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Kingmaker Is A NightmareAuthor: Sigilis Published: 2024-12-05 13:57 EST I've recently started making a program to deal with the difficulty of the administration and bureaucracy of running my weekly Kingmaker game.Some BackgroundI run a weekly Pathfinder 2e Kingmaker campaign with four of my friends. This in practice means that I run a tabletop roleplaying game out of a book that is the adaptation of a set of books that were based on a system that was recognized as having some balance issues. I figured that I would simply use the collected and updated version of that old Pathfinder 1 adventure path and have some fun with maps and paper and stuff.The adaptation process has resulted in possibly the slowest and most tedious system ever put into a game that I have run, the Kingdom Turn.As far as I can tell, the designers of the game were looking for a new way to kill players, and discovered that their attention spans were the weak link. They put in this Kingdom Turn, which represents a month's worth of the decisions of the rulers of an authoritarian nation like entity, as their coup de grace. You have to go through a flowchart of maintenance, calculations, and dozens of tiny decisions that involve referencing a large amount of rules and figures that are not assembled in a convenient manner.Players have become confused by:

What actions they can take

What buildings they can build

What the consequences of various levels of success/failure are

How much things cost to do, which depends on the texture/color of an unclear map

What the stats of an army are

What it costs to have an army

What effect the many built buildings have on the actions they can take

How a change will affect the difficulty of future checks

and much more...

Not even mentioning the constantly fluctuating values for skills that are used to determine the level of success that depend on what bonuses exist which apply to the skill for the given actions and what flavors they come in, since they mostly, but not always, are restricted from overlapping.What's more, these kingdom turns seem to need to happen hundreds of times over the course of the game.These are all problems with the presentation and calculation of data. These are all problems that a computer can solve for us.The IdeaIt's pretty simple, make an app that can present the information that the players need to them and allow them to collaboratively track and execute Kingdom Turns.The users have phones or tablets with them, which are internet connected, but vary in OS. The target platform is therefore "Browser". Given the limited screen sizes of the devices, the density of information should be relatively high, but the "information area" should be low.This results in a design that will show only the current phase of the each of the steps of the kingdom turn with the information that is relevant to the user by default. At the present time this is expected to be achieved by collapsing sections of the interface for the Kingdom Turn by default on transition between phases, but making future and previous phases available for reference.Computed values should provide the sources of the computation in order for the user to identify the source of benefits and detriments to the relevant values from the situation and choices that they have made.The GM should have a view that offers customization for the underlying rules of the kingdom turn as well as the ability to change the current phase and monitor the state of the turn as the users input their selections.Technical DetailsI've been on a bit of a Go kick lately, so this is going to have Go as the server at the heart of this. SQLite should be more than enough database for this purpose, but the specific database in use is not a huge concern and can be changed later. No frameworks again, because despite working with them for years, I don't really know what the point of them is. I'll probably find something somewhere along the way of my various for fun development efforts... right?A Problem Right Out The GateOf course there is a problem.You can't seriously expect that the little bit up above was enough of a specification?I ended up filling in some blanks in a more expensive way than I expected initially. When I was thinking up the authentication and authorization system it has just a hop skip and a jump to consider that many people could use this system later if it turned out even halfway decent.If there are multiple people that can run games on this platform there would have to be a way to track the different games, so might as well give people the ability to run multiple games themselves.If people are running multiple games, then they won't all be Kingmaker, is there anything else that needs meticulous tracking and monitoring? Yes. Encounters, Hero Points (which are supposed to be given out using a per session and time based metric), passive perception checks, knowledge rolls, secret checks in general, and probably more. All of these could be modular components added to a particular campaign at the discretion of the user.On top of that, people might be in multiple campaigns as players and as GMs, so there should be a consolidated interface so that they can log in and select the appropriate one. Also, people might not want to log in in the usual way just to play a game, so there should be an alternative means that doesn't involve registration at all in order to join a game, possibly just a link.So now I have the plans to a tabletop game cathedral where my small chapel where I wanted to pray for salvation from Kingdom Turns was supposed to go. In my regular life as a leader of men and developer for money, I'd usually quash these feelings and identify my MVP for my personal use and do that.But I'm doing this for fun, and isn't it everyone's secret wish to give into the impulse for scope creep?

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