Morien
10-18-2015, 11:07 AM
From this thread: http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=2946.msg22513#msg22513
In short, if you find Book of the Estate or Warlord to be a bit too math-heavy, here are some things you can do to make it easier.
1) Simplified Income & Expenses: Ignore the difference between Assized Rent and Additional Income, and just deal in Customary Revenue. The only difference is that Production = Assized Rent, but you can drop Production, too: that goes to supporting the commoners & production itself, and you don't have to worry about that, the system works. (Also, Additional Income is usually just a small fraction of the total Customary Revenue).
2) Rounding: Round all manor / parcel / trade bonus values to the nearest £1 (nearest £10 if larger than £100). You'll get some rounding errors, but don't worry about it: they will mainly average out, or be small in the first place. For example, a £11.3 manor would become £11, and the trade bonus would be +£1 rather than £1.1, resulting in £12 rather than £12.4. A £315 honour would become £320. Sure, you might get edge cases where unrounded values would be slightly different, but as long as everyone is on board with using the rounded values for the calculations consistently, you are good. For instance, I'd happily round £4.6 manor to £5 and then calculate the trade bonus from that, rounding to £1, for a total of £6 instead of the more exact £5.06 = £5. The manor owner desperately needs that extra £1! :) Also, while it is 20% increase, it is just £0.1 increase in absolute values in the Discretionary Funds, so it will hardly wreck your campaign.
3) Even more simplified Expenses: Like BotE/W say, the only two really important numbers are the size of the army you have in your disposal (1 knight / £10 Customary Revenue) and Discretionary Funds (10% of Customary Revenue + Free Income). You can happily abstract Standard of Living to Estate Holder = Rich and Baron = Superlative and then forget about it unless your holding is raided. (Note that this is actually the recommended DEFAULT for BotW, if I recall correctly, and the full account ledger is more for just 'honour generation': do it in the beginning just to see how much money is going, on average, to the Court etc. You are not expected to calculate things anew with raids etc, but use the Lot system (see below). This makes things a LOT easier (pardon the pun) in actual gameplay.)
4) Speaking of raiding... Lots of damages: For Honours, forget about the current value and instead track 'Damage Taken', if a parcel is raided. Calculate the final damage to the whole honour in Lots by: (all damage taken)/(undamaged honour value) = damage in honour Lots. This is easier and quicker than taking the unnecessary extra step of going via current value.
Still not simple enough? Well, you can simplify even more by going back to £10 'standard manors'. Simply round each parcel to nearest £10 and add trade bonus only when it rounds to +£10. For instance, if you have a £40 parcel in a same county as a city and a same hundred as a market town, you'll get +20% = £8 -> rounds to £10 for a total of £50. Just having a market town would be £4 and under this resolution (rounds to £0). Again, you lose/gain some edge cases by rounding (down or up) first and then calculating the trade bonus, but if you were interested in exact numbers, you wouldn't simplify this much in the first place, now would you? :) Or you can simply ignore the trade bonus, too; it is not a huge deal during Uther Period and non-existent during Anarchy.
In the interests of the full disclosure:
My own two campaigns started before BotE/W were out (and one of them was already way into Arthur's reign), so we were doing things with the Book of the Manor with the old standard manors of £6. With the revised BotE out, I decided to port over to a £10 manor, but we still have most of the book-keeping 'hidden' (See E, below). Since we were using BotM, we have variable harvest income for each manor and variable Improvement income & maintenance, adding heck of a lot of additional rolling and book-keeping in the Winter Phase that is absent from BotE/W. So, in order to keep things simple(r), we do the following:
A) Each manor is £10 to start with.
B) No trade bonus.
C) Harvest modifiers are in £1 chunks. (And the Harvest system is a bit simplified from BotM, too; see house rules here: http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=2589.msg19431#msg19431)
D) Improvements are rolled separately and they are in £1 chunks, unaffected by the Harvest for simplicity. (Meaning I as the GM can ignore them while each player rolls and adds up their improvement income.)
E) We track only the size of the army (in knights, 1 knight / manor) and Discretionary Funds (which varies from year to year based on Harvest and improvement income). This is partially justified that the manors tend to be all over the map due to the quests that have resulted in rewards, and thus they require their own steward -> higher overhead. We do track stewards, too, by the way. In practice, the players have £6 per manor for the upkeep of a knight & family (or a household knight and a £2 veteran steward) with £1 extra as Discretionary Funds, assuming a normal harvest and no improvements. The Court & foot soldiers are abstracted away until they are needed.
F) At inheritance, the improvement income is added to the base manor income to calculate the servitium debitum, but other than that, everything else works as before. (We MIGHT switch to the old improvements giving a steady income and calculate those as part of the manor harvest income, i.e. a £10 + £8 improvements on average = £18 manor and £2 steps in harvest, but so far, it hasn't been an issue.)
So we are actually doing something that is MORE complex than BotE/W in the year-to-year and compensate by keeping the basic blocks (unimproved manors) as simple as possible, due to stuff being grandfathered in. Which makes the harvest oh so much easier for me as the GM, as I can just look at the harvest result and know it is the same income for each manor (+ improvements - calamities). It is a bit of a patchwork of old rules and house rules due to the evolution of the campaign, and I occasionally wonder if it would be a good idea to just port fully into BotE and be done with it. On the other hand, it works for us, so why mess with something that isn't broken? After all, Your Pendragon Will Vary. :)
In short, if you find Book of the Estate or Warlord to be a bit too math-heavy, here are some things you can do to make it easier.
1) Simplified Income & Expenses: Ignore the difference between Assized Rent and Additional Income, and just deal in Customary Revenue. The only difference is that Production = Assized Rent, but you can drop Production, too: that goes to supporting the commoners & production itself, and you don't have to worry about that, the system works. (Also, Additional Income is usually just a small fraction of the total Customary Revenue).
2) Rounding: Round all manor / parcel / trade bonus values to the nearest £1 (nearest £10 if larger than £100). You'll get some rounding errors, but don't worry about it: they will mainly average out, or be small in the first place. For example, a £11.3 manor would become £11, and the trade bonus would be +£1 rather than £1.1, resulting in £12 rather than £12.4. A £315 honour would become £320. Sure, you might get edge cases where unrounded values would be slightly different, but as long as everyone is on board with using the rounded values for the calculations consistently, you are good. For instance, I'd happily round £4.6 manor to £5 and then calculate the trade bonus from that, rounding to £1, for a total of £6 instead of the more exact £5.06 = £5. The manor owner desperately needs that extra £1! :) Also, while it is 20% increase, it is just £0.1 increase in absolute values in the Discretionary Funds, so it will hardly wreck your campaign.
3) Even more simplified Expenses: Like BotE/W say, the only two really important numbers are the size of the army you have in your disposal (1 knight / £10 Customary Revenue) and Discretionary Funds (10% of Customary Revenue + Free Income). You can happily abstract Standard of Living to Estate Holder = Rich and Baron = Superlative and then forget about it unless your holding is raided. (Note that this is actually the recommended DEFAULT for BotW, if I recall correctly, and the full account ledger is more for just 'honour generation': do it in the beginning just to see how much money is going, on average, to the Court etc. You are not expected to calculate things anew with raids etc, but use the Lot system (see below). This makes things a LOT easier (pardon the pun) in actual gameplay.)
4) Speaking of raiding... Lots of damages: For Honours, forget about the current value and instead track 'Damage Taken', if a parcel is raided. Calculate the final damage to the whole honour in Lots by: (all damage taken)/(undamaged honour value) = damage in honour Lots. This is easier and quicker than taking the unnecessary extra step of going via current value.
Still not simple enough? Well, you can simplify even more by going back to £10 'standard manors'. Simply round each parcel to nearest £10 and add trade bonus only when it rounds to +£10. For instance, if you have a £40 parcel in a same county as a city and a same hundred as a market town, you'll get +20% = £8 -> rounds to £10 for a total of £50. Just having a market town would be £4 and under this resolution (rounds to £0). Again, you lose/gain some edge cases by rounding (down or up) first and then calculating the trade bonus, but if you were interested in exact numbers, you wouldn't simplify this much in the first place, now would you? :) Or you can simply ignore the trade bonus, too; it is not a huge deal during Uther Period and non-existent during Anarchy.
In the interests of the full disclosure:
My own two campaigns started before BotE/W were out (and one of them was already way into Arthur's reign), so we were doing things with the Book of the Manor with the old standard manors of £6. With the revised BotE out, I decided to port over to a £10 manor, but we still have most of the book-keeping 'hidden' (See E, below). Since we were using BotM, we have variable harvest income for each manor and variable Improvement income & maintenance, adding heck of a lot of additional rolling and book-keeping in the Winter Phase that is absent from BotE/W. So, in order to keep things simple(r), we do the following:
A) Each manor is £10 to start with.
B) No trade bonus.
C) Harvest modifiers are in £1 chunks. (And the Harvest system is a bit simplified from BotM, too; see house rules here: http://nocturnal-media.com/forum/index.php?topic=2589.msg19431#msg19431)
D) Improvements are rolled separately and they are in £1 chunks, unaffected by the Harvest for simplicity. (Meaning I as the GM can ignore them while each player rolls and adds up their improvement income.)
E) We track only the size of the army (in knights, 1 knight / manor) and Discretionary Funds (which varies from year to year based on Harvest and improvement income). This is partially justified that the manors tend to be all over the map due to the quests that have resulted in rewards, and thus they require their own steward -> higher overhead. We do track stewards, too, by the way. In practice, the players have £6 per manor for the upkeep of a knight & family (or a household knight and a £2 veteran steward) with £1 extra as Discretionary Funds, assuming a normal harvest and no improvements. The Court & foot soldiers are abstracted away until they are needed.
F) At inheritance, the improvement income is added to the base manor income to calculate the servitium debitum, but other than that, everything else works as before. (We MIGHT switch to the old improvements giving a steady income and calculate those as part of the manor harvest income, i.e. a £10 + £8 improvements on average = £18 manor and £2 steps in harvest, but so far, it hasn't been an issue.)
So we are actually doing something that is MORE complex than BotE/W in the year-to-year and compensate by keeping the basic blocks (unimproved manors) as simple as possible, due to stuff being grandfathered in. Which makes the harvest oh so much easier for me as the GM, as I can just look at the harvest result and know it is the same income for each manor (+ improvements - calamities). It is a bit of a patchwork of old rules and house rules due to the evolution of the campaign, and I occasionally wonder if it would be a good idea to just port fully into BotE and be done with it. On the other hand, it works for us, so why mess with something that isn't broken? After all, Your Pendragon Will Vary. :)