Yes, I know, the posts with the math haven't been terribly interesting. I have a friend who believes that while he likes it, no one else will...and the comments line clearly directs that.
I just can't post about artwork, however. Artwork and D&D that is. It seems strange that nearly every blog about D&D that I've come across seems to post regularly about the artwork, and I have no idea why.
Don't get me wrong. I like art. I can wax poetic about it. I'm more likely to talk about Turner and Botticelli, or the Group of Seven, or Gainsborough...or the many interest artistic developments in the field of pornography. But fantasy artwork? No, not too much.
I grew up around a great many artists who produced artwork leaning towards the elves and fairies and large castles and big burly fighters tearing the heads off other things. Very impressive. I couldn't match their efforts. But not particularly interesting to me. Didn't expand my consciousness, if you get what I mean.
I can't remember one conversation about art in D&D in twenty years of playing that didn't end within about three minutes. Have you seen this pic? Yeah, not bad. Yeah, I liked it. End of conversation.
So, why so much time spent on blogs? I guess they've run out of things to talk about. Or they don't want to post about their worlds for copyright reasons.
Me, I'm happy to go on about math. Oh, sure, its a limited appeal. I don't pretend to have the handle on what appeals to the blogosphere...I have never had much in common with it. But I will babble away about my systems and then move on to other things. Things about my world. Things about actually playing D&D.
Not pictures.
Baffling. Some kind of softcore pornography for I don't understand who...
Monday, July 7, 2008
Friday, July 4, 2008
Commodities List part I
At this point, the most useful thing I could provide would be a list of the products I include in my economy. I’ll list off the main heading and its corresponding components…the system is flexible enough that, if at some future point, I want to divide the components and consider them main products, I’m able to do that.
Starting with:
This is merely a list of those cities at which products are gathered and sold to the public. All the markets in a particular province are combined for the purpose of exports. For an example, I use Bohemia, which has 8 market references (names are Medieval): Budweis (1), Pardubitz (1), Pilsen (2), Prague (1), Reichenberg (1), Tetschen (1) and Usti (1). Note that Prague was, historically, a cultural and religious center, not a financial one. However, with eight references, the overall kingdom of Bohemia is a substantial trading center.
That’s pretty self explanatory. There are other gem types, it is only that in the part of the world that I have worked on, these are the gems that I have locations for their production.
There are a lot of individual varieties in this category. I like to supply varying examples, particularly the cheeses, liquors and wines. It is a bit annoying, and the players rarely seem to notice, but nevertheless…
Probably the section I hate the very, very most. And do you think characters care that they can buy their particular doublet in wool, velvet, serge, damask or mohair? Don’t count on it.
There may be some who dispute the inclusion of paper under wood…my world takes place in 1650, and some technologies had developed wood for paper. I believe that in a world with magic, it would be likely they would have made this step up from parchment…besides, if I were to use parchment from animal skins instead of wood, the cost of spellbooks would be prohibitive.
I have seven other tables: Alchemy, Building Materials, Metals and Metalwork, Crops, Fruits & Vegetables, Livestock and Fish…which I promise I will publish. But this has been tiresome up until now and I think I’ll stop for today.
Starting with:
Trade: banking, markets.
This is merely a list of those cities at which products are gathered and sold to the public. All the markets in a particular province are combined for the purpose of exports. For an example, I use Bohemia, which has 8 market references (names are Medieval): Budweis (1), Pardubitz (1), Pilsen (2), Prague (1), Reichenberg (1), Tetschen (1) and Usti (1). Note that Prague was, historically, a cultural and religious center, not a financial one. However, with eight references, the overall kingdom of Bohemia is a substantial trading center.
Ores & Minerals:
Adamantite
Antimony
Bismuth
Cadmium
Chromium
Cobalt
Copper
Gold
Iron
Lead
Manganese
Mercury
Mithril
Molybdenum
Nickel
Platinum
Silver
Tin
Tungsten
Zinc
Abrasives: emery, pumice
Alum
Arsenic
Stone cutting
Chalk: chalk, meerschaum, phosphorus
Coal
Granite: artyk, tufa, basalt, brownstone, granite, porphyry, syenite, sandstone
Guano
Kaolin
Limestone: dolomite, limestone
Marble: alabaster, marble (varying colors)
Niter
Obsidian
Peat
Salt
Slate
Sulphur
Witherite
Agate
Cat's Eyes
Greenstone
Lapis Lazuli
Moonstone
Mother-of-Pearl
Quartz
Turquoise
Alexandrite
Amber
Amethyst
Coral
Garnet
Jade
Pearls
Spinel
Corundum
Emeralds
Diamonds
Rubies
Sapphires
Gemcutting
That’s pretty self explanatory. There are other gem types, it is only that in the part of the world that I have worked on, these are the gems that I have locations for their production.
Foodstuffs:
Brewing
Caviar
Confectionary: chocolate, candy, edible bird’s nests, peppermint, treacle
Copra
Milk: cream, milk, kumiss
Butter: butter, ghee
Cheese: gruyere, gorgonzola, parmesan, ewe’s milk, others
Distilling: arak (date), arrack (coconut), brandywine, cognac, kirschwasser, plum brandy, sake, strega, whiskey, others
Flour: bread, cakes, noodles, oatmeal, yeast
Dried fruit: various fruits, prunes, raisins
Malt
Meat: beef, lamb, meat, mutton, pork, poultry, eggs, yak’s tail
Dried meat: various meats, bacon, sausage
Dried or smoked fish
Vegetable oils: lard, castor oil, citronella, coconut oil, cottonseed oil, linseed oil, olive oil, peanut oil, sesame seed oil, soybean oil, sunflower seed oil, tung oil, vegetable oil
Whale or fish oil
Opium
Qat
Snuff
Sugar: cane sugar, beet sugar, starch
Wine: champagne, vinegar, wine, marsala, asti spumante, beaujolais, others
There are a lot of individual varieties in this category. I like to supply varying examples, particularly the cheeses, liquors and wines. It is a bit annoying, and the players rarely seem to notice, but nevertheless…
Fabrics
Pelts: ermine, fox, lynx, otter, sable, snow leopard, wolf and lesser pelts
Fur Clothing
Spinning, Carding or Fulling
Embroidery
Artwork
General tailoring: gloves, hats, robes, sacks, shawls, much more…I don’t separate this out until the equipment list
Cotton, raw
Cotton cloth: flannel, jersey, muslin
Cotton goods
Flax, raw
Linen cloth: canvas, damask, lace, linen, sailcloth
Linen goods
Rough fibers: hemp, jute, kapok, kenaf, kendyr, ramie
Rough fiber cloth
Fiber goods: hemp goods, nets, rope, twine
Silk, raw
Silk cloth: pongee, satin, pure silk
Silk goods
Wool: angora, camelhair, karakul, mohair, llamahair, vicunahair, sheep’s wool
Wool cloth: felt, mohair cloth, plush, velvet, wool cloth, serge
Carpets: floor covering, tapestries
Woolen goods: felt hats, ribbon, blankets, tents, more
Skins: bearskin, goatskin, kid leather, leopardskin, tigerskin, sealskin, sheepskin, snakeskin
Hides
Leathercraft: boots, moroccan leather goods, saddles, sandles, coats, more
Probably the section I hate the very, very most. And do you think characters care that they can buy their particular doublet in wool, velvet, serge, damask or mohair? Don’t count on it.
Wood
Charcoal
Construction, general: carpentry, water wheels, windmills, looms, presses…represents the general service of construction, not to the wood itself
Mastics: asafoetida, gum arabic, gum benzoin, tragacanth, jelutong, resin
Thatch: baskets, coir, mats, rattan, straw goods, thatch roofing
Musical instruments: cellos, drums, church organs, violins (I consider this the cost for fabrication, so I apply it also to metals, bone, ivory or whatever an instrument can be made from)
Broadleaved woods: acacia, bamboo, beech, birch, blackwood, boxwood, carobwood, chestnut, cinchona, cork, cryptomeria, ebony, eucalyptus, ironwood, lac, laurel, oak, palms, rattan, rosewood, sal, satinwood, tamarisk, teak
Coniferous woods: fir, cedar, cypress, larch, pine, spruce
Farm tools: ploughs, general wooden tools
Wagons: wheels, carriages, carts, wagons
Watercraft: barges, dhows, boats, ships
Carved goods: bonecarving, horncarving, dolls, toys
Furnishings: barrels, buckets, coffins, furniture, veneer, more
Aromatic woods: aloe, camphor, frankincense, mistletoe, myrrh, sandlewood, teak oil, wood oil
Paper: paper, papyrus
Paper Goods: bookbinding, paper fans, manuscripts, paper lanterns, papier-mache, parasols, playing cards
There may be some who dispute the inclusion of paper under wood…my world takes place in 1650, and some technologies had developed wood for paper. I believe that in a world with magic, it would be likely they would have made this step up from parchment…besides, if I were to use parchment from animal skins instead of wood, the cost of spellbooks would be prohibitive.
I have seven other tables: Alchemy, Building Materials, Metals and Metalwork, Crops, Fruits & Vegetables, Livestock and Fish…which I promise I will publish. But this has been tiresome up until now and I think I’ll stop for today.
Thursday, July 3, 2008
Haulage
The greatest influence on the price of anything is the cost of transporting that item from point A to point B. In the modern world, we have very little sense of the cost involved, because the price of transportation is profoundly cheap in comparison with that of the medieval or ancient world. Often, scholars tend to see through a poor lens when making estimates for the cost of haulage, because, for the most part, the only scholars who care very much about such things are historians—who have little experience with the science of economics (trust me, I’ve known a lot of historians).
I am no herald for the genius of economists; “head up ass” is standard operating procedure for that crew…but when discussing economics it helps to go to the books and find out how it’s done. The transportation system I use is based on a fairly simplistic economic dictum, a fairly inaccurate one because it does not take into account a vast array of influences. For economists, it is where you start. For me and my world, it is simplistic enough to work without hopelessly bogging me down into details that I haven’t a long enough life to solve.
It works this way:
Viewing the above, not to scale diagram, we have cities A, B and C and the distance between them. This distance can represent whatever unit you care to apply—a mile, twenty miles or a day’s travel. I use, for my purposes, the time it takes for a wagon to travel a distance of 20 miles—which, over a level distance paved by a good road, is approximately one day.
The system argues that the availability of an article imported into City A from City B is equal to the availability of that article in City B divided by the distance between the two cities. In other words, if City B produces 5,000 tons of wheat, the availability of wheat in City A will be equal to 2,500 tons. This does not mean that the actual amount of wheat in City A is 2,500 tons, or that the actual amount in City B is 5,000 tons (together that would be more wheat than City B produces). This is a representational total, to give a comparison in the value of wheat between cities A and B.
So, wheat is twice as costly (200%) in City A as it is only half as available.
What if City C also produces 5,000 tons of wheat?
Here is where things get a little complicated. City C’s availability of wheat continues to be 5,000 tons, but economically we also add 1,250 tons from City B (divided by 4 for distance). City B also totals out at 6,250 tons, after adding a quarter of City C. City A gets half of City B and 1/5th of City C, equaling a total of 3,500 tons.
Between importing from both of the other cities, City A has improved its supply in comparison with the other cities very slightly…the price is now about 179% (6,250/3,500).
Suppose, however, that City A also produces 1,000 tons of wheat. Re-evaluating the above calculations, we now have:
City A: 4,500 tons. Price: 150%.
City B: 6,750 tons. Price: 100%.
City C: 6,450 tons. Price: 105%.
Thus, the manor lord selling his excess grain in City A is able to sell it at 150% of the price that a manor lord in City B, because he is able to anticipate how much it will cost to ship in extra wheat from the other two cities.
Of course, each city may have different population levels, meaning a lower demand for wheat; and if you like, you can apply the same economic rule to the population of the three cities to discover how much inter-travel there exists between them (remember, City B and City A will likely share a greater percentage of casual labor between them, as they are only two days apart).
The above example is as simple as it gets. Establishing an economic system of your own, you could simply divide the world into four or six or eight different regions (depending on how much work you want to do), make a judgment call on how difficult it is to move material from one region to another, and there you go: an economic system. From something as simple as that, you would have a reasonable idea of what the ship the party was plundering OUGHT to be carrying, beyond making an ad hoc call about it. You could also, from the numbers I provided yesterday, make a reasonable estimate of the total income of any of the kingdoms of your world, and how unlikely they would be to succeed at a war with a neighboring kingdom…or how much they might dearly require help from a powerful mage and his buddies, vis-a-vis, the party.
With a little imagination, there are a number of facts you could interpret from the manner in which your kingdoms interacted with one another economically. What is the shortest distance of travel? Where ought there to be a trading point or an entrepot for the collection of goods before moving on to the next market? What countries would establish tariffs, and upon what goods? Where would smuggling actually make sense?
These are all questions that DMs usually answer by effectively pointing randomly at a map and saying: “there.” Which helps create the completely confusing and irrational world that raises the eyebrows of the smartest member of your party. It is the same as the player asking, “Why is that castle there?” Only the question is, “Why would they be smuggling tobacco into a tropical country?”
For myself, I have about 500 designated trading centers, based on the City A, City B and City C example above. That means 500 different calculations on the price of all the individual commodities…approximately 140,000 calculations every time I want to determine the actual value of traded goods in a given city. I would like to say a computer does these calculations, but in fact only some of them are. And there are several steps involved. Thankfully, it does not take me too long…three hours or so…to produce a new table. It would take me much, much less, but I’m a lousy programmer.
I am no herald for the genius of economists; “head up ass” is standard operating procedure for that crew…but when discussing economics it helps to go to the books and find out how it’s done. The transportation system I use is based on a fairly simplistic economic dictum, a fairly inaccurate one because it does not take into account a vast array of influences. For economists, it is where you start. For me and my world, it is simplistic enough to work without hopelessly bogging me down into details that I haven’t a long enough life to solve.
It works this way:
Viewing the above, not to scale diagram, we have cities A, B and C and the distance between them. This distance can represent whatever unit you care to apply—a mile, twenty miles or a day’s travel. I use, for my purposes, the time it takes for a wagon to travel a distance of 20 miles—which, over a level distance paved by a good road, is approximately one day.
The system argues that the availability of an article imported into City A from City B is equal to the availability of that article in City B divided by the distance between the two cities. In other words, if City B produces 5,000 tons of wheat, the availability of wheat in City A will be equal to 2,500 tons. This does not mean that the actual amount of wheat in City A is 2,500 tons, or that the actual amount in City B is 5,000 tons (together that would be more wheat than City B produces). This is a representational total, to give a comparison in the value of wheat between cities A and B.
So, wheat is twice as costly (200%) in City A as it is only half as available.
What if City C also produces 5,000 tons of wheat?
Here is where things get a little complicated. City C’s availability of wheat continues to be 5,000 tons, but economically we also add 1,250 tons from City B (divided by 4 for distance). City B also totals out at 6,250 tons, after adding a quarter of City C. City A gets half of City B and 1/5th of City C, equaling a total of 3,500 tons.
Between importing from both of the other cities, City A has improved its supply in comparison with the other cities very slightly…the price is now about 179% (6,250/3,500).
Suppose, however, that City A also produces 1,000 tons of wheat. Re-evaluating the above calculations, we now have:
City A: 4,500 tons. Price: 150%.
City B: 6,750 tons. Price: 100%.
City C: 6,450 tons. Price: 105%.
Thus, the manor lord selling his excess grain in City A is able to sell it at 150% of the price that a manor lord in City B, because he is able to anticipate how much it will cost to ship in extra wheat from the other two cities.
Of course, each city may have different population levels, meaning a lower demand for wheat; and if you like, you can apply the same economic rule to the population of the three cities to discover how much inter-travel there exists between them (remember, City B and City A will likely share a greater percentage of casual labor between them, as they are only two days apart).
The above example is as simple as it gets. Establishing an economic system of your own, you could simply divide the world into four or six or eight different regions (depending on how much work you want to do), make a judgment call on how difficult it is to move material from one region to another, and there you go: an economic system. From something as simple as that, you would have a reasonable idea of what the ship the party was plundering OUGHT to be carrying, beyond making an ad hoc call about it. You could also, from the numbers I provided yesterday, make a reasonable estimate of the total income of any of the kingdoms of your world, and how unlikely they would be to succeed at a war with a neighboring kingdom…or how much they might dearly require help from a powerful mage and his buddies, vis-a-vis, the party.
With a little imagination, there are a number of facts you could interpret from the manner in which your kingdoms interacted with one another economically. What is the shortest distance of travel? Where ought there to be a trading point or an entrepot for the collection of goods before moving on to the next market? What countries would establish tariffs, and upon what goods? Where would smuggling actually make sense?
These are all questions that DMs usually answer by effectively pointing randomly at a map and saying: “there.” Which helps create the completely confusing and irrational world that raises the eyebrows of the smartest member of your party. It is the same as the player asking, “Why is that castle there?” Only the question is, “Why would they be smuggling tobacco into a tropical country?”
For myself, I have about 500 designated trading centers, based on the City A, City B and City C example above. That means 500 different calculations on the price of all the individual commodities…approximately 140,000 calculations every time I want to determine the actual value of traded goods in a given city. I would like to say a computer does these calculations, but in fact only some of them are. And there are several steps involved. Thankfully, it does not take me too long…three hours or so…to produce a new table. It would take me much, much less, but I’m a lousy programmer.
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Values
I last left off where I had a system for the location of produced goods and services, and I had a total production number which—admittedly—was an estimate. However, a fairly reasonable estimate from everything I’ve read: the number for iron ore production, for example—this is iron content, mind, not the total weight of the rock in which the iron is found—came to 5 million tons per year. Which is an unimaginable number for most D&D worlds…but mine has an estimated population of well over 200 million (it should be close to a billion by the time I’m finished adding China and India). Plus, 5 million divided into 600 “references”, or mining zones if you like, is 8,300 tons per zone, or 23 tons per day for each…a quite reasonable number.
If you were working from your world, in reverse, you could designate the areas that would be iron producing and thus have a reasonable production estimate…useful if your players decided to do some mining. You can get ore to metal ratios from the internet, to see how much total rock would need to be extracted.
How does this, however, translate into a price?
One of the products that I have references for and a production total for is, of course, gold. 149 references for 312,000 ounces production yearly. It would be nice to think that one could simply compare the iron to gold, that 78 million tons of iron was equal to 312,000 ounces of gold—but I will tell you right off, that will not work. No matter how much you fuck around with it.
For one thing, all the iron in the world is not actually equal in value to all the gold in the world. The two may seem to have something to do with each other, on the surface, but they don’t. If gold did not exist at all, iron would still somehow be traded for food and for wood at the same basic rate that it’s worth defines…that is, the demand for the substance. While one might think that the availability of gold coin should somehow help define that worth…it just isn’t so.
Part of the economic problem in comparing one commodity to another is that in many parts of the world people just get along without it. While gold may be useful as currency, many cultures only use it for jewelry (not having currency as part of their social structure); yet these cultures continue to have economies, based often on community property but not always.
I experimented at length comparing commodities, attempting to use food as a base rather than gold, on the argument that everyone must eat food—but sadly, you wind up with a rather random collection of figures that just don’t represent a working economy.
Another problem I had was with any system that based the value of things strictly on their availability. If you divided that availability into whatever standard you’re using (capital, population, what have you), then things that are very rare and not immediately found nearby will have prices that are ridiculously inflated. Fine, I thought to myself when I first started…rubies should be very expensive in Germany, where no mined rubies are to be found.
However, the same principle must be applied to, say, sea slugs…which no self-respecting German would pay excessive amounts for. So I thought, put a ceiling on the value of goods; above this ceiling, it is either unavailable, or it doesn’t cost more than blank. But what is blank?
And what about obviously cheap things that I did not find many references for, simply because by and large they are not seen as particularly commercial: like thatch, or straw hats? Should they be inordinately expensive? Of course not.
The system that worked used the following logic: if a commodity is mentioned often by my source, then that commodity must have an inherent value proportionally higher than something that is not mentioned often. Thus, if iron ore is mentioned 600 times, and ostrich feathers are mentioned twice, then all the ostrich feathers in the world are worth—base worth only, please—one three hundredth part of all the iron ore in the world.
This may seem ad hoc. Believe me, it works fabulously. All the more so when you remember I have over 19,000 references (I’ve been adding France lately, which should bring this total to over 22,000). Which means—follow the logic, please—that the total value of EVERYTHING is equal to 19,000/600 * the value of iron.
From this assumption, I’m able to calculate the value of any commodity in the location of its development…that is, before transportation costs are added.
What this means for a world for which someone would want to make an economy from scratch is this: begin with the total population of your world, and compare it with Earth. This will give you a working model for the production figures you need.
Designate then the total number of points you wish to assign to each region in your world (I call the points references, but you can call them whatever you like). Kingdom A has 20 points of iron production, Kingdom B has 40 points, Kingdom C has 10 points. The specific locations of these points can be assigned later; it’s best to think only in terms of the big picture. Wherever you assign a lesser number of points, the value of the particular commodity will be higher.
Choose a base monetary unit that can be used to represent the value of said commodity. I use gold pieces, but food or copper will do just as well. To calculate the value of the commodity in a particular region, begin first with this formula:
The total value of all the world’s production of the commodity is equal to the total of your chosen commodity divided by the number of “points”, multiplied by the number of “points” of the commodity. I'll just go ahead and use gold.
Let’s say you have assigned 35 points to the production of gold, and 70 points to the production of iron ore. And you have decided on 175,000 ounces of gold produced worldwide. 175,000 / 35 = 5,000 oz. per point…multiplied against the 70 points you’ve assigned to iron ore, all the iron in your world is worth 350,000 oz. of gold. Simple.
Formula 2: Base price = Total world value / production.
If the total production of iron in your world is (conveniently), 5 million tons, then 350,000 oz. gold / 5,000,000 tons equals 0.07 oz./ton.
This sounds like very little, particularly using the old AD&D system that a g.p. is one tenth of a pound. In fact, a gold piece typically weighed about a quarter of an ounce (7 grams)…which sets the price of our iron now at approximately 3.5 tons = 1 g.p. (ignoring, for the moment, that a minted coin would be worth more than its gold content). Using the AD&D standard of 200 c.p. per g.p., the price of raw, unprocessed iron would be 1 c.p. = 35 pounds.
Of course, this is your system; you’re free to muck around with the numbers as you see fit. Since I’m using the system to reflect the earth as closely as possible, I wound up with a figure that 1 stone of unprocessed iron ore (16 lbs.) equals 6.1 copper pieces.
This doesn’t reflect the final cost, however…I haven’t spoken yet about the services required to transform that iron ore into worked metal. By my system, a piece of ironmongery totals out at 14.1 c.p. per pound. That is, it does in Transylvania…specifically in the town of Kronstadt, the modern city of Brasov, nearest trading town to my player’s land.
Before I can get into any discussion of services, I must get into the subject of transportation…and how that changes all the numbers.
I hope people can follow the logic thus far.
If you were working from your world, in reverse, you could designate the areas that would be iron producing and thus have a reasonable production estimate…useful if your players decided to do some mining. You can get ore to metal ratios from the internet, to see how much total rock would need to be extracted.
How does this, however, translate into a price?
One of the products that I have references for and a production total for is, of course, gold. 149 references for 312,000 ounces production yearly. It would be nice to think that one could simply compare the iron to gold, that 78 million tons of iron was equal to 312,000 ounces of gold—but I will tell you right off, that will not work. No matter how much you fuck around with it.
For one thing, all the iron in the world is not actually equal in value to all the gold in the world. The two may seem to have something to do with each other, on the surface, but they don’t. If gold did not exist at all, iron would still somehow be traded for food and for wood at the same basic rate that it’s worth defines…that is, the demand for the substance. While one might think that the availability of gold coin should somehow help define that worth…it just isn’t so.
Part of the economic problem in comparing one commodity to another is that in many parts of the world people just get along without it. While gold may be useful as currency, many cultures only use it for jewelry (not having currency as part of their social structure); yet these cultures continue to have economies, based often on community property but not always.
I experimented at length comparing commodities, attempting to use food as a base rather than gold, on the argument that everyone must eat food—but sadly, you wind up with a rather random collection of figures that just don’t represent a working economy.
Another problem I had was with any system that based the value of things strictly on their availability. If you divided that availability into whatever standard you’re using (capital, population, what have you), then things that are very rare and not immediately found nearby will have prices that are ridiculously inflated. Fine, I thought to myself when I first started…rubies should be very expensive in Germany, where no mined rubies are to be found.
However, the same principle must be applied to, say, sea slugs…which no self-respecting German would pay excessive amounts for. So I thought, put a ceiling on the value of goods; above this ceiling, it is either unavailable, or it doesn’t cost more than blank. But what is blank?
And what about obviously cheap things that I did not find many references for, simply because by and large they are not seen as particularly commercial: like thatch, or straw hats? Should they be inordinately expensive? Of course not.
The system that worked used the following logic: if a commodity is mentioned often by my source, then that commodity must have an inherent value proportionally higher than something that is not mentioned often. Thus, if iron ore is mentioned 600 times, and ostrich feathers are mentioned twice, then all the ostrich feathers in the world are worth—base worth only, please—one three hundredth part of all the iron ore in the world.
This may seem ad hoc. Believe me, it works fabulously. All the more so when you remember I have over 19,000 references (I’ve been adding France lately, which should bring this total to over 22,000). Which means—follow the logic, please—that the total value of EVERYTHING is equal to 19,000/600 * the value of iron.
From this assumption, I’m able to calculate the value of any commodity in the location of its development…that is, before transportation costs are added.
What this means for a world for which someone would want to make an economy from scratch is this: begin with the total population of your world, and compare it with Earth. This will give you a working model for the production figures you need.
Designate then the total number of points you wish to assign to each region in your world (I call the points references, but you can call them whatever you like). Kingdom A has 20 points of iron production, Kingdom B has 40 points, Kingdom C has 10 points. The specific locations of these points can be assigned later; it’s best to think only in terms of the big picture. Wherever you assign a lesser number of points, the value of the particular commodity will be higher.
Choose a base monetary unit that can be used to represent the value of said commodity. I use gold pieces, but food or copper will do just as well. To calculate the value of the commodity in a particular region, begin first with this formula:
The total value of all the world’s production of the commodity is equal to the total of your chosen commodity divided by the number of “points”, multiplied by the number of “points” of the commodity. I'll just go ahead and use gold.
Let’s say you have assigned 35 points to the production of gold, and 70 points to the production of iron ore. And you have decided on 175,000 ounces of gold produced worldwide. 175,000 / 35 = 5,000 oz. per point…multiplied against the 70 points you’ve assigned to iron ore, all the iron in your world is worth 350,000 oz. of gold. Simple.
Formula 2: Base price = Total world value / production.
If the total production of iron in your world is (conveniently), 5 million tons, then 350,000 oz. gold / 5,000,000 tons equals 0.07 oz./ton.
This sounds like very little, particularly using the old AD&D system that a g.p. is one tenth of a pound. In fact, a gold piece typically weighed about a quarter of an ounce (7 grams)…which sets the price of our iron now at approximately 3.5 tons = 1 g.p. (ignoring, for the moment, that a minted coin would be worth more than its gold content). Using the AD&D standard of 200 c.p. per g.p., the price of raw, unprocessed iron would be 1 c.p. = 35 pounds.
Of course, this is your system; you’re free to muck around with the numbers as you see fit. Since I’m using the system to reflect the earth as closely as possible, I wound up with a figure that 1 stone of unprocessed iron ore (16 lbs.) equals 6.1 copper pieces.
This doesn’t reflect the final cost, however…I haven’t spoken yet about the services required to transform that iron ore into worked metal. By my system, a piece of ironmongery totals out at 14.1 c.p. per pound. That is, it does in Transylvania…specifically in the town of Kronstadt, the modern city of Brasov, nearest trading town to my player’s land.
Before I can get into any discussion of services, I must get into the subject of transportation…and how that changes all the numbers.
I hope people can follow the logic thus far.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Random Good
At this point, any rational person has stopped reading, but I’m going to continue anyway. It was never my intention that a simple trade system would become central to my world’s design, but once I got going I began to see how it functionally defined a great deal.
All of what I’m describing here is invisible in my world. My players see an equipment list—that’s it. They get pieces of treasure, they ask me what they can sell them for, I give them an answer. They see no tired figures, no ground out complicated tables, nothing along those lines. It takes up no more time in the campaign than a regular equipment table would.
Except — when recently one of my players acquired title to a few hundred square miles of Transylvania, it took me about twenty minutes to figure out down to the last copper how much income the land earned…and how much of what raw materials were present.
But I don’t think others will buy the concept; we don’t see the game through the same eyes. I don’t design adventures, I don’t write up scripts for NPCs to read to parties (I make them up in my head on the spur of the moment), I don’t waste hours drawing dungeon maps (easier to simply produce one on the spot) and I don’t try to produce a story climax with a guaranteed big payoff. My players wander like will o’wisps, going off on larks or digging in and piling their cash into fortifications as they wish. Each player has three different characters they run (henchmen of the main character), so that they can play episodes surrounding their lands or go off plundering as they desire. I’m ready to run whatever particular campaign they want, on the spur of the moment, because the deeper groundwork is laid.
I know what a hobgoblin lair or a dragon lair will look like, in my head, so why draw them out? I put traps in as necessary, though they’re fairly rare, which makes it easier to catch a party by surprise. I only have to have the trap in mind fifteen minutes ahead of the party, and I’m creative enough I can usually think of something that takes advantage of the local color without being the same tired old thing.
See, I just don’t see the problem with random that the books all seem to rail against. Random encounters are boring, I’m told. I don’t get it. While the fundamental design of my world is rational to intense levels, on the surface it is played out to be as irrational as possible. Reality is not about every facet of an environment conveniently focused on one goal. It’s so much more fun to throw in additional conditions which have nothing whatsoever to do with the goal. That’s what random is all about. Fucking with parties.
I’m told that this bothers parties, annoys them, frustrates them. Uh huh. Yeah. What exactly is wrong with that? If they’re trying to enter the city which is under siege, and avoiding the orc armies planted around the city walls, with their foraging groups combing the back country for food, what is wrong with throwing in a completely neutral roper who is annoyed with all the ongoing activity, who beats the party down a few hit points just before a squadron of haruchai fly overhead on hippogriffs, whom the party is able to slaughter in time to get undercover and avoid the thunderstorm which is rolling through by ducking into a cave, where they find a party of fifty gypsies hiding out, who are not too keen on letting the party leave because they’re worried about being found, so that the party must reassure them or bribe them or slaughter them, in the last case finding a blessed sword whose paladin owner from Kursk has been seeking obsessively and has been unable to find because the gypsies had a continuous spell going to hide it, which the party couldn’t possibly know about and who is about to jump up in his bed four hundred miles away when his henchmen rushes in to say the sword is found—none of which has anything to do with the reasons for the party actually wanting to enter into the city, but will come up later at the most inopportune moment when the party is trying to get some minor minister to allow their ship out of the harbor in another adventure ten runnings hence.
Random equals boring? In whose world?
I love throwing this shit together on a regular basis, rewarding the party when it manages to deal with a mess intelligently or bravely, bringing as much brunt to bear when they screw up. I don’t see it in terms of “hooks” or “payoffs”…but in terms of one great miasma of interlocking motivations held by dozens of local factions striving for their personal piece of the pie. There is no villain, there is no good guy…there are only hundreds of squalling, scrambling contestants elbowing each other out of the way for the glory or the loot.
Sure, there are moments when a party manages to do something significant: reuniting a daughter with her supernatural father or getting one of their own out of a small corner of hell…but these things are fixed moments that occur because the party decided to pursue that purpose as opposed to some other. It must be this way if the party is to have any decision of their own destiny.
Random, in fact, equals freedom. Because established, formulated adventure design demands that the party plays the actors in the DMs production. I hate that sort of D&D. I hate that it has become the only sort out there.
So if I do seem a little mundane, talking about 19,000 references in an encyclopedia compared to production totals out of an industrial yearbook, don’t confuse that thinking with the way things happen during my sessions. Things do not always fit together in linear fashion.
All of what I’m describing here is invisible in my world. My players see an equipment list—that’s it. They get pieces of treasure, they ask me what they can sell them for, I give them an answer. They see no tired figures, no ground out complicated tables, nothing along those lines. It takes up no more time in the campaign than a regular equipment table would.
Except — when recently one of my players acquired title to a few hundred square miles of Transylvania, it took me about twenty minutes to figure out down to the last copper how much income the land earned…and how much of what raw materials were present.
But I don’t think others will buy the concept; we don’t see the game through the same eyes. I don’t design adventures, I don’t write up scripts for NPCs to read to parties (I make them up in my head on the spur of the moment), I don’t waste hours drawing dungeon maps (easier to simply produce one on the spot) and I don’t try to produce a story climax with a guaranteed big payoff. My players wander like will o’wisps, going off on larks or digging in and piling their cash into fortifications as they wish. Each player has three different characters they run (henchmen of the main character), so that they can play episodes surrounding their lands or go off plundering as they desire. I’m ready to run whatever particular campaign they want, on the spur of the moment, because the deeper groundwork is laid.
I know what a hobgoblin lair or a dragon lair will look like, in my head, so why draw them out? I put traps in as necessary, though they’re fairly rare, which makes it easier to catch a party by surprise. I only have to have the trap in mind fifteen minutes ahead of the party, and I’m creative enough I can usually think of something that takes advantage of the local color without being the same tired old thing.
See, I just don’t see the problem with random that the books all seem to rail against. Random encounters are boring, I’m told. I don’t get it. While the fundamental design of my world is rational to intense levels, on the surface it is played out to be as irrational as possible. Reality is not about every facet of an environment conveniently focused on one goal. It’s so much more fun to throw in additional conditions which have nothing whatsoever to do with the goal. That’s what random is all about. Fucking with parties.
I’m told that this bothers parties, annoys them, frustrates them. Uh huh. Yeah. What exactly is wrong with that? If they’re trying to enter the city which is under siege, and avoiding the orc armies planted around the city walls, with their foraging groups combing the back country for food, what is wrong with throwing in a completely neutral roper who is annoyed with all the ongoing activity, who beats the party down a few hit points just before a squadron of haruchai fly overhead on hippogriffs, whom the party is able to slaughter in time to get undercover and avoid the thunderstorm which is rolling through by ducking into a cave, where they find a party of fifty gypsies hiding out, who are not too keen on letting the party leave because they’re worried about being found, so that the party must reassure them or bribe them or slaughter them, in the last case finding a blessed sword whose paladin owner from Kursk has been seeking obsessively and has been unable to find because the gypsies had a continuous spell going to hide it, which the party couldn’t possibly know about and who is about to jump up in his bed four hundred miles away when his henchmen rushes in to say the sword is found—none of which has anything to do with the reasons for the party actually wanting to enter into the city, but will come up later at the most inopportune moment when the party is trying to get some minor minister to allow their ship out of the harbor in another adventure ten runnings hence.
Random equals boring? In whose world?
I love throwing this shit together on a regular basis, rewarding the party when it manages to deal with a mess intelligently or bravely, bringing as much brunt to bear when they screw up. I don’t see it in terms of “hooks” or “payoffs”…but in terms of one great miasma of interlocking motivations held by dozens of local factions striving for their personal piece of the pie. There is no villain, there is no good guy…there are only hundreds of squalling, scrambling contestants elbowing each other out of the way for the glory or the loot.
Sure, there are moments when a party manages to do something significant: reuniting a daughter with her supernatural father or getting one of their own out of a small corner of hell…but these things are fixed moments that occur because the party decided to pursue that purpose as opposed to some other. It must be this way if the party is to have any decision of their own destiny.
Random, in fact, equals freedom. Because established, formulated adventure design demands that the party plays the actors in the DMs production. I hate that sort of D&D. I hate that it has become the only sort out there.
So if I do seem a little mundane, talking about 19,000 references in an encyclopedia compared to production totals out of an industrial yearbook, don’t confuse that thinking with the way things happen during my sessions. Things do not always fit together in linear fashion.
Thursday, June 26, 2008
Wide, Wide World
When I decided to create an economy for my world, I did not sit down with a real hot cup of coffee and scratch out some notes about which places would produce what: “Let’s see, France and Italy will have a lot of wine, Russia has some trees, India has indigo…” However long I could have gone at the system that way, it would never have been what I needed. I wanted a comprehensive system, something that would include virtually every product in use and its availability. More than that, it had to give a price for those products…a different price for each location where that object would be purchased.
This last, of course, was the major bitch in the project. If we establish a geographical location for the production of materials, it stands to reason that the distance from that geographical location is going to have something to do with the material cost.
Before I could get into that, I needed a source: a comprehensive tome that would list off the locations where objects were produced, so that an estimate could begin. Of course, there was no need for me to be arbitrary about it—the planet earth is filled with books about what is produced and where (part of the benefits of running a system on this planet)…but a consistent one, ah, there’s the rub.
I grew up with an encyclopedia that was purchased the year my parents were married, in 1958. It’s interesting that encyclopedias produced at that time were focused primarily on history and geography, unlike encyclopedias today that are focused on science and social science. I was lucky enough to happen upon a duplicate of that set, the Colliers Encyclopedia, printed in 1952. There are some fascinating idiosyncrasies about a set of facts volumes printed during the Korean War—when space travel was not conceived of, when Libya had no oil production, when Vietnam is still a part of the French colony of Indochina.
Most important to me, the encyclopedia has articles on literally thousands of geographical locations: cities, provinces, plateaus, vales, rivers, lakes, mountain ranges, seas, forests…and each article includes, as was standard at the time, a list of what that particular location produces economically.
Or, at least what it did in 1952.
The age of the book is its best feature—the closer to Renaissance period Europe, the better (my world operates in circa 1650). Of course, there are numerous listings for the production of automobiles, turbines, electrical cable, steel, uranium, radium and so on. For these things I read wagons, windmills, rope, pig iron, mithril and adamantium (the last two are a bit cute, but at least I’m not deciding where they’re found). I make other substitutions as needed.
Very often, the encyclopedias make more than one reference to a particular place in terms of its production of a particular item. For example, I have 7 references to the Island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany for its production of iron ore. As I make my way through the encyclopedia, I make note of each of these references; statistically, it is fair to argue that seven references would mean that a location produces seven times as much as another location, say Val d’Aosta, which has one reference.
Not always true, I know. But I dare anyone to find as complete a listing.
My “trade tables” as they are now, do not include most of Africa, any of the New World, or Western Europe. This has taken some time to accumulate the data. Altogether I have 19,400 references for areas stretching from the eastern half of Germany and Italy to Japan. More than 400 of those references are “iron ore”…so Elba’s seven have a relevance to the local area of Italy, but they would have very little effect on prices in Turkestan or China.
Because the encyclopedia is an independent source, the substance of those things produced vary widely. Some of the more obscure and profound references I have found, many of which I’ve been forced to look up, have included ozokerite, vogla (for which I could not find an English site), catechu, artyk (for which I could find no representative site at all, though it is a building stone used in Azerbaijan and Armenia), kumis, kenaf, asafoetida, perilla seed, brocade, teff, bear paws and sea slugs. These are things I would not have come up with on my own—even the spellchecker doesn’t recognize most of them. Altogether, there are more than 600 different products, which I group together into 279 commodities and services.
Why 279? Because these are what I have been able to find additional statistics for: specifically, production statistics. I began years ago with two books, the United Nations Industrial Statistics Yearbook (1988, earliest one I could find) and the Food and Agricultural Organization Yearbook (same year, for consistency). These two books provided me with a considerable volume of statistics…not as complete as I would have liked, but it was a considerable start.
The numbers, of course, did NOT correspond to 1650. Obviously we produce considerably more pig iron per population than was ever produced in 1650…and there are NO statistics for that period.
And this is the point when an assumption must be made? No, this is when more research is required.
I tore into every book on the Industrial Revolution and the economic development of Europe and the world that I could find, including quite a few very boring published theses. I have yet to find any clear figures…and for some time the numbers floated around as I compared data between what I was reading. I settled on a rough division of 500 between the late 1980s and the mid-17th century. That is, world production of anything would be approximately 1/500th of the present…adjusted individually for various products as evidence allowed. It has not been perfect—but as I pointed out yesterday, neither is the census. Doesn’t mean it lacks practicality.
It has made it possible for me to get a sense for the value of a product with my having as little arbitrary influence on that number as possible. I can, if questioned, “show” my work and challenge others to improve it.
Please…improve my work. I’m trying to do it myself, all the time.
That’s enough for now. I’m enjoying this, so I may post later today, and probably tomorrow.
This last, of course, was the major bitch in the project. If we establish a geographical location for the production of materials, it stands to reason that the distance from that geographical location is going to have something to do with the material cost.
Before I could get into that, I needed a source: a comprehensive tome that would list off the locations where objects were produced, so that an estimate could begin. Of course, there was no need for me to be arbitrary about it—the planet earth is filled with books about what is produced and where (part of the benefits of running a system on this planet)…but a consistent one, ah, there’s the rub.
I grew up with an encyclopedia that was purchased the year my parents were married, in 1958. It’s interesting that encyclopedias produced at that time were focused primarily on history and geography, unlike encyclopedias today that are focused on science and social science. I was lucky enough to happen upon a duplicate of that set, the Colliers Encyclopedia, printed in 1952. There are some fascinating idiosyncrasies about a set of facts volumes printed during the Korean War—when space travel was not conceived of, when Libya had no oil production, when Vietnam is still a part of the French colony of Indochina.
Most important to me, the encyclopedia has articles on literally thousands of geographical locations: cities, provinces, plateaus, vales, rivers, lakes, mountain ranges, seas, forests…and each article includes, as was standard at the time, a list of what that particular location produces economically.
Or, at least what it did in 1952.
The age of the book is its best feature—the closer to Renaissance period Europe, the better (my world operates in circa 1650). Of course, there are numerous listings for the production of automobiles, turbines, electrical cable, steel, uranium, radium and so on. For these things I read wagons, windmills, rope, pig iron, mithril and adamantium (the last two are a bit cute, but at least I’m not deciding where they’re found). I make other substitutions as needed.
Very often, the encyclopedias make more than one reference to a particular place in terms of its production of a particular item. For example, I have 7 references to the Island of Elba off the coast of Tuscany for its production of iron ore. As I make my way through the encyclopedia, I make note of each of these references; statistically, it is fair to argue that seven references would mean that a location produces seven times as much as another location, say Val d’Aosta, which has one reference.
Not always true, I know. But I dare anyone to find as complete a listing.
My “trade tables” as they are now, do not include most of Africa, any of the New World, or Western Europe. This has taken some time to accumulate the data. Altogether I have 19,400 references for areas stretching from the eastern half of Germany and Italy to Japan. More than 400 of those references are “iron ore”…so Elba’s seven have a relevance to the local area of Italy, but they would have very little effect on prices in Turkestan or China.
Because the encyclopedia is an independent source, the substance of those things produced vary widely. Some of the more obscure and profound references I have found, many of which I’ve been forced to look up, have included ozokerite, vogla (for which I could not find an English site), catechu, artyk (for which I could find no representative site at all, though it is a building stone used in Azerbaijan and Armenia), kumis, kenaf, asafoetida, perilla seed, brocade, teff, bear paws and sea slugs. These are things I would not have come up with on my own—even the spellchecker doesn’t recognize most of them. Altogether, there are more than 600 different products, which I group together into 279 commodities and services.
Why 279? Because these are what I have been able to find additional statistics for: specifically, production statistics. I began years ago with two books, the United Nations Industrial Statistics Yearbook (1988, earliest one I could find) and the Food and Agricultural Organization Yearbook (same year, for consistency). These two books provided me with a considerable volume of statistics…not as complete as I would have liked, but it was a considerable start.
The numbers, of course, did NOT correspond to 1650. Obviously we produce considerably more pig iron per population than was ever produced in 1650…and there are NO statistics for that period.
And this is the point when an assumption must be made? No, this is when more research is required.
I tore into every book on the Industrial Revolution and the economic development of Europe and the world that I could find, including quite a few very boring published theses. I have yet to find any clear figures…and for some time the numbers floated around as I compared data between what I was reading. I settled on a rough division of 500 between the late 1980s and the mid-17th century. That is, world production of anything would be approximately 1/500th of the present…adjusted individually for various products as evidence allowed. It has not been perfect—but as I pointed out yesterday, neither is the census. Doesn’t mean it lacks practicality.
It has made it possible for me to get a sense for the value of a product with my having as little arbitrary influence on that number as possible. I can, if questioned, “show” my work and challenge others to improve it.
Please…improve my work. I’m trying to do it myself, all the time.
That’s enough for now. I’m enjoying this, so I may post later today, and probably tomorrow.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
What Price?
I have had issues with the Equipment List since the very beginning, issues which annoyed me twice as much as a DM. The first would be that the prices are too low. In order for my party to have a chance at turning 5th level, I have to give them, on average, about 8 to 10 thousand gold pieces each (half the experience they need to accumulate). Some of this can be in the form of gold, some in gems and jewelry, some of it as magic…but however you cut it, if I have five party members, the total accumulated cash that the party will acquire during that time is going to be around 45,000 g.p.
What’s more, about one game year will probably pass while they are acquiring these four levels (they start with one), which is a total of 252 weeks. The game tells me to charge 5 g.p. a week for food (hard rations), which is 760 g.p. Even if everyone in the party buys chain mail four times (my parties don’t wear plate unless they want to be Joe-the-Slow, last to see combat), each, that’s 1,800 g.p. Charge them another 1,800 for weapons and 2,000 for horses (two each). And just for shits and giggles, let’s charge them the farcical 100 g.p. per month per level (an average of 250 g.p. each per month). Total: 21,360. By the time they’re fifth, they still have more than 23,000 g.p., or 4,728 each.
It takes about the same amount of time to go from fifth level to sixth as it takes to go from fourth to fifth, because the X.P. and the treasures gets bigger (even though twice the X.P. is needed). So sixth level comes just three months game time later and now their coin has doubled. And doubled again at 7th level.
Yes, that’s right, at 7th they’re hauling around 20,000 g.p. each and they’re still not allowed to buy a castle, because they’re not “name” level. Even though the five of them could easily go in together and buy a fortress.
The only time I’ve ever had a party short on cash happened when I’ve been able to catch them doing something stupid, letting me seize a few thousand g.p. from each. But one moderate first level dungeon treasure is enough for everyone to get weaponed up, buy leather or scale, and horses, and flee town.
Things should cost, and it should be HARD for the party to pay for them. That’s one issue.
The next is that there is just nothing to buy. Beyond weapons and armor and horses and jewelry, just where exactly does one spend their money? I’ve had to step in and stop parties from buying 150 vials of holy water…which they can afford and which they can carry in the 600 pound pack capacity of their pet donkey, towed behind their horse. My only argument has been that there aren’t 150 vials available at the local church—but the real problem is that there is nothing else for them to spend their money on.
Perhaps this is something you have experience with? Knights of the Dinner table did an excellent bit with Bob and Dave buying hundreds of untrained pit bulls. If a war dog is 20 g.p., why can’t the party buy fifty or sixty that are trained?
It comes to the point that the party just ditches the gold because it’s a) inconvenient; b) useless; and c) easily replaced. Once it has given them their experience, who cares?
As an aside—recent systems have tried to provide parties with something to buy by selling magic items. This baffles the shit out of me. I’ve had many players ask, when first beginning to play, if they can “buy” a +1 sword; my answer has been a perfunctory NO. Who the hell would go through the trouble of making one only to sell it at the local market? (I did go through a period where I sold really adamant players “magic” swords for immense amounts of money, only to have them turn out to be just an ordinary weapon—I’m nicer now). What mage making swords wouldn’t have a guardsman to give it to? Or a relative? Or a KING? Sell it to some piker who just blew into town? Are you kidding me?
These are the people who accuse me of being unromantic. I can see it now. “Arthur…Arthur…I am the Lady of the Lake. I bring you Excalibur.”
“No thanks. I picked up this little beauty here for 79.95 at Morgana’s hardware shop.”
Among video games, my particular favorites over the years have been those which involved “gathering” as part of the program, particular war games: VGA planets, Age of Empires, Civilization. You must first gather your shit, build an army, and then fight. In all of those games, at the beginning it costs a substantial amount of food and materials to make a single unit. One is always scrambling for more, or even just enough to sustain what one already has.
D&D is the one game where sustenance is a joke. And it should not be that way.
Finally, costs do not logically relate to one another. This, in particular, is the fundamental issue that can be and should be addressed.
Let’s consider something simple: the cost of a horse.
Let’s take the stabling of an animal for one day, typically placed in the 1 s.p. range. A newborn horse requires three years to mature to the point where it can be saddled and ridden for long periods. 3 years = 1,095 days. If we assume the stabling fee is a suggestion for how much money it costs to support a horse for a 24 hour period, and 20 s.p. = 1 g.p., it will have cost our owners more than 50 g.p. to raise the horse. Which sells for 25 g.p., according to the Player’s Handbook.
But, but, but, say the critics. The horse could have been wild. And it costs less to keep a horse in the open country than it does in a stable in town!
Well, first of all, until the North American experiment with a group of escaped Spanish horses breeding in predator-less country perfectly designed for them, it had been 4,000 years since wild horses had been available in Europe or the Middle East. Also, it was expensive for ranches to pay men to watch free range horses…it cost wages that enabled those men to eat up to six pounds of beef a day and up to 11 pounds of food. If this is what I can get for less than a silver piece, why does it cost me 60 silver pieces to buy a week’s food for sedentary activity (non-iron rations)?
But let’s go at this from the other end. What should the price for stabling be? Get ready for a flurry of statistics…here it comes.
A carthorse eats 19 lbs. of feed per day. A heavy Percheron or Belgian eats much, much more. A bushel of oats is 27.52 pounds, or enough feed for a day and a half. The oats are grown on a farm which—in the Medieval world—is typically 20 to 30 acres in area. The yield of that farm was 36 bushels of oats per acre, a total of 1,080 bushels. However 5 bushels per acre are needed to replant the following year, so the actual net yield is 1,030.
If you want the farmer to do any planting next year, along with his wife and average 3 children, you’re going to have to feed them some of the oats they’ve grown. 1,500 calories a day on average works out to 4.32 lbs. of oats for the whole family, or 1 bushel every 6.37 days. Each year, the family eats a little more than 57 bushels.
Well, that still leaves 973 bushels. And the good news is that it’s only taken the farmers 3 days a week to work their own land, and they’ve worked the lord’s land for the other three days. So the farmers have succeeded in adding 2,003 bushels to the lord’s land. Of which the lord only needs 252 bushels to feed his horse.
There’s the argument that the horse could pick its meal from the field, but if the lord’s horse is a warhorse, that’s not going to be enough. It’s going to be fed oats, every day.
Lets say the lord has a manse which includes a little hamlet of about 150 people. Averaging 5 persons per family, and assuming all 150 are farmers (let’s say the miller, carpenter, mason, bakers, chandlers, chaplain, reeve, hayward and vintners, not to mention the men-at-arms, with their families, are dwelling in the manor house), and each has a farm averaging 30 acres, AND the lord has land of the same breadth and size (which would be unusual, but it’s a round number, lets go with it), the total surplus after farmers and before other household members would be 60,090 bushels—in a good year.
Now, the lord has to determine what would be the best way to use those bushels. Every 250 bushels he sends to town means one less horse he can support; not to mention the ducks, geese, pigs, sheep or goats he might have to vary his meals a bit. If he IS going to send a cart load of oats to town, he’s going to have to pay a teamster, cover the cost of maintenance for the cart and risk the goods themselves…but chances are he’s going to have surplus and he’s going to send it to town.
The oats will go into the hands of a wholesaler, who will certainly double the price for the oats—already nominally placed at the cost of 1 horse = 250 bushels (horse, 25 g.p., equals 10 bushels per g.p.). The wholesaler makes it 5 bushels per g.p.; he will sell the oats to the innkeeper, who will again raise the price (lets say a typical sixty per cent), so that now its 2 bushels per g.p. Which the horse will eat 3/4 of in one day. So for food alone (not the bother of having deal with the horse) we are in the ballpark of 15 s.p. stabling per day.
Ah…but the 25 g.p. total cost of the horse may not be fairly juxtaposed with the cost to feed that horse each year. A horse can live for 40 years…should the total value of the horse be divided into the total number of years it lives?
No. It has to eat every one of those years and the total value of the horse is dependent on what it needs to eat before it dies. Moreover, the first two years the horse produces NOTHING for the trouble of keeping it alive and its third year it is able to do only so much marginal work. If it is a trained warhorse, most of its productive life it stands at its ease and produces no value at all, except in the eyes of its lord.
The problem with trying to make any predictions on the cost of the horse or its oats or its stabling, based on the figures in the books, is that you just wind up running around and around in circles. Now the horse requires 15 s.p. per day to keep it fed, meaning that overall it costs 750 g.p. over the first three years of its life (well, less, the horse was a pony first…lets say 500 g.p.)…which means that the oats ought to be worth more, making the stabling cost more, making the horse cost more and so on and so on. How does one make a rational guess at the cost of anything?
The general D&D community’s answer: who gives a shit?
I do. There’s no basis for any of these prices…which means that it is impossible to do the gathering necessary to run the sort of campaign that one could run with rational prices. How am I supposed to figure out how much material it will take to conquer Poland if I can’t get a straight price on the cost of a horse?
Oh, and by the way. How many manor farms does your world have? Exact number, please. I’d like to know how big an army I’m going to need.
What’s more, about one game year will probably pass while they are acquiring these four levels (they start with one), which is a total of 252 weeks. The game tells me to charge 5 g.p. a week for food (hard rations), which is 760 g.p. Even if everyone in the party buys chain mail four times (my parties don’t wear plate unless they want to be Joe-the-Slow, last to see combat), each, that’s 1,800 g.p. Charge them another 1,800 for weapons and 2,000 for horses (two each). And just for shits and giggles, let’s charge them the farcical 100 g.p. per month per level (an average of 250 g.p. each per month). Total: 21,360. By the time they’re fifth, they still have more than 23,000 g.p., or 4,728 each.
It takes about the same amount of time to go from fifth level to sixth as it takes to go from fourth to fifth, because the X.P. and the treasures gets bigger (even though twice the X.P. is needed). So sixth level comes just three months game time later and now their coin has doubled. And doubled again at 7th level.
Yes, that’s right, at 7th they’re hauling around 20,000 g.p. each and they’re still not allowed to buy a castle, because they’re not “name” level. Even though the five of them could easily go in together and buy a fortress.
The only time I’ve ever had a party short on cash happened when I’ve been able to catch them doing something stupid, letting me seize a few thousand g.p. from each. But one moderate first level dungeon treasure is enough for everyone to get weaponed up, buy leather or scale, and horses, and flee town.
Things should cost, and it should be HARD for the party to pay for them. That’s one issue.
The next is that there is just nothing to buy. Beyond weapons and armor and horses and jewelry, just where exactly does one spend their money? I’ve had to step in and stop parties from buying 150 vials of holy water…which they can afford and which they can carry in the 600 pound pack capacity of their pet donkey, towed behind their horse. My only argument has been that there aren’t 150 vials available at the local church—but the real problem is that there is nothing else for them to spend their money on.
Perhaps this is something you have experience with? Knights of the Dinner table did an excellent bit with Bob and Dave buying hundreds of untrained pit bulls. If a war dog is 20 g.p., why can’t the party buy fifty or sixty that are trained?
It comes to the point that the party just ditches the gold because it’s a) inconvenient; b) useless; and c) easily replaced. Once it has given them their experience, who cares?
As an aside—recent systems have tried to provide parties with something to buy by selling magic items. This baffles the shit out of me. I’ve had many players ask, when first beginning to play, if they can “buy” a +1 sword; my answer has been a perfunctory NO. Who the hell would go through the trouble of making one only to sell it at the local market? (I did go through a period where I sold really adamant players “magic” swords for immense amounts of money, only to have them turn out to be just an ordinary weapon—I’m nicer now). What mage making swords wouldn’t have a guardsman to give it to? Or a relative? Or a KING? Sell it to some piker who just blew into town? Are you kidding me?
These are the people who accuse me of being unromantic. I can see it now. “Arthur…Arthur…I am the Lady of the Lake. I bring you Excalibur.”
“No thanks. I picked up this little beauty here for 79.95 at Morgana’s hardware shop.”
Among video games, my particular favorites over the years have been those which involved “gathering” as part of the program, particular war games: VGA planets, Age of Empires, Civilization. You must first gather your shit, build an army, and then fight. In all of those games, at the beginning it costs a substantial amount of food and materials to make a single unit. One is always scrambling for more, or even just enough to sustain what one already has.
D&D is the one game where sustenance is a joke. And it should not be that way.
Finally, costs do not logically relate to one another. This, in particular, is the fundamental issue that can be and should be addressed.
Let’s consider something simple: the cost of a horse.
Let’s take the stabling of an animal for one day, typically placed in the 1 s.p. range. A newborn horse requires three years to mature to the point where it can be saddled and ridden for long periods. 3 years = 1,095 days. If we assume the stabling fee is a suggestion for how much money it costs to support a horse for a 24 hour period, and 20 s.p. = 1 g.p., it will have cost our owners more than 50 g.p. to raise the horse. Which sells for 25 g.p., according to the Player’s Handbook.
But, but, but, say the critics. The horse could have been wild. And it costs less to keep a horse in the open country than it does in a stable in town!
Well, first of all, until the North American experiment with a group of escaped Spanish horses breeding in predator-less country perfectly designed for them, it had been 4,000 years since wild horses had been available in Europe or the Middle East. Also, it was expensive for ranches to pay men to watch free range horses…it cost wages that enabled those men to eat up to six pounds of beef a day and up to 11 pounds of food. If this is what I can get for less than a silver piece, why does it cost me 60 silver pieces to buy a week’s food for sedentary activity (non-iron rations)?
But let’s go at this from the other end. What should the price for stabling be? Get ready for a flurry of statistics…here it comes.
A carthorse eats 19 lbs. of feed per day. A heavy Percheron or Belgian eats much, much more. A bushel of oats is 27.52 pounds, or enough feed for a day and a half. The oats are grown on a farm which—in the Medieval world—is typically 20 to 30 acres in area. The yield of that farm was 36 bushels of oats per acre, a total of 1,080 bushels. However 5 bushels per acre are needed to replant the following year, so the actual net yield is 1,030.
If you want the farmer to do any planting next year, along with his wife and average 3 children, you’re going to have to feed them some of the oats they’ve grown. 1,500 calories a day on average works out to 4.32 lbs. of oats for the whole family, or 1 bushel every 6.37 days. Each year, the family eats a little more than 57 bushels.
Well, that still leaves 973 bushels. And the good news is that it’s only taken the farmers 3 days a week to work their own land, and they’ve worked the lord’s land for the other three days. So the farmers have succeeded in adding 2,003 bushels to the lord’s land. Of which the lord only needs 252 bushels to feed his horse.
There’s the argument that the horse could pick its meal from the field, but if the lord’s horse is a warhorse, that’s not going to be enough. It’s going to be fed oats, every day.
Lets say the lord has a manse which includes a little hamlet of about 150 people. Averaging 5 persons per family, and assuming all 150 are farmers (let’s say the miller, carpenter, mason, bakers, chandlers, chaplain, reeve, hayward and vintners, not to mention the men-at-arms, with their families, are dwelling in the manor house), and each has a farm averaging 30 acres, AND the lord has land of the same breadth and size (which would be unusual, but it’s a round number, lets go with it), the total surplus after farmers and before other household members would be 60,090 bushels—in a good year.
Now, the lord has to determine what would be the best way to use those bushels. Every 250 bushels he sends to town means one less horse he can support; not to mention the ducks, geese, pigs, sheep or goats he might have to vary his meals a bit. If he IS going to send a cart load of oats to town, he’s going to have to pay a teamster, cover the cost of maintenance for the cart and risk the goods themselves…but chances are he’s going to have surplus and he’s going to send it to town.
The oats will go into the hands of a wholesaler, who will certainly double the price for the oats—already nominally placed at the cost of 1 horse = 250 bushels (horse, 25 g.p., equals 10 bushels per g.p.). The wholesaler makes it 5 bushels per g.p.; he will sell the oats to the innkeeper, who will again raise the price (lets say a typical sixty per cent), so that now its 2 bushels per g.p. Which the horse will eat 3/4 of in one day. So for food alone (not the bother of having deal with the horse) we are in the ballpark of 15 s.p. stabling per day.
Ah…but the 25 g.p. total cost of the horse may not be fairly juxtaposed with the cost to feed that horse each year. A horse can live for 40 years…should the total value of the horse be divided into the total number of years it lives?
No. It has to eat every one of those years and the total value of the horse is dependent on what it needs to eat before it dies. Moreover, the first two years the horse produces NOTHING for the trouble of keeping it alive and its third year it is able to do only so much marginal work. If it is a trained warhorse, most of its productive life it stands at its ease and produces no value at all, except in the eyes of its lord.
The problem with trying to make any predictions on the cost of the horse or its oats or its stabling, based on the figures in the books, is that you just wind up running around and around in circles. Now the horse requires 15 s.p. per day to keep it fed, meaning that overall it costs 750 g.p. over the first three years of its life (well, less, the horse was a pony first…lets say 500 g.p.)…which means that the oats ought to be worth more, making the stabling cost more, making the horse cost more and so on and so on. How does one make a rational guess at the cost of anything?
The general D&D community’s answer: who gives a shit?
I do. There’s no basis for any of these prices…which means that it is impossible to do the gathering necessary to run the sort of campaign that one could run with rational prices. How am I supposed to figure out how much material it will take to conquer Poland if I can’t get a straight price on the cost of a horse?
Oh, and by the way. How many manor farms does your world have? Exact number, please. I’d like to know how big an army I’m going to need.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
There Has to Be More
I am, and have always been, crazy. It is this craziness that I brought to D&D, the sort of obsessive preoccupation that one normally associates with people who have to turn the lights on and off five times before bed or replace their keyboards once a week to combat sweat congealment.
As a child I received, as a gift, my first almanac at the age of 7. My parents were well aware of my fascination with atlases and statistics gleaned from the household encyclopedia…and perceived very correctly that I would find the material within an almanac of interest. Thereafter, for the next sixteen years, I received an updated almanac every Christmas. Throughout my school years, that almanac sat in the upper left corner of my desk…a ready source by which every teacher I had was measured. They had better get their national and state capitals right (along with every other statement about geography, history, industry or economics)…because I knew every fact by heart, to date, and I had the book to back me up.
No, I was not well-liked. I was well on the way to my present career of being an arrogant know-it-all with little regard for disinformation.
Yet it may surprise you to know that I was not a “rules lawyer” when I played D&D. I accepted quite readily that the rules in a DM's game were set by the DM and not by the book.
That is because sometimes almanacs are wrong.
My fascination from the beginning was never with the numbers or with the power of the books, but with what they represented. My fascination has been with the planet, the big picture, the manner in which it all fits together and how it relates to itself. No book, not an almanac or a Dungeon Master’s Guide, can completely or effectively relate the whole picture…it takes millions of books and billions of people to do that. For me, the almanac was convenient; it had a great deal of information crammed into a relatively small space—but the thing wasn’t holy in itself.
I suppose that my almanac was replaced by the DMG to some degree when I started playing, but it is has never been the whole game to me. All of the various books together have not been the whole game…if that were all there were, I would have gotten bored sick of the game long ago. What appealed to me about the game most of all was that it left room for me to apply all the other knowledge that I had gathered together through what I had read and studied.
I bluffed my way into a job with Statistics Canada in the 1980s, with no formal schooling and no working experience. I worked through the lead up to the census, which was fascinating for me as I’d spent so much time reading census statistics. It was mind-opening to see how they were gathered and to have a clear representation of how “wrong” they were. However, the application of those statistics, however flawed the data, enables the prediction of a great deal…worlds turn on the political and economic understanding of statistics.
When I left Stats Can in ’86, I entered university after a long period of destitution and zero income. I spent most of that time reworking my world and aligning it with the real world. University gave me plenty of time to go on doing that…even though by ’88 I was married and had a daughter on the way. It was about that time that I conceived of something that would redirect the entire format upon which my world would be based. A format that I have developed and continue to develop until today.
It’s not an easy subject to get into…for one thing, it sounds crazy. And it is. It is the central reason for me wanting to produce this blog, and it is going to take a long time to outline completely; all I want to do today is to outline my thinking process at the outset.
The DMG makes a point under the notes on “The Campaign” that a structure should be created by the DM which gives a reasonable, practical distribution of people, wealth and power…something that will enable the party to get a handle on what is going on. Too much random irrationality will discourage a party’s interest. It is the least read part of the DMG, and in the last 30 years I have seen nothing published which either promotes the argument, or remotely educates a DM on just how this is done.
What is a world, in D&D? It is a collection of described factions and hollowed places in the earth holding treasure and guarded by monsters, a network of roads which connect adventures and a sort of vague “fog” called civilization which settles over everything and impinges on the campaign only in terms of its crop of NPC’s. We’re led to believe that these are the “practical” limits of the game. DMs are forced to find ad hoc answers to player’s questions for lack of any structure to base those answers on.
Let me give an example:
I am a fighter, who has recently established himself as the lord over a 20-mile-diameter hex. Here are some questions I will want answered: I’d like to feed my 200 man army and I’d like it to not cost me any money while I’m not adventuring—how much food can I grow? How much of my land is arable? How much is suitable for the raising of cattle as opposed to sheep? How much meat can I get from a cow? How often will my cows breed? How much milk will they give? How much hay will I need to feed them in the wintertime? Are sheep more practical, considering that the land is similar to Scotland? Do you have other answers prepared if the land is closer to Arabia?
Most DMs will say, the land produces enough that you don’t have to provide for your men.
Does it produce more? How much can I sell? How much will the wool of 75 sheep provide for my coffers? Can I take some of that wool and make clothing, perhaps establishing a weaving mill? Will that make me more money? How much will I need to pay a weaver? How many herders does it take to look after 100 sheep? What does a herder cost?
Most DMs will give numbers, off the top of their head. The weaver costs a g.p. a month. The herder much less. The sheep will give such-and-such lbs. of wool per sheep.
Whereupon I’ll produce charts and evidence to show that now the DM has provided figures so out of whack that I’m able to turn my whole 300 square miles of arable land into sheep country, have it watched by 500 herders for 1 c.p. each and make a total of 7,500 g.p. every month. Why adventure?
Most DMs will recant, pull different figures out of their ass, and argue that I can only make 200 g.p. a month from my sheep. And we’re back to punishing players for thinking outside of the box. Again.
And if I point out that I have 40,000 sheep on my land and that I’m only making 1 c.p. per head because of upkeep, what if I ask to get into the business of feeding sheep, because that’s obviously more lucrative?
The game just doesn’t cover this crap. Because, it is argued, no one wants it to.
I disagree. I believe that the emphasis for the last thirty years by the gaming companies on “character” and “weaponry” has been because they CAN’T solve the problem. They have to push the player out of the real world and into the box because the box has clear, concise defining borders which they actually can address. I doubt that anyone working at Wizards of the Coast has any experience whatsoever with politics, economics, geography or demographics. They obviously think that none of those things, in terms of their existence in the world, are very complicated or at all inspiring in giving humans a motive.
D&D is often judged a children’s activity because all-too-often it resembles one of those games where you roll a die to move along a two-dimensional strip, marked with things like “lose a turn” or “jump forward two spaces.” The words have just been replaced with “lose a character” or “gain a +2 sword.”
I’ve never been satisfied with that. The campaign problem can be solved, and the questions I asked above can be answered without anyone’s butt being involved. I believe I have the way, which corresponds to the title of this blog.
As a child I received, as a gift, my first almanac at the age of 7. My parents were well aware of my fascination with atlases and statistics gleaned from the household encyclopedia…and perceived very correctly that I would find the material within an almanac of interest. Thereafter, for the next sixteen years, I received an updated almanac every Christmas. Throughout my school years, that almanac sat in the upper left corner of my desk…a ready source by which every teacher I had was measured. They had better get their national and state capitals right (along with every other statement about geography, history, industry or economics)…because I knew every fact by heart, to date, and I had the book to back me up.
No, I was not well-liked. I was well on the way to my present career of being an arrogant know-it-all with little regard for disinformation.
Yet it may surprise you to know that I was not a “rules lawyer” when I played D&D. I accepted quite readily that the rules in a DM's game were set by the DM and not by the book.
That is because sometimes almanacs are wrong.
My fascination from the beginning was never with the numbers or with the power of the books, but with what they represented. My fascination has been with the planet, the big picture, the manner in which it all fits together and how it relates to itself. No book, not an almanac or a Dungeon Master’s Guide, can completely or effectively relate the whole picture…it takes millions of books and billions of people to do that. For me, the almanac was convenient; it had a great deal of information crammed into a relatively small space—but the thing wasn’t holy in itself.
I suppose that my almanac was replaced by the DMG to some degree when I started playing, but it is has never been the whole game to me. All of the various books together have not been the whole game…if that were all there were, I would have gotten bored sick of the game long ago. What appealed to me about the game most of all was that it left room for me to apply all the other knowledge that I had gathered together through what I had read and studied.
I bluffed my way into a job with Statistics Canada in the 1980s, with no formal schooling and no working experience. I worked through the lead up to the census, which was fascinating for me as I’d spent so much time reading census statistics. It was mind-opening to see how they were gathered and to have a clear representation of how “wrong” they were. However, the application of those statistics, however flawed the data, enables the prediction of a great deal…worlds turn on the political and economic understanding of statistics.
When I left Stats Can in ’86, I entered university after a long period of destitution and zero income. I spent most of that time reworking my world and aligning it with the real world. University gave me plenty of time to go on doing that…even though by ’88 I was married and had a daughter on the way. It was about that time that I conceived of something that would redirect the entire format upon which my world would be based. A format that I have developed and continue to develop until today.
It’s not an easy subject to get into…for one thing, it sounds crazy. And it is. It is the central reason for me wanting to produce this blog, and it is going to take a long time to outline completely; all I want to do today is to outline my thinking process at the outset.
The DMG makes a point under the notes on “The Campaign” that a structure should be created by the DM which gives a reasonable, practical distribution of people, wealth and power…something that will enable the party to get a handle on what is going on. Too much random irrationality will discourage a party’s interest. It is the least read part of the DMG, and in the last 30 years I have seen nothing published which either promotes the argument, or remotely educates a DM on just how this is done.
What is a world, in D&D? It is a collection of described factions and hollowed places in the earth holding treasure and guarded by monsters, a network of roads which connect adventures and a sort of vague “fog” called civilization which settles over everything and impinges on the campaign only in terms of its crop of NPC’s. We’re led to believe that these are the “practical” limits of the game. DMs are forced to find ad hoc answers to player’s questions for lack of any structure to base those answers on.
Let me give an example:
I am a fighter, who has recently established himself as the lord over a 20-mile-diameter hex. Here are some questions I will want answered: I’d like to feed my 200 man army and I’d like it to not cost me any money while I’m not adventuring—how much food can I grow? How much of my land is arable? How much is suitable for the raising of cattle as opposed to sheep? How much meat can I get from a cow? How often will my cows breed? How much milk will they give? How much hay will I need to feed them in the wintertime? Are sheep more practical, considering that the land is similar to Scotland? Do you have other answers prepared if the land is closer to Arabia?
Most DMs will say, the land produces enough that you don’t have to provide for your men.
Does it produce more? How much can I sell? How much will the wool of 75 sheep provide for my coffers? Can I take some of that wool and make clothing, perhaps establishing a weaving mill? Will that make me more money? How much will I need to pay a weaver? How many herders does it take to look after 100 sheep? What does a herder cost?
Most DMs will give numbers, off the top of their head. The weaver costs a g.p. a month. The herder much less. The sheep will give such-and-such lbs. of wool per sheep.
Whereupon I’ll produce charts and evidence to show that now the DM has provided figures so out of whack that I’m able to turn my whole 300 square miles of arable land into sheep country, have it watched by 500 herders for 1 c.p. each and make a total of 7,500 g.p. every month. Why adventure?
Most DMs will recant, pull different figures out of their ass, and argue that I can only make 200 g.p. a month from my sheep. And we’re back to punishing players for thinking outside of the box. Again.
And if I point out that I have 40,000 sheep on my land and that I’m only making 1 c.p. per head because of upkeep, what if I ask to get into the business of feeding sheep, because that’s obviously more lucrative?
The game just doesn’t cover this crap. Because, it is argued, no one wants it to.
I disagree. I believe that the emphasis for the last thirty years by the gaming companies on “character” and “weaponry” has been because they CAN’T solve the problem. They have to push the player out of the real world and into the box because the box has clear, concise defining borders which they actually can address. I doubt that anyone working at Wizards of the Coast has any experience whatsoever with politics, economics, geography or demographics. They obviously think that none of those things, in terms of their existence in the world, are very complicated or at all inspiring in giving humans a motive.
D&D is often judged a children’s activity because all-too-often it resembles one of those games where you roll a die to move along a two-dimensional strip, marked with things like “lose a turn” or “jump forward two spaces.” The words have just been replaced with “lose a character” or “gain a +2 sword.”
I’ve never been satisfied with that. The campaign problem can be solved, and the questions I asked above can be answered without anyone’s butt being involved. I believe I have the way, which corresponds to the title of this blog.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Strength & Dexterity
Strength & Dexterity
These two tables are going to come as a disappointment to some, particularly those who feel that fighters just don’t bring enough force into their campaigns. Remember, however, that my motivation for these tables did not include giving my party a lot of new powers—but to compensate for the disinterest in what I’ve been calling dump stats. Convincing players to pimp up their strength or dexterity requires no help from any table.
Strength in particular is the big disappointment. It compares very favorably with wisdom and with the father’s profession table, however. And it adds a piece of information that every player needs. This is the first time I’ve ever used a table like this without having to constantly make re-rolls. I’m quite happy with it.
I typically roll a d4 to determine which grandparents are indicated, and a d2 to determine sex of the player's siblings; I usually get asked how many older or younger siblings the player possesses, which is easily determined by rolling a die for the number of children indicated.
I haven't had much interest in rolling great-grandparents, but they could be wedged into the system if anyone wanted.
Dexterity has a bit more oomph. There may be some contentious results on it, but by and large my party has accepted them. I have a thief with a 17 Dex who rolled the “can’t fight with two weapons” result…and he gripes about it…but it’s understood that this is a peculiar circumstance that just has to occur. You may be very quick, but you don’t happen to have the balance that enables both hands to operate in tandem; one hand is far more dominant than the other.
Some might argue it belongs on the intelligence table…and I have a quick, sly answer to that. The medieval mind perceived that such abilities did not transcend from the mind, but from the body. It would not have occurred to anyone that the brain had anything with what the hand was able to do.
Perhaps that’s not fair. But Adler won’t be born for another three centuries, so I don’t worry about it.
These two tables are going to come as a disappointment to some, particularly those who feel that fighters just don’t bring enough force into their campaigns. Remember, however, that my motivation for these tables did not include giving my party a lot of new powers—but to compensate for the disinterest in what I’ve been calling dump stats. Convincing players to pimp up their strength or dexterity requires no help from any table.
Strength in particular is the big disappointment. It compares very favorably with wisdom and with the father’s profession table, however. And it adds a piece of information that every player needs. This is the first time I’ve ever used a table like this without having to constantly make re-rolls. I’m quite happy with it.
I typically roll a d4 to determine which grandparents are indicated, and a d2 to determine sex of the player's siblings; I usually get asked how many older or younger siblings the player possesses, which is easily determined by rolling a die for the number of children indicated.
I haven't had much interest in rolling great-grandparents, but they could be wedged into the system if anyone wanted.
Dexterity has a bit more oomph. There may be some contentious results on it, but by and large my party has accepted them. I have a thief with a 17 Dex who rolled the “can’t fight with two weapons” result…and he gripes about it…but it’s understood that this is a peculiar circumstance that just has to occur. You may be very quick, but you don’t happen to have the balance that enables both hands to operate in tandem; one hand is far more dominant than the other.
Some might argue it belongs on the intelligence table…and I have a quick, sly answer to that. The medieval mind perceived that such abilities did not transcend from the mind, but from the body. It would not have occurred to anyone that the brain had anything with what the hand was able to do.
Perhaps that’s not fair. But Adler won’t be born for another three centuries, so I don’t worry about it.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Constitution
Thinking of a comment made yesterday, about balance. There IS an overemphasis on balance within the game, and that emphasis comes from games being made back to the Babylonians…where what makes the game competitive is the individual’s talent brought to bear on the rules as written.
We play chess. The game itself is unchanged by us; we both understand the movement and limitation of the pieces. The winner is determined by ourselves, our weaknesses, our strengths, our experience.
Yes, that’s right: the winner.
The conceptualization of the winner is, to borrow a word, the hamartia of D&D. It is the fundamental error that has kept most from viewing the game through the right lens. Because D&D does not commit player against player, or player against DM. It is not “man versus himself,” either, although that clever rhetoric would appeal to some. The truth of it is that D&D is man against nature…the character against an abstract.
D&D is not an outward expression of the DM, not if the dice are trusted and invoked and allowed to veto the DM’s desires. The game is world-as-gestalt; the fabrication of multiple persons as a something that can be competed against but which can never be defeated. Your character is going to die. Eventually. There is nothing you can do about that.
Well, obviously, you can stop playing. Le petite morte, that.
And because the conflict in D&D is a mirror of the conflict in the real world, the argument for “balance” is fallacious. I am not competing with my friend the paladin; I’ve got his back and he’s got mine. If I want to see it as a pissing contest, well, that’s my failing…that’s not an inherent part of the game. The enemy is out there, and so long as we stand together, the ogre mages and remorhaz of the world can go hang.
So if my friend the paladin doesn’t suffer from the brittle bone structure that I was born with as a child, good. I hope he doesn’t, no one should have to. I get along with it myself because I’m used to it.
Do you see? The mindsets that occur in THIS game occur nowhere else. Your bishop hasn’t had a bad run of luck lately with turning undead pawns. Your king isn’t having trouble with the queen’s infidelity. It isn’t the power or the cool shit you can do that makes this game, it’s the shit-sucking misery that plagues your character’s every effort. When something goes right, it goes right OUTSIDE of you. Just like the real world, when you've knocked a hole-in-one on the par 4. Yes, you strut and tell all your friends that you are da shit, but in reality, you are thinking really deep down inside, man, that was fucking luck.
The effort people take to find ways to reward “good playing” just don’t get it. We are all spectators in our character’s successes and foibles…and it is fucking awesome to see that die tumble into a critical just when the party really, REALLY needs it. We take the credit, we get the experience, and we don’t care that it was random. We swung the club and got the ace and that’s what matters.
This is the game that is the real world. It works by the same rules.
Okay, that said, let’s get down to business.
There’s less need, I feel, to pump up the combat abilities with a lot of power. Still, constitution can pretty much be applied only one way: how much can the character take. The side over the ability I’ve seen in terms of a character’s sickly genetics—a very simple progression from completely healthy to a collection of multiple medical problems.
(that should read, "poison, paralyzation and petrification")
The side under the ability, on the other hand, was more difficult. I eventually hit on a collection of minor, somewhat supportive attributes. Keep in mind, as I’ve said before, most every party member has a 15 or more constitution. I wasn’t interested in giving some result like “immunity from all disease” for a roll of 10 under (that would make 1/3 of the party immune). I do want to be able to kill a party member occasionally with a disease; that keeps them from stumbling out into the wilderness without clothing, tents, tinderboxes, boots (I’ve had players forget to buy them) and so on.
The rules about the first 3 damage being exempt: I’ve known men who worked in hot, blistering environments with skin like leather. This is meant to address that. The same goes for the fellow who’s already been bit...four times—by his pet tarantula, and it doesn’t bother him as much now.
You may notice this is the second reference I’ve made to “weather grades.” I divide my weather into 26 grades, similar to the system originally suggested in the Wilderness Guide—but better. You’ll also note a link to worldwide weather data on my blog. That is because I use this data when I play. It is precise, incontrovertible and does not represent numbers pulled out of my ass—like almost every number I find in the published books…but we’re not talking about the equipment table right now.
A character’s endurance against these weather grades depends on where the character grew up. I have characters running who have come from as wide a range as Egypt (30 degrees latitude) and Karelia (60 degrees latitude). At present they are above the Arctic Circle…it is the second week of October. Which ones do you think are going to handle the weather better?
This is why I don’t say, “the character is unaffected by weather above –10”…because if the character is from Mozambique, that number should be different than if the character is from the Orkneys.
Incidentally, ever seen a world map invented by a Dungeon Master that had clear, recognizable latitudes? Or a rational weather system? That is because weather is the most complex and annoying geographical consideration—and must be explained away by most DMs as “affected by magic” because working out a completely unique weather pattern on an imaginary world is just plain psycho.
Which brings us to the Disorders Table:
Not much to say about this, it is pretty clear. I’m not going to pabulum feed the readers by going all out to write specific effects for each of the disorders, though of course I could. Insensitivity to touch? Player can’t wear armor, player must wear specific fabrics, player reacts violently (and manically) to being touched and so on. Brittle bones? Player suffers +10%, +20%, +40%, double from falls, crushing damage, etc…however much of Unbreakable you want to coordinate into your campaign. Weak stomach? Food allergies, poison save reduced, whatever you like.
I disdain giving a specific list because you, as DM, ought to be able to work that out to suit your campaign. Anything I suggest is going to be either too harsh or too mild. I’ll stay here by the trunk, thank you. It is your path to walk onto that limb.
We play chess. The game itself is unchanged by us; we both understand the movement and limitation of the pieces. The winner is determined by ourselves, our weaknesses, our strengths, our experience.
Yes, that’s right: the winner.
The conceptualization of the winner is, to borrow a word, the hamartia of D&D. It is the fundamental error that has kept most from viewing the game through the right lens. Because D&D does not commit player against player, or player against DM. It is not “man versus himself,” either, although that clever rhetoric would appeal to some. The truth of it is that D&D is man against nature…the character against an abstract.
D&D is not an outward expression of the DM, not if the dice are trusted and invoked and allowed to veto the DM’s desires. The game is world-as-gestalt; the fabrication of multiple persons as a something that can be competed against but which can never be defeated. Your character is going to die. Eventually. There is nothing you can do about that.
Well, obviously, you can stop playing. Le petite morte, that.
And because the conflict in D&D is a mirror of the conflict in the real world, the argument for “balance” is fallacious. I am not competing with my friend the paladin; I’ve got his back and he’s got mine. If I want to see it as a pissing contest, well, that’s my failing…that’s not an inherent part of the game. The enemy is out there, and so long as we stand together, the ogre mages and remorhaz of the world can go hang.
So if my friend the paladin doesn’t suffer from the brittle bone structure that I was born with as a child, good. I hope he doesn’t, no one should have to. I get along with it myself because I’m used to it.
Do you see? The mindsets that occur in THIS game occur nowhere else. Your bishop hasn’t had a bad run of luck lately with turning undead pawns. Your king isn’t having trouble with the queen’s infidelity. It isn’t the power or the cool shit you can do that makes this game, it’s the shit-sucking misery that plagues your character’s every effort. When something goes right, it goes right OUTSIDE of you. Just like the real world, when you've knocked a hole-in-one on the par 4. Yes, you strut and tell all your friends that you are da shit, but in reality, you are thinking really deep down inside, man, that was fucking luck.
The effort people take to find ways to reward “good playing” just don’t get it. We are all spectators in our character’s successes and foibles…and it is fucking awesome to see that die tumble into a critical just when the party really, REALLY needs it. We take the credit, we get the experience, and we don’t care that it was random. We swung the club and got the ace and that’s what matters.
This is the game that is the real world. It works by the same rules.
Okay, that said, let’s get down to business.
There’s less need, I feel, to pump up the combat abilities with a lot of power. Still, constitution can pretty much be applied only one way: how much can the character take. The side over the ability I’ve seen in terms of a character’s sickly genetics—a very simple progression from completely healthy to a collection of multiple medical problems.
(that should read, "poison, paralyzation and petrification")
The side under the ability, on the other hand, was more difficult. I eventually hit on a collection of minor, somewhat supportive attributes. Keep in mind, as I’ve said before, most every party member has a 15 or more constitution. I wasn’t interested in giving some result like “immunity from all disease” for a roll of 10 under (that would make 1/3 of the party immune). I do want to be able to kill a party member occasionally with a disease; that keeps them from stumbling out into the wilderness without clothing, tents, tinderboxes, boots (I’ve had players forget to buy them) and so on.
The rules about the first 3 damage being exempt: I’ve known men who worked in hot, blistering environments with skin like leather. This is meant to address that. The same goes for the fellow who’s already been bit...four times—by his pet tarantula, and it doesn’t bother him as much now.
You may notice this is the second reference I’ve made to “weather grades.” I divide my weather into 26 grades, similar to the system originally suggested in the Wilderness Guide—but better. You’ll also note a link to worldwide weather data on my blog. That is because I use this data when I play. It is precise, incontrovertible and does not represent numbers pulled out of my ass—like almost every number I find in the published books…but we’re not talking about the equipment table right now.
A character’s endurance against these weather grades depends on where the character grew up. I have characters running who have come from as wide a range as Egypt (30 degrees latitude) and Karelia (60 degrees latitude). At present they are above the Arctic Circle…it is the second week of October. Which ones do you think are going to handle the weather better?
This is why I don’t say, “the character is unaffected by weather above –10”…because if the character is from Mozambique, that number should be different than if the character is from the Orkneys.
Incidentally, ever seen a world map invented by a Dungeon Master that had clear, recognizable latitudes? Or a rational weather system? That is because weather is the most complex and annoying geographical consideration—and must be explained away by most DMs as “affected by magic” because working out a completely unique weather pattern on an imaginary world is just plain psycho.
Which brings us to the Disorders Table:
Not much to say about this, it is pretty clear. I’m not going to pabulum feed the readers by going all out to write specific effects for each of the disorders, though of course I could. Insensitivity to touch? Player can’t wear armor, player must wear specific fabrics, player reacts violently (and manically) to being touched and so on. Brittle bones? Player suffers +10%, +20%, +40%, double from falls, crushing damage, etc…however much of Unbreakable you want to coordinate into your campaign. Weak stomach? Food allergies, poison save reduced, whatever you like.
I disdain giving a specific list because you, as DM, ought to be able to work that out to suit your campaign. Anything I suggest is going to be either too harsh or too mild. I’ll stay here by the trunk, thank you. It is your path to walk onto that limb.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Wisdom
Wisdom is the last dumping ground for stats, for being like charisma and intelligence it has no direct influence on combat. I considered long and hard on how to have this affect the players, and settled on the idea that the character would have made friends or enemies during their early life; the wisdom table is meant to reflect that.
Now, most times, a character couldn’t give a rat’s ass what their family thought of them growing up. Family members do not generally have any place in D&D (nerds must dislike them, hm?), and I haven’t seen a player make much use of the positive results of this table. Most of the time, a player is too busy globetrotting to care much what mum and dad are doing back on the farm. Still, I feel the table has relevance and I don’t feel any need to change the subject matter.
The biggest dispute might be the result where a proficiency or a number of cantrips are lost. I agree, this is nasty. So is losing a limb, or being covered with burn scars. If you accept the negative results of the first two tables, you must accept that occasionally a character is going to have fucked up their studies in their youth. You might want to create some means by which they can take “night courses” and get back that proficiency or cantrip. Or simply eliminate the result from your campaign.
One thing that can be considered is the juxtaposition of this table with the father's profession table I posted days ago. If your father is no one special, then it doesn't much matter how the character is viewed. But if your father was merchant guildmaster (and loaded), and your fighter is HATED by his family...well, that just sucks, doesn't it?
Now, most times, a character couldn’t give a rat’s ass what their family thought of them growing up. Family members do not generally have any place in D&D (nerds must dislike them, hm?), and I haven’t seen a player make much use of the positive results of this table. Most of the time, a player is too busy globetrotting to care much what mum and dad are doing back on the farm. Still, I feel the table has relevance and I don’t feel any need to change the subject matter.
The biggest dispute might be the result where a proficiency or a number of cantrips are lost. I agree, this is nasty. So is losing a limb, or being covered with burn scars. If you accept the negative results of the first two tables, you must accept that occasionally a character is going to have fucked up their studies in their youth. You might want to create some means by which they can take “night courses” and get back that proficiency or cantrip. Or simply eliminate the result from your campaign.
One thing that can be considered is the juxtaposition of this table with the father's profession table I posted days ago. If your father is no one special, then it doesn't much matter how the character is viewed. But if your father was merchant guildmaster (and loaded), and your fighter is HATED by his family...well, that just sucks, doesn't it?
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Intelligence
When it comes to a player choosing the nature of his or her character, here is what I allow: they can arrange their abilities, pick their race, their class, what weapons they choose to buy, and everything they do from the point where they enter the campaign (barring being put into slavery, of course). Up until that point, however, I determine what happens to them. And by that, I mean the die does.
To me, a great deal of the game IS randomness; just as a great deal of the world is. I’m a believer in chaos theory. But a player can mitigate the circumstances of his own background by how he chooses to place his ability scores at the outset.
Intelligence, like charisma, is another dumping ground for unwanted stats. Most players assume, very reasonably, that they’re going to play their characters pretty much the same way no matter what their stats are. They may condescend to play it a little dumb if their intelligence is 8; but they probably can’t play an intelligence above what they actually have…which I don’t mind. How does a 120 I.Q. person play 170 I.Q? Dice roll.
What I want is for players to understand what they’re doing when they’re sorting out those first six numbers into their abilities. I want them to pause really, really hard before they write that little “9” next to the “I”…I want them to consider the consequences of their actions.
Let’s face it: when we are talking about personality development, in real people and in fictional characters, it is not that important what we’re able to do or how others treat us. What defines us…really DEFINES us…is the fucked up things we do to ourselves.
Allowing players too much latitude in choosing what makes up their characters loses a lot of the potential flavor normally accorded to characters in fiction. No D&D player is going to say at the outset, “My character was really stupid and gambled all his money away, so now he’s destitute and can’t afford weapons or armor at first level.” Or, “My character was kicked by a mule at age 5 after taunting the mule incessantly…they couldn’t save the leg below the knee so my character has a peg leg.” Or even, “My character had to go to prison to satisfy his father’s debts…so please increase my age by eleven years to compensate for that.”
Yet this shit happens. No one wants it to happen, but it does, and any background system should include the possibility…even if the players HATE it.
Which they don’t, in my experience. In fact, they love it. They love being able to make fun of someone else’s misfortune, or even their own—once they have to accept that the misfortune is unchangeable. Just like real people do when they think back on THEIR past mistakes. Make fun of it and move on.
Here is the Intelligence table. It works like yesterday’s charisma table, and includes positive as well as negative things. But the negative is, I admit, worse than the positive. Which is as it should be…life sucks and blows, it doesn’t usually steam like a dream.
Gah. I sicken myself sometimes.
"Proficiency" means another weapon. I admit I've been somewhat casual in the creation of these tables. I know what the words mean; I will expand in answer to any questions.
The DM must be prepared to give ready explanations for some of these things: how did the person lose a leg, why was the person put in jail, what cleverness ended in the writ of passage…its not that hard. Take the player’s suggestion, if you like, but realize that all players try to hedge the odds in their favor. I wouldn’t trust any of them, if I were you…you might find yourself approving some story that will come back later to bite you in the ass. Nope, you really ought to shoot your own dog when it comes to this. Make the player figure out a way to make it a good thing. Mistakes build character, remember.
The worst result I’ve yet had in my world is the female cleric (now sixth level) is missing a hand. It is a bitch. She can get herself a hook, but being a cleric she can’t use it as a weapon. Most heavy going clerical weapons require two hands (morning star, military pick, quarterstaff, flail)…so that even though she has weapon proficiencies, she can’t fill them.
Total actual complaints that I’ve received from the player, encouraging me to give her hand back? None. And that’s taking into account that the character had been playing and had advanced to fourth level before I brought this system in. Which means reality blinked and hey, she was missing a hand.
I don’t let things like that worry me. I’m bringing in rule changes all the time, sometimes they test poorly and we drop them. But I’m not going to let a little thing like the player already having used a morning star to gain 9,000 X.P. stand in the way of my campaign.
Besides…it encouraged me to invent a mechanical hand (7-9 thousand g.p.), along with “faerie oil” (400 g.p. cost per month)…if she wants a second hand that bad. She hasn’t decided yet if she wants to outlay the expense. After a couple more levels, I don’t think expense will be a problem. An annoyance, maybe…
To me, a great deal of the game IS randomness; just as a great deal of the world is. I’m a believer in chaos theory. But a player can mitigate the circumstances of his own background by how he chooses to place his ability scores at the outset.
Intelligence, like charisma, is another dumping ground for unwanted stats. Most players assume, very reasonably, that they’re going to play their characters pretty much the same way no matter what their stats are. They may condescend to play it a little dumb if their intelligence is 8; but they probably can’t play an intelligence above what they actually have…which I don’t mind. How does a 120 I.Q. person play 170 I.Q? Dice roll.
What I want is for players to understand what they’re doing when they’re sorting out those first six numbers into their abilities. I want them to pause really, really hard before they write that little “9” next to the “I”…I want them to consider the consequences of their actions.
Let’s face it: when we are talking about personality development, in real people and in fictional characters, it is not that important what we’re able to do or how others treat us. What defines us…really DEFINES us…is the fucked up things we do to ourselves.
Allowing players too much latitude in choosing what makes up their characters loses a lot of the potential flavor normally accorded to characters in fiction. No D&D player is going to say at the outset, “My character was really stupid and gambled all his money away, so now he’s destitute and can’t afford weapons or armor at first level.” Or, “My character was kicked by a mule at age 5 after taunting the mule incessantly…they couldn’t save the leg below the knee so my character has a peg leg.” Or even, “My character had to go to prison to satisfy his father’s debts…so please increase my age by eleven years to compensate for that.”
Yet this shit happens. No one wants it to happen, but it does, and any background system should include the possibility…even if the players HATE it.
Which they don’t, in my experience. In fact, they love it. They love being able to make fun of someone else’s misfortune, or even their own—once they have to accept that the misfortune is unchangeable. Just like real people do when they think back on THEIR past mistakes. Make fun of it and move on.
Here is the Intelligence table. It works like yesterday’s charisma table, and includes positive as well as negative things. But the negative is, I admit, worse than the positive. Which is as it should be…life sucks and blows, it doesn’t usually steam like a dream.
Gah. I sicken myself sometimes.
"Proficiency" means another weapon. I admit I've been somewhat casual in the creation of these tables. I know what the words mean; I will expand in answer to any questions.
The DM must be prepared to give ready explanations for some of these things: how did the person lose a leg, why was the person put in jail, what cleverness ended in the writ of passage…its not that hard. Take the player’s suggestion, if you like, but realize that all players try to hedge the odds in their favor. I wouldn’t trust any of them, if I were you…you might find yourself approving some story that will come back later to bite you in the ass. Nope, you really ought to shoot your own dog when it comes to this. Make the player figure out a way to make it a good thing. Mistakes build character, remember.
The worst result I’ve yet had in my world is the female cleric (now sixth level) is missing a hand. It is a bitch. She can get herself a hook, but being a cleric she can’t use it as a weapon. Most heavy going clerical weapons require two hands (morning star, military pick, quarterstaff, flail)…so that even though she has weapon proficiencies, she can’t fill them.
Total actual complaints that I’ve received from the player, encouraging me to give her hand back? None. And that’s taking into account that the character had been playing and had advanced to fourth level before I brought this system in. Which means reality blinked and hey, she was missing a hand.
I don’t let things like that worry me. I’m bringing in rule changes all the time, sometimes they test poorly and we drop them. But I’m not going to let a little thing like the player already having used a morning star to gain 9,000 X.P. stand in the way of my campaign.
Besides…it encouraged me to invent a mechanical hand (7-9 thousand g.p.), along with “faerie oil” (400 g.p. cost per month)…if she wants a second hand that bad. She hasn’t decided yet if she wants to outlay the expense. After a couple more levels, I don’t think expense will be a problem. An annoyance, maybe…
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)