My biggest problem with BP isn't what my players think of it or where it comes from. It's that nothing happens unless the players spend it. If they choose to ignore a town, nothing will get built there. Not a shop, not a granary to store the harvest, not even a house. There's no mechanism for saying "The people put up these buildings for themselves."
On the other hand, If the GM decided to drain BP to represent the citizens building for themselves, the players would likely get upset, and a large chunk of the kingdom decisions may end up on the GM ("We'll just let them build what they want for now").
The best choice would seem to be free buildings occasionally that the people assembled on their own, but that creates incentive to not spend BP (or not spend it on the small things) in hopes of getting the buildings for free.
Is there a good answer? Can this be made to work?
There's just the RP side. My players listen when one of the Outer Council members says, "Olegrod is feeling a bit neglected, the town is stagnating", and they look to see what might be appropriate there.
(This is presuming they didn't notice themselves that a given town/city could use some attention)
|
My biggest problem with BP isn't what my players think of it or where it comes from. It's that nothing happens unless the players spend it. If they choose to ignore a town, nothing will get built there. Not a shop, not a granary to store the harvest, not even a house. There's no mechanism for saying "The people put up these buildings for themselves."
On the other hand, If the GM decided to drain BP to represent the citizens building for themselves, the players would likely get upset, and a large chunk of the kingdom decisions may end up on the GM ("We'll just let them build what they want for now").
I do small buildings (free) as random events: house, shop, tenement, drug den, slum. Stuff that after a while, they're not you going to build for themselves. And I randomly determine where they get built, which sometimes throws off their building plans. Then they risk a little unrest if they tear it down without rebuilding it somewhere else.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would like to see the point of view of each races about the constructing a settlement. Each races must priorise some important features when building a kingdom.
And maybe, the advantages to used specialists when to purchase a building. Example, dwarves are good at stonemasonry. They may provide a bonus to the value of the building at the cost of time and money.
I found the rules to be too "human-centric".
|
The "magic" economy is much more than the actual sale of the magic item.
First when a magic item is made it require a lot o material, the +2 bow sold by the wizard was a masterwork bow made by someone (hopefully in your kingdom), the 2.000 gp of enchanting materials were gathered and sold to the wizard by some other person so half of the sales price of the bow has already gone around at least once before the sale happened.
Then when the wizard get his cash from the sale half of it go to purchase the material for the next product but the other half, wizards being what they are, will be spend in luxuries, spell components, books and research materials. So the money go around again, enriching the society even more.
Another thing, if you look the establishment that sell magic items you will see that some don't have the mean to product them and probably little interest in trading them. My opinion is that the sales of magic items is a easy way to represent the sales of all high value items, from jewellery to pieces of art. Simply linking the economy check to magic items was more interesting from the players point of view than the sale of a piece of art or the work of a famous fashion designer. Simply the magic item sale check is a dirt and simple way to represent a plethora of high value sales.
it would be nice to have some kind of rules for ruling a domain that isn't a traditional domain.
For example, something to model the running of a huge city. It's the end of CotCT or CoT and the city is yours - now what?
Why exactly would Korvosa not be a traditional domain? Wouldn't it simply be an established city, so that if you were to apply these rules, you would merely have to decide the structures in the city? Korvosa is huge, so I'm assuming you'd need more than a single grid to represent it.
Speaking of which, would you simply use the Core rulebook's table on settlements to determine how many grids to use? So, I guess a Large City would get up to 3 district maps; a Metropolis 3+.
Anyone remember the old D&D Companion rules? If you were a baron or some other lord swearing fealty to another higher up the chain (King, Emperor, etc), you had to pay 20% of your monthly incomes to your liege. I don't see where this kind of expense is represented in these PF rules.
Barons and Dukes are lesser lords compared to Kings, but wouldn't most Barons & Dukes have feudal obligations to a King somewhere? I guess you could simply introduce a consumption increase somehow to reflect this. On the other side of the coin, if you're a King in these rules, you wouldn't be collecting any additional BPs. The way I read these rules, it could be merely assumed you've got lesser lords employed in running smaller groups of hexes within your kingdom.
- Yes, though I didn't use the spells (summon army has implications I didn't care for and the possibilities for it...just didn't) but let the players read up on the rest and use the info to make their plans.
- More buildings (one of the pdf magazines..Wayfinder? had some that were interesting), accounting for climate/terrain more, examples on how to 'build out' kingdom events. (Just because you roll the same event twice doesn't mean it FEELS the same to the PCs)
- 6 players, using the mods from here on the forums, about half were very into kingdombuilding, one very disinterested. The perception of it as "math/homework" I think was the issue. It helped some when the kingdom got big enough that each PC basically could 'patron' a city/town, but the whole thing became cumbersome and slid 'to the background' at the end of book 5.
- The only time unrest was a factor was Grigori and the trolls, other than that, as there's no incentive to spread quickly, they kept the kingdom size small enough to easily make their rolls 90% of the time.
- Its essential once you get to a certain size, or start with armies, but its definetly flawed. We limited it to one item per rank per city district, which kept it under control for the most part