Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

[Username17]

I can't even imagine what 100 different levels of legitimacy would be or do. As I see it, you have only a couple of distinct levels of legitimacy that matter:

First of all, there's the point you've been crowned in a farcical aquatic ceremony and recognized by the land itself. Your health invigorates the land. Crop yields increase and you get faction appropriate supernatural aid.

Secondly there's the point where the denizens of your kingdomvolunteer out of patriotism. You get whatever culturally appropriate elites turning up in your regular levies and in times of great need regionally appropriate monsters will come to your aid because you are the true king and stuff.

Then you have the point where you basically just issue orders that are pretty much followed. You can collect taxes and levy troops. Most leaders pretty much start here if they ascended to the throne a typical and acceptable fashion without proving themselves with the seven challenges or whatever.

Down the slide into illegitimacy is the point where people pretty much don't think you deserve the crown. People will not volunteer when you call, so your army is made of mercenaries and slaves. You still get to tax, but you only get to levy oppressed populations.

Next you fall to the point where people are actively rebelling against you. Taxes don't get paid spontaneously unless your military threatens then or the people in question are already enslaved. Minor uprisings happen frequently and you have to put them down. Some kid gets nominated the rightful heir and you don't know where she is.

And finally on the slide into disrepute there's the point the land itself rejects you. Crop yields are reduced, bad omens happen. Supernatural aid shows up to help people working against you. You may find it helpful to make a pact with dark forces to keep tax revenues from falling by quenching the land with the blood of innocents while you slowly find your power usurped by fiends.

So like 3 levels of legit ruler and 3 levels of illegitimate ruler. You could carve it up more than that, but I don't see much point.

-Username17

[Omegonthesane]

Are you intended to be able to maintain "the land rejects you" illegitimacy in the long term if you're badass enough and/or have enough servants that are loyal to you personally / paid by you personally and don't care about your legitimacy?

Same question for "the people actively rebel against you" illegitimacy really, but that seems like standard levels of evil overlording that are sustainable enough in D&D land to need the protagonists to fix rather than collapsing entirely under their own weight.

[Grek]

Presumably, this chart:

Farmer Status	Family Disposable Income	Tax Revenue
Oppressed Serfs	3 koku	12 koku
Serfs	7 koku	8 koku
Tenant Peasants	11 koku	4 koku
Free Peasants	15 koku	0

is still in effect, and the highest (and most profitable) levels of oppression disqualify you from the best legitimacy levels. People who are hated by the land have more money and can afford more mercenaries and assassins than the righteous king, who gets a volunteer army of patriots instead. Not because being hated actually gives you money, but because the things that get you the most money piss everyone else off.

[maglag]

Presumably, this chart:

Farmer Status	Family Disposable Income	Tax Revenue
Oppressed Serfs	3 koku	12 koku
Serfs	7 koku	8 koku
Tenant Peasants	11 koku	4 koku
Free Peasants	15 koku	0

is still in effect, and the highest (and most profitable) levels of oppression disqualify you from the best legitimacy levels. People who are hated by the land have more money and can afford more mercenaries and assassins than the righteous king, who gets a volunteer army of patriots instead. Not because being hated actually gives you money, but because the things that get you the most money piss everyone else off.

You know, I was about to say that it's been demonstrated that happy workers are more productive workers, but then I remembered there's factories in India where they put safety nets in the windows because the people there are so depressed they would rather jump out for the sweet release of death than keep working, while south Korea singers are worked to death so nevermind that.

[Username17]

If the selling point of your realm is a special resource and you honestly don't care about the income or lack thereof of farms, it might be totally OK to just stay at land rejects you illegitimacy and fill your army with unscrupulous mercenaries and vile scavengers. It's possible that there are even resources that you can only harvest if you're willing to piss off the land. Like the blood of the great forest spirit or whatever. So just lock it in that you are now a Captain Planet villain and accept that forest kami will try to destroy your world soul extractor and no one is going to be growing much happy corn.

My expectation is that players will want to climb up the legitimacy ladder. But evil overlords should be a reasonable output of the system.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I think it's boring if *everyone* wants to be crowned rightwise king.

For one, prideful ambition is a good anti-hero archetype, and stoic rebellion against the celestial order for the greater good is heroic.

For another, although people will want to play against type and have a necromancer who is rightwise-philosopher-king and a paladin who must govern without the mandate of heaven, there is inevitably going to be some synergy-or-not between different strategic-scale class features and the strategic benefits you get from having legitimacy numbers, which you need to accept at the get go.

So players should have some incentive - tactical flexibility or whatever it is - to live at less than max-legitimacy. Max-illegitimacy can be a villain only position.

Then you have the point where you basically just issue orders that are pretty much followed. You can collect taxes and levy troops. Most leaders pretty much start here if they ascended to the throne a typical and acceptable fashion without proving themselves with the seven challenges or whatever.

Down the slide into illegitimacy is the point where people pretty much don't think you deserve the crown. People will not volunteer when you call, so your army is made of mercenaries and slaves. You still get to tax, but you only get to levy oppressed populations.

"Only levy" and "only levy at oppressed" doesn't seem very different to me, or the only difference in these two grades is one of style/province oppression level, in both cases the legitimacy is "meh".

[maglag]

So what if you want to be Sauron/Sauruman where you rebel against the mandate of Heaven and then cultivate your own population to be fanatically loyal and ready to fight and die for you to their last breath even as your land gets all blighted while you enslave/corrupt any local monsters and whatnot?

[nockermensch]

Presumably, this chart:

Farmer Status	Family Disposable Income	Tax Revenue
...	...	...
Free Peasants	15 koku

It had to be done. I'm not sorry.

---

Seriously now, we got to remember that this is adapting ACKS dominions to D&D, which comes with its very bizarre (but still very popular) cultural baggage. Making the population's oppression an universally "bad" trait sounds strange for a multiverse where "Lawful Evil" is the favored roleplaying prompt for a bunch of popular gods and races. If hobgoblin farmers AREN'T being ruled with an iron fist they should want to migrate to a less weird place. Likewise, orcs (or elves) would probably go neurotic with the level of taxation and communal oversight that dwarves consider good and proper.

Actually it's worse than that: on itself, "behaving like a douche", is less of a moral failing and more of a valid path supported by about one third of the deities in most Pantheons. If Forests of Doom, Swamps of Death and motherfucking Mordor are simply less rewarding than Ghibli Hills for their rulers, then you have to question the intelligence of those vampires, hags and evil overlords. Now, this doesn't (and shouldn't) become a retarded mirrored system where bad guys receive the same perks their good counterparts get from their domains, only Evil, because on that path lies shit like Ravages and Afflictions, and we don't want that. I'm perfectly okay with a system where being an upstanding ruler rewards you with a strong economy and therefore more gold/armies, while being an opressive overlord results in a shitttier economy and visitors leaving zero stars for your realm in Yelp but then you find that's just easier to animate/control the dead, that Evil Magics are easier to cast, and also that illithids and night hags come to you with lucrative partnership offers (they want some of those peasants you'd just impale anyway, maybe even after you're done with them).

A lore appropriate balance point could be that after some administrative turns pass, the sucessful good rulers should have more gold / thankful subjects that would fight for them, while the successful evil rulers have a bit more of directly accessible personal power. Basically, the domain system should do as the rules being written describe if you want to play nice or at least neutral, but then go full Ravenloft Domain Lord (only not badly written) if the ruler decides to be a monster and is successful on that enterprise.

[Whipstitch]

Rare resources and Evil Wonders sounds like the most promising path to me. It might be a bit narrow, but I think you could make a reasonably good game where unpopular tyrants are generally at a disadvantage but can really shake things up if their pyramid and volcano base gives a monster bonus to blood hunting.

[Username17]

Presumably, this chart

Well, I've gone metric, so the standard farm is now 10 hectares instead of 20 acres. Which means the base income is 25 instead of 20, so the steps go by fives, which works out to one Koku per member of the household. I think that works a bit better. But basically, yes.

Making the population's oppression an universally "bad" trait sounds strange for a multiverse where "Lawful Evil" is the favored roleplaying prompt for a bunch of popular gods and races. If hobgoblin farmers AREN'T being ruled with an iron fist they should want to migrate to a less weird place.

Well, that's certainly arguable. And since it's retarded, I wouldn't take the "pro" side in that argument.

It's pretty clear that in the Dark Elf books the various "usually evil" races would still actually like to be treated nicely. There's that weird rant in BoVD about how evil people are actually masochists who want to be abused by more powerful evil people - but that viewpoint is not consensus. And also retarded.

What's clear however, is that it's perfectly possible to be a ruler who is evil and legitimate at the same time. While the three levels of illegitimacy are mostly for bad guys, all three levels of legitimacy can appear on bad guys as well.

Gazdakh the Annointed of Avernus has maximum legitimacy. He is acknowledged by the land itself as being the destined and correct leader. When he conquers places, razorvines grow in anticipation of battles et to come. He gets supernatural aid from fiends who believe that he's their herald to again conquer the world.

Chief Sisstral Yellow Scale is the rightful chief of the Swamp of the Wheel. He has a level 2 legitimacy and the full complement of lizard warriors comes to his aid when called. In times of great need there is a black dragon in the deepest bog of the swamp who will come to Chief Sisstal's aid.

Quite often the player characters are going to be liberators who depose a vile and detested villain. But also the players are often going to have less legitimacy than the evil overlord they depose, and the Bullywugs and Orcs will be distrustful and sullen about working for them. Depending on circumstance, the player characters may not even get troop levies from newly conquered tribal areas until they've done significant work to ingratiate themselves with the land and the locals.

"Only levy" and "only levy at oppressed" doesn't seem very different to me, or the only difference in these two grades is one of style/province oppression level, in both cases the legitimacy is "meh".

I'm using Levy in the Crusader Kings 2 sense of the term, where it's the troops that you can call on due to feudal obligation. In the case of illegitimate rulers, the amount of owed troops is zero. You can still conscript slaves if you have any, but whatever non-slave population doesn't give you any base militia. This in turn means that you need to hire mercenaries, who are expensive, so you may need to raise taxes.

So even if you're a vile Drow clan leader who has a bunch of slaves to conscript into war groups, you'd still rather have basic legitimacy because not being able to rally up any basic Drow soldiers is a pain and hiring your own Drow nightblades as mercenaries is expensive.

-Username17

[Eikre]

Maintaining your legitimacy may involve more or less direct involvement in the lives of any particular ethnic group, but putting together a social safety net or a hideously punishing judicial system will nether put you in disfavor of a primary enfranchised group that actually expects those things nor leave you with the money that you would have if you just told that group to go fuck themselves after they handed over the taxes for those particular things.

Like, with Drow; their interpretation of "Free Peasantry" means that they, the supposed peasants, get to own slaves and work them to death on plantations and you don't get to tell them how to treat their chattel or raise many taxes from them. They consider it oppressive if you ask them to turn over greater shares of their profits, institute laws to preclude them from incurring labor inefficiencies through pointless cruelty or dangerous whimsy, or compete with them in the markets by having your government run its own plantations with better-treated serfs. If you run the Drow out of town, the slaves will probably honor you with legitimacy at some point, but you've got to do a bunch of transition work and then you don't get to field free Driders in defense of the realm.

On the other hand, Dwarfs are generally alright guys but they're more comfortable with a great deal of collectivization. The thing here, though, is that they expect a lot more butter than guns; they expect your civil administration to take 70% of their earnings but to immediately put it into communal art and lodging without keeping much of it for the kinds of national projects that you care about as a player character. The money they're satisfied to see you spending on the military or prospecting for soul gems isn't more than you would get from a human Free Peasantry. Other ethnic groups that treasure privacy or who don't value a public education curriculum with thirty unrelated tradeskills may say they feel oppressed if you assign them an apartment and compel them to send their children to public school, but the Dwarves fully expect you to make the minorities conform, and if you do, the granite statues of old Dwarf kings will come to life and protect the hexes where they live.

Some ethnic groups might require qualitative dispensation to regard you as legitimate, instead of or in addition to the quantitative drawbacks you have on your net tax revenues. Those can be written into those groups directly along with attributes like their geographical preponderances. Examples of such requirements for may include: Genocidal prosecution of certain outgroups, provoking your neighbors by harboring pirates or flower warriors, punishing every transgression with the death penalty, ramping up exploitation of a bullshit resource to own the libs, or just demonstrating your machismo with overt acts of sexual subordination.

Further examples may include operating a national religion, spending a certain amount of time working the fields with your own bare hands, protecting the civil rights of difficult-to-manage evil interlopers, refraining from siring children, telling the truth to every person under every circumstance, or passing acts of war by them via referendum.

[deaddmwalking]

I'm curious about legitimacy with opposed (or at least differing) groups.

For example, if a hex includes a tribe of kobolds and a village of gnomes, is it possible to attain maximum legitimacy with both?

If your society is represented by a small elite oppressing a larger native population (Vikings/Rus or Manchu/Chinese or English Colonialism) do you have differing levels of legitimacy? If your king was ordained by god but the people you're subjugating worship a different god, how does that work?

[Username17]

An important point about taxes and government welfarism is that at the level of the simulation they are irrelevant. If the government taxes one gold piece and spends it on public consumption, there is no change to the total amount spent on consumption and no change to the lord's coffers.

In the real world there are often very good arguments as to when and whether the government should tax and spend more or less. And there doubtlessly are such in the game world as well. But at the level of the simulation the choice is entirely superficial. Maybe a peasant keeps a silver piece and invests it in improving their cistern. Maybe that same silver is confiscated to help pay for a public fountain. Maybe the peasant wants or needs one of those two outcomes, but you aren't trackingcistern quality either way. The player need only care how much wealth goes to the character's personal slush fund and how much is spent on things the peasantry want.

Questions about whether spending is better in public or private hands can simply be ignored by the system. Those become societal preference questions and can be handwaived into stewardship generally. Only the amounts that get siphoned into the war effort and the prince's lavish lifestyle need be tracked as coming from the peasantry in any meaningful way.

-Username17

[Username17]

Unfortunately it looks like the entertaining rant about creating social change through Drow prison sex cults got eaten by the internet. I wanted to respond to some of those ideas.

Anyway, one of the things that's terribly different between modern society and feudal society is the idea of investment. In modern society it is considered absolutely non-contentious that people spend a certain amount of their income as consumption and a certain amount of their income as investment. Consumption is everything you pay for food and rent and blowjobs and fancy hats and anything else that makes your life possible and also better in an immediate sense. Investment is anything you pay for making future incomes bigger, whether it be tools or training or clearing land for future crops or whatever.

Medieval philosophers did not think of things in this manner. And the pre-medieval philosophers didn't either. Confucius thought that merchants added nothing of value to the economy. Diocletian thought it was a great idea to try to fix the prices of all goods and services in perpetuity. Pope Clement V outlawed lending at interest on pain of death. The idea that some portion of income should or even could be set aside to increase future incomes was simply not part of the discourse. What they believed in was savings. Not in the "Savings == Investment" sense of modern liberal economists, but in the sense that they were aware that catastrophes happened (indeed, happened constantly during the medieval period) and that if you didn't have something in reserve when that happened that things would go poorly and you might straight up die. Most medieval empires of any size, whether we look at France, China, or Aztlan, had almost no years when there wasn't a famine going on in at least one province. This period's philosophers believed in Consumption and Savings, but regarded the idea of the savings being useful for anything other than future consumption was somewhere between immoral and impossible.

Now Hex conquest is basically a 4X game, players are viewing it from the standpoint of 21st century post-industrialists whether the characters are or not. If society in general doesn't have the concept of investing into populated areas to expand the economy and make positive returns, the players will invent it. It's not an object like the telescope or something where you can just handwave characters in-world not knowing how to stick lenses together. It's just a way of interacting with the world that obviously the players are going to be all-in on. But the whole "savings" angle does do something really important - it makes there be an in-world reason for there to be "treasure rooms" that adventurers can loot.

So here's the deal: some of the wealth you get out of taxes and businesses and whatever can go into the Treasury. Having a Treasury is important for several reasons:

• You can't be a Count without a Count-sized Treasury. Or a Duke without a Duke sized Treasury.
• When dealing with other states, your Treasury size influences what you can do diplomatically.
• Special troops require that you meet certain Treasury thresholds before they can show up.
• Disasters and lesser bad events are much more expensive to pay for at the end of the year than they are to pay for out of the Treasury.

So the standard pattern is that you build granaries, and stuff acts as strains on your food, but since you have the granaries it's just a temporary Koku loss to your treasury and you refill it at the end of the year. If you didn't have granaries, there'd be like starvation and emigration and shit.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

While I understand the concept, and I think there's a lot of merit to the basic idea that a lot of people approach D&D from a post-industrial mindset (mills powered by golems, etc.), I think the zero-sum gain approach to medieval economics is probably a bit harsh - if the only way to improve your income is to conquer more hexes, that works okay in a 4X game but quickly runs into issues where one player or conglomeration of players cooperate to dominate the board, and you're stuck being minor players in small hexes devoting an outsized portion of your income to the army just to keep from getting absorbed.

Instead, however, we might look at D&D as a quasi-medieval post-apocalyptic world, where you can have philosophies and academic working knowledge that exceeds the local tech level. It might be a worldwide consensus like post-WWII Germany that high interest rates are a terrible thing which stalls inflation and investment, or maybe Points of Light mean that trade has broken down to the point where technology transfer has stalled and investment is at the local level of "Maybe I can get a Dire Boar and cross-breed it with my sows to really bring home the bacon." But I'd hate to cut off investment entirely, and historically a lot of nobility has run their domains on credit rather than fat stacks of coin.

[maglag]

Medieval philosophers did not think of things in this manner. And the pre-medieval philosophers didn't either. Confucius thought that merchants added nothing of value to the economy.

On returning home, he said to his father, "What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields?"
"Ten times the investment," replied his father.
"And the return on investment in pearls and jades is how much?"
"A hundredfold."
"And the return on investment from establishing a ruler and securing the state would be how much?"
"It would be incalculable."
"Now if I devoted my energies to labouring in the fields, I would hardly get enough to clothe and feed myself; yet if I secure a state and establish its lord, the benefits can be passed on to future generations. I propose to go serve Prince Yiren of Qin who is a hostage in Zhao and resides in the city of Jiao."-Lü Buwei, chinese merchant gone politician

Investment has always been there. Agriculture itself is an investment, plant the grain instead of eating it now and you'll have a lot more grain down the line. Romans built lots of roads and aqueducts and bridges to support their empire. Even the ancient greeks had banks doing loans with interest, including risk-free loans where if your business failed you didn't have to pay back to motivate people to take risks! In my homecountry there's the story of how smart medieval nobles would buy cheap grain during times of plenty and sell it at highjacked prices when the famines struck.

Now the thing is for that most of history most of humanity didn't know how to read or write or do basic math and they were either slaves/serfs or working from hand to mouth, so the people capable of doing investment were a lot less before the Industrial revolution kicks in along a bunch of science advancements so now there's a lot more food and other resources for people to play around with. You can send your kids to school instead of needing them at the farm for starters.

[Mord]

Unfortunately it looks like the entertaining rant about creating social change through Drow prison sex cults got eaten by the internet.

Reading this sentence is like finding a tiny scrap of readable parchment in the ruins of the Great Library.

[Chamomile]

What the Hell happened to it, though? I remember reading that rant, so it wasn't a thing where the forum swallowed it up upon hitting the "submit" button.

[Username17]

What the Hell happened to it, though? I remember reading that rant, so it wasn't a thing where the forum swallowed it up upon hitting the "submit" button.

Not sure. It's possible the original author thought better of it on the grounds that there were a lot of passages that would be pretty ick out of context. But it brings up a larger point, which is that populations have traits. And some of those traits are cultural things that you can change, and some of those traits are absolute traits that you cannot change.

So consider Dwarves. They are industrious and civic minded and respect wealth to the degree that they accept higher tax rates from rulers with large treasuries. Now consider the Duergar, who are literally exactly the same people but are culturally affiliated with Team Fiend. They are still industrious and wealth respecting, but they are not civic minded. If we were to consider Gully Dwarves, which we will not, they aren't industrious. Clearly you could find or create a cultural subgroup of Dwarves that didn't have any particular standard Dwarf traits, because those are malleable cultural facts about Dwarves.

On a more extreme example, you have undead and golems. They don't even have culture, they just have whatever traits they are built with and that's that. Skeletons don't eat and don't "mind" working for slave wages, and they will never get any better or worse than that.

So the question is: what kinds of traits should populations have? The simplest are ones that affect tax rates and production. Unfeeling creatures like Golems can be taxed to the max and don't care because they are unfeeling. Greedy populations like Dwarves and Duergar accept high tax rates without grumbling about it because they just assume that is what rulers do. Tribal and Nomadic populations don't like paying taxes, and Anarchic or Rebelling populations won't pay taxes. Some populations have production effects that affect specific types of holdings. For example, our Dwarves are probably more productive than usual in Mines and Cities, while the typical Halfling culture has the Skilled Farmers trait that has a good production in farms. Some traits affect specific types of terrain. A population with Forest Lore or Swamp Lore is more productive in Forests or Swamps respectively.

But importantly, these are traits that populations can pick up. Sending populations to go live in the woods is pretty shit unless and until they pick up the Forest Lore trait and then it's not so bad.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

The history of colonialism in the New World is full of hysterical fails which would be nice to emulate in a game devoted to that ( plug for my friends book - http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php? ... 0674971929 and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXrZxYs9gdM ) .

But, okay - this isn't a computer game, right? Do you really want to be in the business of keeping track of whether individual tribes of halflings have the forest survival trait?

At a certain scale, having a ranger character teach forest survival to a troupe of refugee halflings is appropriate, but I think the range of play where that sort of thing happens is the tier below when you start taxing hexes...

[nockermensch]

The timeframe for populations losing or gaining a trait should probably be "One Generation".

As for the lack of economic investment in D&D, you also need to consider two things:
a) it's kind of hard to beat the ROI of "lets finance a raid".
b) because all your neighbors also have (a) in mind, investing in windmills or whatever will probably end looking silly when the lizardmen invade next season and burn everything they can't carry back to the swamp.

It makes a lot of sense in a land without strong international order that most of the wealth is just kept in gold form: The surest bet for rulers is that they'll need that gold to fund an army / pay tribute / otherwise do shit required to keep their heads attached.

[Ancient History]

Magic makes fiat currency chancy at best, because forgery becomes a lot harder. You still have difficulties with magicians conjuring raw material out of the air too.

[DrPraetor]

Olden times are awful, especially in Europe. Draining swamps or clearing more farmland would take precious time away from drinking sewage and dying of cholera.

The new testament has the concept of ROI in it ( http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_pa ... 19_11.html ) but... well, religion is weird.

Anyway, the term "Dark Ages" is disliked by scholars, but it was adopted for a reason. So there wasn't much investment in Europe during the Early Middle Ages, which is when the various chivalric cycles that from the basis of much D&D thinking are set. This doesn't mean Emperor Ashoka didn't spend a lot of points on development, although I don't think ROI is an intuitively obvious principle to people who were, indeed, generally on the edge of subsistence. Marx would tell you that capital, by which he meant specifically investment capital, arose with capitalism and Lü Buwei didn't have any.

You may or may not want to make this lack of investment a general feature of the setting. Ashoka was doing it but people really took notice. nockermensch gives an explanation for D&D that may also be historically accurate for Europe - and in any Demon Haunted world or similar post-collapse setting, I think it makes sense that the world is in a low investment stage due to a combination of lack of surplus and what Marx would call "primitive accumulation" or you might say the Hobbesian war of all against all.

So, even if it's not a historically accurate general principle for olden times across cultures, declaring investment levels to be low and that it is a surprise your neighbors when you start turning strategic turns into aqueducts and shit is, I think, a good assumption for the game of hexes.

[Username17]

Anyway, the term "Dark Ages" is disliked by scholars, but it was adopted for a reason. So there wasn't much investment in Europe during the Early Middle Ages, which is when the various chivalric cycles that from the basis of much D&D thinking are set.

My experience is that people who don't like the term "Dark Ages" fall into two camps: Medievalist nerds who want to tell you at length about advances in horse yoke designs, and Christian apologists who want to downplay the human catastrophe that was the deliberate destruction of Roman-era books. I'm not especially keen on humoring either group.

So, even if it's not a historically accurate general principle for olden times across cultures, declaring investment levels to be low and that it is a surprise your neighbors when you start turning strategic turns into aqueducts and shit is, I think, a good assumption for the game of hexes.

Pretty much this. It's desirable for all the Orc tribes and shit dotted across the landscape to be at a fairly low development level. Firstly so that it's actually possible for adventurers to conquer them in the first place, but also because that way there's stuff to do for the kingdom management game. If things start at development level 5 of 6 you have two development levels of actual play space. But if they start at development level 1 of 6, you have six levels of actual play space.

Magic makes fiat currency chancy at best, because forgery becomes a lot harder. You still have difficulties with magicians conjuring raw material out of the air too.

Magic completely changes the equations as regards to forgery. In D&D-land specifically, Forgery is literally impossible because of arcane mark. It's an unforgeable mark that you can put on anything. So if you have a magic stamp that Arcane Marks things, you can perfectly notarize absolutely anything and fiat currency is go. Other settings put the upper hand with illusions, and make paper money (and often metal money) basically impossible.

The timeframe for populations losing or gaining a trait should probably be "One Generation".

Well, you also have large numbers of immigrants. There are assumed to be overcrowded and wasteland areas that people are living in because of fear of the wilderness or having been kicked off of better land by various invaders in the past. Also you are going to end up freeing slaves and there are sinking islands and shit. Large numbers of people are kind of "around" to come live in whatever areas you clear. So some populations are going to pick up traits by virtue of having people show up with skills.

-Username17

[Emerald]

In D&D-land specifically, Forgery is literally impossible because of arcane mark. It's an unforgeable mark that you can put on anything. So if you have a magic stamp that Arcane Marks things, you can perfectly notarize absolutely anything and fiat currency is go.

As a side note, Eberron noticed this issue and introduced the ability to forge them by taking 10 minutes to cast the spell and taking a -10 penalty to Forgery, making arcane marks unforgeable-for-most-practical-purposes rather than literally unforgeable. You can borrow that rule if you want to be able to have the occasional counterfeit currency/false contracts/fake letters/etc. as plot hooks but still have fiat currency generally function.