Greetings gamers one and all, big and small.
In my next session, the Stag Lord will be killed (He has a single Lieutenant left, and Akiros and Auchs have joined the PCs).
I have been planning to include as many of the alternate rule systems as I can to give my Players a diverse experience. One of my players has plans to make his own vineyard, and I think it will be a perfect opportunity to break out the downtime rules for creating and operating a business.
Has anyone else used the Downtime rules in conjunction with kingdom building? I am looking for some suggestions, on recommended amounts for "start up" funds they could receive in Restov alongside the BP for their Kingdom.
Be careful :) While the Down Time rules appear to match up with the Kingdom Building rules, it starts to fall apart when you dig more deeply.
The two systems overlap on properties - and when you start to compare costs/valued between the two it starts getting clunky. Secondly, the income generation rules in Down Time can skew things. Incomes are not well balanced across the various businesses and some businesses can make a massive income per month. I played an NPC caster with a wizard's tower and made a reasonable income. The NPC running the stables generated a massive income, significantly more than my Caster's Tower (which really surprised me).
In Kingmaker you are advised to leave long gaps between some parts of the game - and the income from an optimised Down Time business could become significant (certainly at lower levels)
If I were going to try and run both systems - I would make the PC take cash out of the kingdom treasury or cash in some of his treasure. That way he can build his vineyard up slowly.
As for a Vineyard, you might want to have a look at White Rose (I think is in book 5?)
Bear in mind, the buildings in kingdom building aren't one building but are rather blocks of buildings; it's implied that there's a bit of diversity within the blocks but enough similarity to use one stat as an abstraction.
Which is where it starts to get clunky.
In the king-maker rules you buy jails for 14 bp. If we use a equivalence value of 4,000gp per BP that makes 56,000gp and equates to about 35 jails under the down time rules. If you do the same calculations with Inns - a Kingdom Rules Lot of Inns costs 10bp, or the equivalent of 40,000gp - under the down time rules that buys you between 18 and 19 inns.
Nothing that can't be managed if you are aware of it, and less important than 'Possible incomes' from optimised businesses at low levels.
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*grin* Yeah. I know I am picky about money / values etc. Don't ever get me started on Incomes and the money you can earn from Skill Rolls :) And never ask me to compare those with the Down Time system.
You can keep the Retrain, Research Spell, Craft things etc. but, as said, don't involve anymore economy and buildings than the Kingdom Economy and Buildings...
Unless your PC choose to dan't take part in the government (it's feasible, never heard of any PC refusing to rule but they can if they want :p )
A couple of things that help to better illustrate the difference between downtime buildings and kingdom buildings:
A city grid is 1 square mile, and has room for 36 buildings, each of which represents over 17 acres worth of that 1 square mile of space. Even we account for very large boulevards, courtyards, and space for an enclosing city wall, you're still going to have at least 10 acres for each building. One acre, in turn, is enough space that even with 20' roads and 'blocks' that are 1x4 buildings, you are going to end up with 20 buildings that each have space for 8 10x10 rooms on each floor, plus space for 5' corridors up the middle of each floor, with a spiral staircase at one end. Multiply that by 10 acres, and you get 200 houses per 'building' in the city grid.
If you use the maximum values for each of the rooms included in a house, you get 42 squares, or 10.5 10x10 rooms. We already established you get 8 of those per house, but that's for a single story dwelling, so let's throw in a second story and a basement, and now our houses can have additional bedrooms, which increases their cost, but also makes them a bit more realistic. Let's throw in four extra bedrooms, which makes for a nice sized family residence, and a new cost of 2,490 gp per house.
Now, remember, there's 200 of these things, so that works out to 498,000 gp, or 124.5 BP. Doesn't look like you're saving all that much money by building individual houses now, does it?
Now, some players will then ask why a house is so 'cheap' in the kingdom rules, when other buildings, like a wizard's tower, are so incredibly expensive compared to how much it would cost to build using downtime rules. The answer of course, is that BP doesn't represent actually paying for the construction of each and every building, it represents promotion and assistance. You're spending money to attract people to come live in your new settlement, and that's a lot more expensive when you're trying to attract a wizard than when you're trying to attract commoners. Also, that wizard is going to want something FAR nicer than the basic setup you get from the downtime rules, and is certainly going to expect you to chip in for the whole cost, which is how you're convincing him/her to move to your kingdom in the first place.