or retirement :-)
Sorry I didn't update last night, but it looks like the server was down.
We got in pretty late today, so I'll update tomorrow morning folks. Sorry for the delay.
GM's need a Labor Day sometimes too ... I'll post an update tomorrow. In the meantime, since you're fighting the undead, enjoy this somewhat relevant short clip:
On travel - posting will be spotty
I was hoping to get a turn from Ned & Lleidr at least by now so I could update. I'm going to be out all evening, so we probably won't have an update till late tomorrow afternoon.
Hey, sorry about the delayed post. Just getting back to normal from an awful weekend stomach bug. Should be back to normal posting now.
for some reason the site isn't letting me post on the gameplay thread? I rolled a 24 to hit and 14 damage if someone could post that for me..
no worries folks .. i'll update this evening.
Things will still be spotty for me.
I'm working again at a nearby theme park's Halloween event on the weekends, but we had 3 different training days this week! So, that's the reason I was a little behind this week.
Going forward, it'll purely be a weekend thing, so I shouldn't have a problem keeping the game moving.
Do you have a character for the theme park yet?
Yep. He's a 3rd level wizard with a 17 Intelligence.
Kidding .. yes, I've been assigned a character. And they tell us to give him/her a name, how you got this way, and things you tend to say. So, my guy is a butcher in a slaughter house, where today's meat is always homo sapiens. The room I'm in is one they really do have in slaughter houses, a place where they drain the blood out of the meat and then wash it away; so there's water hoses on the walls and drains in the floor. My costume, which I think I'm gonna hate before the season's up, is a yellow rain suit.
So, my character started working here cause he was broke and needed the money, but then found out he can never leave. He's tired of cleaning the floor all the time and yells at people coming through to 'Don't make a mess!'.
I also get to hold a very long knife.
Ah, the classic long pork set up. Been a fan since I saw Motel Hell at the all-night horror movies fest at the Twin back in junior high :)
What's the name? Clean Gene?
And don't worry, you can always multi-class to wizard later.
This thing has AC of 22+?
I failed to hit on a 21...
I should have modified his AC while he was kneeling and you attacked him (he was prone), so you really did hit him.
Got a question for the group for a problem that's been in the back of my head for awhile now.
Eventually, I'd like to build a fully developed campaign world for fantasy gaming, but I keep tripping over representing political boundaries on a game map. I favor the old-school approach of using hex grids for world maps, and in this case, a grid may actually help solve this particular problem or present a partial solution.
The problem is this: in a feudal setting, it doesn't make much sense to talk about a single political entity. Any entity consists of smaller political units. This is a vast oversimplification, but in general:
Empires contain kingdoms
Kingdoms are made of duchies
Duchies are made of counties
Counties are made of baronies
Baronies are made of manors
That's a lot of political boundaries to draw on a map! And, most likely, even if I had time to draw them all out, it would be more confusing than helpful. Plus, I like to use Hexographer and it's only got 2 built-in lines for political boundaries (minor & major).
So, how would you approach this? My first thought is that the problem is one of scale; at the outset, the PCs are moving through the baronial scale of things. At the highest level of play, they'd be interacting with kings and imperial advisers.
One partial, potential fix is that each hex in a settled, civilized area represents a single barony.
Another thought: draw counties, duchies with the minor political boundary and treat them as individual entities within larger entities like kingdoms. This has historical precedent - Henry II was the Duke of Normandy, Count of Anjou, and King of England. In other words, after consolidating power in England, he didn't consider Normandy and the other French regions to be part of the Kingdom of England. These smaller areas can be thought of as their own thing, with a distinct political identity.
Plus, perhaps an abstraction is in order: both duchies and counties are made of baronies, but a duchy is simply a bit bigger geographically.
I can't tell if your concern is the politics, or the maps, but if you looks at mapping historically, they rarely deal with more than 1 level of politics.
For instance, a world map almost never shows the US divided into states, and a map of the US never shows individual counties. On a state map, sometimes you see counties and also some sort of overlay like representative districts or school districts, but even those are usually on a county map.
You could probably get away with two layers by using lines for one and colors for the other (which is probably what the minor & major options are in the Hexographer.
I do think your level of abstraction makes sense, though.
I'm with Selia on this - do the big map and then, as needed, go down into smaller details - otherwise you'll do work for places the adventurers may never go to.
It comes down to personal preferance of course. The way I do it is draw up a terain map first with landmasses, mountains, rivers etc. I then make a copy of the map and do write in the political boundaries, cities and roads. If necessary you can make more copies showing spheres of influences which transcend political boundaries, weather patterns etc.
In the 'old days' I'd use paper for the first map and transparancies for the rest. If you're drawing it up on a computer try and find a program that support layers. That way you can draw up the terain map on layer 1 and then draw each political map on its own layer. That way you can display your map with any combination of layers you want.
Hurray for 6th!
Lleidr is going to take 4th level Rogue.
xp: 23,000
Favored Class bonus: halfling racial alternate bonus: +1/2 circumstance bonus to critical confirmation rolls for attacks made with a dagger
+1d8 HD >
+1 BAB
+1 Reflex save
Rogue talent: Offensive Defensive (Extraordinary ability): When a rogue with this talent hits a creature with a melee attack that deals sneak attack damage, the rogue gains a +1 dodge bonus to AC for each sneak attack die rolled for one round.
Uncanny Dodge (Extraordinary ability): cannot be caught flat-footed, and does not lose Dex bonus to AC if the attacker is invisible; still loses Dexterity bonus to AC if immobilized or if an opponent successfully uses the feint action
+7 skill pts
* +4 Bluff (maxed with 6 ranks now)
* +3 Perception (maxed with 6 ranks now)
Upgraded!
Updated. Sorcerer level 2 is nothing mind-blowing...
Forgot about rerolling HD if less than half...
So, after mulling this over a good bit, I think a good general approach is one that you find done often. Determine a campaign's starting point, and go nuts with the detail when it comes to political boundaries at the low end: manors, baronies, etc.
Then, assuming greater geographical distance roughly correlates with increases in PC levels, zoom out on the campaign map as needed and portray political entities on the higher end (duchies, kingdoms), until on the highest end (20th level), you're playing in the Imperial level of crises, wars, and intrigue.
On the other hand, the campaign world I've got in mind is one with quite liberal PC movement ... so I dunno. Maybe what I need is a system whereby, on the fly or via quick prep, I can generate the innards of a high level political entity as needed, so that, for example, a kingdom can be deconstructed into its constituent parts: baronies, counties, duchies, etc.
Sorry to ramble ... just thinking out loud on this. Hexographer is great software for this actually, cause you can take a subset of your big map and make a child map. The only wrinkle is that you'd better be finished with that area of the big map first.
I've been fighting off a head cold this week; give me another day, and i should have an update for you all.
Guys, gotta beg for patience. Horrendous day at work today, and I'm totally spent. I'll shoot for an update tomorrow. My apologies for the delay.
Remember what we learned in school: liquor makes it all better.
So, for the 2nd time in 2 years, I've wound up with a full time job where the job itself bears no resemblance to the work described during the recruiting process. *sigh*
Time to prep the resume!
Hmmm ... no posts since Thursday from any players. Anyone out there?
I am just about to head to the air port but I've been reading if not posting
Still here. I''ve been considering our options :-). I'll post in a bit.
Busy family weekend here too.
Halloween is almost here and I am slammed. Let's take a short break and commence again this Sunday, 11/1.
Works for me.
ok
So I've been thinking more about the best way to represent political entities on a campaign map, and lately, I'm leaning towards drawing the entities as atomic, more or less.
An example you long term gamers might be familiar with is old D&D's 'Known World', specifically in the Grand Duchy of Karameikos. I'm looking at a hex map they did around 1991, and the duchy is drawn with its familiar borders and then they drew a few minor borders around internal baronies & estates that were vassals, the only one of which I'm familiar with is the old Black Eagle Barony.
I'm not a big fan of drawing entities inside another entity - that sounds like a solution I was describing in an earlier post. That said, there will be times when that's inevitable. An atomic solution would be to show vassals on the periphery as separate and apart, and then in your game, simply note which smaller states are vassals of the bigger ones.
Hope you don't mind the rambling ... I've been toying around with various rules & map stuff for awhile and it's nice to talk it out loud.
Have you guys been following this story? It's about the search for a hidden area inside King Tut's tomb.
Cool.
I'm fighting off an infection so my postings may be a bit spotty.
get well soon!
Any of you familiar or have played using the old dominion rules from the D&D Companion Set or the D&D Rules Cyclopedia? Had a few thoughts on them and wanted to gauge your reaction.
Sorry - not me...
I've got the Cyclopedia but am not familiar with building keeps, gathering followers etc
I think my exposure to those rules consists of a conversation you and I had a long while ago :)
The Mentzer D&D rules are great stuff and the rules they introduced in the mid 80s for high level characters were innovative stuff for the time, specifically the mass combat system, War Machine, and running domains.
The domain rules are only a few pages and are pretty simple, but are scalable: they work in theory for a small barony on the wilderness as well as for an imperial power containing dozens of smaller domains. The only problem is that they always felt only half finished to me.
One central idea is that each hex you control generates a few resources, randomly determined:
- Vegetable (1 gp per peasant family/month)
- Animal (2 gp ... )
- Mineral (3 gp ...)
So, based on however many peasant families you have in a hex, you multiply the population by the resource type to get Resource Income. This isn't money; it's the value of resources you collect as the ruler. The resources would be described as lumber, copper, honey, stone, etc.
You also get Standard Income: 10 gp per peasant family in a hex. Again, not money; it's instead the value of services these families produce. What's it used for? The rules are pretty vague on this, but it's supposed to be for internal improvements.
Then, there's tax income: 1 gp per peasant family, which is money.
Another potential source of income, but also an expense for anyone except an emperor: salt tax. 20% of all your incomes goes to your liege; if you have vassals, they send you 20% of their incomes.
I like the idea of having descriptors for the resources your dominion produces. Here's a few changes I was considering:
- get rid of Standard Income. there's no good guidelines on how to use this; how many ways can you spend it and what are the effects? who knows!
- Resource Income is also left hanging. It's easy to see where it comes from, but it's hard to see how it's used, according to the rules. I'm thinking you can use it 2 ways (and no, it wouldn't be to feed folks; these should be considered resources in excess of subsistence)
-- The DM can determine the max amount that can be used towards dominion expenses. So, if your dominion produces a lot of iron ore, then it may be reasonable to assume up to 50% of your resource income could be used towards outfitting troops with weapons and armor. So each dominion would have a statistic, Resource Consumed, that is simply a percentage from 0% to 100%.
-- Each dominion has a statistic, Improvements Level, which ranges from 10.0 to 1.0. This value is the ratio at which you can sell 100 gp of resources and get X amount of money back. For a barony on the frontier, it'll be 10 to 1; for a developed kingdom with massive ports and paved roads, maybe it's a 3 or 2. More on this in a bit.
So, this way, a ruler has a choice on how to use their resources. And, choices in a game are always a good thing.
More broadly, each ruler has 3 choices or rather, 3 competing priorities when administering a dominion:
- Economic improvements (the Improvements Level)
- Military spending (troops and defensive structures)
- Domestic popularity
There's several sets of rules for running dominions in fantasy RPGs and one thing i've seen a lot are lists of things you can build to improve your dominion's economy: docks, ports, roads, trade routes, etc. Instead of dealing with lists of stuff, I'm thinking an abstract approach is easier. Gauge how well a dominion promotes trade & commerce with a simple stat, the Improvements Level. It costs 500 gp to go from 10.0 to 9.75; maybe it'll take 530 to go down another step, to 9.50. Each step represents new roads, lookout stations, etc., without having to inventory all these things.
Military spending consists of troops & strongholds. This ties in with the War Machine rules, or whatever mass combat rules you've got. Again, I'm favoring an abstract stat, ranging from 0.0 to 10.0, with each step representing city walls, towers, strongholds, etc., dispersed within an area. This stat would need to be tracked at the hex level, not per dominion. Since you can have many hexes in a dominion, some of these stats have to tracked at the hex level, instead of at the dominion level.
Troop spending is simply a matter of selecting troop types and their quantity. It also gets into things like siege engines and ships.
Last is Domestic Popularity or Morale. Again, I imagine a dominion level stat, ranging from 0.0 to 10.0. Money can be spent to improve the rating, and this would be represented by holidays, public gardens, etc.
There should also be some cross effects; if people feel safe, popularity would improve. So, if I just built a castle near town (by paying to increase the Defense score), that should spill over to some degree onto popularity. In the old rules, popularity was simply Dominion Confidence.
Another thing the rules didn't answer was Tax Rates. Each ruler should be able to set a tax rate; high ones hurt confidence, low ones boost it and encourage population growth.
So what do you think? I'd love to run a campaign sometime with PCs running their own dominions, trying to carve a living from a wilderness frontier.
Hee hee ... I just love this game.
I think you need to make it also a bit more 'knife' edgy. So many systems seem to end up with the 'kingdoms' being quite profitable and everyone living very comfortably.
What I mean is when things are good? They are really good. When they are bad, they should be really bad ie. Starvation diets etc but most of the time? It should be on a bit of a knife edge. Food needs to be stored for the winter - thats food that doesn't make it into production and no production of food is possible for about 3-4 months a year.
Which can be tough if you need to fight (generally not done in winter by civilised races but orcs are another matter) and need food. Food that has to come from your peasants stores.
Taxes in general should be need to be in the 5 to 6 range. Supporting a household of nobility, of experts (farriers, weapons smiths, stone masons if building a keep etc) + the ever needed men at arms, small embedded guard force is expensive as is taxes in turn paid to the crown etc.
When the crown needs extra? Then they'll tax the knights/barons - who will in turn? tax the peasants, turning taxes from a 5-6 to a 7-8 or even worse.
Magic can offset some of the impact. A cleric (not attached as a hanger on to the local ruler) of sufficient level can purify rotten food or even create it.