campaign

[MerricB]

G'day, all!

I'm currently flipping through Paizo's "Ultimate Campaign" book, hoping to be inspired enough to write a review about it, and instead coming up with a question: Does anyone care about what the book does?

Not "how it does it", but rather whether the new systems it adds to Pathfinder are actually worth the time.

The new systems, for those who are following along at home, are "Character Background", "Downtime", "Kingdom Buildings" and "Mass Combat". Yes, there is another chapter ("Campaign Systems") which has a grab-bag of rules for in-game situations, but the big ones are the four I just mentioned.

It's not that these topics are bad things, but rather, do you really want to deal with them as part of a D&D/Pathfinder game? At its heart, D&D is a game about a group of characters going off and having fantastic adventures. To a large extent, things that happen before, after and between these adventures don't actually matter. That's the traditional approach.

Ultimate Campaign says, "Yes, these things do matter", and gives you a lot of mechanics to handle them. Of course, actually implementing these mechanics takes time, and so takes away from the fantastic adventures you could otherwise be having. (I ran Kingmaker; I'm quite familiar with how much table-time the actual running of the kingdom could take; it's not horrid, but it's still time spent away from adventuring).

I'm curious: What do you feel? Is the material Ultimate Campaign covers irrelevant to your games, or it something that you're very glad exists and was lacking from your game? Or something else?

Cheers!

 

[fjw70]

Mass combat is the only one of those I care about, but I rarely play with anyone else that cares about it so it has been a long time since it was a part of my game. Maybe again someday.

BTW how are the mass combat rules?

 

[paradox42]

Different games have different needs, even conducted within the same setting. For example, if you're not planning on doing a kingdom-building game, then most of chapter 4 will be totally irrelevant to you, but if a PC suddenly decides he wants to be the adventurer who owns his own tavern (a staple character of many a fantasy work), then it'll sure as Hells help you to have chapter 2 on hand ready to go!

It all depends on what you (and your players- never forget that their desires may differ from yours as GM) want out of your role-playing game. Adventuring is cool, sure, but sometimes it's also cool to have some actual concrete idea what's going on back in Sandpoint while the party goes out after those pesky goblins.

Ultimate Campaign isn't meant to be used in every game. It's just there for niche situations that we've all seen but never (before now) had explicit rules to handle, and usually ended up having to make our own. When you don't need it, it'll just sit there, but when you do need it, you'll be very glad to have it!

 

[I'm A Banana]

At its heart, D&D is a game about a group of characters going off and having fantastic adventures. To a large extent, things that happen before, after and between these adventures don't actually matter. That's the traditional approach.

I think that's kind of a gatekeeping statement: "X is what D&D is, Y is not!" is rarely categorically true. D&D clearly IS domain management and mass combat and character backgrounds and training time. These things are interesting and fun for a not-insignificant number of players, who value these things. "Time away from adventuring" isn't necessarily time ill-spent, since adventuring doesn't have a monopoly on fun times. What's more, a lot of these things serve to help create adventures and to add dimension to adventures that might be undertaken.

Do we care? Well, Paizo's sales numbers on the product might give a good indication of if the Pathfinder audience in general cares. They clearly don't think it's a silly bet, so it's pretty obvious that THEY think that enough people care. I imagine their market research is better than my personal market research, so I'd say the odds are in favor of a significant chunk of people caring. If you don't care, it's probably not a good product for you to review. It'd be like me reviewing the newest One Direction album: I don't care. If you'd like to learn to care, you can maybe learn from a fan why it's fun, and drop the idea that a game of Pathfinder must fit some rigid mode of adventuring.

Like, you said about Kingmaker that it takes time away from adventuring, but if what you're doing instead is just as fun -- or more fun -- than a dungeon raid, then you really don't need to go adventuring. And you don't need to have a definitional crisis about the game you're playing just because you're not doing a dungeon raid.

 

[Umbran]

It's not that these topics are bad things, but rather, do you really want to deal with them as part of a D&D/Pathfinder game?

Given that with stunning regularity, we see folks asking, "How do you do mass combat in D&D?" and, "How do you handle kingdom building in D&D?" I think the answer is a resounding "YES!" for a couple of those.

At its heart, D&D is a game about a group of characters going off and having fantastic adventures. To a large extent, things that happen before, after and between these adventures don't actually matter. That's the traditional approach.

"The traditional approach", at least in 1e, was to get followers, build a stronghold, and such - kingdom building. And what campaign *doesn't* have a war or threat of war such that mass combat isn't called for?

 

[Jester David]

Who hasn't had a character in a campaign take ownership of a business somewhere along the line?
Or had a character sit around bored while the wizard crafts wands for a week?
Or had the party decide to build a manor or keep?

It's not a necessary part of the game, but it helps solve problems that come up.

 

[MerricB]

BTW how are the mass combat rules?

My impression from their original form in Kingmaker was "problematic". They're quite abstract (not in itself a bad thing), but the interaction with Challenge Rating mathematics leads to some odd situation. I'm just about to try looking at how the maths for an army of 500 Fighters lines up against five armies of 100 Fighters - and other permutations on that idea.

The bigger problems probably come from their intersection with the kingdom-building rules. You could do some very wonky things in Kingmaker when building armies (they read very much as an afterthought rather than a properly integrated set of rules). I'm hoping that they're better integrated in Ultimate Campaign.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

"The traditional approach", at least in 1e, was to get followers, build a stronghold, and such - kingdom building. And what campaign *doesn't* have a war or threat of war such that mass combat isn't called for?

Was it really? I know that the earliest days of D&D, coming as they did from wargaming, had that as part of play, but was that approach also used by everyone else?

I'm not saying it *wasn't*, mind you, but I've seen a lot of reports of dungeon adventuring and very little on owning a castle.

 

[dd.stevenson]

I would care a lot about the mass combat rules if they were good, but I suspect that they'll just be some statistical averaging trick derived from 3.x, only marginally better than what I could have baked up myself.

By all means, I'd love to know if my suspicions are unfounded.

 

[Azgulor]

Ultimate Campaign is one of the best RPG purchases in years. My players love the background generator, retraining is a good system, downtime rules are a system I've been seeking since 1st edition. Additionally, kingdom-building & mass combat needed refinements over Kingmaker given its popularity.

While I can't fault your "heart of D&D" statement, long-term sustainable campaigns struggle to exist on that alone and most of the print run of Dragon flies in the face of that being "enough". I know WotC caught flak at 4e's launch for taking a "this is the way to play" (rightly so). If people will play Skyrim and flock to things like Hearthfire with its homesteading mini-game or spend sessions reading in-game books to learn more world lore, there's a poorly served appetite for these kinds of subsystems. It's not for everyone and certainly not for beer-n-pretzels games, but it greatly enhances my games.