What to Do When You Do

Let's say for the sake of discussion that as a group of characters, you've decided to settle down near the town of Odda, the example from the last post.  Let's say the party isn't concerned about its distance from Bergen because they have a light schooner and can make the journey in near a day.  Let's say the party has just had a recent adventure in the town and has just gathered a few henchmen, and now they'd like to have a general meeting point for the main party and the secondary party, for further adventures in the area.  Let's say the mountains and tundra to the east provide lots of opportunities for just that.

And let's say the party has already explored the area, so we can freely give them the map shown on the left, indicating type-6 and type-7 hexes surrounding Odda.  Most of them are forest-based but one is in high country with less trees.  We count a hammer in every hex and 30 food (as opposed to "30F" which should now be understood to mean something completely different), amounting to a total of 1350pd (45pd per food), with a rural population of some 210.  Odda has a population of 862, so the small region is food-abundant, able to export food outside as the production is more than Odda's needs.

There are four coins in the area and we can postulate 15 active support persons per coin, supporting families that number three times that on average, or 60 persons per coin.  These are probably all based out of Odda ... so we can postulate that Odda's population of 862 includes 240 bourgoise and 49 of the aforementioned food-producers.  Most of the labor operating in other hexes would be based in Odda as well ~ earlier we described these as 5 persons per hammer, and each of them has three times as many dependents, so this accounts for another 20x8, or 160 persons, a quarter of which are not at home a lot of the time.  All told, 449 persons.

I said during the mapping coins post that the coins accounted for everyone related to making money and controlling money, so what about the other 413 persons in Stavanger?  We can't call them government or officials or guards ... these are accounted for already.  They're not farmers or foragers (all the food is accounted for), they're not scouring the countryside for valuables.  Who are they?

A small number, perhaps 2-3%, about 16 to 24, fall into two categories: they live on charity or they have enough money that they do not need employment.  This includes beggars, of which there would be only two or three that would be tolerated, the local cleric, his second and their one servant, and those who are living on investments, sinecures or are simply rich.  If the player characters settled in the area and simply hung around, they would fit into this third category.

The remainder are dependents whose principle wage earners are elsewhere ~ perhaps working aboard ship in the North Sea, or working aboard a trawler outside of Stavanger, or working some small mine or trap line further afield than those near Odda.  A few might be in the Norwegian army; one of the houses may have ten servants and seven members and be owned by a noted minister in Copenhagen.  Each of these would send money home to support their dependent family, who use the money to buy food in Odda.  That accounts for all the extra people.

There, now we have a good, solid concept of the town, how it makes its money, where the food comes from and who is doing what.  These are things the PCs can know without harm ... and we can even give them numbers as this only contributes to their "feel" for the place.

We were talking about settling down.  I'd like to run through some of the ways the players might do that.  Let's do it in point form.


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Locations and Towns

Featuring the full post.

Like rivers, my 20-mile scale maps indicate various villages, towns and cities within a country, which get special status because they were important enough to be included on 1:4,000,000 scale maps provided by Rand & McNally mapmakers in the 1950s.  This is as good an arbitrary measure as any, because it is not my arbitrary measure and R&M knew more about why to indicate some locations and not others than I could ever hope to know.

These locations get a special status with regards to my population numbers, my infrastructure and my geopolitical boundaries because they were so included ... even if they happen to be immediately adjacent to another town of equal or even larger size.  For example, Flekkefjord in Agder [Vest-Adger in modern times] is only 20 miles from Lyngdal, which appear to have been about the same size in the 1950s; but Flekkefjord has a much longer history and so it got chosen and Lyngdal didn't.

[An annoying thing about Flekkefjord came to my attention just two days ago.  I plotted the town along with hundreds of others in 2010; but as it turns out, I have it about 35 miles east of where the town actually is.  I most likely misread the latitude when I plotted the town, and am only learning this now.  This messes with a lot of details having to do with maps I posted just a week ago, as well as my infrastructure numbers ... but I just know I'm going to obsessively fix the error, even going to the point of reposting maps and adjusting those numbers, just because.  Damn it.]

I wrote on Wednesday that benefits do arise from towns ... and that references those specific towns that do appear on a 20-mile scale map.  Sometimes, they do.  Rarely.

Because the infrastructure calculation originates with these towns, they are bound to benefit from the distribution of more important hex types, which in turn are already accounted for.  It wouldn't make sense to give a settlement, just because it is a settlement, an extra benefit.  Therefore, I don't.  Usually.

But ... a population center is going to have a minimum level of coin associated with its existence; and occasionally a pre-assigned population center turns out to be in a type-5 or type-6 hex, because the population of that center is very small and it is somewhat remote.  Odda, in Hordaland, is an example (shown here in 6-mile hexes).  None of the surrounding hexes are especially settled; the land is rough and somewhat obscure, with Odda enjoying the benefit of having a lake on one side of its location and the Sorfjorden on the other.  The vision of the town is so pretty I feel I have to include a picture:

Most of the time, a pre-determined location like Odda winds up being on a body of water of some kind and I don't need to adjust its benefits by adding a coin.  Odda's one coin originates with its location on the coast and lake (no, it does not get two, it is still in a type-6 hex).  All of the non-wilderness hexes exist because Odda was noted on a map in 1952.

Now and then, however, I get a location that isn't ~ technically ~ located on a body of water or a river.  Voss, or Vossevangen, is about 40 miles north of Odda.  While it is located on a small body of water, the Vangsvatnet, this wasn't large enough to be noted on the 20-mile scale map ~ and like I said with the last post, you can't walk fifty feet in Norway without a risk of getting wet.  We have to draw the line somewhere on what is a sufficiently sized body of water to count as a coin benefit.  And yet Voss is clearly an important location regardless ... so the coin it doesn't get from water and wouldn't get from being in a more important hex, we grant because it is one of those Rand & McNally locations.

That's a lot of explanation for a very simple thing.  But as I thought about it, I saw so many angles for how I could be misunderstood, particularly in readers thinking that every important location ought to be granted a bonus coin, so that Odda should have two and not one ... the only rational approach was to explain it very carefully.

There is another point I'd like to make about towns that won't take quite as long.  The groups mechanic does create a number of type-1 to 4 hexes that don't have population centers at all, because they cluster around larger settlements like Stavanger and Bergen.  And because the benefit for hex type grants these 6-mile hexes with coins, my answer has been to posit that a town does exist in that hex.

Take this area around Bergen, for instance.  Bergen is the only pre-determined location for the area, but the distribution of hexes creates quite a number of type-2 to 7 hexes scattered over the islands and coastland.  The coast is so complicated that my eyes tend to cross when I look at this too intently.  There are five hexes, apart from Bergen, that have a coin benefit from being a type-1 to 4.  In those hexes, I've searched on google maps and turned up actual place names to act as the "designated location" in those hexes: Knarvik, Hosanger, Bruvik, Salhus and Glaevaer, all real places.

In game terms, these are real towns, indistinguishable from any pre-determined town that would be in a comparable hex.  Salhus, for example, would be larger than either Odda or Voss, with a great deal of industry and commerce, as indicated by its four coins.  But it is shown here as a brown circle rather than a black, as a reference to it being a satellite town of Bergen and not an original town showing on the 20-mile scale map.

The last benefits come from trade references ~ but before I get into that difficult subject, I'd like to bring some of this conversation back around to the players, and how they might address the problem of picking a hex to play in and establish themselves and their "estate."  We can talk about references, and about the scaled effects of multiple benefits, afterwards.

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Mapping Coins

I've written about this before, so I won't dwell, but I wanted to comment on the ground work the Kleivaland post provides for game play. The space is defined; the characters arrive looking for something, or on the way to their quest. The farmer offers vittles, the hunters can serve as guides; they tell some frightening urban-legend type stories about whatever the party might be interested in. It sets the scene for a tense encounter once the hex is crossed or more thoroughly explored. It gives the players a tactile place to return, perhaps so that they don't need to make their way fully back to town.

Intricate design allows an improvement in the game's texture; that is the reason to go gritty. It is the reason why there are not just two or three hex types, but many ~ which in turn are modified by the presence of hills, water, climate, proximity to civilization and so on.

Following up on yesterday's post, we have to talk about rivers and the presence of coins ... which I must admit has been the most elusive part of this design. For this, we'll need a hex that borders on a river ~ I'd like to pick a type-6 hex, simply to talk about an expansion beyond our concept of the type-7 already discussed.

This is a forest hex in Agder, on the Lygne river as shown. The hex receives 1F and 1H from the temperate forest, with 2F from being a type-6 hex. It also receives 1 coin symbol (1C) from being located on the Lygne river.

Should we expand the hex out into two mile hexes and build hexes, most likely we would produce a growing settlement producing a considerable amount of food, running along the river (not everything has to be random!), with some hunting as the forest will support one or two camps. In all, the hex produces enough for 21 single farms, 7x the previous type-7 hex. We can easily imagine there would be some small hamlet of 15-20 buildings here.

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Core Benefits

The next element I should clear up is how the type-7 hex in this post gets rated with 1 food and 1 hammer.  Opening with a caveat, this is a system with several versions that I've posted on the Tao of D&D, because I keep tweaking and adjusting it.  Please always know that a concept isn't the final word until it appears on the wiki ... and is then edited and changed on the wiki.  As long as I'm still talking about something on the blog, I'm still in "design mode."  The blog is the workshop; the wiki is the storefront.

Let's call food, hammers and coins "benefits."  6-mile hexes are assigned a symbol for each for a number of reasons: 1) the natural vegetation; 2) the hex type; 3) the presence of a significant river; 4) the established presence of a settlement, prior to mapping the 6-mile hex from its 20-mile hex predecessor; and 5) the presence of a trade reference, as part of my trade tables.  I'll need to explain these things before we can continue.

This image on the right describes a simple set of vegetations from which we can derive benefits.  The regions themselves, whether or not exploited, represent both a food source and a source for minerals and other raw materials; the assignment of hammers and food for these vegetations takes this into account.

Tundra, at the top, adds 1 hammer symbol per 6-mile hex (indicating the collection of minerals and other raw materials).  Boreal and Temperate forests add 1 hammer and 1 food.  Tropical forests are considered impractical sources for locating raw materials without clear cutting or development, so they only add 1 food.

Grassland provides the best possible benefit, granting 2 food symbols (as discussed in the previous post), as plentiful forage can be found in both plant life and large game.  There is not enough of the former in a Chaparral environment, reducing the benefit to 1 food.  Deserts provide no vegetation benefits.


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Binary Numbers

I feel presumptive writing this post ... and, I guess, I feel like I should apologize or something. This issue with binary numbers feels like an elephant in the room; I've never felt the matter was rightfully explained and I want to be clear about why I'm using them and how. So, spoiler alert, I'm going to write about very simple math ~ please feel free to skip this post. [There is a bit at the end that explains why I'm using binary numbers for my mapping].

In any case, the worst we're going to do is addition.

I'll begin with the obvious. We use a ten-based number system every day without much thought that the number of symbols, 0 through 9, are arbitrary. If we discarded the 9, there would be nine symbols remaining in what we would call a nine-based number system. The math we use everyday would be just the same ... but, admittedly, it would be weird.

Binary is a two-based number system, using only 0 and 1. Most talk about binary nowadays ends up being about computers, because a two-based system is perfect for a machine using electrical impulses ... but we don't have to talk about any of that. Suffice to say that the math in binary works like the math in the base-ten that we use.

When we see the number 123, we don't stop to think about it, but we're fairly clear that this is 100+20+3. It helps to think of this as three columns, as shown:

While some of you are having flashbacks to grade 9 math class, I'll take the next step and explain what happens when we add 123 to 869 ... the sort of thing that we do every day without a moment's hesitation. We begin by putting one number above the other, so the columns line up; then we start with the 1s column, adding 3 + 9 to get the product 12. We then divide the product by ten, putting the 1 in the 10's column and the 2 in the 1s column.

We don't think of it as dividing by ten. We do it so habitually that we just automatically divide the number 12 in half, putting the numbers where they belong, without a moment's thought. But we are dividing that product by ten.

The rest is clear. We add 2 + 6 + 1 (that we've added from the 1s column) which gives us 9. We write this in the 10s column. Then we add 1 + 8 to get 9, so that our final total is 992. And I'm sorry ~ I know this has to be old hat to most of us. But it's necessary we're all on the same page.

When we count in base 10, we count 1, 2, 3, 4 and so on. And this seems obvious too. But with binary numbers there is no 2 and no 3 or 4. So how do we count in binary? Well, how do we actually count in base-10?

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Mapping Food & Hammers

Our first step is to understand the mechanics of the image shown on the right. We have here an obscure 6-mile hex found in Rogaland, in an area of tundra (as indicated by the greenish-tan hex). The number indicates that this is a type-7 hex ... which means that while the hex has been settled, most of the hex is wilderness.

There are two other symbols beside the number: a single food and a single hammer.  The food originates with the settlement.  The hammer originates from the natural environment: because this is a tundra hex, there is a certain amount of raw material exploitation, most likely furs, timber or prospecting.  

Our agenda with this post is to get a firm handle on how much of this hex is settled and how much is wilderness; and to firmly understand how the symbols for food & hammers represent an amount of something being produced, and the number of people involved in producing it.  This will set a scale for more settled places with more elaborate results of production and the devising of a local economy.

First, as we've discussed before, let's expand the hex above into a 2-mile representation, that will provide us with more information.  This helps if we want to take a fairly empty part of our world and expand it rationally so that the players can relate the larger map to something that is more detailed.

I have had a fair amount of practice with this, but in truth it is a matter of copy/pasting a few hill icons, adjusting the colors and postulating some hex characteristics for interest's sake.  Here I've depicted the full 6-mile hex separated into its 2-mile components.  I rolled randomly using my generator 3.0 to determine the one settled hex would be in the east, the one lightly coloured hex among the other tundra hexes.  The low hills are put in for flavour, but in fact you may imagine the landscape being open, bare rock, small pockets of marshy pits and holes, with small stands of forest pine throughout.  Oh, and I added renditions of locale lakes based on their Rogaland counterparts, with a big one on the south edge of the settled hex, to give more interest.  I've named this small area of the world Kleivaland (an actual town that is quite close to the location of the hex).  A game version doesn't have to be pretty, it just has to be something the players can relate to.


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Estate Mechanics: a Fresh Start

The further I get into any system of estate mechanics (and yes, still thinking and working on this, but slowly), I grow more conscious of the necessity to balance what can be reasonably worked out in game terms without an elaborate program.  All while providing a game experience that will appeal to savvy players.

Regarding the latter.  We have all encountered mountains of game fixes and gamified features in role-playing games ~ and gawd help us, in video games as well ~ that simply failed to grab our imagination. In some cases, we've made these fixes ourselves. While at the outset they seem to manage the problem, after a few uses they've worn out their welcome. An estate management system shouldn't just solve the problem of where the money goes ... it should provide context and purpose, that itself feeds the adventuring spirit. We're not looking for a cheap mini-game or a side quest of "let's build a town." We're looking to create an ongoing, interesting, adventuring companion, where what happens on the estate affects the player's game choices, and where the player's game choices affects the estate.

In the past, I have run such a campaign piecemeal, fitting in as much detail as the players seemed to expect or want. This I did with my offline party, and then again with the Senex campaign when they arrived at Koufonisia. But the latter exposed the inefficiencies of my former strategy, particularly in a venue where numbers can't be calculated in real time on a mutually observable surface.

It is a challenge, then, to create a system that fits a greater requirement than I would need myself: to not only build something that I can use, but that others can also use, especially if I am not there to show them how. Seeing this, I've been moving slowly on how to approach the problem, with an eye to providing solutions that will create fascination and not just accounting.

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