Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 06:38:48 PM
I meant like no place undergoing economic troubles, maybe excesses in one place, worse land in another, inefficient management in one specific 10 square miles?

The numbers are averages of course. But Malthusian economics is pretty amazingly simple really. Nowadays land quality will affect individual productivity, sure. With a pre-industrial population, the worse land has a lower population density while actual productivity per worker remains unchanged. The population of any inhabited area rapidly increases to its Malthusian limit, at which point people are producing that $20-$25/day I mentioned. The only way you'd get somewhat higher productivity per capita is if new farmable land was in the process of being colonised.

Greetings!

I have long held to my own "Three Pillars of RPG's."

My Three Pillars of RPG Campaigns are the following:

FIGHTING: Heroic combat. Lots of fighting, death, blood, and war. People and creatures need to be dying. Pile the bodies up! Unleash the vengeance! Men and women alike, most everyone loves violence. Violence is deeply satisfying to the beast lurking under the façade of civilization and polite society.

BOOTY: Lots of SEX. Men and women alike, everyone likes sex. The more, the better. Drown them in all the fine booty they can grab, with both hands. Later on, spouses, families, and kids become important. Otherwise filed under "Romance".

GOLD: Gold, baby. Piles of silver and gold, fine jewels. Crazy detailed toys. Epic, glorious magic items. Give it all out with a lavish hand, like candy.

In all the years I have been playing, these three pillars have kept players engaged, again and again. When a GM is stuck, or uncertain, unload the train of FBG--FIGHTING, BOOTY, and GOLD. It has never failed. It is these three primary elements that make a campaign interesting, dramatic, exciting, and fun. It is important to remember that all three of the pillars are like legs on a table; they are each more or less equally important. These are the three pillars I think that every GM should embrace. Your game and your campaign will always be better off with MORE FBG!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK on May 22, 2023, 02:56:19 AM
Greetings!

I have long held to my own "Three Pillars of RPG's."

My Three Pillars of RPG Campaigns are the following:

FIGHTING: Heroic combat. Lots of fighting, death, blood, and war. People and creatures need to be dying. Pile the bodies up! Unleash the vengeance! Men and women alike, most everyone loves violence. Violence is deeply satisfying to the beast lurking under the façade of civilization and polite society.

BOOTY: Lots of SEX. Men and women alike, everyone likes sex. The more, the better. Drown them in all the fine booty they can grab, with both hands. Later on, spouses, families, and kids become important. Otherwise filed under "Romance".

GOLD: Gold, baby. Piles of silver and gold, fine jewels. Crazy detailed toys. Epic, glorious magic items. Give it all out with a lavish hand, like candy.

In all the years I have been playing, these three pillars have kept players engaged, again and again. When a GM is stuck, or uncertain, unload the train of FBG--FIGHTING, BOOTY, and GOLD. It has never failed. It is these three primary elements that make a campaign interesting, dramatic, exciting, and fun. It is important to remember that all three of the pillars are like legs on a table; they are each more or less equally important. These are the three pillars I think that every GM should embrace. Your game and your campaign will always be better off with MORE FBG!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Hi SHARK! I know we discussed posting this (with which I highly concur)  , but I think this should be posted under Alternatives To GNS https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/alternative-to-gns-theory/ 

Quote from: S'mon on May 22, 2023, 03:20:57 AM

Quote from: SHARK on May 22, 2023, 02:56:19 AM
Greetings!

I have long held to my own "Three Pillars of RPG's."

My Three Pillars of RPG Campaigns are the following:

FIGHTING: Heroic combat. Lots of fighting, death, blood, and war. People and creatures need to be dying. Pile the bodies up! Unleash the vengeance! Men and women alike, most everyone loves violence. Violence is deeply satisfying to the beast lurking under the façade of civilization and polite society.

BOOTY: Lots of SEX. Men and women alike, everyone likes sex. The more, the better. Drown them in all the fine booty they can grab, with both hands. Later on, spouses, families, and kids become important. Otherwise filed under "Romance".

GOLD: Gold, baby. Piles of silver and gold, fine jewels. Crazy detailed toys. Epic, glorious magic items. Give it all out with a lavish hand, like candy.

In all the years I have been playing, these three pillars have kept players engaged, again and again. When a GM is stuck, or uncertain, unload the train of FBG--FIGHTING, BOOTY, and GOLD. It has never failed. It is these three primary elements that make a campaign interesting, dramatic, exciting, and fun. It is important to remember that all three of the pillars are like legs on a table; they are each more or less equally important. These are the three pillars I think that every GM should embrace. Your game and your campaign will always be better off with MORE FBG!

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Hi SHARK! I know we discussed posting this (with which I highly concur)  , but I think this should be posted under Alternatives To GNS https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/alternative-to-gns-theory/ 

Greetings!

Good point, my friend! DONE.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Whether or not any "Domain Rules" work is secondary to the fact that "Domain Play" is a completely different game than "We as a Team all Go Adventure, Kill Monsters & Get Kewl Stuff" which is the core of 99% of RPG play.

Few players want that transition, especially once they see how different Domain Play is from what they signed up for.

If you have those few players, kickass for you! BUT the rest of us need to discuss Domain Play in detail before considering that as part of a campaign.

Kind of a funny thing, I find that this was a common retirement state for many PCs back in my AD&D days.  New blood would take over the adventuring and questing while the semi-retired high level characters were doing the domain play thing.  They all created fortresses, acquired lands, built towers, temples, and guilds.  One of them even made their own dungeon and stocked it with beasties.  (Kind of like a live fire exercise except you could be eaten.)

I have not seen that with later iterations of D&D players.

Quote from: Spinachcat on May 22, 2023, 05:36:14 PM
Whether or not any "Domain Rules" work is secondary to the fact that "Domain Play" is a completely different game than "We as a Team all Go Adventure, Kill Monsters & Get Kewl Stuff" which is the core of 99% of RPG play.

Few players want that transition, especially once they see how different Domain Play is from what they signed up for.

If you have those few players, kickass for you! BUT the rest of us need to discuss Domain Play in detail before considering that as part of a campaign.

Yeah. ACKS was originally intended to be played either like SPORE and MOUNT & BLADE II: BANNERLORD, where the nature of the game changes as you advance through it; or like X-COM: UFO DEFENSE, where you have a strategic level and a tactical level at the same time. Those are personally my favorite types of games. I love the feeling where a choice I made at the tactical level has huge strategic implications or vice versa. But if your players don't want that experience, I can see why domain play is dead on arrival.

That said, I that problem is better genericized to being a problem whenever one game has multiple modes of play, like CAR WARS, MEKTON, ARS MAGICA, etc. For instance, I recently ran a MEKTON campaign and we had to discuss beforehand that there would be a "mecha wargame on a hex map" component and a "melodramatic anime roleplay" component. One player decided not to participate because even though she liked anime roleplay she didn't want to push mecha around a hex map. If the whole group had hated mecha wargaming, I'm not sure I'd use MEKTON, even though it is really good for melodramatic anime roleplay outside the mechs.

Mecha RPGs is a perfect example. I love them, but you must have players who want to play a Wargame/RPG hybrid. Unfortunately, since our 1990s crew, I've never found a crew who really wanted that hybrid play.

Our crew were mega-fans of Hero Games' Robot Warriors back in the day
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/61459/Robot-Warriors-3rd-Edition

Does Pendragon have domain play? I mean it is generational in nature so it seems it should but I've never heard anyone mention it, ever.

Quote from: Ruprecht on May 22, 2023, 07:27:37 PM
Does Pendragon have domain play? I mean it is generational in nature so it seems it should but I've never heard anyone mention it, ever.

   It has domain management, but it's mostly a solo or 1-on-1 operation as I understand it. Between the rules design and the assumption that all PCs are on the same side, I don't think you get the wargaming that Gygaxo-Arnesonian-BrOSR-Imperial D&D intends.

Quote from: Ruprecht on May 22, 2023, 07:27:37 PM
Does Pendragon have domain play? I mean it is generational in nature so it seems it should but I've never heard anyone mention it, ever.

There is an annual "Winter Phase" for downtime (because you do one adventure per year, stereotypically), but it's not at all like an ACKS domain management. From 4th Edition:

• Do any relevant solo adventuring after the group is done
• Check for skill gain
• Check for characteristic loss from aging
• Check income from your lands, update status & modifiers
• Check to see if each of your horses survives
• Deal with marriage (and dowry), children (birth & survival), events in the broader family
• Do any training or practice or voluntary character sheet changes
• Figure out glory from the last year & if the character advances from that.

So the domain plays a role - income, marriage, possibly solo adventures or family events - but isn't simulated in any detail. (IIRC some editions had the wife's skills bear on how well the manor is managed?) You're not conquering new lands, you're getting them from your liege for service. Any deeper thematic interaction is put together by the GM.

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 21, 2023, 05:14:53 AM
What's much more sensible in Medieval Authentic play is that social growth is extremely difficult. It doesn't matter if you're level 9 or level 19, you may be extremely famous, as a soldier, or a thief, or whatever, but you still won't just be made into a Lord. Before the Renaissance, that almost never happened. Occasionally someone might be knighted.  Of course, commoners could get offices or special ranks. They could be given salaries, a manor house, or other benefits. But no, your level should have almost NOTHING to do with your ability to move up the social ladder; only your accomplishments could potentially do that, and it's not very likely.

To expand on this the problem is that the commoner is an outsider. The utter lack of social connection to anybody in power compared to somebody who was born noble and raised noble is staggering. More so the commoner's mannerisms and assumptions will be very different than those who are raised noble. 

Sure there are positions and titles but unless the commoner is very fortunate, those of noble birth will always have the inside track to obtaining those before any outsider.

The surest way of gaining position and power as a commoner is through royal favor. The great magnates and the king were at odds in various European realms with the ultimate balance tilting in various ways. But in general the king (or sovereign) generally wants an independent source of power over his magnates. The few wealthy and skilled commoners are a pool of people that the king can tap for men that will beholden to him and not put their own house and lands first. However this impacted the gentry (lesser nobility) first more than it did those of common birth. Which makes even this path a hard one for a true commoner to follow.



A close modern analogy is an Irishman trying to make it to high ranks in the Italian-run mob. As a complete outsider to the social system of the mob, the Irishman has a tough hill to climb because of the utter lack of meaningful social connection to anybody in power. His mannerism and assumptions will continually be issues compared to somebody born within the mob. Sure racism is part of the issue in this situation but the lot of other factors here that work against the Irishman even if he was extremely skilled at what he does.

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:37:46 PM

Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 21, 2023, 10:22:16 AM
A Deathstar will probably never be economically or militarily viable. There is probably absolutely no way for the DSII to explode and not heavily damage Endor. But I'd much rather experience a setting to simulate a mood or thematic premises than deal with an alternate reality theoretical physics engine to ensure every molecule can be accounted for.
Now to be clear, even if I don't get the appeal, doesn't mean I don't appreciate different things existing for different people.

Of course. I'm not by any means suggesting that ACKS is for everyone. It's all different strokes for different folks. I don't do or want mood emulation. I'm earnestly a simulationist where the rules of the game are the physics of the game world. So I'd never create a game that was centered around Death Stars that weren't economically or physically viable. (And this is why I haven't created a mecha game, even though I love the genre in anime and manga.)

Where I take umbrage is just at the suggestion (not from you) that there's nothing behind the curtain of domain rules, since I've spent 10 years behind the curtain, or that if there is something behind the curtain that no one wants it, since those folks pay my mortgage!

Your rules are clearly something you have thought through very carefully. And you clearly have a lot of fans for it.

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:57:25 PM

Quote from: RPGPundit on May 21, 2023, 05:14:53 AM
What's much more sensible in Medieval Authentic play is that social growth is extremely difficult. It doesn't matter if you're level 9 or level 19, you may be extremely famous, as a soldier, or a thief, or whatever, but you still won't just be made into a Lord. Before the Renaissance, that almost never happened. Occasionally someone might be knighted.  Of course, commoners could get offices or special ranks. They could be given salaries, a manor house, or other benefits. But no, your level should have almost NOTHING to do with your ability to move up the social ladder; only your accomplishments could potentially do that, and it's not very likely.

I admire your commitment to historical authenticity and I think that you're right about the medieval world in reality. But, to the extent that medieval authenticity precludes "personal power = political power," I've found that any sort of level-based play with the power curve typically seen in D&D-type games is incompatible with the sort of medieval authenticity you want.

Feudalism arose under very specific conditions of agricultural production, equestrian availability, social structures, and so on, and among those conditions was the limits of human power of the real world. When historical conditions changed, feudalism changed. And if the limits of human power changed, I think feudalism would change. In a world where a wizard can kill a king with a word and then vanish, he WILL have political power, and the governance systems will reflect that. In a world where a warrior can single-handedly cleave through a thousand men, he WILL have political power, etc. It might resemble the medieval world but it won't be authentically the medieval world.'

We live in a world where a terrorist can kill a thousand men with the push of a button; but that doesn't mean he becomes President of the USA. And of course, the president of the USA has his own terrorists who work for him.

Medieval people were ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that there WERE wizards who could kill a man with just a word, and holy men who could perform miraculous works of wonder. Some of those people translated that into elements of political or social influence. There were numerous court magicians who made bank off their occult knowledge. There were living saints that established powerful institutions or were given armies to lead. But those were rare, and they still weren't made dukes or popes.

QuoteYou can overcome this by tweaking the rules to avoid having people become powerful enough to be "weapons of medieval destruction", which I think is a good approach. I assume that's what you've done in L&D or your other books.

Well yes, to a degree. Medieval Authentic magic doesn't involve just throwing around fireballs. You can do some incredibly powerful stuff in L&D with magic, but most of it isn't as showy unless you get to really high-level stuff.

There are time periods where personal power or knowledge can be enough to massively alter your social standing, typically in tribal societies, very primitive civilization, and in the modern industrial and post-modern world. These are worlds with highly fluid social mobility.

Most societies in between have very static social mobility. In terms of Europe in the middle ages, the early middle ages still had slightly more fluidity, then everything gets extremely stratified until the late High Middle Ages when you see just a slight start of a widening window in the course of the Renaissance.

Now, you can do two things about it: the first is to just say "fuck it, I don't care, in my world which is totally like medieval europe as soon as you hit 9th level you're a Lord even if you were born in a mud hut".
The second is to start out with that presumption, that personal power level equals social standing, and create a coherent society based on that principle. But I have to say, it will not look very much at all like most of Medieval Europe.

Quote from: S'mon on May 21, 2023, 05:10:11 PM

Quote from: amacris on May 21, 2023, 04:28:32 PM
The ACKS model is, without exaggeration, better than anything being used in academia to model ancient economics, to the point that PhDs who have dug into it have suggested I should be publishing academic papers based on it.

Was it Greg Clark who said that modern economic models are great for understanding ancient economies, it's modern/industrial economies we have no idea about? 

Pre-industrial economies are based on human and animal labour, plus land/crops, and IME are amazingly consistent and predictable, as you have of course discerned.  Your 12 gp/month output per peasant family is higher than the 5gp/month I use as rule of thumb (it seemed to fit with the numbers I could find for ancient Rome & Greece, Middle Ages feudal Europe of course was not a cash based economy) but I suspect we're either valuing a GP differently, or modelling something slightly different.

As a rule, D&D based games are ridiculously over-inflated. If you assume the cp is a penny, and the gp a pound, you would probably want to assume that a typically Medieval peasant family might make 1-2gp per YEAR.  If you wanted to say there was a platinum piece worth 5gp and that was the pound (because a pound was not 100 pennies, it was typically 240 pennies), I guess you would say 1pp per year.

But of course that screws up all the D&D price lists. Curiously, in both directions, as there's certain items that the typical D&D price list has as massively overpriced (mainly all common items, foodstuffs etc), while others that the D&D list has massively underpriced (anything special, including high-end armor).