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Saturday, February 18, 2023

Pathfinder: Kingmaker concept transfer to tabletop

I'm replaying Pathfinder: Kingmaker on two concurrent playthroughs - Molly the Lawful Evil monk, Holgar Carlson the Lawful Good Paladin - to experience the story and the options from two more paths than Otto the Lawful Neutral fighter experienced. One of those reasons is that you get to simultaneously deal with ruling a land and adventuring in that land.

Ruling a territory is often called an "endgame" for D&D and D&D-inspired games. You adventure a bunch, then you grab some money and found a kingdom (OOTS spoiler alert!), and that's that. Or, in the style of very old play, you keep playing but also deal with the upkeep of your kingdom, and delve in dungeons to earn the funds and power that'll help you keep your kingdom intact and growing.

In Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you get the kingdom right away. You need to adventure to keep the kingdom up, and keep the kingdom up to benefit your adventuring. You pretty much rule a kingdom from like, 3rd or 4th level onward.

I think this is a nice campaign approach. The trick is, alternating kingdom-level decisions with adventuring decisions. You need to alternate choices you make for the kingdom - which cost in-game but not out-of-game time and in-game resources - with actual adventuring, which costs you in-game time (delaying kingdom decisions, sometimes) and potentially earns you in-game resources.

This would need some work, but having downtime between delves where you have to decide what the kingdom should do, solve some problems as a ruler would, and make decisions about the direction of the land you rule. Those will also drive adventures, where you have to solve some problems with the sword, the gun, or face-to-face roleplaying diplomacy.

This way you get the effect of rule, but don't get bogged down in the micromanagement of a kingdom and keep those players who'd rather just smite things involved. Yet you tie it all together with the higher-level kingdom stuff.

I'd need to think of how to do this well, but the basic framework for it has existed since back in the day - Gangbusters! is a good example of a place for this, especially criminals. I think this would be a good way forward for our Gamma World game, if we ever play it again. I'd have to think how I'd run this as a GM and see if we can't give it a go someday.

4 comments:

  1. Have you considered seeing how the actual Kingmaker adventure path for Pathfinder plays this out? Or is this something you want to do in a vacuum as a design exercise?

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    1. The concept alone is the valuable bit, not how they execute it in the game. So I'll pass - for now anyway - on seeing how it is done on paper as well as in a video game.

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  2. For what it's worth, I think this basic structure of switching back and forth between high-level strategic or "state" play and granular "individual" play can be found in a lot of games, in some form or other. What first comes to mind for me is video games like X-Com (with world-level and base-level decision-making in addition to the granular battles) and Darkest Dungeon (which layers in town development and team management on top of the literally step-by-step play of dungeoneering), but I also see it in the switch between character and "officer" modes in Band of Blades, or the division between seasons and scenes in Ryuutama.

    All that said, I'd definitely be interested in seeing your take on this!

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    1. Good examples - and I agree. It's rare to see it as part of a pure RPG, though - where you run one guy (or a group of guys) who aren't replaceable, and create a political entity that operates on a difference scale than the PCs. Some kinda do - Darkest Dungeon is a kinda, because the PCs are disposable. But I'll keep noodling around on this idea.

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