For the last seven years I have been running an online game, at RPoL, based around Paizo’s Kingmaker campaign, using a home-brew set of kingdom rules.  The game finished a few weeks ago and now I have a chance to reflect on what I learned while the game was running, so that I can build a better set of campaign rules for the next game that I run.

Purpose

The rules were intended to in encourage cooperative role play, encourage PCs to interact with the world, allow PCs to build strongholds and to, eventually, build a whole kingdom.  To some extent, I achieved all of those objectives, but not consistently.

Cooperative Role Play

Fuzzy Time:  The game generally ran with three PC parties operating in the same world, which limited player interaction.  There were two reasons for this: the more players I had, the more chance PCs had of finding someone on the same role-playing wavelength as themselves; Kingmaker is a huge Adventure path, and it took three years to run it as a tabletop campaign, running on RPOL, with a single party would take ages.  Even with an average of three parties, we were only halfway through the campaign after seven years of play.

Fuzzy time let me run non-combat threads where characters from different adventuring parties could meet up and role-play with each other.  That worked quite well for occasional meetings, parties and shopping trips – but I soon ran out of ideas and couldn’t work out how to start suitable new threads.  I ran a few political threads but, in hindsight, I could have developed that further.

Many of the ‘meeting’ threads dealt with political matters.  Should we allow a particular religion?  How should we react to the King?  A trip to visit the Ruler of the new Aldori holding.  Not only did they allow PCs to interact across adventuring groups, but they encouraged PCs to interact with the world.  However, my politics were too complicated for me to have a good handle on it, and too isolated from the day-to-day life of the characters for it to be relevant.  In future, I need to make the world, and its politics, smaller and more relevant, so that I can consult the players more often.

That will help me in another way as well.  I am not good at finding ‘unique’ voices for NPCs and all of my NPCs tend to be very similar in their approach.  With fewer NPCs to worry about, I might be able to develop better personalities for them.

Stewardship rules:  The Stewardship rules were introduced to encourage PCs to run holdings and businesses cooperatively.  They worked spectacularly well in some cases, but were undermined by the Entourage rules.  The city of Tusk was built using the resources of many different PCs, overseen by a committee of three PCs – although one of them took on a majority of the planning work, the others remained involved to some extent or another.  V&A shipping was build using the resources of two different players and became the largest business in the game. WSM, a cooperative venture between two PCs, grew quite quickly as well. House Solanus used both marriage and adoption to increase their resources and work cooperatively.

However, other holdings were run by a single PC, using their Entourage members to support them.  That was something that I encouraged, but it reduced the need to work cooperatively.  I think, perhaps, that I need to reduce the number, or effectiveness, of entourage members, to make them less appealing as partners in running a business.

Noble Houses:  While Noble titles were a goal in their own right, Noble Houses intended as a catalyst for driving cooperative role-play, and building long-term relationships between PCs.  The rules included: Marriage, we had a number of marriages between PCs and even a few featuring NPCs and Entourages; Adoption, which became a tool for legitimizing and advancing entourages, although one PC was adopted into a Noble House formed by a marriage; Alliances, which were little more than a tool for building relationships with NPCs and introducing new entourages.

That system worked well, although it wasn’t taken up as well as I would have liked.  However, I think that the role of Allies needs to change so that they don’t become tools of the PC.  In the previous rules, I oversaw the way that allies resources were spent to ensure that the NPC, and their backers, got something from the relationship.  Perhaps I can extend that to allow players to run NPCs who are available to become Allies of other player’s PCs.  I’ll have to think about that one, when I rebuild the entourage system.

However, next time around I will include rules for Venture Companies, to complement the Noble House and Allies rules.  By setting up a formal system where PCs can profit from working together, it should encourage more group-based developments.  It builds on the actions of the PCs in my tabletop Skull & Shackles game, who give an equal share of money recovered to their Ship’s Fund –  so that they can meet any group expenses.  The same sort of thing happens in a Starfinder game that I play in, although the share isn’t quite the same – and it is a starship, rather than a sailing ship.

Interacting with the World

This is something I became interested in, while I was helping to build Persistent Worlds for Neverwinter Nights.  In a computer game, it is easy to set up.  I can build scripts that change character’s alignments, write conversations with a number of different options, and set NPCs to attack characters who are caught stealing or fighting.  I can build class and race guilds, and run exclusive adventures for members, and I can write systems where all the NPCs in a town call the Character by their title.  Rather than Characters interacting with the world, the world interacts with the Character.  However, in a Roleplaying game, it has to be the other way around  :}

I am quite please that the systems I wrote enabled some interaction with the wider world, without making it compulsory for those players who don’t really enjoy those aspects of the game.  Players all bring something different to a game, and that variety and flexibility is important to the game dynamic –  it soon gets stale if everyone thinks and behaves in the same way.

In The Stolen Lands, the game area was shaped by the PCs.  They built the towns and settlements, they decided religious structures, they built the main trade links, they facilitated alliance with others, and they made most of the big political decisions.  Half the time they might not have realized it – but the area they colonized is shaped by their decisions and actions.

Better still, they helped me develop the systems they wanted to make the game work and tested the systems that I had written to the limits.  We invented new descriptions of troops, revived a dead god, designed temples and expanded the range of businesses – all done cooperatively, and all driven by player decisions or requests.  The world grew and took on personality because of the actions of players.   But opportunity to do those things was sporadic.

As I said earlier, reducing the size of the world, and its politics and reorganizing the Alliance rules will help to condense the system and make opportunities to interact with the world easier to write, and therefore more frequent.  However, there are other things that will help as well.

Holding Development: My original campaign rules are based on the system delineated in the Kingmaker AP and used Build Points and standard buildings, although we did away with the block city template.  That has the advantage of separating PC Gold that should be used to buy gear, from the resources needed to develop a holding – which doesn’t disadvantage those who want to interact with the system.  It doesn’t matter if they own property or not –  every PC in a party should have roughly the same amount of money to spend on gear.  However, it means that you pretty much have to use the building ‘packages’ as they are, and they can’t be modified easily.

However, I intend to use the new system published by Paizo as the base for the next set of campaign rules.  It still has building packages, so a character can buy an off-the-shelf building, but it also has costs for individual rooms and different troop types defined, which allows for a much greater range of customization.  The downside, is that everything is priced in GP and poses a risk to adventuring gear.  I think I can resolve that by using patrons who reward characters with Development Funds, and tax rebates, that are paid directly into a Development Fund.  PCs will be able to put money into their development fund, but taking money out will be heavily taxed.  The businesses themselves will only make a small profit, although that is boosted by a tax refund, if the profit goes straight into a Development Fund.  Gods, I am starting to sound like a demented politician obsessed with taxes, but I’ll keep the system simple no one will have to fill in tax returns for their character :}

Patrons

I haven’t really used patrons before, but next time I will have a small group of people and organizations who are prepared to pay for certain things.  All of them will be interested in extending their holdings and securing what they have –  so part of the reward will always come in the form of Development Funds.

So far I have …

A Mercenary Company who will make a regular payment to lease a Dojo/Barracks in return for the right to train the PC’s military, when they need it  (The PC still pay the same fee as normal, but gets a regular income).  Possibly backed by some combination of Abadar and St Cuthbert.

A merchant company who will lease a pier, for the right to trade from it.  The FFTC is a long-term favourite trading company of mine.

A governor, who wants to expand their holdings, who will pay a regular stipend to anyone who extends her influence by building a Fortified Holding.   

If the PCs do it right, they can get extra income from all three of those examples, from a single holding. I am sure I can think of a few more ‘background’ patrons as well. 

There will also be some Active Patrons who have specific tasks to be carried out.  Perhaps something like ‘Get revenge on that Orc tribe for me’, ‘Find the lost Temple of Wee Jas’ or ‘Get that pirate ship!’.  All pay out in development fund credit, as a well as a small cash reward.

Time

There are two ways that time became a problem for me. 

The first was down to the finance system that I was using.  I really didn’t have a good idea of how well people would build with the rules that I gave them.  The first few Kingdom Rounds were great, people managed to get on the Property Ladder and started to grow slowly.  Then things took off exponentially, and everything started to grow at a ridiculous pace.  We built a city, a number of large towns and a set of large businesses in about 12 years game time, which is much too fast. OK, it showed me a lot about the campaign rules very quickly, but things were getting out of hand, and the world was building too fast.  Characters were able to get noble titles too early, I was giving away much more XP than I intended, and managing the spreadsheets became a nightmare.

Which leads to the second problem with time.  My time.  Managing spreadsheets and updating websites went from a bit of casual work to weeks of intense work – and that burned me out.  Game Over.

Shrinking the world, and reducing the business returns, will fix that.

PC Backgrounds

I pushed players towards game-friendly character backgrounds, and let them help develop the part of the game that they chose.  Some areas were very popular, and they became quite heavily developed, as characters developed their backgrounds.  That worked quite well, and led to some good role play.  Not everyone followed that line, some players don’t like detail in their backgrounds –  and that is fine, we all have our own ways of playing, and so long as it adds to the game, that is fine by me.  I shall certainly do something like that again.