Kingmaker Questions

[Transbot9]

I'm thinking about eventually running a Kingmaker campaign on FG and am wondering:

• How has that gone for anyone whose played it?
• Does the Kingmaker APs for FG have the Kingdom rules built in?
• How well has it gone for anyone who ran/played Kingmaker on FG?
• Anything I should keep an eye out for?

[Svandal]

Basic summary: very fun concept, but broken mechanics and designed by someone who have not played d&d past level 3

We played some of it, we didn't start from the beginning, but at about level 10 (dont remember exactly)
We are a group who knows the mechanics very well, I mention this because experiences will vary based on mechanical knowledges in groups.

The kingdom building was fun for the first few sessions, but the mechanics dont work at all past a few sessions. There is no point in making any rolls with a d20 when the bonuses surpass the dc of the checks, this happens fast if you make any attempt of optimizing. For our case we stopped when we made stability, loyalty and economic rolls of d20+50 with a dc of about 40.

The army building mechanic is also broken, and does not make much sense. You should stick to a more role playing aspect of the kingbuilding and somewhat just ignore most of the mechanics for army and kingbuilding.

Our group was a kineticist blaster, a paladin of tyranny, a lich wizard teleport specialist, and a gunslinger.
The combats are just terrible at higher levels 10+ where we started. The designers of the adventure have not thought about fly, teleport, dimension door, invisibility or any other utility spells.
Here are some examples:
We annihilated a barbarian village because we all had fly, and they could not fly and could not reach us with throwing weapons. (And blocked escape routes with wall of xxxxx)
Inside dungeons the same problem, no fly on enemies and very high dungeon.
We stormed a fort where the designers assumed at level 12 that we where going to walk through the front gate. (Dimension door, summons, fly made it easy)
We where role playing wise tricked by another king by going to a tournament. This was a trick to get us away from our kingdom so that their army could destroy us. We found out immediatly because we always had some scrolls of sending in our kingdom, and I always had teleport ready. Our reaction time for this was instantanious. (This is what I mean that our group have good mechanical knowledge).

Edit: I was one of the players. Our DM did try some things, like throwing all the encounters for a quest at us at once, but this did not work either (we had great battlefield control and mobility).
I dont want to be overly negative. You can make a great adventure based on this adventure, but it requires work. We had a good time playing it, but we also stopped after 8? Sessions

[Trenloe]

Our group had a great time playing this adventure path. We’re on a break now (book 4) and will be starting again soon. We played well over 50 sessions and enjoyed all aspects of it - the hex exploration, the sand box environment, the settlement building and management, into the mass combat.

This adventure path frequently gets great reviews and is a favorite of a lot of players and GMs. Liked with any campaign, it’s good to know your players - what they enjoy and don’t, and how optimized their characters are; and make adjustments as necessary.

[Transbot9]

Hrm. So far sounds like what I've suspected - I'd have to do a bit of reconstruction work to run it the way I want to and my money is better spent on picking up bestiaries and rulebooks for FG than directly on the AP. No big deal on that. I love the APs so far (got the PF1e PDFs when I backed Kingmaker PF2e), but so far not that big of a fan of Owlcat Game's PC version (picked up on a Steam sale; haven't founded a Kingdom yet but so far feels like it's trying too hard to be Balder's Gate).

I think I'll start up some prep work, though, by getting charts & stuff from Ultimate Campaign put into FG. Then start on drawing a "World Map" of the region with some tokens to go with it. Then make a bunch of rando charts to roll on for exploration...for some reason the campaigns that I'm attracted to running require far too much work to prep.

I think I like making the prep stuff too much.