Some context. My last attempt at running the GPC crashed and burned. There were several reasons for this. The main reason was that I became too fixated on following the campaign. I wanted to do it justice, and had a hard time adjusting to initiatives from my players. Another reason was that we went into it with every bell and whistle available. Book of the Manor, Book of Battle, you name it we used it!

Now I’m toying with the idea of trying again. But before I do I need to do two things. Set the campaign someplace outside Salisbury to give me and my players more mental space. Perhaps Cameliard. And I need to simplify/adjust some rules. Economics need to be made simpler while remaining important and some other details must be adjusted. This an attempt at tackling some of the rules issues. This is very much a work in progress, and I’d love input and feedback from you guys here.


Ideals

- All Christian characters use Roman Christian traits. British Christian was too much an "adventurous religion" and had too much overlap with chivalry. Ideals should be hard and they should involve sacrifice.
- Chivalry bonus takes 90 points total in the relevant traits. Prior to Arthurs reign being chivalric only grants 50 glory per year.
- Being a True Knight also takes 90 points total in the relevant traits. This ideal never goes out of fashion and grants 50 glory per year, every year.

Glory: Too much glory is generated passively from traits and passions. I want to tone down this and increase the emphasis on owning land, having vassals, building castles etc. And I want the APP stat to matter.

- Only the highest Trait over 15 grants yearly glory
- Only the highest Passion over 15 grants yearly glory
- Every point in APP over 10 grants 5 yearly glory. Every point below 10 subtracts 5 from yearly glory.
- Each vassal knight grants 10 glory per year. Max 100 per year.

Economics : Manors give knights living standards or vassals, not income.

The number of demesne manors and living standards:
Less than 0.5 Manor = Impoverished (0 Glory)
0.5 Manor = Poor (3 Glory)
1 Manor = Normal (6 Glory)
2 Manors = Rich (12 Glory)
3 Manors = Superlative (18 Glory)
4 Manors = Spectacular (24 Glory)
5 Manors = Spectacular + (30 Glory)

The effects of Stewardship and Bad Weather.
1 Calculate Bad Weather as in GPC
2 Roll Stewardship against Bad Weather and adjust living standard up or down one level for each difference in success level
3 Decide if you want to increase living standards with available funds. To improve just spend £ equal to the difference in glory.
4 Record benefits and glory.

Raiding: Raids reduce income from manors. A raided manor only counts as 1/2 Manor. A pillaged manor only counts as 1/3 manor. Plundered manors are too ravaged to contribute the knight’s living standards. Manors hit by raids improve by one category per year. A plundered manor counts as a pillaged manor the next year, and a raided manor the year after that.

Investment and entourage: A successful Stewardship roll generates 2£ per manor for the purpose of investments and maintaining followers. A critical roll nets double the amount and a failed roll gives half the amount (round down). Enfeoffed manors provide half this amount. This income must be allocated to a project or to upkeep. Abandoning a project before completion means the loss of half the investment so far.

In addition a knight can chose to roll once against each of Worldly/Selfish/Arbitrary/Cruel to gain +1£ per demesne manor in coin. A fumble on any of these means the peasants have rebelled.

Economics : Manors give knights living standards or vassals, not income.

The number of demesne manors and living standards:
Less than 0.5 Manor = Impoverished (0 Glory)
0.5 Manor = Poor (3 Glory)
1 Manor = Normal (6 Glory)
2 Manors = Rich (12 Glory)
3 Manors = Superlative (18 Glory)
4 Manors = Spectacular (24 Glory)
5 Manors = Spectacular + (30 Glory)

[\quote]

Was thinking something similar, with the expansion that Rich knights have some entourage and Superlative even more entourage.

[quote]
Investment and entourage: A successful Stewardship roll generates 2£ per manor for the purpose of investments and maintaining followers. A critical roll nets double the amount and a failed roll gives half the amount (round down). Enfeoffed manors provide half this amount. This income must be allocated to a project or to upkeep. Abandoning a project before completion means the loss of half the investment so far.

I am thinking of 'not burdening' the knight with details whether to buy an apiary or fishpond.
So any steward worth his salt will use the profit from a good year to invest... So instead of shifting maintenance level (this also saves the whole 'was I now this year rich or last year?') any incoming gained is invested which a 1/10 yearly return..



In addition a knight can chose to roll once against each of Worldly/Selfish/Arbitrary/Cruel to gain +1£ per demesne manor in coin. A fumble on any of these means the peasants have rebelled.


Love it!

fg,
Thijs

Investment and entourage: A successful Stewardship roll generates 2£ per manor for the purpose of investments and maintaining followers. A critical roll nets double the amount and a failed roll gives half the amount (round down). Enfeoffed manors provide half this amount. This income must be allocated to a project or to upkeep. Abandoning a project before completion means the loss of half the investment so far.

I am thinking of 'not burdening' the knight with details whether to buy an apiary or fishpond.
So any steward worth his salt will use the profit from a good year to invest... So instead of shifting maintenance level (this also saves the whole 'was I now this year rich or last year?') any incoming gained is invested which a 1/10 yearly return..


I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. Investments under these rules means walls, fortifications, churches, pleasure gardens etc, not something that increases your income. They might provide trait checks or yearly glory, never money. I assume that a manor that have been handed down for generations will already produce all the income it ever will. The trick is to manage it properly, and that is already covered by the Stewardship rolls.

The reason I didn't link entourage and living standard is because under these rules your living standard might fluctuate quite a bit (+/- 3 levels), and that would make keeping an entourage very hard. What I have tried to do is to decouple living standard from money. Sure money matters, but having a spectacular living standard one year doesn't mean becoming very rich. It is more a matter of avoiding disease, good crops, healthy kids, beautiful weather and happy peasants. The income might remain constant, but some years are just better than others.

Edit: If I were to allow investment in income I would simulate this by letting the player foster population growth. I would rule that a manor should be considered an economic unit as well as a settlement. So by establishing a town with a market on his land a knight could get a Manor that counts as two manors (or more) in economic terms. I would think that spending ten times the amount of glory you get from a Manor (normally 6) would increase it by six. And that the maximum amount spent on population growth each year equals the glory (again, normally 6). This means that it would take ten years and and considerable investment (60£ worth) to develop a town worth two manors. And it would take ten more years and 120£ more to get a town worth three manors etc.

The beauty of this is that it is suddenly more easy to rate different settlements. I would say that Sarum should be worth about 5 manors. Du Plain perhaps 3 and so on.

I'm sorry, I should have been more clear. Investments under these rules means walls, fortifications, churches, pleasure gardens etc, not something that increases your income. They might provide trait checks or yearly glory, never money. I assume that a manor that have been handed down for generations will already produce all the income it ever will. The trick is to manage it properly, and that is already covered by the Stewardship rolls.


Interesting assumption. So all the extra's build by your father have been taken by earl (I think Greg supports that). But why did your father then not also buy all the extra fortifications...
What would be nice idea is the 'growing' manor table. According Greg most manors evolved identical, so why not tabulate that and decide how far a manor is when a player gets it..



The reason I didn't link entourage and living standard is because under these rules your living standard might fluctuate quite a bit (+/- 3 levels), and that would make keeping an entourage very hard. What I have tried to do is to decouple living standard from money. Sure money matters, but having a spectacular living standard one year doesn't mean becoming very rich. It is more a matter of avoiding disease, good crops, healthy kids, beautiful weather and happy peasants. The income might remain constant, but some years are just better than others.


To me, it always seemed weird that every 'bad' year all these entourage were laid off and rehired next year.
If you have good year, you have some good parties, buy that fishpond, but you dont go hire retinue (except maybe that wandering bard).

fg,
Thijs

I think your conclusion about not using all the bells and whistles is valid - if you aspire to 1 session/year then you need to be quite focused and make each year about one 'thing' (maybe two). Use the full featured rules for the 'A' plot of the year, everything else uses simplified versions of game systems (if it gets any time at all).

Regarding the houserules - they look pretty fair. I have some comments however:

1) What is a True Knight?

2) I wouldn't go with the glory revisions you suggest, but that is a matter of taste and desired glory balance.

3) I would suggest tweaking the estate size table somewhat:

Size of Estate (demesne manors):
Less than 0.5 Manor = Impoverished (0 Glory)
0.5 Manor = Poor (3 Glory)
1 Manor = Normal (6 Glory)
2 Manors = Normal (12 Glory), 1 household knight
3 Manors = Rich (18 Glory), 2 household knights
4 Manors = Superlative (24 Glory), 3 household knights
5 Manors = Superlative (30 Glory), 4 household knights
6 Manors = Spectacular (36 Glory), 5 household knights

This brings the table into line with the extended system (where you net a surplus of £2 from any additional manors that you hold, but you need an extra £3 to live at Rich, £6 to live at Superlative, £9 to live at Spectacular). Since this table is built on the assumption that you have to provide knights for the manors I have added the household knights that an estate of this size maintains 'for free' - I would suggest for the sake of simplicity that any economic shifts on this table as a result of stewardship vs bad weather don't read across to the number of knights you can maintain that year (but that might be a wrinkle that could be added to fine tune things balance-wise). The benefit of having an estate which lies between the breakpoints for quality of maintenance (over you having an extra knight in your following, natch) is the fact that a single shift resulting from the annual stewardship roll either has no effect on your living standard or lets you live large for a year.

4) Retaining the 'pay difference in glory to upgrade your maintenance' breaks with the extended system, so you could either revise that to 'pay £2 per shift on the table' or keep it as is and make a virtue out of the fact that this is not as efficient a method of living well as having a well-managed estate.

5) Will players have an option to ameliorate the effects of raiding by actively defending their manor? Currently there's nothing here for that. Further to this, I assume that the Weather rating won't include 'Raided' modifiers any more (since the effect has already been factored in to the effective return of the estate by the manor divisor)?

6) Do you intend the stewardship roll in 'Investments and Entourage' to be separate from the roll against bad weather? If not then you are already determining some (dis)advantage from this role which would then get further amplified by the additional income at this step so I would suggest that you halve the amounts of potential income to be garnered to make this less swingy (if you round fractional amounts down before the total for the estate is transferred to the player, then this is another wrinkle for the estate size table as 2, 4 and 6-manor estates get an extra librum here). If it is intended to be a separate roll then you can keep the suggested values, but either way I would strongly suggest taking enfeoffed manors out of consideration for this - anything to do with them should count as 'money you do not see'; you get a vassal knight in your following from that deal and nothing else (other than the bump in annual glory you added in your glory houserule).

7) The trait checks bit to represent squeezes on the peasantry etc I would put into its own explicit 'Exceptional Measures' step, this would also include stuff like going to the moneylender or asking for cash gifts from your friends.

8 ) Rather than making a special case for allocation of the income from the Investment & Entourage step, I'd just say that the cash is moved to treasury and then you fund next year's entourage and investment payments out of the treasury as the final act of the year - the sequencing for the fiscal year would therefore be:

(i) Determine raided status of the estate
(ii) Roll vs Weather to determine maintenance, pay from treasury to upgrade your maintenance
(iii) Determine Additional Income, move to treasury
(iv) Determine Exceptional Income, move to treasury
(v) Pay next year's entourage and investment outlays from treasury (NB. The treasury is not allowed to be less than zero after this step)


Regards
Luke

Thanks for the constructive and interesting feed-back people!



Interesting assumption. So all the extra's build by your father have been taken by earl (I think Greg supports that). But why did your father then not also buy all the extra fortifications...
What would be nice idea is the 'growing' manor table. According Greg most manors evolved identical, so why not tabulate that and decide how far a manor is when a player gets it..

Hmm. I think we are talking past each other. My perspective is that when you talk about settlements like manors, the most striking characteristic is how static they are. I think it is safe to assume that a lot of manors in logres will have been settled for hundreds if not thousands of years. People have been cultivating the land for generations already, so without radical social and technological change they will probably remain the same for many generations to come. So the perspective shouldn’t be “hey, where are my father’s improvements?” but rather “wow, my ancestors have been so awesome at cultivating the land that I’m one of the landed nobility!” Starting the game with a plain manor isn’t a testimony over how little your father improved the land, but rather how very well he managed it.

And the same goes for fortifications. Any given manor could have had a ditch and rampart several times during its existence. But these things tend to be buildt in times of war, then torn down in times of peace, burnt in raids or restricted by jealous overlords. The fact that your manor doesn’t start with fortifications doesn’t mean your grandfather didn’t have any. But mainly it is because at the start of the campaign your culture is just beginning to crawl out of tribalism and into medieval feudalism. Manors with more than a strong hall and a wicker fence is probably quite novel for the cymri.

On the other hand, cymric society is going to experience an enormous leap in social and technological sophistication as part of the campaign. So in this context it isn’t that strange that a manor that has remained static for centuries suddenly grows into a market town and gets a castle in the PKs’ lifetime. That is the kind of anachronism the GPC is.



To me, it always seemed weird that every 'bad' year all these entourage were laid off and rehired next year.
If you have good year, you have some good parties, buy that fishpond, but you dont go hire retinue (except maybe that wandering bard).

Exactly. That is the reason I’m reluctant to link living standards and entourage too closely. Your ability to support henchmen should be a bit more stable.

1) What is a True Knight?
My bad. True Knight was an alternative ideal posted on the old forums. I think it was Darren Hill that created them originally. The ideal is referred to in this thread:
http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=634.msg5308#msg5308
(I always ignored the arbitrary thing, and just went with the five basic traits)


3) I would suggest tweaking the estate size table somewhat:

Size of Estate (demesne manors):
Less than 0.5 Manor = Impoverished (0 Glory)
0.5 Manor = Poor (3 Glory)
1 Manor = Normal (6 Glory)
2 Manors = Normal (12 Glory), 1 household knight
3 Manors = Rich (18 Glory), 2 household knights
4 Manors = Superlative (24 Glory), 3 household knights
5 Manors = Superlative (30 Glory), 4 household knights
6 Manors = Spectacular (36 Glory), 5 household knights

This brings the table into line with the extended system (where you net a surplus of £2 from any additional manors that you hold, but you need an extra £3 to live at Rich, £6 to live at Superlative, £9 to live at Spectacular). Since this table is built on the assumption that you have to provide knights for the manors I have added the household knights that an estate of this size maintains 'for free' - I would suggest for the sake of simplicity that any economic shifts on this table as a result of stewardship vs bad weather don't read across to the number of knights you can maintain that year (but that might be a wrinkle that could be added to fine tune things balance-wise). The benefit of having an estate which lies between the breakpoints for quality of maintenance (over you having an extra knight in your following, natch) is the fact that a single shift resulting from the annual stewardship roll either has no effect on your living standard or lets you live large for a year.
This does simplify the system even more. But it does remove an incentive I tried to build into the system for lords to grant manors to vassals. In a normal year the end results are similar: If you have two manors under my system a successful Stewardship roll (not the roll against bad weather) gives £4 (2£ per manor), and that is what you need to maintain a household knight. But in bad years you fall short (failed Stewardship only grants £1 per manor), and have to find other ways of financing your follower. If your estate is sufficient to maintain you at your desired living standard, granting extra manors to a vassal is financially prudent. He’ll maintain himself in good years and bad years, and his manor will provide £1 to you in good years and £1/2 in bad. And that is actually a good deal. As it stands now, granting manors will always be a sub-optimal solution.


4) Retaining the 'pay difference in glory to upgrade your maintenance' breaks with the extended system, so you could either revise that to 'pay £2 per shift on the table' or keep it as is and make a virtue out of the fact that this is not as efficient a method of living well as having a well-managed estate.
Valid point. But assuming that living standards is more about healthy living, happy wives, good weather and healthy livestock – not just income, I can easily justify that making up for the difference in money is more costly. Cash helps, but I can’t buy you everything.


5) Will players have an option to ameliorate the effects of raiding by actively defending their manor? Currently there's nothing here for that. Further to this, I assume that the Weather rating won't include 'Raided' modifiers any more (since the effect has already been factored in to the effective return of the estate by the manor divisor)?
Another good point about raiding. Yeah there should be a system like this, and I think fortifications should be very important. Roll against total DV on the manor to reduce the raiding by one level? Is that too little?

And I hadn’t considered the double effect of raiding. Yeah it shouldn’t normally affect weather - that would be cruel. But I think bad weather still should be affected by macro-economic effects like full blown wars (even if they don’t actually reach your manor). Saxon raiding across all of Salisbury would probably mean both increased bad weather and lower income. You’d better pay those tributes!


6) Do you intend the stewardship roll in 'Investments and Entourage' to be separate from the roll against bad weather?
Yes. The second roll is unopposed, and is more about efficient use of the labor your peasants owe you as their lord. And it is important that this is understood to be labor and services, not treasure. You use it on projects or to maintain an entourage, or lose it.

I realize that I’m in danger of making Stewardship the new God Skill, though.


If it is intended to be a separate roll then you can keep the suggested values, but either way I would strongly suggest taking enfeoffed manors out of consideration for this - anything to do with them should count as 'money you do not see'; you get a vassal knight in your following from that deal and nothing else (other than the bump in annual glory you added in your glory houserule).
I guess I need to think more on this. My intention was that this was a way to make enfeoffment even more tempting, a way to explain how the highborn can afford all those followers (I would rule that this would give the Earl of Salisbury about £95 in services to play around with. That could easily mean 10 household knights (£40), 10 specialists at court (£10) and another 45 footmen) and to give player lords fincancial muscles to improve their domains.

All this without drenching the players with money.

Ok, more house rules:

Raiding: I really like the raiding rules from Greg's site (where you chose how far you want to take it by accepting checks to vengeful, selfish, cruel and arbitrary), so this is just an small modifier those rules:

For each knight value of followers you have with you on the raid, you gain +1 on all rolls. This is the reason you gather your family knights, vassals and lineage men to go a raidin'.

Before each check you have to roll an opposed Battle or face 1D6 x 1D6 knight values in a skirmish.