SKM Development: The Grit of Grub 2

Alright, needed some time to figure out subsistence values and how to randomly determine them. So I used what my late father would call the SWAG principle, and took a scientific wild-ass guess.

The general terrain types ACKs gave us were terrain types that, well, anyone could grasp. Coastal / River, Plains, Hills and Mountains, Wastelands, 'Civilized' and so on.

Well, Civilized is right out. We got rid of those. And hills and mountains might have similar monsters in them, but they differ on how easy it is to have food on them. You can have herdsmen and some pick-crops raised on a hill, but getting enough food out of a mountain to feed your family is difficult even if you're hunting.

See. Subsistence isn't just farming. Subsistence is farming, fishing, picking, and hunting. It is getting the food and putting it in the belly. Therefore, a coastline of rocks overlooking a prime fishing spot would have a subsistence value and so would a thick forest.

So, I SWAG'd up the following table..

Die Roll	PLAINS	DESERT	COASTAL / RIVER	HILLS	MOUNT	WASTELAND
1	0.5	0	1	1	0	0
2	1	0	1	1	0	0
3	2	0.25	1	1	0.25	0
4	2	0.25	2	1	0.25	0
5	2	0.5	2	1	0.5	0.25
6	2	1	2	2	0.5	0.25
7	2	1	2	2	1	0.5
8	3	2	3	2	1	0.5
9	3	2	3	2	2	1
10	4	3	4	3	3	2

Yeah, its ugly. Blogspot wouldn't let me do much to format it.  Plains, as you can see, reliably grant that magical 2 value for subsistence. They also, thirty percent of the time give you something better, and twenty percent of the time give you something worse. The worst plain though, of cracked dry land and weed filled dirt, still gives much better resources then some of the mid-tier mountain or wasteland areas.

You might be saying, Spook, why does the desert give better values then the mountains? I'd reply, it only does as you tier up, and this is representative of more huntable animals, salty flat areas you can grow in, and even hunting for cactuses and the like. A desert hex might have an oasis for example.

And every territory has the possibility for a really good subsistence spot. Really rich land, oases, places where fish leap into your boat, hidden verdant valleys that may have a jolly green giant in them, and so on.

And the table above is so the DM can randomly roll for a hex's sub value. Higher tier research might modify the sub values as well. Maybe you learn how to find root vegetables easier in a desert. Maybe you learn which rocks you can eat on the mountain.

We'll need to climb that mountain on Research, what it does, how its done and its costs after we take care of this though. Still, I think we have enough subsistence done that we can move on to the next hurdles.

Resource. And Gold.

SKM Development: The Grit of the Grub

Most of our philosophical girders are in place, and that brings us to the tricky part. The math.

See, this is tricky because its inter-related.

The upkeep cost of a stronghold, the costs of hiring and replacing men, the discounts you might earn through research, the cost of that research, the exchange rates of Resource for Gold and for Subsistence, and how precisely to accomodate all of that on an easy to read and manipulate spreadsheet.

That's the dragon at the end of this proverbial dungeon. The spreadsheet.

Our goals, as stated are 1.) Choices matter and 2.) Simplicity..and so today, we start unpacking Subsistence.

Previously stated, each hex has a subsistence value. One point of subsistence represents one fed family (5 people). That's easy to accommodate. So, how do we determine a hex's subsistence value?

Most hexes should not have a 1 rating in subsistence. That would require the entire hex's population to be focused solely on food production just to feed the people in the hex, meaning that the player won't really have assets available for stuff like resource production. However, too high of a subsistence value would mean that there'd be little need to worry about your folks starving if you mis-dedicate resources. Therefore, I think the idea mean hex rating should be 2. This means that you can feed your hex with half of your workers dedicated to subsistence.

Sensible, no? Well, there's a hidden problem to the subsistence system. More people equals more food.  Simple sensibility rapidly goes crazy.  But we already figured out our maximum pop size in a hex (750), so that becomes our hard cap. You can never have more then 750 families's work worth of subsistence from a hex.

Still, since subsistence is a resource, it accrues, but we don't want people doing stuff like switching the entire kingdom to farmers, and then back again once the graineries are full. Agriculture is a 24-7, 12 month process, after all. The answer I thought for this was spoilage.

Let's assume we have 9 hexes, each with sub value of 2 and each with 100 people. This means we pump out  900 subsistence value in exchange for half our work force. They make just enough to survive. Nothing goes into the coffers however, so if we get a bad event like a famine, or burned fields, or crop blight, then well, we end up starving and losing fams and morale.

So lets assume our player decides to focus ENTIRELY on subsistence. That's 1800 subsistence. 900 of which passes into storage. That's an entire month stored up. Nice and simple, and too nice and simple. It'd tempt players, unwise ones admittedly, to switch on and off. A growing season approach of six months of subsistence might be a wise action for a player though since a 2 subsistence would fill in 6 months of stored stock if he put everyone on farm duty.

Food wastes away though, so, if we assume a 75% spoilage rate per month, the numbers get a little trickier. That would mean that our total-farmer dude would produce 1800 food, consume 900 and store 225 (the rest rotting away/fed to pigs/eaten by pests). We're being a jerk with the spoilage rate for multiple reasons. It makes the player want to invest in agriculture. It also incentivizes him for preparedness and constant-production (at least early on). We want hard choices to be a thing for the player. And 'can I feed my people' is an important thing. It also prevents him from accidentally growing too fast, attempting to found a settlement and then discovering that due to one error he can't feed it.

Still, how do we determine the value? Well that can be complicated. It's a DM side thing. Terrain should have a major effect on it (you can't really grow food in the mountains, not enough to feed al ot of people). There's a reason that tractors are associated with plains of grain, and not deserts, and so forth.

The issue is that a straight die roll will produce effects that are, to put things honestly, crazy. 3 and 4 sub values are outrageously good and 0.25, .5 or god help you 0s, are pretty terrible. 

And this, this here? This is a pandora's box.

We just stumbled onto a horrifying thing. We took down ACK's fence and found ourselves in a forest.

We need to figure out modifiers to resource and subsistence generation based on what kind of hex we're in.

I'm going to take some time to scream.

 

SKM Development: Townsfolk. The Pops. The Fams. The Creeps.

One of my players commented on a previous post, pointing out a really useful post from another website.

Medieval Demographics Made Easy

Now, I gave this place a cursory once over and found out some pretty useful stuff.

The guy from this site Mr. Ross uses late-medieval France as his baseline and states that he'd aim for pops between 30 (for benighted hellholes) to 120 (for rich land full of milk and honey) per square mile, as reasonable population bases. Mr. Ross is going for kingdoms, not hexes, but he does give a helpful method for determining the square footage of a hex, which is to take the hex's size in miles, multiply it by 0.9306049 and square the results.

This means that essentially, our six mile hexes are 31 and some change in square miles. So let's eyeball and say its about 31 square miles. Now, this means if we use those demographics, we have a maximum hex population of about 748 families (remember a family is 5 people). This actually matches up with where ACKs puts a maximized civilized hex (750 max pop, outside of settlements), so at the danger of recreating the wheel, lets make that our maximum population if we don't have a settlement (settlements can get larger, but as I stated are still hungry beasts).

Now, where I'd get weirder here, is I'd argue if a hexes population drops below 30 families, which is about 5 people per square mile, the hex is in danger of becoming 'depopulated' and lapsing from control altogether since at that point the people are so spread out that its impossible to manage them.

So.. Max Hex Fam size is 750. Min is essentially 30. Quantities in between can be taken to found settlements (at a to-be-determined gp or resource cost), which let you break the cap buuuut..

Only families in the hex (not in a settlement in the hex) can be assigned to subsistence production.  

This now gives an additional reason for hex clearing and maintenance. The 750 is the HARD CAP for life living in the hex. Sentient monsters would be assigned to represent pop (that tribe of orcs is using/misuing land your people can't) and thus would limit your ability to spread to complete control in the hex.

This gives mechanical friction to say, having tribes of innocuous, but not allied creatures in your land (giants, lizardmen, etc).

But non-sentient undead, in most cases, wouldn't count except for say the really, really big ones. 

SKM Development: The Ruler part 2, the Fisher King

The issue with having stats for your leader, and having those stats affect the kingdom, is again, the spreadsheet.

We’ve already figured out two modifiers to incomes, specifically to resource income. One is raising too many people. One is potentially our leader and his proposed Ministry stat.

Now, in case you can’t see yesterday’s posts, I decided on the following stats.

Thew:  How physically tough is your leader?

Craft:  How magically tough is your leader?

Shrewd: How cagey are you / how good are you at doing roguish things?

Ministry:  How good are you at managing things?

Allure: What is your personal charisma?

Now, how do we actually apply those, without making this into a book keeping nightmare?

Well, firstly, I don’t think the addition of a third sheet for ‘ruler’ would be particularly daunting for a PC. Alternatively, we can make a ruler section on the spreadsheet. It’s just five stats (and maybe a class).

Secondly, what should each apply to?

Well, Allure might tie to morale. We haven’t figured out that mechanic yet though.

Craft, Thew  and Shrewd are direct combat scores, really representative of the ruler’s own capability for putting the hurt on people. Keep in mind that count intrigue, attacks by owlbears, demonic pleromas attacking are all events or adventures. So they can be dealt with on a case by case. Thew is not CK2’s martial, it’s not representative of how you’re both a badass and a tactical genius. The whole ‘tactical genius’ thing is really up to the player.

That leaves us with Ministry and Allure. Allure ironically could tie into military matters, but I think for simplicity it’s better that we don’t. Ministry however, Ministry should be pretty darn useful for Kingdom stuff.  I figure Ministry should be good for cutting down set costs and drawbacks (or increasing them if it’s too low).  Maybe let it increase your range on how far your troops can travel before incurring Subsistence drawbacks, maybe it decreases spoilage, maybe having it over a threshold means you can get away with a higher tax. 

And that’s the thought process I had. Thresholds. The ‘problem’ with thresholds is that if we make the cut off 10, then a guy with an 11 ministry is only better on paper from a guy with 10, but since we’re trying to keep our stats low, well, that shouldn’t be a problem.

Where this also ties in, is with the class system. Even in CK2, there are classes. They’re hidden, but they’re there, in the form of a character’s education background. Theologian, Failed Warrior, Grey Eminence, and so on. Each one a focus on a specific stat. Since we’re a fantasy RPG, lets instead have our classes modify the base 1d6 rolls of the players.

So let’s start with the “Holy Four,” as a thought experiment.

Fighter: +2 thew, -1 craft, +1 allure   

He’s a tougher guy. Not really focused on magic and spells. And peasants generally like a strong warrior king. After all, wizards are weird.

Wizard: +2 craft, -1 thew, +1 shrewd

Same mechanic. Same aiming for the ‘net increase.’ Not really focused on physical stuff. And he’s not so much a person people look up to, as someone cagey, partially for book learning.

Rogue:  +2 shrewd, -1 thew, +1 craft

All cage. Not super into muscle, and a little magical know-how there.

Priest: +2 ministry,  -1 thew, +1 allure

Knows how to administrate and take care of people. Still, somewhat bookish. And well, people respect a man of the cloth. King-priests are a thing after all.

Just an idea for the moment.

Might add on a barbarian/ranger type style thing later. I don't want too many different types. 

SKM Development: The Ruler

Now this is one where I didn’t even really bother in the old system. To the consternation of one of my players.

Since ACKs intends for you to earn a Stronghold as part of its high level end-game. It assumes you have a player character already built, and nice doughty rules on how to create successors, use money, gain xp, and so forth.

Ultimately, this was more then was needed for a top-down kingdom management game, except ACKs requires /adventures/. You’re expected to go on four of the damn things a year. Also, while off adventuring, you’re not at home administrating. This meant that I, the DM, had to carry a lot of admin weight as the PCs didn’t hear about their decisions from a month prior to adventuring, until they got back from the adventure. Meaning they missed out on events and administration.

Also, PCs had  a hard time figuring out what it was they were really good at.

Now, being an RPG, and an OSR RPG at that, ACKs is very well built, but ultimately, we don’t need all of it.

Now, a major inspiration for this game, was a video game called Crusader Kings 2.  CK2, as it’s known, is a game where you take on the role of a dynasty of rulers and see how they thrive, or die, throughout the rough time period of roughly the 8^th through 15^th centuries.  Your various rulers have a series of traits, and five stats. These five states determine how well you deal with your subjects and others (diplomacy), how good you are at plotting (Intrigue), how good you are at war (martial), how smart you are (learning) and how good your guy is at basic management (stewardship). The traits modify these five stats, and each of these stats has different effects on other factors (size of your army, how well people like you, how big of a kingdom you can manage, how many vassals you have, and so on).  A high enough martial, or certain traits would also grant a ‘personal combat score’ meaning that your ruler himself was a force to be reckoned with.

For us, I think a set of similar stats would be useful. A base idea of class, and then ratings for more adventurer-y things.

I find myself thinking of stuff like say..

Thew:  How physically tough is your leader?

Craft:  How magically tough is your leader?

Shrewd: How cagey are you / how good are you at doing roguish things?

Ministry:  How good are you at managing things?

Allure: What is your personal charisma?

It’s kind of like the classic four classes (and the bard) , although every ruler would a rating in each of these. It would basically let management of disasters come down to a die roll when adjudication is needed.

I think the scale would work best on a 6-tier system. This also makes generation of courtiers and successors easier (roll a 1d6 down the line).

As an example. Let’s say I’ve got Conan.

He’d be say

Thew: 6, because he’s relentlessly beefy.

Craft: 1, because magic is damn near alien to the guy.

Shrewd: 4, he used to be a thief, he’s also pretty damn clever.

Ministry: 3, Conan means well, and 3 here is average. He’s not precisely a master steward, but neither is he an incompetent.

Allure: 5, he’s apparently spectacularly charismatic and people immediately fall in behind him.   

Compared against say, Grima Wormtongue

Thew: 2, because he is a man of Rohan, even if he’s the weediest.

Craft 3: He actually knows his way around magical shenanigans.

Shrewd: 6, honeyed words and sneaky git.

Ministry: 1, if this guy was managing the Sahara, they’d run out of sand.

Allure 1: He’s repugnant to even his own ostensible supporters.

I might modify the ratings, or make the scale wider, but I like this system. Especially for conflict resolution stuff. I think I’m going to eliminate the ‘must adventure’ stuff and the ‘lose out on administration’ stuff, for the most part. If you’re going on a journey that takes a few months, you will have to go into ‘regency.’

Also, I’ll need to automate what the ruler stats do to spreadsheet elements, if anything. Ministry might affect Subsistence spoilage for example.