Kingmaker: The App!
When my group started running Kingmaker, I noticed that the kingdom rules involved tracking a lot of different numbers. I went looking for some electronic resources to take care of all of that, but I didn’t find much. Some decent spreadsheets, mostly. Recently, Hero Lab released a kingdom builder as part of their Ultimate Campaign package, but I found it to be crude and a little buggy.
So naturally, I started staying up late at night working on my own mega-all-in-one-kingdom-builder-slash-manager. Because who needs sleep?
It’s been a fun project, although it’s nowhere near finished. It will probably never get finished, really – it’s a big project and I have a family and work full-time. But I’ve been happy with my progress so far, and thought I would share some screenshots. The interface is not pretty. Heck, the interface isn’t even finalized. But the town screen does pretty much everything I would want it to do. You can drag and drop buildings from the left side onto the town map and it validates the location (is the space empty? is it next to a house? is it next to the water? etc.) and updates all of the bonuses. The hex map portion is brand new and still embryonic. Eventually I want to add on a whole turn-tracker component that can generate kingdom events or read them from a file… but I’m getting way, way ahead of myself. For now, I will be satisfied if it computes all the bonuses correctly, which is already more than Hero Lab can do…
The flags in the screenshots are just examples ones that I threw together myself; the players haven’t decided on any symbols for their kingdom just yet. But everything else is their kingdom as it current exists, after turn/month 6. Although only the town bonuses are being calculated right now. Everything else – leaders, hexes, quest rewards, etc. – is hard-coded in at the moment.
Next: further developments
Next: it is finished, for now
Daddy DM 
Oh my! That’s quite alluring, the siren call of automation.
My group just used a google docs… book? I don’t think anyone will mind if I link it
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ag7Mkp0K7qcfdE40cmhSQTVEakpNN0JwTzQ2QWlWLUE&usp=drive_web#gid=0
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Ha! The siren call indeed. There’s just so much book-keeping involved. Trying to do it without a computer would be difficult, I think. My players can’t even add up their character numbers correctly without Hero Lab. And they’re only 4th level…
That’s one of the better spreadsheets that I found. It looks like you guys didn’t fill in the little town maps in the spreadsheet? Did you have a paper accounting of that, or did you just handwave it? With that many buildings, I wouldn’t blame you. Jeez.
It seems like it would be nearly impossible to fail rolls at that stage, where you just have so much stuff to boost your bonuses. Did your group get bored of the kingdom game at some point, given that nothing could really affect the realm? (aside from war and alien invasion, of course)
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Ah, we had a whole map of the campaign for the city planning on Maptools, each building was token and we just positioned them appropriately.
We slowed down our expansion to focus on boosting our kingdom’s saves, because botching a save means unrest, or stacking penalties from like, assassinations or squabbling nobles.
We purposefully measured the saves to only fail on a 1, but then the blooms happened. so we had to blow BP on those, and we stopped expanding, and it was all very messy.
We have at least 1 player who thinks “luck” shouldn’t have any place in an rpg.
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Back on the topic of “things that Rekt our party”
Gaze attacks. Period.
We might just play them horrifically wrong, but everyone making a high DC save each round or die/become charmed is just too good for a single creature.
You can’t even get away from it because the first round is usually a surprise round because you didn’t know there was a creature with a gaze attack. We ran into a spirit naga, and off the bat the entire party except for the wizard is charmed. Followed soon by the wizard, because it’s now a level 11 or something wizard, against a 12 HD monster he can’t get within 30 feet of, who casts as a 9th level sorceror, is good at grappling, and is convincing the rest of the party to subdue their friend so he can “see reason” and stop shooting fireballs at her.
We even did a do-over and this time the wizard failed the first time around and the cleric got to get grappled, or was that the first attempt…
We had a weird statue taking up prime real-estate in our capital for a bit there.
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Yeah, gaze attacks can be nasty. Especially Nyrissa’s. You’re sort of damned if you do and damned if you don’t, there.
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By the time we got to Nyrissa we were all rocking countermeasures, every fight with gaze attacks is a nightmare. D:
I recommend getting blindfight, darkness and gaze attacks are persistant foes… for PCs, not so much the DM.
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Wow, that’s nice!! can you share this?
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Thank you! Not at this time, no. Right now all the kingdom data is hardcoded and has to be updated by hand. And there’s not even an interface to create a fresh kingdom yet. Once the abilities to start a kingdom from scratch and to save/load the data are in place, I will probably make an alpha version available.
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I should also note that at the moment it’s a Windows-only computer application, not a tablet app or anything. Someday it might migrate to Windows-based tablets, but it’s written in C# so it will never run on iOS or the like.
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Ok thank you. I’ll check regularly your blog for news about it! I’m really interested
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Did you take a week off to work on your kingdom building tool? Or did you just not feel like writing up what happened for our perusal yet?
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Hey, can it be downloaded from anywhere?
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As I mentioned in previous comments, it’s not ready for primetime yet. I have made some good progress on it lately, though.
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