jt wrote:
Many things are just going to be a sizeable bonus to some stat or another. Got warg riders for cavalry? They eat twice as much and they get twice the shock bonus when they charge. Those are the easy ones. Maybe it's helpful to remember that you can't trust your resource exchanges to stay where you put them, and sometimes your players are going to end up with an order of magnitude more cavalry power than you expected because they have tireless golem workers harvesting meat from inexhaustible hydra farms to feed an entire army of warg riders. The system has to be resistant to that sort of bullshit from the PCs.
I agree on both counts.
Most fantasy stuff is going to be pretty easy to do with some minor bonuses. Zombies are just some assignable manpower you don't have to pay or feed. Even Earth Spirits are probably just Manpower that gives you a cost discount when building certain kinds of things. Some sort of reverse-medusa meat mining probably gives you a lot of food, but ultimately that's going to be equivalent to some quite countable number of hexes of farmers. You can get a
thousand small farms into a single plains hex and your meat mine is going to be measurable on that scale. Raising longdead workers from ancient graves is quite comparable with getting immigration from the Dwarven lands. And so on and so on.
Actually transformative fantasy aspects certainly exist, but most of them are translatable into simple bonuses or tradeoffs.
But stat bonuses, even big ones, aren't as exciting as absolute or non-numeric powers. So I think that, when assessing mechanics, it's important to stop and look at every stat you track and ask yourself: "What happens if I replace this number with 0? Null? Enough? Infinity? Orange?" A system that has more satisfying answers to these questions will have more useful hooks on it for when you go looking for things that wizards can do, or what it means for a hex to be populated by will-o-wisps, or what happens when the fighter finds the Fountain Of Youth and carts it back to the capital city.
Agreed.
Dean wrote:One thing I really liked from my Domain rules were special theme domains. So instead of developing your civilization down various paths of technologies or public works or governments you could become some very particular kind of domain that had a much lower power ceiling but offered unique abilities based on their racial or religious theme.
I agree that there's a desire for this sort of thing, but the text to return isn't very good. I would like to shift this as much as possible into the chosen council hats. That is, your sun theocracy has a council where the Chaplain, Inquisitor, and High Priest all do piety actions every festival and you recruit as many archons as you can. And the great library has a council with a Dean, Diviner, and Historian all doing lore accumulation stuff. And those can play differently without playing by different rules.
Because if you make an entire set of rules for what happens if your civilization is made of fire or something, those rules are going to be filler text in most games.
Dean wrote:I also think the less racial difference the better but one thing that occurs to me that might be neccessarry to model which is size. The town of Storm Giants definitely has to work differently than the town of goblins, that simply must be true. I actually can't think of an easy simply solution to the fact that Giants might totally be living in your society and they might do it in numbers that are super relevant.
My thought on Nations is that it should be rules relevant enough that it
matters that you have Halflings in your Shire, and not more than that. So whatever the minimum it is that makes you care that you have Orcs and don't have Hobgoblins is your target.
But yes, genuinely giant sized people do need special rules that make their massivity matter. I'm OK with Halflings and Humans taking up the same amount of acreage, but it genuinely has to matter that you are feeding Ogres and not Elves.
-Username17
