The Sky Above Us Shoots To Kill
I have been running Pathfinder's Kingmaker Adventure Path for about six months. The experience has been interesting - sometimes in good ways, sometimes not.
Let's talk about the good so far. I do love the concept. It's a twist on the standard D&D style that focuses on a part of the RPG experience that I personally enjoy: building relationships and telling a story. Don't get me wrong. I love my dice. I love to get that nat 20 and slice a monster in half. But for me that's secondary. Without the story and characterization, I might as well be playing a video game. (Which I also do, but that's not the point.) The sidebars that allow the party to skip the story-building elements and just get to the hacking confuse me. If that's what you wanted, why are you running this adventure path?
I have players who are willing to invest in their characters as well, which is always great. The Lawful Good Paladin and the Chaotic Good Ranger sit at my table and argue politics in character. The Cleric has made less than optimal decision because it was the merciful thing to do. And the gnome Cavalier decided that the pranking faeries everyone else hated were his new best friends - after all, they made a magic mud-spitting tree! What could be cooler?
The potential for political intrigue is fantastic.
However...
Okay, everybody bitches about this, so let's get it out of the way. There should have been more playtesting on the kingdom building rules. They are slightly fucked. The potential for epic failure is set in motion with just a couple of bad rolls. Our table's resident engineer actually had a several-week-long panic about this as he ran the numbers over and over again and it kept ending in a crash & burn. I almost had to hurt him (a little), because he was trying to spread said panic to the rest of the players. We finally had to have an emergency game session (no, really) to run through a few kingdom building turns to demonstrate the ways in which I was prepared to offer them bonuses for in character activity and how much that could help. For instance, I allowed one character per turn to make a Survival roll to reduce Consumption. I also intend to allow them to essentially store a certain number of Build Points to be applied to Consumption should they need it, so long as they have built certain structures (such as a granary). I tried to convince him that I was not going to let half-assed rules kill the game, as that would not be conducive to good story. It took some doing and caused far more stress to all concerned than was warranted.
In addition, the supposed sandbox nature of the game is a bit of a lie. This has nothing to do with increasing CRs as you head down the map, but it is necessary to do a bit of GM finagling. I mean, a Lawful Good party such as mine has no reason not to head straight for the Stag Lord's fort as soon as its location is discovered. If they happen to still be second level when that happens, chances are good for a TPK. (I am not a GM who relishes such thoughts. Again, story.) So you have to trickle them information appropriately. My players got wind of the fort, but were still uncertain of its location. They were prepared to head straight down the Thorn River in their next phase of exploration, to block out where they wanted to go next. Logically, this is a perfectly reasonable course. History is full of explorers who started with the waterways. The writers, however, seem to presume that the players will take it row by row. The encounter layout in both books so far has made that clear to me. I can't imagine the group who would actually do that. Moreover, the Stag Lord's fort is one row below everything else on the first map. On the map in book two there are several other things in that row, one of them a permanent structure. My players? Already explored that hex in the previous book. I moved the structure to another hex - not a huge deal - but it points to a flaw in the thinking. There was no reason to think that the PCs would somehow end up only hitting one hex in that row. Especially if they were going row-by-row.
And my most recent issue, heading into book two, is the wanted poster adventures. I liked the idea of them at first, even if it did feel a little bit like Dragon Age's chanter board sometimes. But in this book they are supposed to get wanted posters from themselves. Apparently. There are two wanted posters in the front of the book that say "the kingdom approves an award of 1,200 gold pieces." I'm sorry, but aren't the PCs supposed to be "the kingdom" that we're talking about here? What is this supposed to mean? It could be that the citizens are pooling money, but these are pretty large sums for that. Sure, if only half of the current residents donated 1 gold, they could get close to the amount, but how many of the peasant farmers have a gold to spare? This is a frontier town, not a gold rush town. And are the other half of the citizenry donating the second bounty? There aren't nobles here. Few are wealthy. I could make it from a single wealthy patron, but then I need a reason. Which I can do, but the point here is more that I shouldn't have to. This is a silly little lack of thought on their part. They did, however, nicely sidestep one issue. There's a side quest for which this set of characters most certainly would not accept payment. But there's none offered. The quest instead increases Loyalty. That's nice. What I might do is give them Loyalty boosts for dealing with potentially deadly monsters, or decrease Unrest, if that's needed. Then I just need to seed the money into the treasure somewhere, so they don't end up behind on equipment.
Anywho, that's enough for now. I'll try to post here after every session in the future.