It's good to be the King: PCs as rulers

[Libertad]

Many campaign settings assume that the PCs become movers and shakers of the world once they reach a high enough level.  Defeat the demon lord, save the world from destruction, your tales are sung by bards throughout the land, etc.

Some PCs want to be rulers.  Although D&D isn't much geared towards Civilization-style play, there is an appeal to a master swordsman king or a merchant lord tackling the forces of evil head-on.  Birthright is an entire setting based around this concept.  The 3rd Edition supplement Power of Faerun tried to do this for the Forgotten Realms setting.  The Pathfinder Adventure Path Kingmaker is no different.

But Core D&D doesn't have much in the way of advice on how to run such games.  Kings are rich, with legions of minions at their disposal.  They're probably way above the standard Wealth by Level guideline, and the taxes from their treasury probably mean that they can afford some really sweet magic items.

Are there any good house rules/suggestions for games and adventures based around the PCs being the leaders of a nation/nations?

[X-Codes]

Keep it to the broad strokes.  Don't get too detailed.  If you have a city, then determine the makeup of it's population normally using the guidelines in the DMG.  Use generic statblocks if you need to, except potentially for NPCs above 1st-level (depends on how high level the PCs are, they may not even care).

In any case, have the income of the kingdom be about 10 gold pieces per day per 100 citizens.  This is a pretty low tax rate, though, so feel free to increase it to 20 or 30 gold.  Tax rates of 25 and higher, though, will strain your peasants and, unless you're at war and able to stoke the fires of patriotism, you'll run into issues with unrest.  Note that this is just based on how much the peasantry produces.  Taxes on merchants and the like don't really come into the equation, because they would be used to maintain infrastructure, bureaucracy, etc.

As for your military, they are professional, hired soldiers.  Followers you have from Leadership play a different role than your actual armed forces.  Paying for their upkeep is generally 1gp per day for a 1st-level soldier, not including their equipment, barracks, maintenance of your infrastructure, etc.  For soldiers higher than first level, I'd go with (level)^1.5 gold pieces per day for soldiers of up to 5th level or so.  Higher-level soldiers are high enough level to be notable NPCs, and their salary should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Generally speaking, pirating your tax money for personal expenses isn't that wise.  You'll exhaust your funding for soldiers and upset the nobles.

[veekie]

More than that, a key priority is that the kingdom's wealth isn't your equipped wealth, which is distinct from your personal wealth.
Your equipped wealth would have to be made static in some form, a common houserule could be to make the magical items require attuning(and you have a limited attune capacity).

Your personal wealth is more dynamic, and you blow this money on a nice place to live, great food, babes, and generally living large(or you can spend it on getting elite personal defenders). It can be assumed you're supplementing it with the kingdom's coffers for living large, but this is still likely a small portion of the full national wealth.

Your national wealth for the most part goes into infrastructure, maintenance and general natonal development. Most of it would be going out about as fast as it comes in, barring some savings in a treasury to take care of unexpected issues.

[Libertad]

What happens when the PC rulers do drastic and radical ideas, like creating teleportation circles in major trading centers or build a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water to make a big oasis in a desert region?  High-level spellcasters can really change society; if most of the world's stuck in a pseudo-medieval realm, there's probably some reason why other high-level guys haven't tried the same things (with the except of awesome ancient empires).

It hasn't really happened, but there's always the possibility that some players will use this as an opportunity to remake modern political ideals into a fictional setting, particularly if the ruler's the more philosophical, scholarly type of idealist.  I can see how ideas like a classless (in a hierarchical sense) society or freedom of speech being "too ahead of the times" to catch on, but some settings have fantasy equivalents to democratic societies (Greyhawk has the Yeomanry).

[veekie]

Possibly in part they need to consider the problems of simply getting the society to work(since most of the actually going Tippyverse stuff involves custom magic items, traps, undead/construct workforce or large scale planar binding, which in character would actually require research and development time or special effort), they could, and should change some things, with a note that these processes require high level characters to maintain. Changing everything now is harder.

[Halinn]

If you want a magitech campaign, just head over to Eberron.

[Unbeliever]

What happens when the PC rulers do drastic and radical ideas, like creating teleportation circles in major trading centers or build a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water to make a big oasis in a desert region?  High-level spellcasters can really change society; if most of the world's stuck in a pseudo-medieval realm, there's probably some reason why other high-level guys haven't tried the same things (with the except of awesome ancient empires).

It hasn't really happened, but there's always the possibility that some players will use this as an opportunity to remake modern political ideals into a fictional setting, particularly if the ruler's the more philosophical, scholarly type of idealist.  I can see how ideas like a classless (in a hierarchical sense) society or freedom of speech being "too ahead of the times" to catch on, but some settings have fantasy equivalents to democratic societies (Greyhawk has the Yeomanry).

This depends on the kind of campaign you want to run.  A lot of this talk about how D&D meshes with the fantasy setting sort of ignores the unrealistic elements of a fantasy setting.  For example, in Tolkien's world, there is essentially no technological progress for centuries.  If you guys are committed to a fantasy campaign, then at some point you probably will have to address the tippyverse type of stuff.  One of my abiding annoyances with the Forgotten Realms is that it goes back and forth between being very  un-fantasy and anachronistic (highly-developed nation-states, magical equivalents of technology) and a fantasy setting.

I don't think being leaders has to change too much of what characters do, though it may change the kinds of plots they get embroiled in.  In a good way.  I'm kind of thinking of characters like Ned Stark from Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire (a name I hate ...).  He's a powerful leader, and that defines his status in the world. 

That's probably akin to the broad brushstrokes that X-Codes was referring to.

[Kajhera]

What happens when the PC rulers do drastic and radical ideas, like creating teleportation circles in major trading centers or build a portal to the Elemental Plane of Water to make a big oasis in a desert region?  High-level spellcasters can really change society; if most of the world's stuck in a pseudo-medieval realm, there's probably some reason why other high-level guys haven't tried the same things (with the except of awesome ancient empires).

It hasn't really happened, but there's always the possibility that some players will use this as an opportunity to remake modern political ideals into a fictional setting, particularly if the ruler's the more philosophical, scholarly type of idealist.  I can see how ideas like a classless (in a hierarchical sense) society or freedom of speech being "too ahead of the times" to catch on, but some settings have fantasy equivalents to democratic societies (Greyhawk has the Yeomanry).

Those 'awesome ancient empires' are a very good example that people try this and it works and it's cool. If PCs want to do a political tippyverse campaign then, yeah, roll with it, that's very cool. Expect resistance from entrenched forces and many interesting complications.

At some point, the world revolves around the players. 11th level is when you become legend (mechanically). There's absolutely no reason for the world to be static rather than dynamic and responsive to their machinations - high-level spellcasters can and do change societies dramatically.

I mean, once you get 9th level spells you can be god. That's pretty dramatic.

[Marco0042]

Or, if the rules of the game your playing don't support the kind of game you want to run .... Play a different game.

just saying 

[kitep]

Are there any good house rules/suggestions for games and adventures based around the PCs being the leaders of a nation/nations?

I hope you get some good feedback, since this is something that comes up often.

It's probably going to have to involve how to run massive battles - something that D&D rules aren't good for.

I would say check Birthright and the Minitures Handbook for some ideas.

I did have a character that ran his own city - but we didn't get very detailed, and just said that the taxes raised covered the cost of running the city, and my personal wealth was kept entirely separate from my city's wealth.  As long as I kept it "reasonable", the DM had no problem with whatever I added to my city.

There's a reason why tippyverse-level ancient kingdoms aren't around any more - sooner or later, someone comes up with the magic equivalent to nukes, biological warfare, planet devourers, or other WMDs.  Poof!  Kingdom gone.  Maybe the gods have noticed this and stop any current kingdom from rising to tippyverse level.  Maybe not.

I see you're a handbook writer.  If you come up with something good, can you do a writeup of it for others to use as well?

[Libertad]

To the Magic Nuke equivalent, this is what happened in Forgotten Realms in the Netherese Empire.

Despite having awesome epic-level NPCs all over the place, the Goddess of Magic banned the use of epic-level spellcasting, meaning that even guys like Elminster have to stick to the 0-9 formula.

Also, I don't write handbooks so much as I port existing ones over here.  I joined the "Handbook Writer" group so that I can do that.

If I ever do write up a handbook, it would probably be something along those lines, like how to start a revolution against a tyrannical empire D&D-style, an adventuring party strike team of PCs.  The handbook would have recommended spells and PrCs for stuff like covert communications and changing public sentiment.

Damn, I just got an idea!

[Rejakor]

I like the whole 'but then they got greedy' angle on ancient societies using magic to make things insanely better in their lives.  As in, people did do it, and then the planar 'big boys' showed up for all their nice little trinkets, or someone summoned cthulhu or whatnot.


Also, 10g/day per 100 people seems pretty fucking insane considering that using the rules in the DMG, most 'peasants' wouldn't see a gold in their lives, and would make less than 10g/year, most of that in barter or new tools/goods.


Also consider different types of government and taxation - for medieval europe, taxes were usually collected yearly or seasonally, except for small tariffs on goods collected at the entry points of cities.

[Marco0042]

For a campaign of Noble Houses, including a PC ruler try "Houses of the Blooded" http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/14/14250.phtml or perhaps if you would like a Sci-Fi element http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/12/12453.phtml then perhaps "Burning Empires".