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Author Topic: Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding  (Read 23670 times)

AnthonyRoberson

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« on: February 15, 2012, 08:42:09 PM »
For those that might be interested, I have both Adventurer Conquerer King and An Echo Resounding (thanks for the review copy Kevin!) I thought I would compare each book's Domain Management system. (NOTE: these are based on fairly quick reads and may not be 100% accurate).

- Both use domain turns of approximately one month (although ACK does not refer to them as such.
- The only resource in ACK is gp. AER uses three abstract resources values; Military, Wealth and Social for a domain's various locations.
- ACK contains detailed tables for construction costs, population values, Markets, Trade Routes, etc. but doesn't really have a 'domain subsystem'.
- AER provides rules for domain actions like accumulating treasure or establishing a domain asset but lacks detailed tables and rules systems.
- ACK appears to use a combination of old and new systems in a very traditional way.
- AER uses the Sine Nomine 'plot point' system as the basis for its story driven mechanics.
- AER does include a detailed starting area for adventuring; The Westmark.

crkrueger

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #1 on: February 15, 2012, 09:16:12 PM »
Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;514803
For those that might be interested, I have both Adventurer Conquerer King and An Echo Resounding (thanks for the review copy Kevin!) I thought I would compare each book's Domain Management system. (NOTE: these are based on fairly quick reads and may not be 100% accurate).

- Both use domain turns of approximately one month (although ACK does not refer to them as such.
- The only resource in ACK is gp. AER uses three abstract resources values; Military, Wealth and Social for a domain's various locations.
- ACK contains detailed tables for construction costs, population values, Markets, Trade Routes, etc. but doesn't really have a 'domain subsystem'.
- AER provides rules for domain actions like accumulating treasure or establishing a domain asset but lacks detailed tables and rules systems.
- ACK appears to use a combination of old and new systems in a very traditional way.
- AER uses the Sine Nomine 'plot point' system as the basis for its story driven mechanics.
- AER does include a detailed starting area for adventuring; The Westmark.


Very interesting, I have ACK, but haven't grabbed AER yet.  How compatible do you think they would be bolting pieces of one onto the other?
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Aos

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #2 on: February 15, 2012, 09:17:17 PM »
Quote from: CRKrueger;514820
I have ACK,


Is it pdf only right now? I can't find a hard copy for sale.
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crkrueger

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #3 on: February 15, 2012, 09:30:22 PM »
I think the physical pre-orders went out when the pdf went live, the general order physical copies aren't out yet (or weren't when I bought the pdf).
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AnthonyRoberson

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #4 on: February 15, 2012, 09:36:58 PM »
Quote from: CRKrueger;514820
Very interesting, I have ACK, but haven't grabbed AER yet.  How compatible do you think they would be bolting pieces of one onto the other?


I think it would be pretty easy to integrate AER's Domain system into ACK (it is designed to be modular), even if you decide not to use AER's resource values. I think it would be more problematic to go the other way because ACK's systems appear to be much more intertwined.

Fiasco

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #5 on: February 16, 2012, 08:24:23 AM »
I thing I will be getting both.

Silverlion

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #6 on: February 16, 2012, 09:59:46 AM »
Link for AER?
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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #7 on: February 16, 2012, 11:31:53 AM »
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I have An Echo Resounding and rather like it. I was planning to use it for a Darker Dungeons game, but I've been hearing good things about ACK. Thanks for the comparison between the systems and thoughts on compatibility, Anthony. I may end up buying it after all.
 

SineNomine

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #8 on: February 16, 2012, 01:29:36 PM »
I'm hardly an uninvolved onlooker in this, but I've had some time to sit down with ACKS and give its domain and campaign region creation sections a proper read. I think it's a very interesting book that does a good job of accomplishing what it set out to do- but it's interesting to me that it and AER have almost diametrically opposed ways of getting to their destinations.

The key structural difference between ACKS and AER, in my reading, is that ACKS attempts to directly anchor domains in plausible extrapolations of regional population densities, markets, and gold piece values. The roots of the domain system are embedded in tallies of peasant families per hex and a gp-per-family domain income value. Population growth, feasible land carrying capacities, and racial modifications for elves and dwarves are factored in to produce plausible population totals, and those are used to derive the lord's per-turn income. Out of this income, the lord pays stronghold upkeep, garrison costs, and other fees- including the presumption that he's paying 10% in tithes and a 5 gp per family festival cost at least four times a year.

Stronghold construction and settlement building are also established on a strict gold-piece basis; if you want a stronghold, you need cash, and a substantial amount of it. Prices are given for everything from a 10' stretch of corridor to moats (filled or unfilled) to the cost of a stone door. Everything is calibrated to a particular scale of gold piece costs. The plain intention is that as long as your campaign shares the default ACKS economic scale, the prices provided for domain operation should make sense and be useful in play.

The model is explicitly feudal. Your PC can't personally control more than one domain, while the mightiest empires on the globe might be composed of tens of thousands of domains. The emperors of these realms subinfeudinate their best domains to their henchmen, who in turn subinfeudinate all the way down. It patterns very strongly on traditional Western European historical models, right down to the assumption of tithing, festival costs, and duties/favors granted to vassals.

In summary, ACKS handles domains by extrapolating upward from base population numbers and handles their activities and influences through direct gold piece expenditures, income, and population adjustments. AER approaches the matter from the exact opposite direction. I think it has to do with some fundamentally different things that the creators of ACKS want from their games as compared to what I want from mine. ACKS does a great job of doing some things that I, personally, wouldn't ever want to do with my game. Which is all for the better, as it's in everyone's interest for new material to cover as wide a range of playstyles as is possible.
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AnthonyRoberson

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #9 on: February 16, 2012, 02:13:47 PM »
Exactly. I totally respect what ACK is doing. But I am not really looking for a fantasy medieval sim that I have to run with a spreadsheet.

danbuter

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #10 on: February 16, 2012, 02:21:32 PM »
Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;514803

- AER uses the Sine Nomine 'plot point' system as the basis for its story driven mechanics.


Care to explain? This means absolutely nothing to me.
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Benoist

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #11 on: February 16, 2012, 02:22:44 PM »
Quote from: SineNomine;514959
In summary, ACKS handles domains by extrapolating upward from base population numbers and handles their activities and influences through direct gold piece expenditures, income, and population adjustments. AER approaches the matter from the exact opposite direction. I think it has to do with some fundamentally different things that the creators of ACKS want from their games as compared to what I want from mine. ACKS does a great job of doing some things that I, personally, wouldn't ever want to do with my game. Which is all for the better, as it's in everyone's interest for new material to cover as wide a range of playstyles as is possible.

Could you extrapolate on the exact opposite approach AER took? What are these fundamentally different things you want from your game? I'm genuinely interested in the difference of philosophy here.

SineNomine

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #12 on: February 16, 2012, 03:42:24 PM »
Quote from: Benoist;514970
Could you extrapolate on the exact opposite approach AER took? What are these fundamentally different things you want from your game? I'm genuinely interested in the difference of philosophy here.
For my own games, I don't get sufficient payoff out of attempts at demographic or economic simulation. The fundamentally different reality of your bog-standard D&D campaign world makes such simulation very difficult to execute, and I don't feel the investment is worth the results at the table.

Because that's what it's all about for me- GM effort versus GM reward. What exactly am I gaining for my next session by doing a particular piece of work? How is this going to make my life easier at the table tomorrow, or the game more fun for the players, or the creation itself more fun for me? Every element in a game has to justify itself on those terms.

AER's domain system is light, low-math, and heavily abstracted. Here, for example, is a sample manorial domain, using stats taken from memory:

"Lord Regenhard Chou, a 7th level Fighter, rules the coastal village of Wei Lung, a Resource Location with Good Fishing. Assets at Wei Lung include a minor temple to the sea-god Hjal (Shrine), a low landward wall (Palisade), and a regular crew of "law-abiding fisherfolk" (1 unit of Skandr Raiders). Including Regenhard's class bonus of Martial Glory, total/available values for the domain are Military 5/2, Wealth 4/4, and Social 2/1."


No population totals, no market details, and no specific military manpower totals aside from the general rule that 1 unit of humanoid soldiers is 100 men. Why not? Because these things are not worth the effort necessary to coherently establish them in the kind of game I'm supporting. The PC lord knows that he's got a 7th level priest working for him, a wall between him and the bad guys, and a hundred scary vikings willing to kill things for him. Those are facts that are going to shape his adventuring choices and plans in a very direct, obvious way, and a GM can respond to them in equally direct fashion.

By the same token, you have Cities. What is the purpose of a city? It's to make the players' life interesting in ways impossible for villages or ruins. Therefore, whenever establishing a city, the question you answer is "How is this place interesting to players and useful to the GM?" Issues of how many people live there or what kind of trade goes on are meaningful only in the context of helping the GM run a hot table on Sunday. Here's a randomly-generated AER city:

"Eigenvolk was founded by a band of Makerite heretics who were convinced that the Maker spoke directly to men and women, and that priests were unnecessary. (The Innovator origin: +2 Wealth) It thrived as its commitment to universal education made it the local seat of learning and enlightenment. (The Education Tradition activity: +2 Wealth) Unfortunately, the Deans of the Five Academies have been dabbling in sinister arts, and their mutual enmity has left them willing to make dark pacts to overcome their rivals for control of the city. (The Corrupt Leadership obstacle)"

You'll notice that Eigenvolk has no listed assets. Why not? Because it's not important yet. When the GM needs it, he'll just mark off an Academy, some Walls, maybe a Barracks and Market, and enough troops to fill the city's available pointage. Every other factor about Eigenvolk is left undefined and unconsidered until the point at which it becomes relevant. Everything that the GM is compelled to do needs to pay off immediately at the table.
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Tavis

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #13 on: February 16, 2012, 11:49:03 PM »
Benoist, to use an analogy about the different approaches, I used to be a neuroscience grad student. One of the things I used to like to do was to make analogies about the different systems that are as complex as the brain - the economy, the weather - and a fantasy society/universe is theoretically as complex. So in neuroscience you have bottom-up approaches (like ACKS) and top-down approaches (like AER).

If you ask a bottom-up person what they do, they might answer "learning and memory" but if you show that you're interested you can drill down to "I study this gating molecule in this ion channel in this nerve cell in this aquatic mollusk which shows a learned response to electric shock." In our analogy, these details are the gold pieces and numbers of peasants and acres of land etc. that ACKS builds up from. (If pressed, a purely bottom-up scientist will say yes, that's not what most people think of as memory, but you have to hitch the research to a larger issue because no one will fund just fooling around with ion channels; likewise some gamers are happy just counting coins without thinking about what it means from a top-down perspective.)

A top-down person who studies learning and memory is like "I know that remembering new events is different from learning new procedures, because if you look at someone with damage to the hippocampus they can eventually learn to write in a mirror even though each time you ask them to do so they don't remember ever having done it before." By analogy these meta-categories of declarative vs. procedural memory are like the AER abstractions SineNomine describes. (If pressed, a purely top-down scientist will admit that sure the hippocampus has cells that have ion channels in them, but that's not relevant at this level of description; likewise some gamers are happy with systems that handle everything in abstractions and don't have a way to figure out how many gold pieces change hands.)

In neuroscience, the really exciting stuff comes when you can bridge the gap, like the finding from neural network modeling that the characteristic geometric visual phenomena experienced by hallucinogen users come from cell-level interactions caused by the drug's effect on the retina. This is (speaking as a top-level guy by training) way more exciting than just looking at ion channel flows with no reference to mental states, and way more compelling than the kind of gassing on about the shared unconscious you get if you just look at self-reported experience with no reference to the brain.

Some examples of bridging the gap relevant to the topic at hand:

I've been looking at the Keep on the Borderlands through the lens of ACKS, and one surprising finding is that the sixth-level Castellan is in command of a stronghold whose upkeep costs are far greater than his expected income. This strikes me as rich with dramatic possibilities - is he the agent for a greater liege who is so over-extended that he can't properly staff all the fortifications he controls? Or is he a Conqueror who has somehow seized control of a plum but is at constant risk of losing it to someone with the resources to handle it properly? Everything necessary to reach this conclusion is there in Gygax's module and the guidelines set forth in ACKS; but figuring it out takes a lot of doing, so being able to tag this situation with an AER-style abstraction is highly valuable.

Contrariwise, since ACKS by default assumes that the characters start out at first level, building up from the details smooths the transition between the very concrete stuff you start out caring about (I want 50 gp to buy myself platemail) to the stuff that can later be wrapped into an abstraction (I have 260 men at arms in my keep, how will equipping them all with platemail improve its defenses?).

Both of these are examples of building from the bottom up to reach the things that are interesting from a top-down view, which is ultimately ACKS's intent.

And having the AER's top-down approach link to the bottom-up detail that 1 unit of military value is 100 troops is vital because if your players are contemplating an assault on a keep, they need to know "how many dudes do we need to lure out and fireball to make a meaningful impact on its defenses?" The path from abstraction to detail is vital whichever starting point you take.
« Last Edit: February 16, 2012, 11:53:18 PM by Tavis »
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SineNomine

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Domain Management in ACK vs. An Echo Resounding
« Reply #14 on: February 17, 2012, 12:56:03 AM »
I think bottom-up versus top-down is a very good way of describing the philosophical differences between ACKS and AER. Putting them side-by-side tends to highlight both the strengths and the weaknesses of both approaches.

AER's top-down approach makes it very difficult to answer certain questions that a PC might well want to ask. Nowhere in AER, for example, will you find price lists for common structures. They're intended to be built with domain actions, not simple cash outlays, and that's nice as long as that model is working for you, but it's deeply unhelpful if you decide that this time it makes sense to let the PC just buy it.

By the same token, you'll find dozens of troop types described with their Military/Wealth/Social costs listed, but no mention of gp/day hire rates. How much is it going to cost for the fighter to hire a squad of mercenary ronin to defend his farming village? AER gives the default answer that the gold pieces are irrelevant; if the fighter wants to conjure a unit of Kueh Samurai into his service, he's got to either use the Establish Asset domain action and risk the value checks, or figure out some suitably adventurous way to impress them into fealty with the help of judicious GM plot hooks. This works so long as the model works, but it's not going to help you find a day rate for katana-slingers.

So why not include these prices? Because unless you can control the economic context of the game, you can't price things appropriately. If you don't know how much money is going to go into that campaign, you can't tell whether 5,000 gp is a king's ransom or maybe enough to get you a nice farm in the country. Early-edition D&D is notoriously unpredictable with its gold income and outgo unless the DM takes an active hand in controlling the flow. ACKS is able to deal with this because it can control the default economic context. If you're controlling the treasure tables and implicit assumptions of the game's economic base, you can peg prices and be confident that they're going to work without serious DM tweaking.

Still, every system has the advantages of its limits. Because AER doesn't tightly interface with any assumptions about money or population, the domain system can be lifted and planted in drastically different games with minimal changes. My next project, the SWN post-apocalyptic companion game Other Dust, is going to have AER's domain system built into the core book. The fact that in the grim darkness of the far future there is only barter doesn't faze the system at all- it doesn't need cash, or a specific social context, or the presence or absence of any particular element. So long as you can define the values of a Location and what qualities an Asset might have, you're golden.
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