This means that even homesteaded undeveloped farmland is worth working, but not to the degree that people with marketable skills are going to say "Screw that, I'm growing potatoes!" It also means that there's quite a bit of room to improve farmland. High quality farmland in Japan was making upwards of five Koku per acre, and that's not unreasonable. Assuming the farmers still mostly eat their own food you're looking at 56.5 gp going to the farm each month at fertility 5. Such a farm would be able to pay significant amounts in taxes, because their base income is about 12 gp per person. That's a reasonable top end for the family farm - enough to be rich but not eating at fancy restaurants every day rich.
This also feeds nicely into the Barony. The Barony is assumed to run on the Manor or Plantation model. That means it has about 500 agricultural acres and is worked by about 40 people. At fertility 1, the Plantation is making about 500 Koku and they get about 300 gp as an operating budget. That's enough that they could hire their laborers as basic laborers for about 100 gp per month and have 200 gp to have a small staff, make occasional capital improvements, and of course keep the Baron's family in the style they are accustomed to. That's a large enough income that it perhaps makes sense to invest in their own mill (as that would generate about 50 gp per month), and at higher development levels Barons could be rich enough to outfit their own armsmen. That all looks like it checks out. Players can build up a Barony from the dirt and there's enough wealth circulating that it can chug along and you could do adventures to reinvest in it and shit.
Anyway, the micro foundations that are a little bit more difficult are the Guilds.
So a Guild doesn't have an inherent dirt-based income stream. It's all gold based, and that means it's entirely dependent on the urban population and development level. It's more ephemeral, because the amount of money that can be taken in by a thieves guild or a brewers guild is pretty much arbitrary. Your cash outlays are pretty high, because you're maintaining an entire staff of skilled labor. There has to be enough customer base to support that skilled labor, so the size of a Guild is pretty strictly limited by the urban population and development.
I broadly agree that income of any kind can severely impact low level play.Grek wrote:The level inappropriateness happens in the other direction, Frank. If your level one ass can take the Tax Collection action in order to acquire 25000 gold for personal use, that breaks certain aspects adventure portion of the game for the first handful of levels. Ditto if you can Hire Mercenaries (to explore the dungeon for you), Seize Him! (to make a human enemy go to the dungeons) or Lay Siege (to collapse the pyramid on top of the mummy).
The Hireling issue is perhaps more fundamental. It's been there since the beginning - characters can hire mercenaries or train a pack of dogs or whatever and hit well above their weight. Mostly players don't seem to do that for whatever reason, but when they do it works pretty well.
To an extent I'm even OK with it. D&D is still pretty fun when everyone is controlling a main character and three mooks. It bogs down if people get much more than that, and also too the game goes off the rails hardcore if one of the players is a mastermind and the other players are not. 5th edition is the worst about this, but that's ever been so.
Not only is this not obvious, it's not true. The entire point is that the measure of scaling from apprentice weaver to master weaver should not be character level. At all. Being very good at weaving should not mean that you're separately qualified to fight giants and lead armies. Skills should simply be orthogonal to level. Ranks was not a good idea. It does not do good things. It can't be made to work. People have been trying for nineteen fucking years, and there are no numbers you can plug in to make that not be a load of ass.Chamomile wrote:Whatever amount of scaling you want, you could obviously achieve by adjusting the rate at which the amount of ranks you have and the cap on them comes in, or else by adding in level-gated non-rank bonuses.
And aside from the fact that you should be able to go from apprentice pottery to expert pottery without gaining any levels, the d20 is actually a pretty bad RNG for that kind of mundane task. It works out OK for long jumping, where it's basically OK that the generated distances aren't very different one person to the next, but it's not OK for like wood carving and shit. The Take 10 and Take 20 thresholds are better than nothing, but they are still extremely blunt instruments. The RNG is flat, so it doesn't have any numbers that it normally rolls and thus there's no such thing as a normal result. A character one point off the Take 10 threshold of succeeding all the time fails half the time. It's not even possible for the system to generate routine tasks that characters can usually succeed at. That's fucking mind blowing.
No. You can't fix it with a math patch. It's a bad system. It's unsalvageable. Kill it with fire and start over.
-Username17
