Posting guidelines

    * I'll try to post 2-3 times a week or more
    * Please post in the third person, past tense.
    * Use a colour or boldface to separate dialogue from description. Use italics to denote private thoughts. Orange is reserved for OOC text.

Sample post:

During the long walk, Kaito had always kept up good cheer, setting a fast pace despite his armor, and always encouraging the others to press on for just a little bit longer. More than once they'd have to charge off the road into the face of some ambushing, but working together, he and his companions scattered anybody foolish enough to attack them, fortunately taking only some minor scratches in the process. There were now fewer demons and bandits, and more ronin had been educated about the name and honor of the Emperor. The road to Myoken was safer for honest travelers, and out of a million small services a nation was made.

He spotted the figure on the far rise and stopped in his tracks.  A tenshi, that rarest of figures, a messenger from the celestial realms.  The gods must have something important planned for him, if they arranged for one of their agents to stand in this place, at this time.  Kaito bowed as deeply to the tenshi as his armor would allow. "Good afternoon, honored messenger.  I am Kaito Matsumura, Samurai.  What worthy business brings you here?"


Combat

    * A typical combat post should include an in-character description of your actions, and then an out of character section specifying your standard action, move action, swift action, free actions, and a copy of any necessary rolls.
    * Please keep your section in the Encounter Status thread up to date.
    * You are encouraged to adapt the flavour of your powers to the setting. It's entirely possible, for example, that a character who is mechanically a sorcerer is in fact a practitioner of the long-lost martial art of Kiaijutsu and can harm or disable his enemies simply by shouting and projecting his aggressive energy at them.
    * In order to keep things running at a reasonable pace, I'll be posting once per monster round, which implies that monsters will all use the same initiative roll.
    * More importantly, this means that I won't be stopping in the middle of rounds for players to micromanage immediate/free actions that they can perform on others' turns. I'm somewhat flexible on this point if you want to discuss particular exceptions, but I think that overall it's best to sacrifice that little bit of control for the sake of the pace.
    * In the Encounter Status thread, at the top of your section you can give me any standing instructions for when to take such actions. You can be as vague as you want with them, and I'll attempt to use my limited intelligence to anticipate what you'd want in a given situation. The penalty for being vague is that you must accept my interpretation of your instructions.
    * If you have instructions particular to the current situation, please put them in an OOC section at the bottom of your post and I'll apply those before your standing instructions.
This message was last updated by the GM at 03:42, Tue 01 Nov 2011.

The Kingmaker Adventure Path utilizes a type of gaming called sandbox exploration. The essential element of the sandbox is that the world exists as a laid out area, and the PC's job is to explore it.

In fact, in 'Kingmaker', the PC's overarching quest is to explore the entire region known in the world of Golarion as the Stolen Lands, beginning with the Northern Greenbelt. To this effect, the Greenbelt has been divided into a hex map, with each hex covering a 12-mile area (that is, a line from one edge of the hex to the other is 12 miles long - overall, the hex covers an area of around 120 square miles). Each hex is dominated by one specific terrain type - plains, forest, hills, mountains, water - which affects travel time through the hex.

Traveling through a hex requires a certain amount of time, with the party's speed being determined by the slowest party member. Fully exploring a hex, however, requires that the party take much longer - whereas traveling through a hex is mostly a matter of hours, exploring a hex is usually a matter of days.

When you explore a hex, you not only go through the action of charting and fully mapping a hex, but you can uncover Sites of Interest. There are three types of Sites: Landmarks (example: Oleg's), which you uncover automatically once you enter a hex; Standard sites, which you discover automatically after exploring a hex; and Hidden sites, which require the PCs to pass some kind of skill test - usually, but not always, Perception - to locate.

Once you fully explore a hex and uncover all Sites within it, you are awarded XP for taking a step forward in completing your assigned mission.

The rules:
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/chases

TLDR rules: This is similar to a skills challenge in 4E.

Each PC and each NPC will face 2 possible obstacles on each round, determined randomly from a list that is pre-made. The character can choose which obstacle to tackle: success means moving forward, failure means staying in place.

Imagine a line of 10-12 cards in a row. The bandits start on the second and third cards, and face those challenges ahead of you. They are trying to reach the end (escape). To beat them, you have to either match them and land attacks, or overtake them and reach the end first, at which point it is obvious to them that there is no escape.

Each round you have a standard and a move action.
Move: to move 1 card forward after defeating the challenge
Standard: you can take a standard action to tackle a challenge, or to attack or cast a spell (if in range). Melee attacks can be made if you and an opponent are on the same card.
Full round: you can take a full round to try and leap ahead 3 cards. Doing so is risky: the character must beat both obstacles on the card he is currently on, and if a character fails either obstacle check by 5 or less, he only moves one card forward and his turn ends. If a character fails either obstacle check by more than 5, he cannot move at all that turn.