How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...
As much as is in the pile of wood; after that there is no more.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...
About as much ground as a grounghog could hog if a groundhog could hog ground.
How much wood would a woodchuck chuck...
if a woodchuck would chuck wood?
A woodchuck would chuck as much as a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood.
Or about a chuckload.
How many Lyre's of Building would it take to be able to build an extra building in the kingdom building minigame?
I played with optional House rules on it. I GAVE the party one, and said that it was good for 3BP per month, and they can never benefit from more then one.
|
How many Lyre's of Building would it take to be able to build an extra building in the kingdom building minigame?I played with optional House rules on it. I GAVE the party one, and said that it was good for 3BP per month, and they can never benefit from more then one.
Interesting. Did you work out a rough math behind the 3BP number? if so i'm interested to hear it...
I'm also curious about how Goraxes's house rule worked out.
I, too, gifted my PCs with a lyre (hidden in the elven keep in RRR), because they seemed unable to accrue enough BPs to build anything significant.
I started them off with the rule as listed in the AP (-2 on BPs for any building), but I told them if a PC puts skill ranks into Perform (string instrument), then the bonus will increase as their ability goes up.
But I'm not sure how this will pan out. I wanted the lyre to give them a boost to start with, but I don't want it to unbalance the whole building system.
Any thoughts?
My PCs made their own Lyre of Building. I ruled that they could reduce the cost of any "building" by 1 if it normally costs 3-5BP or by 2 if it costs 6+ BP. For each point of reduction, they need someone to make a Perform(Strings) check and the first failure means it cannot be used again until the following month. I also put other restrictions like that it can only be used on buildings in the same city in any given month.
So far, it's been quite a boon but as they begin earning more and more BP through other means, the couple BP they get from this will decrease in proportion so I'm not worried about it unbalancing the game.
So, My group totally pimp slapped the Stolenlands and took it's cookie. They have quite a small fortune and decided to buy the Lyre of Building. By amassing their wealth (they gave up quite a bit of personal loot) and using their trade with Oleg, they were barely able to do so. For the game, I have already said it will only work in one city per phase (unless they wish to purchase 1 more per city).
Now does the -2 BP to building costs apply to each building built during building phase (say that fast 5 times) or only to one building per building phase? If they are able to cast the Wall of Stone spell would that add another -2? (total of -4 to each building or single building or even -2 to 2 different buildings)
Hello!? Anyone Home? It's cold and there are wolves out here. :D
I'm table ruling -2 BP to up to 2 buildings per month. If a Perform (String Instrument) DC check of 25 is made, you may add another building. For every 5 you beat the DC by, you can use it for an additional building (DC 30 gets you -2BP on 4 buildings, DC 35 for 5). As stated above, the Lyre can only be used in one town a month.
If anyone has any further suggestions or an official ruling, I'd love to hear them. Thanks!
It hardly seems necessary for the PCs to put ranks into Perform (String Instruments) to benefit from the lyre. It'd be much easier and likely more productive for PCs to hire a professional minstrel to rock the lyre in a command performance once a week. According to the perform skill description, a musician able to achieve a perform skill DC of 20 (what's needed to properly use the lyre) can expect 3d10 sp per day (about 16.5 sp a day, or approximately 6.6 gp for four performances in a month). That'd seem a better option than having a PC sacrifice a skill point per level for this one purpose.
It's a different matter if the party includes a bard however.
Some thoughts on the Lyre...
-It can be used Once per week.
-It can be used for 1 Hour by anyone...but someone reasonably competent (+8 Perform total) can continue to use if for as long as they can play...(I'd house rule this to 3 hours for common sense and balance reasons...even 3 hours of playing a Lyre is going to end in raw and sore fingers, I think)
-Each hour is the equivalent of 200 man-days
-so presuming 3 hours per session, 600 man-days...call it 20 man-months. At 4 weeks/month, 80 man-months...or 80 men working a month.
Considering that BP are very abstract, you really can assign any value of BP to the labor...personally, I'd stick with your idea of up to 4 BP/month, but I'd say that any building can have a maximum of 1/2 cost due to the Lyre (with 1 BP buildings being free)...the rest is used in materials and such (as well as labor in getting the materials to the site).
So one 8 BP or higher building (at -4 BP), two 4 BP buildings (at -2 cost), four 2 BP buildings (at -1 BP) or four 1 BP buildings (free).
The big advantage in my mind is *time*. Any building made entirely with the Lyre (8 BP or less) shouldn't count against the building limit, as there is no labor involved, just one musician playing for a few hours.
I don't think it would be game breaking...it would give a break on larger buildings, and allow rapid construction of smaller buildings.
thoughts?
|
A common worker will receive about 1 sp day plus maybe some kind of accommodation and food from the employer, say a total of 2 sp/day. 6 gp month.
In Pathfinder each hour of use of a Lyre of building is equivalent to 600 man days of work.
A three hour performance is reasonable I think. So using it 4 times in a month equate to having 7.200 extra man days of work, approximately 300 man months of work (even in a medieval world people will have at least 1 man day of rest every week and you should account for some day of bad weather when the work done is reduced).
That will allow you to reduce the wages you pay by about 1.800 gp each month.
A BP is approximately 4.000 gp in material and labour.
1 BP/month from 1yre is the maximum I will allow but it could reasonably allow the construction of a extra building.
At the same time if your GM is "evil" it would impose a -1 economy penalty as less money is moving around.
...In Pathfinder each hour of use of a Lyre of building is equivalent to 600 man days of work.
Insert my red face here. I just failed basic math.
As for the amounts, since BP are so abstract (and not directly equivalent to cash), I think the exact BP amounts can be handwaived to anything that the GM feels comfortable with, but considering the significantly larger number of man-days, I might double the potential effect to 8BP/month (i.e. 2BP/week), with the same 'half-cost' math...and the caveat that both BP in a given week must be spent in adjacent squares of a city grid (otherwise it would be two separate performances).
FWIW, my thought process was that 1/3 of a building's cost is materials (in line with Craft skills), but that I'd only give a 1/2 break instead of 2/3 to account for labor that the Lyre can't accomodate (mostly getting the materials on-site).
I suppose if you had a dedicated healer dropping cures to heal your fingers, and were using some way to reduce/remove fatigue, you could significantly increase these figures from the base, but in that case I'd forgo the 'take 10' aspect (mostly as a balancing mechanism)
...At the same time if your GM is "evil" it would impose a -1 economy penalty as less money is moving around.
Unless the GM imposes the same penalty on any turn that you don't build at all, he's just being punitive at that point.
|
|
To me 8 BP seem way too much, at least for building city blocks.
I would keep it fairly low power. 1 or at most 2 BP.
I would make it more efficient (x2 the city BP) when working outside the city (converting a hex to farmland or building a road) as you usually will need some guards for the people doing the work and spend resources to bring them food and other consumables. It will be way easier to guard and supply 1 guy using the lyre than 200-400 workers building a road.
Diego Rossi wrote:
...At the same time if your GM is "evil" it would impose a -1 economy penalty as less money is moving around.
Unless the GM imposes the same penalty on any turn that you don't build at all, he's just being punitive at that point.
I would like to impose some secondary effect to some player actions and choices.
For example if the ruler get married the kingdom could get a bonus to the stability cheek for a period (one year or so).
Him/her getting or selecting a heir would add to the stability in a permanent manner (unless there are problem between the ruler and the heir).
Not having jet played the Kingmaker AP I haven't jet a good idea of how large an appropriate bonus/malus should be.
About the Lyre an people employment it could work the other way too.
If you construct enough new buildings and structures (i.e. spend enough BP) your economy would get a temporary boost thanks to the influx of workers.
It would depend on your kingdom BP value. If your current kingdom is "worth" 20 BP (i.e. you have spent 20 BP so far building it) spending 10% of that net worth in BP could get you a +1 economy for a month.
If your kingdom is worth 100 BP it will require 10 BP of new works to get the same effect.
In that scenario if the Lyre substitute 1 BP of workers it will have a serious impact on a small kingdom (removing 1 BP from a 2 BP expenditure will negate the bonus) while the effect will be smaller for the larger kingdom (the lyre will cover only 1/10 of your expenditure and you could probably do some extra work to get the bonus).
I am a wargamer at heart and have played Civilization a lot, so the idea of stacking effects attract me.
Especially if it can be mixed with the players role playing.
Last thing:
a Lyre cost 13.000 gp. To "buy" a BP in gold cost 4.000 GP, converting it in gp give you 2.000 gp. Even halving that 1 BP of work would be worth about 1.000 gp.
If I was the manager of a construction firm (they existed even in the middle ages, even if they were differently organized than today) with a constant workload I would do some math and buy one as soon as possible even at the rate of 1 BP/month as it will pay itself in 13 months.
At 8 BP month it will be a mandatory purchase to anyone working in the construction field even in small cities. The equivalent of today excavators and concrete mixers. And the Stonemasons guilds would pay assassins to kill every spellcaster know to build them.
Short Short Answer: Don't let your PCs get their grubby littles on a Lyre of Building.
Short Answer: I'd treat it as a discount to the BP cost of each building, but scaled rather than flat.
Long Answer: 100 humans can do a lot of labor in 3 days - even if I'd rather have that in man-hours, because I don't know how pseudo-Middle Ages to treat a term like "days." (How powerful is the Golarian labor movement? Do we mean the modern 8 hour work day? A classical sunup to sundown? Middle Ages church time? Does the length of the day matter? Or, since we're discussing magic, is that a literal day, like 24 hour period of time?)
Also, despite all the discussion here about materials costs, the Lyre's description doesn't mention anything about them. It can build buildings and mines. Presumably it can make due without materials.
In fact, I'd imagine that one of the best uses for the Lyre would be in a materials-oriented aspect. The big costs are in capital. Consider this: even talented labor is at 3sp. Artisan's Tools are 5gp, a Miner's Pick is 3gp, and even a hammer is 6sp. Even if there's skew to those particular numbers, it's still fairly realistic to treat the hard part as the tools and other goods. Since the lyre doesn't need that, it's not that much of a bend to the rules to walk into dense forest, strike up a tune, and then cast Unseen Servant a bunch to move out the massive piles of lumber you've now produced. Assuming that's too much of a stretch, the materials still aren't required for the construction, which is massive savings.
However, - and this is why I think that you don't have to deal with the Stonemason's Guild assassins - however, the Lyre doesn't discuss anything about skill. There's no discussion of what the kind of labor is, nor what the sort of construction is like. For throwing up a simple cabin or doing the preliminary excavation, the Lyre is great. But its repertoire of actual buildings is limited. Extensive use of the Lyre will lend a decidedly central-planning ambiance (or at least something of a Sim City vibe) to the housing. The Lyre can't do 'cathedral' or 'wizard's tower.'
In fact, the greatest use of the Lyre is going to be when there's times that your laborers can't or don't work - rain, strikes, feast days, night. Get a bard (and a tent) and the next day you're good to go with a pored foundation. You're going to need people with skill and knowhow to actually do anything interesting, but you're cutting out a lot of the labor-intensive slow parts of construction.
Then again, I can also see the ruling on this that didn't allow it. After all, if it's a matter of a bard saying "got to, lean to!" or singing "my quonset baby" getting the specifics of a certain sort of minor construction might not be in the Lyre's oeuvre. Still, you could probably get things like "wall," if only to then be stripped for materials by the people who actually do the construction.
So, all in all, you're saving time and making things easier for those who then come in and finish up the job. You're probably not going to get things below expending a BP (or fractional BP) for anything, but having the lyre around will considerably speed up the process of doing a building project, reducing the overall BP cost...insomuch as the performer makes the performer checks.
On the -1 to Economy: I really don't think that's justified. I can think of some RP potential, as noted above. ("Sire, your subjects are demanding vibrant colors of paint, so that they can tell each other's homes apart.") The money and labor that doesn't go to construction, still goes somewhere, to expand or deal with other parts of the economy.
A lyre is also useful for dangerous construction, where there is a high likelihood that one or more workers would lose their lives before finish. Bridges over treacherous water, tall buildings, some mine working, all of these efforts could easily be mankillers but can be sidestepped by augmenting the normal workers with a lyre. Why risk fragile humans doing something risky when you can save them for the finish work and highly skilled parts and do the deadly parts with magic?
Also, despite all the discussion here about materials costs, the Lyre's description doesn't mention anything about them. It can build buildings and mines. Presumably it can make due without materials.
In fact, I'd imagine that one of the best uses for the Lyre would be in a materials-oriented aspect. The big costs are in capital. Consider this: even talented labor is at 3sp. Artisan's Tools are 5gp, a Miner's Pick is 3gp, and even a hammer is 6sp. Even if there's skew to those particular numbers, it's still fairly realistic to treat the hard part as the tools and other goods. Since the lyre doesn't need that, it's not that much of a bend to the rules to walk into dense forest, strike up a tune, and then cast Unseen Servant a bunch to move out the massive piles of lumber you've now produced. Assuming that's too much of a stretch, the materials still aren't required for the construction, which is massive savings.
Sorry, that's not quite correct. The lyre replaces workers, it doesn't manufacture materials from thin air. You still have to provide the raw physical components of whatever it is you're constructing. (Otherwise I'd always use it to build a "large pile of perfectly cut diamonds the size of melons.") The item uses fabricate in it's manufacture, what you're talking about would require true creation (which isn't currently in Pathfinder) or wish. Fabricate requires as its material component "the original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created."
You're right that the lyre doesn't require tools (it's magic), but it certainly requires materials. It should also require a Craft check to determine quality of construction, which is mentioned for the spell but not the lyre.
Also, despite all the discussion here about materials costs, the Lyre's description doesn't mention anything about them. It can build buildings and mines. Presumably it can make due without materials.
In fact, I'd imagine that one of the best uses for the Lyre would be in a materials-oriented aspect. The big costs are in capital. Consider this: even talented labor is at 3sp. Artisan's Tools are 5gp, a Miner's Pick is 3gp, and even a hammer is 6sp. Even if there's skew to those particular numbers, it's still fairly realistic to treat the hard part as the tools and other goods. Since the lyre doesn't need that, it's not that much of a bend to the rules to walk into dense forest, strike up a tune, and then cast Unseen Servant a bunch to move out the massive piles of lumber you've now produced. Assuming that's too much of a stretch, the materials still aren't required for the construction, which is massive savings.
Sorry, that's not quite correct. The lyre replaces workers, it doesn't manufacture materials from thin air. You still have to provide the raw physical components of whatever it is you're constructing. (Otherwise I'd always use it to build a "large pile of perfectly cut diamonds the size of melons.") The item uses fabricate in it's manufacture, what you're talking about would require true creation (which isn't currently in Pathfinder) or wish. Fabricate requires as its material component "the original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created."
You're right that the lyre doesn't require tools (it's magic), but it certainly requires materials. It should also require a Craft check to determine quality of construction, which is mentioned for the spell but not the lyre.
This is an EXCELLENT point. Thank you for this.
KISS - if they have some one semi-competent to play the lyre reliably, they get the -2 BP per building, minimum of 1 BP, that is described in the Chapter 2 rules. Now, this basically stands in for the later level access (along with Kn (engineering) and Prof (architect) skills) to spiffy stuff like wall of stone, fabricate and stone shape - all requiring its own massive suite of Craft and Profession skills to implement properly - to reduce buildings' costs.
In the end, what ever their resources, generally speaking the lyre contributes that reduction. If a building's cost is halved because of other buildings, the -2 comes after halving with the stipulated 1 BP minimum per building. This keeps things tolerably sane from what I'm seeing at the table.
WOW, thanks everyone for chiming in. I appreciate the input and you all bring up some great and interesting points (love the stonemason assassin angle), however we seem to be getting away from my original question. Is there any ruling to how many buildings a lyre can effect in 1 phase? In the AP it specifically says using a lyre gives you -2 BP to your building. However arguments could be made for either per building or per phase.
As for my table ruling involving Skill checks (Yes I do have a Bard in the group), since the Lyre of Building description states that a Perform(string inst) check is needed to use the lyre for any length of time (otherwise they must wait a week before using it again), I figured using the same check to allow the PC's to have it affect more buildings would be a fairly easy way of keeping them from overusing it, but still allowing them a chance to "build more" by using their (or NPC's/cohort's/etc) skills.
WOW, thanks everyone for chiming in. I appreciate the input and you all bring up some great and interesting points (love the stonemason assassin angle), however we seem to be getting away from my original question. Is there any ruling to how many buildings a lyre can effect in 1 phase? In the AP it specifically says using a lyre gives you -2 BP to your building. However arguments could be made for either per building or per phase.
As for my table ruling involving Skill checks (Yes I do have a Bard in the group), since the Lyre of Building description states that a Perform(string inst) check is needed to use the lyre for any length of time (otherwise they must wait a week before using it again), I figured using the same check to allow the PC's to have it affect more buildings would be a fairly easy way of keeping them from overusing it, but still allowing them a chance to "build more" by using their (or NPC's/cohort's/etc) skills.
I do not have a problem with the lyre giving the discount as a blanket ability every Kingdom turn regardless of how many buildings. Granted, I want a kingdom turn to be resolved in 10 minutes or less at the table, so that's part of the motivation for me. The less time spent on the book keeping, the more time the PCs/rulers can spend on getting killed by monsters/killing monsters and taking their stuff, role-playing and what not.
EDIT: requiring a lyre per city is reasonable, as all the administrative stuff happens within the same week of game time. YMMV.
Also, despite all the discussion here about materials costs, the Lyre's description doesn't mention anything about them. It can build buildings and mines. Presumably it can make due without materials.
In fact, I'd imagine that one of the best uses for the Lyre would be in a materials-oriented aspect. The big costs are in capital. Consider this: even talented labor is at 3sp. Artisan's Tools are 5gp, a Miner's Pick is 3gp, and even a hammer is 6sp. Even if there's skew to those particular numbers, it's still fairly realistic to treat the hard part as the tools and other goods. Since the lyre doesn't need that, it's not that much of a bend to the rules to walk into dense forest, strike up a tune, and then cast Unseen Servant a bunch to move out the massive piles of lumber you've now produced. Assuming that's too much of a stretch, the materials still aren't required for the construction, which is massive savings.
Sorry, that's not quite correct. The lyre replaces workers, it doesn't manufacture materials from thin air. You still have to provide the raw physical components of whatever it is you're constructing. (Otherwise I'd always use it to build a "large pile of perfectly cut diamonds the size of melons.") The item uses fabricate in it's manufacture, what you're talking about would require true creation (which isn't currently in Pathfinder) or wish. Fabricate requires as its material component "the original material, which costs the same amount as the raw materials required to craft the item to be created."
You're right that the lyre doesn't require tools (it's magic), but it certainly requires materials. It should also require a Craft check to determine quality of construction, which is mentioned for the spell but not the lyre.
Well, yeah, unless they were construction-grade diamonds.
I can see the basis of your argument, but I don't like in the least. The discussion is totally absent from the Lyre's description, and that absence of the Craft check implies that it's not meant to be merely Fabricate: the Musical.
The list is "buildings, mines, tunnels, ditches, et cetera." If no materials are included, not even construction materials, the first three on that list are hindered to the point of unusable or non-viable.