Domain Rules

[Username17]

Yeah, the "immediacy" of a magical action matters a lot with 6 second combat turns (let alone GURPS style 1 second combat impulses), but it doesn't really matter much in 1 month domain turns.

In any case, the basic mundane resources are Koku, Gold, and Manpower. A Koku is enough food to live on at a low level, which means that it trades for roughly 1 Gold per month. Manpower requires Koku even if it's slave labor and basic labor gets 1 Gold per month. Manpower allocated to a project normally turns back into free Manpower when that project is finished. Projects will skilled labor simply cost more in Gold and/or Koku - you don't have to part out which units of Manpower cost which amount - you buy all the Manpower and you pay the premium for whatever you're doing.

The big exception to this is transforming Manpower into troops. First of all, this is a one-way transformation. You do not normally get the Manpower back after some number of months. The second is that troops have specific Gold and Koku costs. That has to be that way, because some of the options include murdering peasants and turning them into zombies that don't need Koku at all.

Magic resources are Gems and Piety. Gems are mana crystals that you can use to power rituals or infuse magic items or create magical creatures or whatever. Also you can sell them and use them to hire magic creatures that want them. Piety is a purely domain level resource. Doing things that please the gods raises your piety, doing things that pisses the gods off lowers your piety, and it is spent when you get miracles or to recruit supernatural creatures. Note that Piety is not the same as Goodness. It's entirely possible to do blood sacrifices every festival and spend your piety on recruiting monsters and fiends if you happen to have an evil government.

Which brings us to Festivals. There is a festival at the midpoint of each season whether you like it or not. So every three domain turns, festival. Festivals cost money and manpower, but they are also opportunities to do stuff. You can make sacrifices to gods or produce propaganda to make people like you better or just spend more to make bigger festivals to make people happier.

Which brings us to the Cultural currency. I am not as settled in how this should work. In Crusader Kings there is Prestige on a per character basis and in Civilization you have Culture accumulate for regions. Both are I think excusable.

The big sticking point for me is whether Prestige is something that you spend to do things or whether it's an amount that you have to keep above a certain level to stop various problems. I kind of like the idea that the big hurdle in early Domain management is simply getting your prestige high enough to convince the border hexes that they should pay taxes.

-Username17

[Username17]

The core issues on culture points or prestige or whatever the fuck is that:

• You don't want people to get to the Prestige singularity where their borders just keep expanding and they functionally never have to do anything to improve their standing with the masses.
• It's kind of weird if most kings and emperors are sitting around at 0 prestige because they spend it as fast as they make it.

More generally, you'd like to be able to compare prestige or culture totals, and that's not really possible if you aren't spending your culture points away every time you want the elves and dwarves to stop fighting.

My inclination is that your prestige should be a running tally, with prestige "needs" increasing with domain size, population, and the number of races you happen to be presiding over. You could spend prestige on costly political actions like moving people to the frontier or changing the state religion, but the basic issue is that your realm's stability level is simply your government's prestige divided by its inertia. That might be too complex for pen and paper, but it does a lot of things I want it to. Like how realm stability automatically takes a hit when you conquer additional lands and add it to your province and how the starting stability will be worse if you conquer a bunch of Orcs and snake cultists than if you wed the princess after slaying the dragon.

-Username17

[Username17]

The core issues on culture points or prestige or whatever the fuck is that:

• You don't want people to get to the Prestige singularity where their borders just keep expanding and they functionally never have to do anything to improve their standing with the masses.
• It's kind of weird if most kings and emperors are sitting around at 0 prestige because they spend it as fast as they make it.

More generally, you'd like to be able to compare prestige or culture totals, and that's not really possible if you aren't spending your culture points away every time you want the elves and dwarves to stop fighting.

My inclination is that your prestige should be a running tally, with prestige "needs" increasing with domain size, population, and the number of races you happen to be presiding over. You could spend prestige on costly political actions like moving people to the frontier or changing the state religion, but the basic issue is that your realm's stability level is simply your government's prestige divided by its inertia. That might be too complex for pen and paper, but it does a lot of things I want it to. Like how realm stability automatically takes a hit when you conquer additional lands and add it to your province and how the starting stability will be worse if you conquer a bunch of Orcs and snake cultists than if you wed the princess after slaying the dragon.

-Username17

[ETortoise]

This is probably too fiddle and complicated for a subsystem of a subsystem, but what if prestige was wagered on actions? The king bets a certain amount of prestige that they can win a war or whatever. If they succeed, they get that prestige back with a bonus. If they fail. The prestige is lost.

[jt]

In any case, the basic mundane resources are Koku, Gold, and Manpower. A Koku is enough food to live on at a low level, which means that it trades for roughly 1 Gold per month. Manpower requires Koku even if it's slave labor and basic labor gets 1 Gold per month. Manpower allocated to a project normally turns back into free Manpower when that project is finished. Projects will skilled labor simply cost more in Gold and/or Koku - you don't have to part out which units of Manpower cost which amount - you buy all the Manpower and you pay the premium for whatever you're doing.

My initial reaction to this was that you need a way to separately track skilled and unskilled labor. But I don't think that's too big of a problem:
[*] You can't have a plot where you have a skilled labor shortage. That's just one plot though.
[*] You can still model something like my "Enough skeletons to do all the unskilled labor in a hex" proposal as "Projects in this hex that cost 1gp per manpower or less don't cost manpower."

Festivals. There is a festival at the midpoint of each season whether you like it or not. So every three domain turns, festival.

I like this.

Which brings us to the Cultural currency. I am not as settled in how this should work. In Crusader Kings there is Prestige on a per character basis and in Civilization you have Culture accumulate for regions. Both are I think excusable.

A proposal: Prestige is the equivalent of experience for your domain classes. The size of your domain is equivalent to its CR. If your domain is too big for your prestige, then your domain's CR is too high for your level, and you might not have the required abilities to handle level-appropriate threats. Your "monster manual" includes internal threats like revolts, rapidly growing cults, overly well-connected merchants, other claimants to the throne, etc. If you expand a bunch without pacifying your populace (by impressing them, throwing awesome festivals, mind controlling them, or hiring devils to keep them in line), you can end up with a harder version of one of those plots that you don't have great abilities to resolve.

[Dean]

I like prestige as a force that makes conquering other domains easier and the turnaround time before they accept your rule uncontestedly shorter. I've been using just such a thing in my domain rules and it makes intuitive sense to people. Culture victories have been around in games like Civ for as long as I've been alive. The idea that you can make a good enough society that is respected and culturally exported enough that if you lay siege to your neighbors they'll surrender and start joining your armies WAY faster than they would for the dark orc Lord of Killrapeistan

The cool thing about culture is it means you're already inside their castle walls. Your philosophy is their philosophy, your art is their art. Sparta has to conquer you, Athens can look at the communities around it and ask in what way they are not Athenian already. Actually as an apropo historical fact I wasn't even intending to reference "Athenians" was a word that people all throughout the Attican region would refer to themselves as, a unique phenomenon even among the other large poleis.

[Username17]

My initial reaction to this was that you need a way to separately track skilled and unskilled labor.

In addition to plot related events and challenges you've noted, you can also just have development level limits on certain tasks and goods. Like how there is a cost limit for the amount of art you can normally expect to purchase based on the size of the city. You'd need to upgrade the harbor to a certain level before you could make warships, and doing that would assume that you had shipwrights and shit somewhere in the mix. Manpower normally comes in units of 100, so tracking how many are skilled carpenters or whatever is too intensive. Once you have a guildhall, you are assumed to have carpenters and masons and the cost of hiring those specialists is included in the cost of whatever you're having them build.

But "We need to find a [Sage]" where [Sage] can be replaced with master brewer or silversmith or fucking whatever is a perfectly reasonable quest, and the kind of thing that plugs right in to the intersection between the RPG and the domain sim.

A proposal: Prestige is the equivalent of experience for your domain classes. The size of your domain is equivalent to its CR. If your domain is too big for your prestige, then your domain's CR is too high for your level, and you might not have the required abilities to handle level-appropriate threats.

I don't think that line of thought is going to end up being particularly productive. The size of the domain that you get is more story dependent than level dependent. You might end up conquering Rohan and have three provinces that are each 600 hexes. You might end up with Bladereach and its immediate environs. And most importantly of all, depending on the story either of those could happen at 5th level or at 15th level.

The key then is that having more prestige lets you actually control more of the domain. At low prestige your rule doesn't really extend out of Bladereach no matter where the nominal borders are and the Banemires pretty much do whatever and ignore you. But also too at low prestige the horselords of Rohan do not come when you call and do whatever the fuck they feel like.

Thus, for large domains, the act of gaining prestige is to bring an unruly land under your control. And for small domains, the act of gaining prestige is something you can do to start affecting the area around and maybe growing your domain and pushing the borders around.

I like prestige as a force that makes conquering other domains easier and the turnaround time before they accept your rule uncontestedly shorter.

Yeah, I like this framing. Prestige as a lump sum that has to be enough to cover all the hexes in your domain to quell rebellions, but when it's big enough to include hexes in other domains you could conquer those without having them be rebellious. So ideally you'd want to build up your prestige to where it was bigger than it needed to be to stabilize your realm before you expanded.

This is probably too fiddle and complicated for a subsystem of a subsystem, but what if prestige was wagered on actions? The king bets a certain amount of prestige that they can win a war or whatever. If they succeed, they get that prestige back with a bonus. If they fail. The prestige is lost.

Honestly this seems like a perfectly reasonable festival action. You could make a sacred vow or a mighty boast at a festival to do a thing and wager some amount of Piety or Prestige. If you succeed at doing it by the next festival, you get a bonus and if you don't you get a penalty.

Piety is a bit of a placeholder. It's the Crusader Kings term for the concept, but Magic the Gathering has "Devotion" instead which is the same number of syllables and has the advantage of not starting with the same letter for purposes of domain sheet presentation.

-Username17

[Orca]

There are places in NZ where soldiers were granted land to settle on & farm in order to thoroughly claim that land back in the 19th C. Opotiki for example; a friend's wife comes from there. Manpower - troops is not necessarily a one-way street.

[DrPraetor]

If prestige is your control radius, then it is your domain size limit from a certain perspective, so I'm not sure if what you're saying is that different from what jt suggested in that respect. I can see where he's coming from in tying domain size to challenges, or at least total military might, since you don't want the army subgame to be too one-sided either way. But size (or even population) and might should be only moderately coupled in a D&D setting with various sorts of fantastic troops and secret mountain monasteries full of badasses and such.

Now, whether it equates to land area or not, there definitely does need to be some tie between level and "level appropriate challenges" for the domain minigame. This could very well preclude having a 5th level character conquer all of Rohan (or indeed having anyone below 7th level or whatever limit participating in the domain minigame at all, even if you are nominally a prince or something.) It's a bit artificial, but everything about character level is at least a bit artificial.

Various editions of Elric have called your divine favor Elan and Allegiance, so you might consider those as well. I like Elan as a floofy magical currency more than as a piety indicator ( it derives from the french word for momentum, cognate to lance ).

[Username17]

There are places in NZ where soldiers were granted land to settle on & farm in order to thoroughly claim that land back in the 19th C. Opotiki for example; a friend's wife comes from there. Manpower - troops is not necessarily a one-way street.

The Trollmans in Austria were given land in exchange for military service. I'm familiar with the process. The point is that disbanding and settling soldiers doesn't turn them back into manpower. For the most part it turns them into farms which in turn create much smaller piles of manpower. Otherwise they'd turn into Urban Population, which again would produce fractional manpower.

So I suppose it isn't purely a one-way transformation, but it's a loss heavy reversal. Actually using soldiers as manpower to build things is a very imperial thing. As in, Roman Emperors, Chinese Emperors, and Aztec Emperors all managed to get soldiers to efficiently maintain roads, but European Kings mostly did not. I could see there being a prestige minimum to get your soldiers to do road work when not fighting or possibly have that be a title power of some more bureaucratic council positions like the Minister of Works.

If prestige is your control radius, then it is your domain size limit from a certain perspective, so I'm not sure if what you're saying is that different from what jt suggested in that respect.

Your prestige defines how big an area you could control, not how big an area you actually do control. Development level and military mobilization are a bigger predictor of what kinds of challenges you can deal with than your regional control limit. You could have a small prestige and your region of control could be an Elven metropolis with elite Pegasus cavalry or you could have a large prestige and your region of control could be a vast swamp with hunter gatherer Lizardfolk. The first would be able to roflstomp most bandit uprisings and the second would get smashed by a dragon rider invasion.

Domain size and fractiousness is a challenge, and overcoming it requires you to do things to gain prestige and spread cultural awareness of your domain. But it's not a particularly good proxy for domain power. Wilderness hexes only support 20-60 families of hunter gatherers, they aren't worth very much (a plains hex supports 1000 small farms).

Now, whether it equates to land area or not, there definitely does need to be some tie between level and "level appropriate challenges" for the domain minigame.

This I definitely agree with. Some of it is simply book keeping - I don't want to talk about deploying my units of silverhelm cavalry to repulse an individual cattle raid. That kind of shit gets exhausting in Dominions and it's totally unacceptable in Paper and Pencil. My intuition is that such things should be tied to development level somehow. That if your economy is large enough, minor disasters like fires and local floods and blights are simply relegated to background noise. If your law level is high enough, minor bandits and unruly drunken ogres and such are simply dealt with.

Events that you get smacked by would therefore be only things large enough to matter. I'm not sure how many different axes you should track. One for each type of event I should think. But how many types there are is an open question.

Certainly the fact that sometimes the players are going to have their own army and carve out a chunk of wilderness to go play Dwarf Fortress in and sometimes the players are going to ascend to the council of Waterdeep through the Thieves' Guild or whatever means that economy and military could be very independent. How many others should be there I don't know.

-Username17

[jt]

I'd have as few power to threat matching scales as possible, ideally one. It's just hard to make threat books that multiple axes well. The more axes there are the more opportunities for the threat-writer to mess up there are, and there's a tendency towards making all the numbers roughly the same size (similar to how 4E's high level monsters all end up being solos). If you want to exercise an entire empire's resources instead of each axis one at a time, the number of threats you need to fill out your book goes up exponentially with the number of axes (threats per level pairing * (number of levels) ^ (number of axes)). Even worse, you have to contend with the difference between a threat with [Economics 3 and Military 2] versus one with [Economics 3 or Military 2], which interact messily with your character classes if some use fungible resources and others don't.

So I'd suggest getting a bunch of example threats, grouping them into themes (economic, military, cultural/religious, covert), sorting them within the themes, then deciding where you'd like to draw the line of equivalency between themes. Then you can go through your domain classes and force that to work. Somehow it has to work out so that your merchant empires can buy enough mercenaries to deal with the same bullywug uprising that your nomadic centaur horde can handle directly, and your horde has to be able to deal with an equally difficult iron shortage by plundering the right people. And this doesn't actually have to be a huge stretch, because empires that are powerful in ways that aren't fungible with violence don't last very long.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

In any case, the basic mundane resources are Koku, Gold, and Manpower. A Koku is enough food to live on at a low level, which means that it trades for roughly 1 Gold per month. Manpower requires Koku even if it's slave labor and basic labor gets 1 Gold per month. Manpower allocated to a project normally turns back into free Manpower when that project is finished. Projects will skilled labor simply cost more in Gold and/or Koku - you don't have to part out which units of Manpower cost which amount - you buy all the Manpower and you pay the premium for whatever you're doing.

If I wanted to adapt this system to a setting where paper currency is a thing, would that significantly change this setup at all? Or can gold just be substituted for whatever the fuck people are trading as currency like dollars or bottle caps or dildos?

[Username17]

If I wanted to adapt this system to a setting where paper currency is a thing, would that significantly change this setup at all? Or can gold just be substituted for whatever the fuck people are trading as currency like dollars or bottle caps or dildos?

In pre-modern economies, production of food is the limiting factor. Urban populations were smaller than rural populations and artisans and the military were constantly limited by available bread. The Sun King's kingdom had its wealth measured by the amount of wheat grown, the Chinese balanced standard backed currency in rice. French and Chinese philosophers were able to say outright that merchants "produced no value" and noone laughed at them for doing so because it seemed obvious to everyone that real value was simply an extension of whatever came out of the soil. Even at the turn of the 19th century Thomas Malthus based his entire concept of population limits on the assumed productivity of farmland.

Modern advanced economies are not specifically food limited for the most part. And while certain shocks to transport might lead to food riots in the event of hurricanes or Brexit, there isn't a global lack of food and won't be one for the foreseeable future. And this is with the amount of people working in agriculture dropping every year. It's down to 28% globally and the world's largest food producer only has 11%. And even those agriculture workers are mostly not working "on the land," the on-farm employment in the united states is seriously than 1% of the population, with the rest being associated with food in various industrial, logistical, or service capacities. This has come with a shift of population from rural to urban. Globally, more than half of people now live in urban environments and in the United States it's 83%.

What this all means is that if you're modelling an advanced economy, agriculture isn't necessarily special. Population and employment rate is what you have to worry about, and the agriculture sector essentially just makes money. Taxes are paid in dollars, not Koku. And the upkeep of military forces is also pretty much just money.

Now if you're thinking about doing archaic economies, just with script instead of gold, then you don't have to change anything. The things that make actual gold different from paper currency is mostly the wildly unstable prices associated with a commodity backed unit of exchange. That is, if we are exchanging literal gold and silver for goods and services, the fact that the supply and demand for gold and silver is itself highly variable means that metal denominated prices bounce all over the place. But for purposes of playability, prices are assumed to be fixed - which is more akin to what you'd see with a paper currency carefully managed by a central bank than with solid lumps of metal as a store of value. Prices and wages are simply the numbers written down in the book, and don't shoot up rapidly every time someone opens a silver mine.

Even worse, you have to contend with the difference between a threat with [Economics 3 and Military 2] versus one with [Economics 3 or Military 2], which interact messily with your character classes if some use fungible resources and others don't.

My thought is that you'd just have Diplomatic challenges that check your prestige and economic challenges that check your economy level. The Empress won't consider a marriage proposal unless your domain is getting respected, and major blights can't happen unless you have enough farmland for it to qualify as a major blight.

That doesn't mean that the threats have to use up an explosively large amount of space. If you have an economic challenge you look on the Level 2 list and if you have a military challenge you look on the level 3 list. You don't need Economic 2 / Military 3 challenges, you just need Diplomatic, Military, and Economic challenges of each level.

-Username17

-Username17

[Whirlwind]

Actually using soldiers as manpower to build things is a very imperial thing. As in, Roman Emperors, Chinese Emperors, and Aztec Emperors all managed to get soldiers to efficiently maintain roads, but European Kings mostly did not. I could see there being a prestige minimum to get your soldiers to do road work when not fighting or possibly have that be a title power of some more bureaucratic council positions like the Minister of Works.

There are some examples of feudal military obligations being rendered in the form of road building, or more typically in fortification maintenance, especially for the poorer classes. I think what is even more important is that feudal military service is done for relatively short periods whereas a Roman governor can get his legionaries building all the time but is paying much more for their maintenance. And as Frank says, you can only get some of your potential troops to do it: your professional troops won't do it if there are feudal levies who are around doing it. So I don't think I would base it on prestige exactly, more as an option of what to do with your (potential) feudal levy troops if you have a feudal-type medieval society.

[Username17]

There are some examples of feudal military obligations being rendered in the form of road building, or more typically in fortification maintenance, especially for the poorer classes. I think what is even more important is that feudal military service is done for relatively short periods whereas a Roman governor can get his legionaries building all the time but is paying much more for their maintenance. And as Frank says, you can only get some of your potential troops to do it: your professional troops won't do it if there are feudal levies who are around doing it.

D&D worlds don't have feudal labor levies in precisely the same way that historical medieval Europe did. Player characters go adventuring and clearly don't have to go plow the manor fields every third day or whatever the fuck.

But to a first approximation, you don't really have to get in to the nitty gritty of whatever level of coercion exists in the fantasy society. Farms give Koku in taxes, Urban centers give Gold in taxes. Manpower is simply the amount of people available to work on your projects or get pressed/recruited into military service. Putting labor to work or raising armies costs Koku and Gold. It's not terribly important whether the gold is going to slave overseers or directly to the workers.

The Invisible Hand and Macroeconomic Perspective covers a lot of issues. Presumably some amount of the Koku generated by farms that you don't tax goes to carpenters and blacksmiths and they in turn buy metals and clothing with their spare turnips as well as eat enough to live. Similarly, many of the people in urban centers that aren't available as Manpower are not available because they are already gainfully employed as scribes or wainwrights or whatever. But you don't need to track any of that. We're only interested in three things: That the food output of the domain is sufficient to feed all the farmers, soldiers, and urbanites; the amount of Koku and Gold you take in as taxes; and the amount of Koku and Gold you pay out to maintain an army and advance projects.

You certainly could do something that utilized the fact that the amount of gold in the system is in fact invariant and track it all. But while that would be an accurate fact about metal using economies, I doubt it would add enough to be remotely worth it. Stuff like coinage leaving circulation due to hoarding can just be an economic challenge. Peoples' modern experience with money is that the monetary supply is functionally elastic with central banks printing additional currency as it is needed. And treating the gold supply as elastic is a simplification that makes things feel more realistic to people because it makes it more familiar to the modern experience.

-Username17

[Emerald]

My intuition is that such things should be tied to development level somehow. That if your economy is large enough, minor disasters like fires and local floods and blights are simply relegated to background noise. If your law level is high enough, minor bandits and unruly drunken ogres and such are simply dealt with.

Events that you get smacked by would therefore be only things large enough to matter. I'm not sure how many different axes you should track. One for each type of event I should think. But how many types there are is an open question.

My thought is that you'd just have Diplomatic challenges that check your prestige and economic challenges that check your economy level.
[...]
You don't need Economic 2 / Military 3 challenges, you just need Diplomatic, Military, and Economic challenges of each level.

In my last realm-focused campaign I went with a diplomacy/military/economy setup as well, but each of the three was split into internal and external attributes: diplomacy had Diplomacy (external) and Unity (internal), military had Military (external) and Stability (internal), and economics had Trade (external) and Resources (internal). External attributes were for dealing with events originating from outside the province (world wars, monster attacks, alliances, embargoes, etc.) while internal ones were for those originating within the province (civil wars, plagues, peasant revolts, resource shortages, etc.).

This allowed for modeling things like moving an army into a province and placing it under martial law increasing its Military while decreasing its Stability and so rendering it vulnerable to uprisings and counter-propaganda campaigns, insular kingdoms having high Resources and low Trade being much more susceptible to droughts and mines running dry, nomadic tribes having strong cultural bonds (high Unity and Stability) but being hated by their neighbors (low Diplomacy and Trade), and similar.

Whether it's worth the split from three to six attributes depends on how many and what kind of challenges you write up, and simpler is probably going to be better than more granular in many cases, but in this example:

Certainly the fact that sometimes the players are going to have their own army and carve out a chunk of wilderness to go play Dwarf Fortress in and sometimes the players are going to ascend to the council of Waterdeep through the Thieves' Guild or whatever means that economy and military could be very independent. How many others should be there I don't know.

...that's not just a matter of economics and military being independent, but a case of a party coming in from elsewhere and imposing order on a place (and so bringing in followers, money, and soldiers from wherever they call home, but having to put in a lot of effort to develop relationships with the natives, find and exploit resources, and guard against monsters) vs. a party working their way up the ranks within an established society (and so most likely having good political, economic, and military connections within that society but probably having much less influence and reach farther outside the city).

So if "clear and conquer a hex" and "play Game of Thrones" are the two main campaign styles you expect the domain rules to be used for, the internal/external split might make a lot of sense because the strengths and weaknesses of Elvenopolis or the Dothraki are going to be very different in each campaign.

[Username17]

In my last realm-focused campaign I went with a diplomacy/military/economy setup as well, but each of the three was split into internal and external attributes: diplomacy had Diplomacy (external) and Unity (internal), military had Military (external) and Stability (internal), and economics had Trade (external) and Resources (internal).

I can normally see the reasoning for dividing things up into smaller and smaller pieces, but I'm really struggling with this proposal. How is 'Unity' different from 'Stability'? Those extremely sound like the same thing to me, and I can't tell how fractious Nobles would be a Unity problem or Stability problem and not the other one.

One thing that I think is being missed from this conversation is that a challenge being 'Military' doesn't mean you can't use Diplomacy or Economics to address it or vice versa. You can send in the troops to put down secessionist nobles and you could ask the Dwarf King for aid against the invading Trolls.

I think it's important to also consider the difference between the Military number as discussed in AER and in this conversation. In AER, the Military Number is where your soldiers come from, and the fact that it doesn't actually differentiate between quality and quantity means that the scalar doesn't give enough information. But here we're talking about an overall strength position that determines whether potential enemies think they have a shot against you. In that case the scalar actually is providing enough information, because we can imagine that there is some number of Goblin spearmen that are comparably as offputting to a potential invader as an elite corps of silver armored Unicorn riders. We could assign both of them a Military level and assume that substantially weaker threats would not attempt to invade.

-Username17

[Emerald]

I can normally see the reasoning for dividing things up into smaller and smaller pieces, but I'm really struggling with this proposal. How is 'Unity' different from 'Stability'? Those extremely sound like the same thing to me, and I can't tell how fractious Nobles would be a Unity problem or Stability problem and not the other one.

The verbiage isn't great, admittedly--I picked Unity for brevity instead of something like "Law and Order," there are definitely better names out there--but it still just means "internal diplomacy." Fractious nobles could represent either kind of threat depending on what exactly the nobles are up to.

For a Game of Thrones example, when Cersei and Lord Baelish are plotting to get Robert assassinated and put a Lannister on the throne, that's a Unity threat and is addressed by politicking and intrigue-ing at the disloyal nobles. If the Lannisters had declared open rebellion and there was fighting in the streets, that would be a Stability threat and would be addressed by sending in the Kingsguard to quell it.

Sending in the Kingsguard to kill Cersei and Petyr in the first case would be solving a Unity problem with a Stability solution, and quelling the fighting with a propaganda campaign that it's all a Stark plot and the Lannister soldiers need to chill until Tywin gets there to explain things would be solving a Stability problem with a Unity one. And bringing in a bunch of Unsullied and Dothraki would be handing Unity and Stability threats with a Military solution, and would presumably be a more expensive solution in gold/morale/etc. than either of the two internal ones.

You can just have one Military and one Diplomacy value and you'll be fine most of the time, like I said. But that doesn't let you easily represent situations like the Lannisters having firm control of the city via the Kingsguard and easily quashing a Peasant Revolt threat (high Stability) but freaking out when the Iron Islanders show up for a Sea Invasion threat (low Military), or Kingsport being full of nobles who constantly scheme against each other with Noble Betrayal threats (low Unity) but unanimously rebuffing Danaerys when she shows up making a Claim to the Throne threat (high Diplomacy). If a province just "is good at politicking" or "has a strong army" it seems to me like you can't represent those cases without a bunch of situational modifiers or the like.

Admittedly, part of my reasoning for splitting things up like that was also that I had 7 total player roles and wanted to make them more distinct, so a Magistrate (Legal role, internal military), a Grand Marshal (Military role, external military), a Spymaster (Intrigue role, internal diplomacy), and an Envoy (Diplomacy role, external diplomacy) would have different kinds of events they were good at addressing and different means to address diplomatic and military events in general. If you don't mind that e.g. 5 of your 30ish roles are military-centric roles, each of them can handle military threats with roughly the same efficacy, and there'll be noticeable overlap if multiple players pick military roles, there's less of a need for it.

[Username17]

But that doesn't let you easily represent situations like the Lannisters having firm control of the city via the Kingsguard and easily quashing a Peasant Revolt threat (high Stability) but freaking out when the Iron Islanders show up for a Sea Invasion threat (low Military)

I definitely don't care about that, because it doesn't make any sense. If you can crush the peasants but can't crush the not-Vikings, it's because your military is in between those two things in size. Now I could see it being a problem going the other way, like maybe both the not-Vikings and the peasant uprising were small enough military threats that you expected to win on the field but enough of your own troops were Orcs that you couldn't really depend on them to fight the Orcish civilians. But that thing you just said doesn't make sense, and also various interest groups in your domain having some measure of claim on the loyalty of some number of your troops seems like an emergent property of prestige being insufficiently high.

Admittedly, part of my reasoning for splitting things up like that was also that I had 7 total player roles and wanted to make them more distinct

That also seems like a non-issue because I'm going for the open ended council rather than trying to make a color wheel with fixed council positions. If every council had a Marshal position and an Envoy position, then the "Red" and "Blue" slices of the color wheel would have to be included in everything. But if we go with the big list model and let people select their own superpowers we don't need a color wheel at all.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Boy, it's hard to see "secretly is the princess" as anything other than a complication which pays off at higher levels - and those are doubleplus ungood.

The "obvious" (but ++ungood) way for this to work is, at 5th level you discover you are secretly princess of the Rohannim, and this is a plot complication because you are playing Chrono Trigger and the only issue is whether you can sneak out of the palace to go on your adventure.

Then, at 7th level, ding, you have entered the heroic tier and you are playing a palace management subgame, if not Age of Wonders. It's hard to see how the rightful princess doesn't cash her plot complication out for prestige points.

I suppose the only solution is to make these independent picks with otherwise cosmetic effects, but that is somehow unsatisfactory as well.

[jt]

Boy, it's hard to see "secretly is the princess" as anything other than a complication which pays off at higher levels - and those are doubleplus ungood.

A problem that's so big that it becomes the focus of an entire session (and then settles down) isn't really a plus or minus in terms of character balance. Your characters are going to face a fixed amount of strife as part of being characters in a story and/or people who get stronger by getting experience points. Having to sneak one of the party through a town because they're a secret princess silently replaces something about hobgoblins that your GM never has to finish writing notes on.

So you're free to throw that sort of "disadvantage" into a class, as long as the "payoff" isn't any better than what you would've gotten without.

[Username17]

The model for KSF is that basic classes are only 10 levels long, and that beyond that you need to take Prestige Classes. And these Prestige Classes are not "better at hitting things with daggers" or "able to use a whip" or whatever, they are things that provide genuine domain-level benefits such as leadership abilities for troops or weather control.

Incidentally: I don't want Prestige Points to be confused with Prestige Classes, so they should probably have a different name. One option is to go the Civ route and call Prestige Points "Culture" and another is to go the 4e route and call Prestige Classes "Paragon Classes." I'd be tempted to do both things, but I am cognizant of the fact that 4e was bad and reminding people of 4e is probably also bad even where some of their choices and terminology were good in isolation.

Anyway, the Arthurian "rightful king" seems like a pretty good Paragon Class that you could take regardless of what you've been doing because like you've been secretly the princess the entire time or whatever. And I've often thought that there should be a base class that made you a Disney princess. You could call it "Beloved of Nature" or just have that be what the Favored Soul is. I don't think anyone would really miss the 3.5 Favored Soul because it was a weird game mechanical hodge podge.

-Username17

[Username17]

So I think I'm down with Culture being the thing that spreads legitimacy. Which means that it's easier to hold onto countries that have libraries and schools. Stadiums and stages are tools of control.

Anyway, on Manpower. The simulationist in me wants to punish people for having uncommitted Manpower. That is, if you don't recruit spare manpower into the military or send them to build roads or walls or whatever you run the risk of those people being unemployed. Which is where you get riots and bandits from.

It might be simpler if crime and banditry are things that "just happen" off the random event chart. But from a simulation standpoint it would be really cool if people turned to banditry literally because there weren't jobs for them.

-Username17

[maglag]

It might be simpler if crime and banditry are things that "just happen" off the random event chart. But from a simulation standpoint it would be really cool if people turned to banditry literally because there weren't jobs for them.

-Username17

Weren't you saying some posts ago that puny bandits should only matter at low level and then they just turn to background noise that the party doesn't need to worry about anymore?

Also lacking a job isn't enough to make people rebel, a much more important factor is lack of food (people with a job will often turn to crime if said job doesn't actually pay enough to feed themselves and their family).

Starving or they just hate the current government.

But if you keep people fed and happy, they don't mind lacking a job that much and will gladly spend all day watching the circus eating bread. See: Ancient Rome.

[Thaluikhain]

Weren't you saying some posts ago that puny bandits should only matter at low level and then they just turn to background noise that the party doesn't need to worry about anymore?

On a personal level as someone threatening the PCs, yes, but once the PCs are running the country they have to worry about societal issues like that, surely?

But if you keep people fed and happy, they don't mind lacking a job that much and will gladly spend all day watching the circus eating bread. See: Ancient Rome.

You get Green vs Blue riots, same as soccer hooligans today. Not the same as bandits, who are also not necessarily rebels as such.

Though, is there much difference between banditry and being an adventurer? If they don't do it to your peasants, but go over the border and rob from people with fangs and tails, same behaviour becomes respectable, in a privateer vs pirate way.