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So I am thinking of running a campaign based largely around exploration and the construction of a settlement in the wilderness. The PCs will take the roles of explorers, site overseers, and planners - and the campaign will involve a lot of construction via PC and NPC building crews.
I have read and reviewed the Craft skill, and I was thinking that instead of treating each structure like it's own object (i.e. rolling Craft checks by the week until the castle is completed), I would instead treat every five-foot section of wall as it's own craftable object. That way a building doesn't just sort of spring into existance at the end of several weeks - and if monsters attack mid-construction, you know exactly which walls and objects have been crafted already.
If the PCs put multiple building crews to work, each constructing a five-foot section of wall (each of which costs MUCH less than the completed structure, and can therefore be finished faster), then they'll see real progress (individual sections of wall going up) between Craft checks.
My question is this:
You've got to have a cost to use Craft to create an item, so I've got to have a cost for a five-foot section of wall. What should these costs be? A pavillion tent is 100 gold, apparently. Should a five-foot wooden wall cost the same? It's much more durable, but much, much smaller. What about a five-foot stone wall?
NPC labor (via Profession skills like miner and lumberjack) can mitigate or negate these costs, but I have to have some kind of cost system. Any simple, easily-executable ideas?
NPC labor (via Profession skills like miner and lumberjack) can mitigate or negate these costs, but I have to have some kind of cost system. Any simple, easily-executable ideas?
Check out the Land and Home Guide by Dark Quest Games here on DriveThruRPG. It's cheap ($1.50), simple and pretty decent. Avoid Stronghold Builder's Guide; there are some good ideas in there but the pricing of everything is completely nuts.
I'm going to go ahead and suggest the obvious - rules for exploration and settlement/kingdom building are in the Kingmaker adventure path. Most of the crunchy bits are in the 2nd part, Rivers Run Red (available at the Paizo store). Paizo made parts of the rules open content so they have also been compiled and expanded in the 3rd party book from Jon Brazer Book of the River Nations: Exploration and Kingdom Building. And there is a ton of discussion about the rules here on the messageboards. Those rules are abstracted, so don't get down to the level of single sections of wall or really even single small buildings, but they work well at a more macro level once you've gotten a settlement up and running and the micro-level fiddly bits stop being fun to play with because of all the paperwork. There's enough paperwork doing it the Kingmaker way, though there are some very helpful spreadsheets made by players that vastly simplify the process.
Down at the single-section-of-wall level, I also like Mongoose's Book of Strongholds and Dynasties. Ignore some of the magical enhancements, they're often just silly, but the actual buildings and pieces make sense and are listed with the skills needed to get them built. (Though they're 3.x rules, you'll have to convert skill ranks.)
If you *really* want to get down to the gritty details, you can't go wrong with Expeditious Retreat's A Magical Medieval Society: Western Europe. It's a great book (and part of a great series) if the details really matter to you, or even just to have as a reference. It's system-neutral and gets down to the level of farm yields by crop and occupations of absolutely everyone in your town by probability.
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Building things from Stone
Agreed. I ignore the craft rules altogether. When a mage can permanently enchant a sword in a day but basic crafting can take months, things are a bit out of whack IMHO.
+1 This has been a personal pet peeve of mine since forever
I would use an entirely different system for buildings, as long as the workers have a decent value in the corresponding craft skill.
Do it like it would be a computer strategy game.
My idea: Let the players assign the workers to stuff like cutting trees and building this and that building. Every building needs a certain amount of ressources (which have to be processed) and a certain amount of workerhours with a maximum of workers that can work on it at one time.
Make some rolls for motivation of the workers, depending how the players treat them and what is already build (they are less motivated without sleeping quarters and a bath house and so on)
"Workers" can also be assigned to watchposts and guarding duty, both should be essential to prevent surprise attacks (the watchposts can signal the workers to take cover or arm themselves, the guards can shut gates, ready crossbows and the like