About seven years ago our gaming group began playing through the Pathfinder Kingmaker Adventure Path, led by a GM who was fairly new to the group. Unfortunately our GM experienced many health crises and family issues, and the campaign was frequently interrupted by many hiatuses, some of them lasting as much as a year. Eventually it became apparent that our GM wasn't going to be able to continue running this campaign. None of the other members of the group who also GM waned to give up being players to take over the GM role mid-campaign, and so the Kingmaker campaign came to an end.
Recently the GM of our just-concluded Mummy's Mask campaign has decided he'd like to run Kingmaker himself. Kingmaker is an unusual Adventure Path because it requires the characters to run a kingdom. This involves some bookkeeping during the characters' down time. Some of the players in the group enjoy that, while others find it dull. To alleviate some of that lack of interest, the current GM has spent a month or two working out a different method of doing the kingdom-building bookkeeping that should allow all of the players to be involved - previously it was one player who did most of the work, along with the former GM.
In addition to trying to make the paperwork aspect of the campaign more enjoyable for everyone, the current GM wants to make the party a more cohesive group that starts out with the intent of filling certain roles. This kingdom-building aspect of the campaign intends that each character will fill a predefined role in the rulership of the kingdom, from the ruler to chief priest, magister, treasurer, warden, and even spymaster and assassin. Not every one of those roles has to be filled by a player-character, but at least some of them should be. In our previous run-through of this Adventure Path our party were just random characters we came up with, without any choices made to ensure they were suited to fill any of the kingdom leadership roles. We also didn't make any effort to create a group of people who were well suited to cooperate with each other. There was a campaign, and we made our characters fit into it even if their skills and personalities weren't really suited for the situation they found themselves in.
This time we're trying to make a greater effort to build a cohesive group and think about what kingdom roles they could fill before we start. We'll have a "Session Zero" during which we'll build an association between the characters and possibly try out several characters before deciding which one to play for the rest of the campaign. I'm considering playing a paladin, the one core Pathfinder/D&D class that I've never tried in my 25+ years of tabletop roleplaying.
I've been watching quite a few videos on YouTube recently about improving your gaming experience, particularly videos from Taking20 and How to Be a Great Player. I'm trying to take to heart some of their suggestions, especially to give my character some relationships in the world instead of making her an orphan or a loner, and to treat her more like a real person by speaking about her in first person instead of third person during gaming sessions.
It will be interesting to re-play a campaign I've already played through 3/4 of. But it will also be fun to do it with a different GM and a different perspective on how the party is formed and how I play my character. I'm looking forward to it. I'll make another post when we have our Session Zero.
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