What Is Best In Life? Solvency. Stability. A Nice Hat.

 The ACKs game I spoke of way back in my first post has finally started. Its relatively slow and low key and I don’t want to drop too many details yet (in case players read this) but it seems to be doing pretty well. We play on Discord, which fits the play-by-mail feel of kingdom play better.

Now, as I stated, its not a real ACKs campaign. See, the players are starting at 12^th level, their individual character sheets aren’t super important, and it’s not about dungeon crawling, it’s about domain management.  

When I was setting things up though, I did research and one place I found some useful information was over at the the Wandering Gamist's blog. Specifically this post here.

The guy also has pretty cool ACKs home rules. Check him out.

The Gamist thinks the domain system as it stands is too spreadsheet heavy and detracts from the party’s cohesion. I agree.  That was one of the biggest problems with Birthright back in the day. The answer I arrived at, and arrived at early, was to not bother with a party at all. Everybody gets their own country.  And nobody gets to see their leader’s stats, instead the spreadsheet for managing the kingdom is their character sheet.

Well they get their own “country.” See, I decided to start the tech level lower, and made them essentially former impoverished city-states who once were languishing under a terrible evil empire. As a result, they’re all poor, small, underpopulated, and in situations where they have to rebuild.

While looking into it, I realized the “problem” of the King portion of the Adventurer-Conqueror-King trifecta was that the King portion was well, too damn smooth. You gain income, you pay outgo, a large portion of it is designed to avoid pooling up money (money being xp, this makes sense), but I realized what it lacked was ‘challenge.’

And that’s because I don’t think it was ever really intended to be a source of conflict in the game. So.. I did what countless bad DMs have done throughout the decades. I started making house rules and custom scenarios.

ACKs is so diamond hard in its mechanics that the economy, events and decisions by a player have immediate, concrete and most importantly palpable effects for a player. Increase families, increase garrison costs, increase holiday costs, increase taxes and it upsets people on the morale roll, etc, etc.

This means that the core mechanics, for lack of better words, the THAC0 of kingship is built in, all it needs is, well, a dungeon.

The dungeon is not necessarily a location. And the character sheet is not necessarily the King. Instead the real character sheet IS the spreadsheet for managing the kingdom. Lists of families, income, etc, all those hard crunchy numbers that enable and are affected by what truly guides a game system, the player’s decisions. And in that, I hope to find the “emotionally-charged play,” that the Wandering Gamist speaks of.

I don’t disagree with him though, the mechanics for supporting domain level stuff seems a bit brief in the core ruleset. I had to create my own random events chart based on the stuff from Oriental Adventures, to provide for at least one encounter per player each ‘turn.’ Turns effectively being months.

I made the turns months because that’s when income hits, and income is a major driver for the kingdom. Remember, the idea is that the spreadsheet is the character sheet since all we’re focusing on is domain-level play. This makes maintaining it less onerous to the player, because it’s less of a strange side mechanic, and more the primary mechanic.

Also, I broke the hexes up. The maximum domain a player can control in ACKs is a 24-mile hex. This is comprised of a number of smaller 6-mile hexes. Since this game is all about managing territory and kingdoms, I decided that an individual player could manage a number of 6-mile hexes that would EQUAL a 24 mile hex, and then I started them with just 7 6-mile hexes and left it to them to grow.  

I also gave them a treasury, rolled their land values, put the strongholds in place for the initial hexes (some of which were barely sufficient and some of which were stupidly massive) and determined their hex’s family pops.

Some kingdoms started off relatively flush, others severely underpopulated, some severely overbuilt, some with economies in the black, and one or two in the red.

With the issues of nitty gritty being moved from sideline to main game, suddenly players are much more invested if they lose or gain a few families per hex here and there.  

One player for example wants to expand. One wants technological updates. One has crazy vassals. One is trying to keep his people fed. And everybody stares at the random monthly events that come at them with weal and woe, while trying to keep body and soul together.

Because again, their decisions matter.

And that’s what really makes or breaks a game.