So, in that thread over in IMOI, Koumei brought something up:
Koumei wrote:Actually, if you have ideas on how running a kingdom should work, I'd love to hear them, as in an IRC game, one character has become... Baroness Countess Overseer Fourth General Duchess, and I imagine Princess is next on the list. They might want to start doing less adventury things (possibly), despite what I said about 3E being all about stabby.
That actually would be a cool ruleset to have around. For the sake of getting some discussion out there, here's my three ideas on how kingdoms/duchies/earldoms/counties/autonomous collectives/whatever work:
You Wear Them: holdings work like your pants. This is the simplest. Define some hard bonuses; everything else is flavor. I suggest an income or a leadership bonus. Otherwise, it's all fluff. Your pants don't have stats for how many things you can put in your pockets, and your benevolent tyranny doesn't have stats for how many people you can put in jail. Maybe Evil Steve used to rule your Czardom and is plotting to take it back, and maybe he used to own your magic pants and wants them back. At the end of the day, a holding is nothing more than a possesion, albeit a bulky one.
You Run Them: holdings work like businesses. In fact, they are businesses. Use the PHB2 rules. You can probably export "Diplomacy" or "Not Stabbing People(BAB)" more easily than otherwise, but I don't see anything preventing a clean conversion.
You Play Them: holdings are funny looking player characters. When you play with your holding, PC-scale characters don't even show up. This could be a cool system, but its all MTP until someone makes up a separate system for it. It'd have to work kind of like Exalted's nation system, though hopefully with better execution.
I like "you wear them" best.
edit: spelling
Last edited by fectin on Mon May 02, 2011 12:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
You know, I think it would be hilarious to literally wear a kingdom...
I think that the best way lies somewhere between "You wear them" and "You play them"; you get your own kingdom when your abilities start being significant on a kingdom scale; you still use some of the abilities from your pre-kingdom character, like "planar binding" or "storm of vengeance", but you can also use abilities from your kingdom like "Trade sanctions", "Colonize", or "Send in the miners to strip mine the tomb of horrors"
"You wear them" + "You play them" = giant robot kingdoms. If you want to bring in baronies and the like you can also have them be combining giant robot kingdoms.
Well if we go with "you wear them" then it might make sense to have a number of holding slots - possibly based on Leadership score or possibly just a flat number.
In this model, holdings probably do stuff similar to magic items, yet with notably different flavor.
Off the top of my head, types of holdings could maybe be:
Populace: Like followers, only you get more of them and they don't actually follow you around, they just live under your rule - you can command them as ruler, but they also have their own lives to attend to.
Tracts: Land. Farmlands, Hunting Grounds, Pastures, etc. These are lands you rule. You get bonuses to do stuff while you're in or near them.
Titles: This is a way to turn some other character resource into additional holding slots. You can have an unlimited number of titles, but each costs something. Most give you a additional holding slot and/or some other small bonus.
Fortifications: Forts, Keeps, Monasteries, Castles, Impassable Mountains, Hadrian's Wall, The Great Wall of China, Warding Spells, etc. These give your lands and populace defensive bonuses and abilities.
Resources: Timber, Minerals, Magic Secrets, Crops, etc. These somehow provide you an income and your populace a standard of living.
Developments: Mines, Mills, Libraries, Markets. Each of these increases the effectiveness of a type of resource.
Transport: Trails, Roads, Canals, Harbours, Portal Networks. Ways to get around in the lands. These provide your character and populace movement bonuses on the strategic scale.
Military Knights, Yeomen, Infantry, Dragon-Riders, Legion of Terra-Cotta Golems, Undead Hordes, etc. These are your regular army, they can keep the peace and control monsters internally, fight against foreign threats and they can go raid or invade your neighbors.
Last edited by Josh_Kablack on Mon May 02, 2011 4:39 am, edited 1 time in total.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
Birthright has rules for running provinces and the benefits of various domains within those provinces.
Most of the rules catered to leeching regency points so you character would get a heap of special abilities, but if you wanted to use your province as a weapon it was kind of possible.
Such as establishing trade routes to a foreign province, then having bandits and brigands leech income from that territory. Or using temples to agitate against the ruler. Or if a wizard, forge a ley line from your ancient elven forest and then mind control the administration of your enemies.
The actual mass combat rules are a chore to read, but far simpler than Battlesystem. Once you had your unit, terrain and spell cards all figured out it was a cool little minigame.
Josh_Kablack wrote:Well if we go with "you wear them" then it might make sense to have a number of holding slots - possibly based on Leadership score or possibly just a flat number.
In this model, holdings probably do stuff similar to magic items, yet with notably different flavor.
Off the top of my head, types of holdings could maybe be:
Populace: Like followers, only you get more of them and they don't actually follow you around, they just live under your rule - you can command them as ruler, but they also have their own lives to attend to.
Tracts: Land. Farmlands, Hunting Grounds, Pastures, etc. These are lands you rule. You get bonuses to do stuff while you're in or near them.
Titles: This is a way to turn some other character resource into additional holding slots. You can have an unlimited number of titles, but each costs something. Most give you a additional holding slot and/or some other small bonus.
Fortifications: Forts, Keeps, Monasteries, Castles, Impassable Mountains, Hadrian's Wall, The Great Wall of China, Warding Spells, etc. These give your lands and populace defensive bonuses and abilities.
Resources: Timber, Minerals, Magic Secrets, Crops, etc. These somehow provide you an income and your populace a standard of living.
Developments: Mines, Mills, Libraries, Markets. Each of these increases the effectiveness of a type of resource.
Transport: Trails, Roads, Canals, Harbours, Portal Networks. Ways to get around in the lands. These provide your character and populace movement bonuses on the strategic scale.
Military Knights, Yeomen, Infantry, Dragon-Riders, Legion of Terra-Cotta Golems, Undead Hordes, etc. These are your regular army, they can keep the peace and control monsters internally, fight against foreign threats and they can go raid or invade your neighbors.
You could probably build them as FATE characters with those as skills. That would give you enough crunch to arbitrate things like two nations attacking each other without getting too complex with rules for a secondary aspect of the game.
If we're building this off of something like 3E, then we're going to need to keep track of mid to high level adventurers in the kingdom. Just like NPC kings, we occasionally have an issue that we don't want to deal with ourselves but can't send the army because we'd lose the army. So, we hire Joe Adventurer and he runs off to kill dragons for us.
We'd also need to keep track of Hostile NPC's because their potential impact on a kingdom can be put on the same level as natural disasters.
I think the Majesty series revolves around this entire concept.
3E doesn't seem like it has a lot to salvage for doing kingdoms. Having a single HP abstraction doesn't work that well, the D20 isn't a particularly useful RNG and the class paradigm doesn't fit well either. I really don't think you gain anything by using 3e as a base.
Birthright used a hit dice abstraction for units of monsters. So a unit of 4hd ogres could take much more punishment than a unit of 1hd demihuman warriors. Only a percentage of damage reflected actual death, with the remainder of damage representing wounded units. Typically, squads would inflict less damage and be easier to rout once half their 'health' was gone.
In that system you were better off hiring mercenaries for foreign campaigns...Coz once you stopped paying them the became brigands in the province you left them in. Your elite troops only required minimal pay (cost of living, equipment, etc) and would instead be sustained by good will toward your empire, providing your character had enough regency. Otherwise launching attacks on foreign nations was hideously expensive.
That's not what I was talking about at all. I'm talking about whether or not personal power can eventually match or exceed that of society's. If we have people like Elminster, Hercules, or Lu Bu in our world, we need to track them because those are people that possess the ability to impact things at a Kingdom Scale.
If we don't, then cool.
Wrathzog wrote:That's not what I was talking about at all. I'm talking about whether or not personal power can eventually match or exceed that of society's. If we have people like Elminster, Hercules, or Lu Bu in our world, we need to track them because those are people that possess the ability to impact things at a Kingdom Scale.
If we don't, then cool.
Didn't Lu Bu get hung by Cao Cao? I'd consider this a probably thing for western fiction and a resounding No for eastern stuff.
But the more I think about it, the better FATE seems for this.
Kingdoms have maybe 10 skills (say Heroes, Military, Resources, Trade, Espionage and Propaganda to start with, but you can easily add 4 more), 5 Aspects (things like "Rich Gold Mines" or "A strong martial tradition" or "a beloved king") and 5 Fate points with some Stunts. You use three stress tracks, military, economic and political (armies attack military, trade attacks economic and espionage attacks political).
You can raise armies by rolling military for size, resources for the equipment and heroes for the leader. Size determines how many units you can have and how badass they are (you might be able to raise a huge army of peasants or a few armored knights) while equipment gives you some free bonuses (for example, you might have ogres with clubs or ogres with giant swords and three inch thick iron plating). You could probably model things with 6 skills (melee attack, melee defense, ranged attack, endurance, will, agility), an aspect each and refresh by the power level and the ability to purchase Powers to define them (Horsemen would give a charge bonus and faster movement, Hulking would give a bonus to attack power and armor etc). Heroes would just be badass units with multiple aspects.
This should allow you to do most scales from a small lordship to entire kingdoms. Add in some special rules for higher level stuff and it should work out pretty well.
Okay, before you can make a kingdom, you have to make some assumptions/have some understanding about high-level D&D.
Taxes
The rulers of kingdoms and empires are probably in the wish-economy. They probably don't see a dime of the peasants taxes - they know, vaguely, the peasants pay taxes, and those taxes make the empire keep running, and they're probably where the golden throne came from. The king doesn't care, as long as he doesn't have to summon up an efreeti and beat it until it wishes him the things he wants. Taxes are a matter of convenience - kings do not need them, at all.
Armies
People in the wish-economy can destroy armies without breaking a sweat. This varies a bit - lots and lots of low-levels might be able to give some level 11's a run for their money. But a well-built wizard (and by well-built, I mean has fly and a wand of fireball) can kill like a 100 people per charge from the sky. A few minutes and a few thousand gold reduce an army to cinders (and yes, it cost more to equip those troops than it did to incinerate them, so it is a cost-effective strategy to just burn away thousands of people at a time because they marched into your land holding sharp bits of metal - a lot more cost effective than gathering up people with other sharp bits of metal and have them poke at eachother). There is seriously no reason to think D&D armies serve any purpose but to stop less dangerous members of team monster from eating villages.
Are you seeing the problem? People powerful enough to have kingdoms cannot possibly benefit from having the taxes or fielding an army. It's completely useless to them. This has a lot to do with the fact that thanks to teleport, high-level PC's can be everywhere at once. And then it has more to do with the fact that high-level PC's can kill lots of low-level shit very easily and without much risk to themself (hitpoint inflation between low and high levels, not to mention the uberness of magical battlefield control).
Before we even worry about the rules for running a kingdom, we need something a kingdom can offer that is a mechanical benefit. Otherwise, kingdoms, much like toughness, are just a dumb option to trap unwary players. Here's some ideas.
Divine Right of Kings
Frank, in another thread, mentioned something about Populous. I'm not sure what he meant specifically, but it put this in my head.
In D&D-land, the divine right of kings is a real, tangible thing. Having lots of people obey you makes the universe think you are that much more badass. There are two routes to go with this:
1) Owning a kingdom gives you some kind of points you use to buy special abilities and bonuses. The number of points you get is based on the size and success of your kindom. The specifics of such a system would have to be worked out, but in general, more people = good, more authority = good, more prosperity = good. (Authority can come from ruthless enforcement of your will, or being loved and respected. Prosperity can mean for your serfs, or your nobles.) Gaining points lets you buy new abilities, losing points means having to give up abilities.
2) Instead of giving you points to buy abilities, it gradually fills some sort of 'divine right resource pool.' You can expend this pool to establish bad-ass things and do bad-ass effects. These effects can be personal-scale, or they can be campaign-world scale. Whatever. As you use these abilities, your pool depletes, and it fills up over time based on the success of your kingdom as described in 1.
Royal Family
Your character may not literally be a member of a royal family (in fact, he may have just slaughtered one and deposed them), but your character rules a kingdom, and kingdoms have lots of powerful people in them. Every kingdom, based on its size, has a certain number of powerful people in it. Every unit of time, you can petition those people (a d20 roll, based around the level of that NPC and the success of your kingdom, similar system as described in 'Divine Right of Kings,'), and success means you can ask them for a favor. You probably want to limit the amount of petitioning per week. And repeating asking the same person incurs deeper and deeper penalties. That sort of thing.
So, yeah. These are two ways I think we could make it actually useful to the PC's to have a kingdom - give them access to special powers, or give them access to a variety of pseudo-cohorts. Before we can come up with the rules for running a kingdom, we need to know what PC's can hope to get out of a kingdom. Because let's face it - it's not the gold and it's not the army. So these are just two ideas.
The thing you need to remember is that while a genuine strategy scale rpg might be interesting this is not really the goal of a strategy layer in a game like D&D.
The strategic kingdom management exists almost exclusively to interact with and generate D&D scale encounters and adventures.
To the extent that you generate and manage armies and defenses and such it should be in a manner that generates appropriate NPCs for an actual D&D scale encounter. The sites and holdings and castles and such should generate D&D scale dungeons.
So you are probably best off running with a loose feudal society. The peasants and the greater economy is more of an environmental factor of the region, sure you tax them, boss them around, collect all the good looking ones for your harem, whatever. But characters interact with kingdom management and attributes in a rather intimate and small scale manner. You absolutely should NOT have a "kingdom espionage rating", you should have a Spy PC who runs an actual spy school dungeon with a limited number of elite spy school NPC minions. Because a spy school is a usable D&D scale dungeon site, spy NPC minions are usable D&D minions, and the Spy PC is a usable D&D character, and he achieves spy tasks and advancement of the spy academy by going on D&D style spy adventures, and bringing his friend who owns the wizard tower and that warrior from the castle and so on.
As such you should be managing keeps and wizards towers, maybe the odd city and a handful of individual "special" sites, the surrounding kingdom is just the chaotic peasant fluff that collects about the edges of such things and should have relatively limited direct interaction or even meaningful presence.
Then all your interactions with other "kingdoms" are about interacting with their special sites (dungeons) and special elite minions (NPC minion side kicks) and their leaders (major character NPCs) in a D&D style and scale.
You really really shouldn't be throwing peasant militias at each other by the thousands or staging massive abstracted espionage campaigns using an entirely separate rules set. That's all a bit of a mess.
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PhoneLobster, well you could make quick, easy rules for big combats just by stacking units. If all peasant militia have the same stats, 100 peasant militia combine to make 1 peasant militia with 100x the damage and 100x the health. (And it fights at an army scale, not a PC scale). If sides are roughly equal, that all works out. Attack rolls and AC rolls can be the same. You can even get flanking bonuses this way and other standard D&D modifiers. Even war wizards make some sense in this fashion - combine a volley of magical attacks together. Area attacks do increased damage (fireball, for example) based on their size.
The problem isn't that managing all those people is hard (rules for that are sort of easy to come up with). The problem is that there's no point to it, because one high-level wizard can literally slaughter an army of a thousand in the time it takes them to don their armor. A world with powerful PC's make armies obsolete and useless. The only thing that matters is high-level PC's. So kingdoms have to be about more than taxes and armies (because those literally are nothing more than fluff).
If you're going to allow wizards to clear a battlefield by casting big spells then you should also allow wizards or priests to say "nuh uh" and counterspell. Then your massive army starts to mean something.
I am not proposing removing or nullifying magic, but scale is an important consideration. Just how big is a your typical spell? How big is your typical army? Also resource management is an issue. Sure, the wizard can fuck off to his magnificent mansion when he is out of spells, but when he returns, his city or the surrounding countryside may well have been raped and pillaged already.
Sure, a wizard could wipe all goblin footsoldiers off the map if they arrange themselves nicely out in the open. Skirmishers that ride in and out of dense forests by the cover of night are a little harder to pin down. Give those goblins a shaman and suddenly they have some of the advantages of the wizard. If this is just one tribe out of many that are being marshalled by a local dragon, you suddenly have a campaign on your hands.
Making pissant, useless armies should be a part of the package. That is what the players have access to in the beginning, or at least a package for novice players to get used to in whatever the proposed system is. Once they have experience, then add in some other unit types with paradigm shifting abilities. At the very least they can keep their chaff for depleting the resources of their enemies while using the cool stuff to win the day.
DSMatticus wrote:Armies
People in the wish-economy can destroy armies without breaking a sweat. This varies a bit - lots and lots of low-levels might be able to give some level 11's a run for their money. But a well-built wizard (and by well-built, I mean has fly and a wand of fireball) can kill like a 100 people per charge from the sky. A few minutes and a few thousand gold reduce an army to cinders (and yes, it cost more to equip those troops than it did to incinerate them, so it is a cost-effective strategy to just burn away thousands of people at a time because they marched into your land holding sharp bits of metal - a lot more cost effective than gathering up people with other sharp bits of metal and have them poke at eachother). There is seriously no reason to think D&D armies serve any purpose but to stop less dangerous members of team monster from eating villages.
That's why armies never line up for battles then. They go in scattered, quiet, and fast, and kill your commoners. Then you can't build your castle (no labor), and your food always has that magickey aftertaste.
Alternately, wizards are WMDs, and everyone is subject to MAD.
So, let's rewind a bit. Are we assuming that we have people running around with 3E power levels? If so, what is the power disparity between War Wizard and Peasant with a Spear? How cost effective Are War Wizards in comparison to just hiring tens of thousands of peasants with Spears? (I bet he costs more than just a wand of fireballs)
But the first and most important is:
What is the highest level of personal power attainable by people in the world? Assuming we have Wizards, are they closer to Gandalf or Elminster in terms of power?
I'm not sure that 3e comparisons are even helpful. The wizard and peasant would not exist in a microcosm in this sort of game. I mean, how powerful is the wizard when the peasant and a bunch of pitchfork weilding malcontents are setting fire to his house? Sure the wizard may still be able to blast them all, but at what cost?
For any useful discussion, it would be better to focus on the power of Rulers, rather than a specific class. If that means that every player has earth shattering abilities bestowed by technology, worshippers or leeching power from the land so be it. I don't know. Perhaps it's better to think of this sort of thing divorced from a system in order to deal with the practicalities of running a fantasy kingdom. I could be completely wrong though.
Not a system, but the paradigms that come with it. I'm sorry that I keep using 3E as the example because it seems to distract people... but it's the system where power disparity is extremely obvious.
So, I'm going to ask again and try to keep it system generic to avoid confusion, do we have Heroes in the game? If so, what level of power can they possess as far as impacting the game world?
fectin wrote:You Play Them: holdings are funny looking player characters. When you play with your holding, PC-scale characters don't even show up. This could be a cool system, but its all MTP until someone makes up a separate system for it. It'd have to work kind of like Exalted's nation system, though hopefully with better execution.
In the You Play Them Category...
1. Houses of the Blooded
2. Birthright (2eADnD)
3. Reign
I went with the "Wear Them" model for my rules though I haven't developed it completely. It is modeled actually with what Josh listed except without titles and military which would fall under my rules for cohorts/contacts.
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If you want a game modded right you have to mod it yourself.
fectin wrote:That's why armies never line up for battles then. They go in scattered, quiet, and fast, and kill your commoners. Then you can't build your castle (no labor), and your food always has that magickey aftertaste.
Alternately, wizards are WMDs, and everyone is subject to MAD.
Guerilla warfare is possible, yeah. But not as satisfying as big battles.
Winnah wrote:If you're going to allow wizards to clear a battlefield by casting big spells then you should also allow wizards or priests to say "nuh uh" and counterspell. Then your massive army starts to mean something.
Ehh, only so long as one side hasn't won the caster duel.
But it seems like we're talking more about a generic system now than a 3.5 system, so we don't really have these problems. We can decide how big the disparity is between our top tier wizards and our pointy-stick militia. But if we're using 3.5 as a base (as Koumei was originally talking about), those are some problems you have to deal with, sadly.
DSMatticus wrote:
The problem isn't that managing all those people is hard (rules for that are sort of easy to come up with). The problem is that there's no point to it, because one high-level wizard can literally slaughter an army of a thousand in the time it takes them to don their armor. A world with powerful PC's make armies obsolete and useless. The only thing that matters is high-level PC's. So kingdoms have to be about more than taxes and armies (because those literally are nothing more than fluff).
I'm not a huge fan of the DnD paradigm, but how can a Wizard kill thousands of people? They can take out small groups (20-30) pretty easily, but so can a Paladin. They'll have some big advantages with creating walls and leading teleporting invisible murder teams, but they're not going to be that dangerous unless you start teapartying things.
Winnah wrote:
The actual mass combat rules are a chore to read, but far simpler than Battlesystem.
Talk about damning with faint praise. Battlesystem is wrongthink, and should be ignored. At least the original should, maybe the revision made it playable, I don't know.
How about the War Machine from the Companion Set? It's been a while since I actually read those rules, but I seem to remember them being written at a level of abstraction that did not immediately make me rip my eyes out in aggravation.
