Programming an Estate

Tuesday's post got little response, so I feel I better explain.

In describing the bare bones of managing an estate, there are a host of things we need to know.  These can be broken down into a few general categories: 1) how much of whatever can the estate produce; 2) how much of this will go to the support of the estate vs. how much can be sold; 3) how many people will it take to watch over this production; and 4) how much will we pay in maintenance/wages.

From this, we'll be challenged to use our resources to create permanent assets that we hope will be productive, then produce a profit.  But every time we create an asset, we increase the number of persons that we need.  We increase the cost of maintenance.  We increase wages.  And most of all, we increase the chances that something in the organization will fail.

Make a hand mill, and operate it yourself, you can assess immediately how it needs to be handled and what may be wrong with it.  But hire someone else to work that hand mill, and trouble starts.  Build a watermill to grind grain and there are bigger problems.  Now you're relying on the river to run, and at a certain speed; you're relying on several people to keep the wheel and the cams in working order.  More people, more chance of incompetence, laziness, theft ... and ultimately that something will go wrong, which will be deliberately hidden from you because the worker doesn't want to be blamed.  Suddenly the mill goes up in flame ... or the wheel breaks and jams ... and while you think this was random, it's more likely because of who you hired or how much reliable oversight the mill received.

And the more you build, the more ventures you jump into, the greater your risk becomes.  Someone comes along and creates a friendlier, more manageable program, or delivery system, and *poof* ... Amazon or Facebook are gone.  No matter how big you are, there's no such thing as security.

When asking the question, "How do I manage an estate?" the assumption is usually that the players keep pouring money in so that money comes out, until it is boring.  OR, the DM keeps creating so much trouble with the process, strangling the profit, that the players quit.  We want a system that lets the players manage the troubles, and yet the management itself creates more troubles that the player can foresee, but can't easily escape.

We want the players to be laying in bed at night on a Tuesday, four days from the next game session, running it through their head: "If we shut down the mill in November, and pull the wheel from its mount then, we'll have four months to rebuild the housing ... and if we commit Jerome to it, we can trust him not to screw that up; but if Jerome's working on the mill, we'll need someone else to oversee the mine through the winter ... maybe if we concentrate on shoring up tunnels until we can get Jerome back, and suspend digging the shaft down to the third level; 'course, the second layer's starting to play out, and we'll need a fresh vein if we're going to get the foundry started next summer.  God, it sucks that we're fifty miles from another source of iron.  We should have taken August and September and prospected that south ridge.  Too late now.  Then again, we could still do it, but that's going to need a foreman too.  Who's going to keep a crew of twenty prospecting those hills in December and January.  Davis?  Nah, he gave us trouble on the mine.  Somebody new?  Not sure ... new people can be very unreliable.  I guess I could do it myself, let my henchman run with the party when we tackle the keep.  Then I could be around to oversee Davis every few days, and could plumb the third level.  But if I'm here, why not just manage the mill, and leave Jerome where he is?  Hm."

None of this means a thing if we don't nail down the principles upon which the game is founded.  What land produces how much food and raw materials; how much does it cost to build something; how long do built things last?  How much damage can a random person do, and how do you choose people you can count on?  All the games that we play like this work on the same principles: find the resources, make the resources, allocate the resources, reduce spoilage, fire incompetents when we find them, find ways to make more capital or streamline costs, etc.

The main difference is that, because this isn't a video game, there are no technical limits on what strategies a player can try.  Video games are full of arbitrary boundaries: the map is just so large, the buildings are this big, such and such always costs this much ...

There's no way for YOU, the player, to program the system.  But with a DM, that should be possible.  In fact, that's what makes this format in D&D a massive upgrade.  The player is the programmer.

That doesn't mean we can suspend the niggling bits, however.  A solid, reliable baseline has to be established in something very like concrete ... and that baseline has to be as simple to grasp and understand as it is in any video game.  That's why we don't want to fiddle with comparisons between food calories, soil yields and consumption.  Once we establish what a "person diet" is, we can then adjust one number to manage health benefits, famine, distribution, value, space required and so on.

We want to simplify the base factor so that we can adjust that factor to manage far more complex problems than crop yields.  This is the goal across the system.

We don't need to know the exact cubic footage of mine we've dug; we need a ratio between one miner, production of raw material and the cost to shore up what a miner can mine in a day or week. Then we can produce one number that tells us the cost and the effect at one time.  We can then rate individual miners at 0.98 "ert" [excavation rate], 1.01 or 1.05.  That helps the player decide if this miner needs to be replaced or if it isn't that big a deal.  Replacement means time training, unknown qualities in the green worker and possibly ill feelings among those who are now worried they'll be let go.  It isn't just the ert that matters.

I trust this helps put Tuesday's post in perspective.  I'd rather not write post after post about how to manage fifty different land improvements/buildings that could be emplaced ~ though that would be the goal in the long run.  A goal that, I admit, I've considered for a long time and have been making incremental movements towards.  It's only that my interest was rekindled this week by the retinue post.