SKM Development: The Vassal State, or “Oh, THOSE Guys”

Vassals are an important function of kingdom maintenance. In many cases they are automated, but the issue of who you have administering an area is important, it’s also important when you have areas that ostensibly under your control but who you yourself do not directly administrate.

In ACKS, a vassal has to pay 20% of his net income and is required to fulfill one favor to his liege per month. Additional favors requested result in more likelihood the NPC in the vassal state goes squirrely. In the case of PC’s being vassals to someone else (which ACKs assumes is a likely situation for someone just getting into the stronghold part of the game) the 20% is still there, but they’re free to get squirrely as soon as they want.

Now, why are vassals a problem? Because of the spreadsheet. A vassal state can itself have sub-hexes, tithe requirements, taxes, garrisons, strongholds, and so on. This means the mother state has to have a nested sheet just for someone else’s stuff. Someone else’s stuff which they might not be entirely truthful about. So it means the player has to have a sheet telling him that because Bob’s Vassal State has 250 families and such-and-such land value, he’s entitled to a certain amount of cash, assuming of course that Bob isn’t suspiciously overspending on his garrison.  And the DM might have another sheet, showing that Bob’s increased his tax rate to 4gp instead of 2gp and indeed has a suspicious garrison, a very large and very angry and very undead garrison.

I had this discussion with one of my players and he reaffirmed my personal belief. The player doesn’t need to know the nuts and bolts of the vassal state (the DM still does of course), no, the player just needs to know roundabouts how much he’s owed. If he knows that the vassal owes him 20gp a turn 40 subsistence , and perhaps 40 men as a combat levy, and when he goes asking for it he only gets 5gp, a firm handshake and a bushel of apples, well, he knows something is up. 

This also means that I just need to inform the player monthly of what he’s owed, and tell him what he actually got. Which, to be honest, is how it was working before.

Now on the DM side, we can once again crib mercilessly off of ACKs. 20% is a good reasonable percentage of income requirement. Instead of being nice and making it net though, let’s make the vassal requirement instead a standard requirement and make it off of the gross. So the vassal owes 20% of what a normal tax income would be based on 2gp per family, he owes 20% of his fams (in terms of military if he raises it) and he’s required to provide 20% of the income in subsistence that it would take to feed his own people (meaning he needs to produce 120% of his own required subsistence).    Instead of ACK’s favor system, we can make it so the player can just straight up request more of these categories, but doing so will tend to piss off the vassal.  This is also why I based it on the ‘typical’ requirements.

See, that way, we provide a ‘perverse incentive’ to a greedy vassal to overtax and over-raise his own men, meaning an incompetent or greedy vassal is going to rapidly put his own hexes in disarray. Meaning fun administrative problems!