YOU are in charge of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3e...

[PhoneLobster]

I threw in the several variations on "But this might not work for other groups" to stave off the inevitable

Oh sorry I didn't see the bit where you STAMPED "THIS IS NOT FOR CRITICS" ON IT. Well gee I guess no one can disagree with your shit since you said some people might not like it.

Your anecdotal story is irrelevant shit. Your waving of credentials in an attempt to argue from authority is shit. Your declaration that your weren't pulling rules out of your ass in game... except when you were, is shit. Your declarations of design principles, that instead as it turned out were almost all goals rather than methodologies, is shit.

Then just in case anyone was uncertain that everything that you touch isn't shit, you also specified an "Iron age low wealth setting", which lets face it is basically just "Gritty Realizmz" and then you also several times strongly implied "Low Magic/No Magic Items" and we just fucking KNOW how well we can trust any ideas or totally legit stories from anyone who talks about how awesome that sort of stuff is.

Of course if we still weren't sure then you said THIS

six or seven hilarious PC deaths tragic PC deaths replacement PCs

and pissed all over the credibility you had left.

And as an aside. As an actual qualified computer scientist, I am actually somewhat offended that you actually think it's cool to claim that anyone who has qualifications or a career in math, science or software automatically is clearly SOME form of spreadsheet fan. That sort of "nerd" stereotyping is ANOTHER ignorant and offensive stereotype that people who work with math or science have been trying to convince everyone is not a thing for LONGER than decades.

[Username17]

You know what actually is an unfortunate stereotype for nerds? The 'noone likes what I don't like' guy. Unfortunately, PL proves this is a real unpleasant nerd archetype by literally being that guy.

Anyway, I take it as proven that having a scaling management game which goes from cottage industries to empires would be a good thing. That it causes PL to go apoplectic with rage is a minor side benefit.

As far as attacking wings and shit, such things work better in a static hit points plus damage soak world. You could model attacking to wound by giving people a bonus to damage but a cap on the amount of damage they can inflict. So you might get +3 to pass soak but be capped at light damage for targeting a hand or something. Such a system would emergently make you chip away at bosses whose soak numbers were too high for you to damage effectively with your attacks while still cleaving through zonbies like it ain't no thing.

It's a better system, but I dunno if D&D wants it. D&D combat can just be 'come in groups or gtfo' that has worked well for forty years.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

a scaling management game which goes from cottage industries to empires

You neither will nor even CAN make that happen.

[Username17]

Your defeatism is boring and stupid, like your face. Scaling your management game is all about aggregation and optional averaging. You work a specific farm you want to know crop yields and acrage and shit. But if you control the whole hex you just want to know average yield per farm and the number of farms. If you control the Duchy you maybe don't even bother knowing the number of farms, just the revenue per county. But the revenue per county is an aggregate of the hexes in it which are an aggregate of the farms and so on all the way up or down. The level of detail is simply whatever you want it to be for the story you are telling.

If you wanted to extend the chart all the way up to multi system star empires, you'd just need to add a line on the chart for typical planet revenues and levies plus some percentages to work it out yourself if you wanted your star empire made of specific planets with know populations.

The hard part isjiggering the math so it doesn't become unstable. But making it functional out to the levels discussed and beyond isn't conceptually difficult. Big ideas are not required. Just more math crunching than the dnd design team has had on staff for a decade.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

For the people claiming that this whole no plan other than bogging down in endless obsessive compulsive simulation of irrelevant bullshit thing is some sort of strawman.

I just want to point at Frank's most recent posts and wait for you to come to grips with the sheer scale of this insanity. From your local bakery to star empires, he actually claims the detailed simulation plan is totally desirable and even doable.

The only reason he or D&D proper can't do it is because it just needs a whole professional team of "math crunchers" to just MAGIC IT OUT OF THEIR ASSES, such a pity, I guess it will just have to remain in the realm of "totally would work totally, trust me" for arguments forever without ever becoming a thing. How sad, how unfortunate, how convenient.

Meanwhile people with less utterly batshit goals can get shit done.

[Lokey]

I guess the claim of being an actual computer scientist is bullshit too?

I've made about 3 pages of the kobold fortress thread so far, and so far it's not looking good. Have to see where the few posts about the subject between your tirades go.

[momothefiddler]

It's a shame nobody likes math, or calculations, or minutia, or spreadsheets, or anything. That'd really help a project like this happen. But since we're all PhoneLobster and we all only like the things that PhoneLobster likes, it's literally impossible. Oh well.

Anyway, Frank, where would that math need to start? I'm admittedly only one math cruncher, but I get the impression that's still more ability/willingness than is on the D&D team now, at the very least. If you give me some broad outlines I'd be happy to start grinding at it. I really do love this sort of thing - I've only been in a few games where I didn't use at least one spreadsheet.

[Username17]

The math is by no means beyond me,there just happens to be a lot of it. The idea is that countries, provinces, taverns, empires and whatever the hell else you rule over has a net income that includes mandatory staffing and repairs and shit. Things you do as additional costs, whether they be adding extra table space to your donut shop or raising an army for your kingdom would come out of pocket.

And where the math starts is the niggling stuff about farm yields, hex capacity and labor costs in koku. Once that micro shit is done, the big numbers can be calculated and then the average gold income from a barony can be made a number that makes sense.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

I apologize - I never meant to imply that the math was beyond you. Merely that, as a disabled mostly-house-bound piece of shit, I have more spare time to throw at it than some crazy game-developer-slash-super-doctor whose life I don't claim to understand but apparently involves, as a regular matter of course, going to other cities to stay awake for a week at a time saving lives? Just a matter of free time is all.

[Rejakor]

PL, your argument is really that 'people can't help but endlessly optimize things endlessly with huge spreadsheets and then EVERYONE has to do that because NO-ONE is okay with anyone having more <imaginary dnd items> than them', and 'the only way to stop that happening is to make rules that don't allow anyone to do anything complicated', so therefore 'it's impossible to create scaling management/rulership rules', and then you talk about negative gamer stereotypes?

I uh, have no words.

Stuff like 'oh I was responding to a thread I posted in years ago, not this current thread, and didn't bother to note that', aka normal levels of fucking stupid, don't even impact on the above.

Speaking of which, though, i'm interested in seeing Frank's/Anyone else's kingdom management rules, because I -

a) am about to start running an Ars Magica game where you manage a covenant full of grogs and npc magi in addition to going on adventures

b) am playing in a 'guilds' game where you play as a guild of people which has it's own rules (and asynchronous play over discord/googledocs) but the GM might like to look them over

c) am seriously thinking about running a 'Explorator Fleet' w40k game where a big part of the thing is managing the crew populations, cults, orders, floating manufactoria etc that form the fleet you are a part of/are in charge of.

Note that PhoneLobster ranting about how those rules can't exist isn't actually a set of kingdom management rules and need not apply.

[momothefiddler]

a) am about to start running an Ars Magica game where you manage a covenant full of grogs and npc magi in addition to going on adventures

This isn't extra rules, but to the extent that you're using AM5 you might find use in a copy of the spreadsheet I linked upthread.

[Ice9]

When I played Kingmaker, we did end up using literally a spreadsheet to track the kingdom, and nobody had a problem with that. Yeah, it's number crunching and fiddly bits ... but since we were playing Pathfinder, the whole system is number crunching and fiddly bits. People who didn't like that sort of thing would have quit playing in disgust back in char-gen.

I mean really, a kingdom provides much of the same benefits as a character (roleplaying, mechanical strategy, Skinner-box enjoyment from watching numbers grow bigger), so I don't see how having similar complexity to a character sheet (which for 3.x can be quite complex) is a problem.

That said, the Pathfinder kingdom rules are bad. We had fun even with them, but they make a major mistake that hypothetical new rules should avoid - the amount of "process" was vastly higher than the amount of actual decisions. It mostly didn't matter what you built, except that some buildings were more or less efficient, but there was a ton of rolling to get to that point (we streamlined it by assuming average results on a lot of things).

So when you're making a distinction, like Dwarf Miners vs Orc Miners, then either:
A) There should be reasons for both - like Orc Miners might not produce as much, but can be used as militia when needed, for instance.
B) Your access is limited - maybe Dwarf Miners are strictly better, but you can't get them, so you use Orcs instead.

Because if the answer is "You can buy them both with the same type of resources, and Orc Miners serve no purpose but to be a worse option", then that's just wasting time.

[Harshax]

In reference to one of Frank's posts about scaling management systems:

HarnManor is worth mentioning as a system that attempts to calculate the maintenance and yields from the acreage of one feudal manor. This system took into account population density, how the land was utilized, its quality and the skill of its individual administrators.

I don't recall that it had tables for random events that might affect the output of a manor, but all things being average the yield of several hundred acres of land by semi-competent administrators doesn't fluctuate too dramatically. Things that could bankrupt your manor was spending too much on lifestyle or levied forces and botching rolls that determined the yield of crops, livestock and resources.

While I never tried it, I think it could scale pretty well to feudal kingdoms of any size. At any scale above a few manors, you should only be looking at average yield per manor. You can run the whole thing through a simulator ad-nauseum to assign values to the toggles a player can manipulate at a macroscopic level. Too few vassals could increase yield in gold, but might result in modifiers to random events that result in rebellions. Too many vassals might mean a larger standing army that is more susceptible to poor crop yields.

The math for one manor already accounts for the diminishing returns of subinfeudation. That equation is simply the total acreage of your fiefdom divided by the number of vassals necessary to manage it times the average yield of an average manor.

So if the math is true, then as you broaden your view to a macroscopic level of several hundred manors, some of those details have to lose some importance and you might as well switch to D&D Blue (or teal?) box rules by assigning X Gold Pieces of value per Hex. Then you need some random encounter tables to simulate various factors like natural disasters, raiders and embezzlement and maybe some rules that simulate loyalty, how much of last year's resources were spent on maintaining law and order, etc.

My observation being what is micro-managed by the PC's directly uses the most detailed management system. Base your averages off that system and those averages becomes perfectly acceptable for any sized demense, then add in random fluctuations for flavor. This doesn't seem to be an insurmountable task for dedicated professionals to draft.

Sorry for rambling. Back to lurking.

[Emerald]

Oh sorry I didn't see the bit where you STAMPED "THIS IS NOT FOR CRITICS" ON IT. Well gee I guess no one can disagree with your shit since you said some people might not like it.

Not "This is not for critics", just "Don't dismiss this out of hand like you have been every single thing that you don't agree with by saying that this group doesn't count."

Your waving of credentials in an attempt to argue from authority is shit.

It's not waving credentials at all, it's pointing out that what you call "offensive nerd stereotype" I call "the last twenty-some people I've gamed with." There's no authority in working with computers, but there is lots of this and this.

Your declaration that your weren't pulling rules out of your ass in game... except when you were, is shit.

Care to point out an example of such?

Your declarations of design principles, that instead as it turned out were almost all goals rather than methodologies, is shit.

"Make the bulk of combat encounters involve lots of enemies and lots of followers with PC and NPC leaders instead of boss fights against a few powerful monsters" is a goal. "Go through the combat rules finding the anti-mook mechanics that will be used most frequently, modify them so they're more streamlined and balanced, and ensure that everyone has easy access to those anti-mook mechanics" is a methodology for meeting that goal. That's what the "I want X, so I did Y" sentence structure means.

Then just in case anyone was uncertain that everything that you touch isn't shit, you also specified an "Iron age low wealth setting", which lets face it is basically just "Gritty Realizmz" and then you also several times strongly implied "Low Magic/No Magic Items" and we just fucking KNOW how well we can trust any ideas or totally legit stories from anyone who talks about how awesome that sort of stuff is.

I know I'm very verbose and you hate everything I've typed in this thread so you're probably just skimming my posts, but the very next words after "Iron Age and low wealth" were "so stuff PCs usually get from magic items was made mostly inherent or was condensed into a few signature items, and monetary wealth comes in the form of favors, rare materials, and the like more than actual coinage."

That doesn't mean I take all the fighter's toys away and laugh in his face, it means PCs get one or two big signature items with a variety of powers to which they can give names and backstories like Excalibur or Mjolnir instead of a random collection of weaker items (y'know, the same "PCs should have fewer, better items" stuff that the Den always talks about), enhancement bonuses to attack, damage, ability scores, etc. are made part of the level progression and independent of items, and instead of the party slaying a dragon to get a few tons of gold and dozens of magic items in its hoard they get the dragon's hide (which can be turned into magical armors and shields), fangs (which can be turned into magic weapons), and blood (which can add fire or lightning powers to existing magic items), and when the party tells their clan leader about how they've slain the dragon and made the settlement safer they can get more shipments of supplies and more hirelings who are eager to serve with such heroes.

Of course if we still weren't sure then you said THIS

six or seven hilarious PC deaths tragic PC deaths replacement PCs

and pissed all over the credibility you had left.

I'm sorry, I promise to never again reference the number of PC deaths that have occurred in a given campaign in a humorous manner for fear of offending your delicate sensibilities.

And as an aside. As an actual qualified computer scientist, I am actually somewhat offended that you actually think it's cool to claim that anyone who has qualifications or a career in math, science or software automatically is clearly SOME form of spreadsheet fan. That sort of "nerd" stereotyping is ANOTHER ignorant and offensive stereotype that people who work with math or science have been trying to convince everyone is not a thing for LONGER than decades.

Well, I'm glad you've at least gone from "Players liking lots of fiddly accounting at all is an offensive stereotype" to "Players liking lots of fiddly accounting because they're into things requiring lots of fiddly accounting is an offensive stereotype." That means that you can at least admit that there do exist some people who like all the fiddly accounting, so, progress.

[GnomeWorks]

Scaling your management game is all about aggregation and optional averaging. You work a specific farm you want to know crop yields and acrage and shit. But if you control the whole hex you just want to know average yield per farm and the number of farms.

Harvest Moon: TTRPG Edition is a thing that could conceivably be done.

If you can do that, then you can conceivably extrapolate out all the layers above it, by combining multiple behind-the-scenes copies of HM:TTRPG and averaging their outputs, and throwing in some mechanics specific for the layer you're at (so maybe a drought affects a town full of HM:TTRPG, and so they as a whole produce less than normal, without getting into the details of which ones are doing relatively better or worse). You can do the layer above town - call it county - by doing the same thing with towns.

Simplify the math, maybe with conversions to bigger units so you go, so your numbers don't get stupidly out of hand. But honestly this isn't something that is impossible, it's just a lot of maths and a lot of time to figure out all the details.

[Harshax]

Coup rounds out the math of a star spanning domain to two coins per player, three if you claim a Duke in your retinue.

What if, Fief, Demense, College, Empire were just the names of Epic level classes? Warmonger (fighter), Shadow Government (rogue), Theocracy, College

[Username17]

Coup rounds out the math of a star spanning domain to two coins per player, three if you claim a Duke in your retinue.

What if, Fief, Demense, College, Empire were just the names of Epic level classes? Warmonger (fighter), Shadow Government (rogue), Theocracy, College

Coup is a great game. It is deterministic, but uses secret cards and bluffing to create tension and uncertainty. Would play again.

But that only works because it is free for all. In an rpg, the assumption is collaboration. In such a scenario there is no reason for any player to call a bluff and the face down cards do nothing.

A kingdom management game for an rpg is necessarily going to look more like Pandemic than Coup. It's a coop game with events supplied by charts and/or Mr Cavern. It's PVE not PVP by necessity.

-Username17

[Harshax]

Back to the OP:

Adventurer, Conqueror, King seems to have tightly focused classes. Choices to tweak them and an extensive toolbox for creating completely new ones. It also has some kingdom management stuff for wizard towers, spy networks, domains. Each has different currencies that can be used for different reasons. The game explains why wizards are obsessed with filling dungeons with monsters and attempts to shift play toward domain management when PCs reach name level.

I've only read the material, but was impressed enough to back the companion on Kickstarter. It's got bits I don't like (old school saving throws), but the system appears to be very house-rule friendly. I think if I had to start somewhere with 40 years of D&D permutations to choose from, I might start there.