What is best in life? Not spreadsheets.

I’ve been running an ACKs campaign of a sort for a few months now. A few months because it takes a considerable amount of time to resolve each turn.

In general, I really like the ACKs system, its smooth, its crunchy. Choices matter and things you do with it are well, fun and enjoyable.

However, we’ve started to discover it might not be the best for running a multiple player kingdom management game.

See the issue is that the weight of the complexity is making it impossible to really manage the turns and the decisions, and in the lack of automation, the players have been forced to rely on ever increasingly complex spreadsheets. This is because ACKs was never intended for tabletop Civilization style play. The kingdom management stuff in ACKs was intended primarily as backdrop, and I still think the complexity was designed for the express purposes of making players realize why Conan felt that settling down in a kingdom was so much of a sea change from his previous adventurer lifestyle.

The weight of managing Hexes, land values, populations, garrisons, strongholds, events, etc, quickly became too much, and I was building an increasing framework of house rules around the already overbuilt ACKs superstructure that made things somewhat overtaxed. See, again, ACKs doesn’t expect you to have to be dealing with MULTIPLE domains.

And thus, I’ve started building the system I’ve dubbed SKM (Spook’s Kingdom Manager). Since we don’t really care about the on the ground framework, I’m less worried about some of the issues ACKs is. However, there were some elements that had to be immediately addressed.

·         ACKs grants a hex a land value, service value and tax value. Ultimately, all of these turn into money (gp). Service value can be adjusted the easiest off of morale. Tax is adjusted by the ruler. Land is typically not adjusted at all. It all forms the foundation of a single resource (gold) which is used for damn near everything. This simplicity is based on the fact that ACKs uses gp at its xp granting mechanic. This game though doesn’t care about xp. So..at the moment I’ve actually added complexity in the form of eliminating these  values and replacing them with Subsistence, Resource and Tax (Well I kept tax). Subsistence represents the hex’s capability for feeding its people. Subsistence is a straight up ‘can you feed your people,’ Resource is a fungible thing I intend to be able to be used for various purposes (decreasing construction costs, research costs, conversion into gold or subsistence) and tax provides just straight up gold.  I’ll discuss this stuff more in depth in another post. It’s all WIP.

·         In ACKS, there was a ‘stronghold’ requirement for a demense. I felt this was unnecessary for a hex-based kingdom management game and opted instead for a ‘Defense Value’ or ‘Security value’ that could be provided by either a single output on a stronghold or an ongoing output on garrison forces (think hired guards).

·         In ACKS, the “Garrison” is based on the demesne. I believe that ACKs intended for a demense to encompass the entire held territory of a player, however, we added on a hex framework to provide a reason for exploration and more fun for management. I decided to ditch individual hex garrison and stronghold requirements earlier (last bullet point) and then further decided to just have a garrison for the entire territory. Each hex still has its overall requirement, but now the garrison is considered to be on patrol, out and about and checking up on the area.  

·         The stronghold requirements are still difficult. Representing the stronghold, with all of its delicious side things (drawbridges, parapets, etc) is somewhat necessary. As is the upkeep costs for the same. Particularly as one of the kingdoms in the game is in bad financial straights because of the overbuilt defenses they have. However, with the Security or Defense Value mechanic I’m working on, now all of those perks give a benefit. Whereas in ACKs they were just expenditures that didn’t give a specific mechanical benefit.

·         Raising an army and operating it was a freaking nightmare from a spreadsheet / management perspective previously. Everything in ACKs affects everything else, so the sheer level of IF/THEN statements I’d need to code would make things impossible to manage. I decided to simplify the army system, even if it lost a bit of its crunch.

·         At the core, as I continue working on SKM, I’m trying to keep to the following goals.

o   Player choices have to matter and events and decisions should have meaning. Players should worry about things like their people starving if they misappropriate resources.

o   Exploration is very important, and the players shouldn’t feel like they need relentless subsystems to handle ‘on foot’ mechanics.

o   Income and costs should be able to be easily apprehended. If a spreadsheet is required (and it likely will be) it should be simple and not require modification of dozens of secondary sheets.

o   Making decisions shouldn’t feel like one is filing tax returns.

Persistent Worlds vs Plot Worlds

Is my world meant to be Persistent or does it exist for Plot? When you design a campaign, this is an important element of your world building.

To explain, you need to make a determination if you plan to use the campaign setting again and again, or if its sole function is to provide a fun game for the players at the time. This is important because it determines how you treat the world and the things in it, and how you play things out.

A Persistent World is one that is well, Persistent. After the adventure is over, another group of adventurers will have another campaign. This campaign might happen a thousand miles away, concurrently, or a hundred years afterwards, but the world continues existing as the stage for all of them.

The Plot World is a world where everything is designed for the purposes of accomplishing a given plot or storyline. The world is a backdrop for the story to be accomplished, and locations tend to be treated less as ports of call, and almost more like ‘nodes.’

For a lot of DMs, what they really want are Plot Worlds. Even when they pick up a module for Golarion, or the Forgotten Realms, or Mystara, they don’t really plan on revisiting each town. Once each place is ‘used up’ you don’t really need to come back to it. And when some games can run for years on end, well, that world dedicated to Plot can feel pretty consistent and persistent because its damn persistent to its own Plot.

When you design a world for Plot, you design it to be consumed. The towns are there to serve the plot. The dungeons serve the plot. Plot worlds tend to have what I’d call a big ‘story focus’ where most baddies are tied to the main storyline, most locations have plot elements tied to the main storyline, NPCs are involved with the main storyline in someway, and NPCs are also involved. The story tends to involve things that shake the world’s basis to its foundation. It feels put together, and feels, well, well designed. Your world in your average video game or the like is designed this way, most everything ties in and forms a cohesive whole. That’s because the Plot world assumes that plot threads will be handled, side quests will be pursued, and the main quest will be resolved. The bad guy will be dealt with, the horror of the day declawed, and the PCs disappear off into happily-ever-after epilogues. 100% completion, good job!

This is not bad. The players walk away fulfilled, they feel like they had fun spending time in the world, and are ready to move on.

Persistent worlds are however, different. They aren’t as clean.

Towns are there because they are. Subplots are floating around from two campaigns ago. The world may have persisted through edition changes, players or even DMs. Bad guys exist who have plots and plans that are completely unrelated to the main quest elements. The main storyline for your guys is just one of many the world’s suffered over time (and as a result most DMs will tend to make it less world shaking). The plot threads might be all over, waiting for players to follow up on them, and they will metastasize into other threads if left unexplored. Bad guys might float through the setting for no discernable purpose, and continue with their own stories despite the players. Threads are everywhere. The main quest may be resolved, but other nonsense will keep happening, and when the heroes retire at the end of the story, they do not necessarily disappear over the horizon but may find themselves as NPCs for the next batch of heroes.

Persistent worlds tend (note tend) to have plots that are more local, and less ‘world shaking’ then Plot worlds. This is because Plot worlds eventually run out of Plot, and Persistent worlds tend to nurse their plot elements, never wanting to give one up until they have a new one to replace it.

An example of why this is an important distinction to keep in mind is a Persistent world gone wrong: Dark Sun.

Dark Sun was a world based around survival in a dusty desert wasteland. A magical post-apocalypse, where water is scarce, and the pathos of living in a world dying is the guiding focus. People lived at the whim of insane king-priests who lived over the few spots of civilization. Man’s spirit was being crushed and consumed as the landscape had been consumed. And heroes were needed to contend against vile kingpriests and reclaim what could be lost. And then the first novels came out.

Now, novels aren’t adventures, but the novels do show what a player would do, or want to do with this setting. They set out to fix things. Defeat the kingpriests. Liberate the people. Restore the world.

After the first novel series, the world was unrecognizable to what was originally pitched. Green arable land had been discovered. The iron law of the kingpriests was shattered. It rained occasionally. Things were improving. And the question that became raised was ‘we still have all of this interesting setting, but what do we really do with it?’ The Kingpriests were the only really established bad guys. There were some slumbering evils, but they were also inexorably tied to the Kingpriests. Without Kingpriests, you kind of didn’t have much.

Lord of the Rings is another “Plot World,” once Sauron’s army is defeated, you’re not realty in Lord of the Rings anymore, which is also why I’ve always found games of Star Wars or Lord of the Rings based in the era of the mainstream kind of awkward. You tend to end up either trying to tell The Plot differently, or spend the entire time dodging it, and I’d rather have something new.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is set in a Persistent world. This is because while the game has a clear driving element to it, the setting leaves the world at large relatively untouched. There are threads and streams only hinted at in the game, and things with which the player can only shallowly interact while going about his own quest. There is more stuff going on. Now this frustrates the player, but it frustrates him into wanting more. Now at the same time, that Persistent World desire to keep the Persistent World stable, also robs the player of his chance to do stuff that’s /world shakingly awesome/. The world itself is huge, with countless troublemakers, problems, issues, and so on. When you visit a town, the town might have nothing at all to do with the ‘main quest’ or you, or your desires or personalities. It might just be a town. Maybe it’s a town that meant something to somebody who played in the world before, and your engagement with it now is just a shallow thing.