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.
Quote from: AnthonyRoberson;514803For 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?
Quote from: CRKrueger;514820I have ACK,
Is it pdf only right now? I can't find a hard copy for sale.
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).
Quote from: CRKrueger;514820Very 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.
I thing I will be getting both.
Link for AER?
Sine Nomine Homepage (http://www.sinenomine-pub.com/)
Drive Thru link
(http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=99063)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quote from: SineNomine;514959In 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.
Quote from: Benoist;514970Could 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.
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.
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.
Hearing your description of AER reminds me a lot of the House generation rules in Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying.
My question is, if you do have a tight handle on the economy of your setting, is there a way to translate that into the AER abstracted Asset system? For example, do the Assets scale in any way against each other, so if I am able to pin something down (for example values of mines/ores/etc), does the level/cost whatever of a Mine Asset mean I could use it to measure against some other Asset level?
Quote from: CRKrueger;515069My question is, if you do have a tight handle on the economy of your setting, is there a way to translate that into the AER abstracted Asset system? For example, do the Assets scale in any way against each other, so if I am able to pin something down (for example values of mines/ores/etc), does the level/cost whatever of a Mine Asset mean I could use it to measure against some other Asset level?
Every Asset has a value or upkeep cost for Military, Wealth, and Social scores. A squad of grass-green peasant levies costs 1M/0W/0S, while a phalanx of Dwarf Heroes will run you 3M/3W/2S and a good reason why they're fighting for you. You have a total cost specific to each, so you can use that to eyeball gold-price relationships.
Where cash has a direct influence on domains is in the adventuring process. Because any domain action can be made an automatic success by having a successful adventure related to accomplishing it, you burn your cash to help you succeed at your particular quest. The costs are left intentionally vague in order to let the DM hoover out as much cash as is necessary to keep the players lean and hungry.
For example, suppose that a bunch of low-level PCs have just swooped in to save a half-ruined border village from the depredations of a band of crazed jungle cultists. The locals beg the PCs to stay and protect them, and the group decides to lay claim to the village as their own. It becomes a Location and the base of a new domain.
Their first order of business is dealing with the Obstacle that's preventing their new home from being useful to them- a level 5 case of Extreme Poverty. The village is so impoverished that it can't even support a Merchant asset to try and snap it out of the poverty, and the PCs are too low-level to have the Champion abilities that would let them banish certain problems with their own awesomeness. So what do they do? They think back to the nearest market town, and decide they're going to go there, find a merchant willing to open up a trade route with the village, and convince him to finance reconstruction. In other words, they're going to make an adventure out of it.
At this point, the PCs' purses are now at the mercy of the DM. If he's accidentally injected too much loot into the campaign, well, here's a perfect opportunity to bleed it. Every time the PCs adventure with a goal that doesn't relate to making a profit, they're practically
expecting him to empty their pockets. They'll usually feel downright
rewarded at the opportunity to spend their cash to accomplish their goals. It proves that their plunder is worth something and that having tens of thousands of gold pieces to swing around can actually help them accomplish larger goals. If you've got a firm economic grip on your campaign, you can set prices to some objective measure- but at the table, it's often more convenient to let the PCs blow obstacles out of the water with massive, Conan-esque expenditures of plundered ancient loot.
I hate to whore blog entries like this, but I think this feeds into the whole classicist/romanticist dichotomy at the heart of modern fantasy which I wrote about a long time ago here (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2008/09/two-towers-of-fantasy.html). The gist of it is that you can approach fantasy in two different ways:
The
Classicist approach is to try to create fantastical simulacra of the real world. This is the ACKS way: you're creating an imaginary world, but it's a world that makes sense behind the scenes. And what's more, the enjoyment comes from making it all make sense, and tinkering with systems to make it more plausible and believable.
The
Romanticist approach is to deliberately ignore realism and play up the mystery and enigma angles: the enjoyment comes from the fact that everything is fucked up and weird and doesn't actually make sense or accurately simulate reality. This is probably the AER way.
M. John Harrison wrote about the issue here (he has an obvious bias):
QuoteThe great modern fantasies were written out of religious, philosophical and psychological landscapes. They were sermons. They were metaphors. They were rhetoric. They were books, which means that the one thing they actually weren't was countries with people in them.
The commercial fantasy that has replaced them is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else's metaphor, or realise someone else's rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, "Yes, but what did Sauron look like?"; or, "Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?"; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien's images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.
I agree with him, but I don't think it's a bad thing - there are advantages as well as disadvantages to "taming, colonising and putting your own cultural mark" on fantasy worlds. ACKS and AER scratch different itches, and are probably equally worthy.
Quote from: noisms;515115I hate to whore blog entries like this, but I think this feeds into the whole classicist/romanticist dichotomy at the heart of modern fantasy which I wrote about a long time ago here (http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2008/09/two-towers-of-fantasy.html). The gist of it is that you can approach fantasy in two different ways:
The Classicist approach is to try to create fantastical simulacra of the real world. This is the ACKS way: you're creating an imaginary world, but it's a world that makes sense behind the scenes. And what's more, the enjoyment comes from making it all make sense, and tinkering with systems to make it more plausible and believable.
The Romanticist approach is to deliberately ignore realism and play up the mystery and enigma angles: the enjoyment comes from the fact that everything is fucked up and weird and doesn't actually make sense or accurately simulate reality. This is probably the AER way.
I think this is a useful distinction to make, and that there's a real philosophical difference there that's worth recognizing. Still, I wouldn't put AER into the Romanticist bucket of that taxonomy.
ACKS offers a detailed and closely-reasoned system for producing plausible results as an organic outcome of their mechanics. AER offers a much higher-level system that also attempts to produce plausible results, but focuses on a different set of concerns to do so. Both of them care about taxes, for example, but ACKS details specific taxes on a set population while AER abstracts it into "This City is worth 8 Wealth points." Both of them are intended to produce predictable and logical results, such that seizing a rich city in either system means you get a lot more material goods to play with. The difference is really instrumental rather than fundamental; I chose the higher-level approach for AER because I found it easier to sustain at the table and offering me the most play content for the least GM effort.
First, thank you for the detailed answers gentlemen. This is great. In the words of mister Spock: "Fascinating."
Quote from: SineNomine;515075At this point, the PCs' purses are now at the mercy of the DM. If he's accidentally injected too much loot into the campaign, well, here's a perfect opportunity to bleed it. Every time the PCs adventure with a goal that doesn't relate to making a profit, they're practically expecting him to empty their pockets. They'll usually feel downright rewarded at the opportunity to spend their cash to accomplish their goals. It proves that their plunder is worth something and that having tens of thousands of gold pieces to swing around can actually help them accomplish larger goals. If you've got a firm economic grip on your campaign, you can set prices to some objective measure- but at the table, it's often more convenient to let the PCs blow obstacles out of the water with massive, Conan-esque expenditures of plundered ancient loot.
I'm confused on this. You seem to be saying that you can allocate a value to a wealth unit if you control the economy of your campaign milieu and know what's worth what, and yet, you don't say it point blank. So say... I could say "OK, you use 2 Wealth to do this. Coming out of your own accumulated loot/funds... that's 20,000 GP."
Can you do that?
Since I'm running an AD&D 1st ed campaign including a megadungeon and really, all the classic tropes of the game, I need to be able to transition with the PCs as they reach name level, or before, depending on the campaign's circumstances. If I can't make equivalences like this, wouldn't it feel like I'm just changing game systems entirely, and the loot suddenly doesn't matter at all when you get your stronghold? Hm.
Quote from: Benoist;515124I'm confused on this. You seem to be saying that you can allocate a value to a wealth unit if you control the economy of your campaign milieu and know what's worth what, and yet, you don't say it point blank. So say... I could say "OK, you use 2 Wealth to do this. Coming out of your own accumulated loot/funds... that's 20,000 GP."
Can you do that?
Not quite. Wealth points are a measure of how much your domain can support rather than a resource you spend and lose. If you have Wealth 8, you can handle up to 8 points worth of wealth upkeep costs, but those costs don't actually lower your Wealth score.
Let me show an example of how this might work, using the above band of low-level PCs in their shabby jungle village.
Mechanically, that village is a Location with 0 Military, 0 Wealth, and 0 Social value. It also has an Extreme Poverty obstacle, which means that even if it did have some value, the PCs couldn't get any benefit from it until the poverty was conquered. How do you overcome obstacles? Well, one way is to get an agent to go deal with them- but agents have upkeep costs, and this village can't afford to pay attention, let alone a Merchant asset. So if this problem is going to be solved, the PCs are going to have to do it themselves. The GM decides that if they do pull it off, the village will become a Resource with Good Hunting, turning it into a 0M/4W/0S location.
They decide to solve this problem in the simplest possible fashion, and just throw gold at the peasants. At this point, the GM just sits back, decides what a good ballpark would be for suddenly turning the locals into rich men and women, and also decides if this tactic actually is likely to work, given the demons of inflation and the lack of anything nearby to actually
buy with the gold. Maybe he throws in a complication with a bunch of bandits who decide that it's time to come relieve the locals of their newfound wealth.
Or maybe they decide to visit the nearest market town and convince a merchant to set up a trade route with the village. This might be substantially cheaper if the PCs are persuasive- or help the merchant out with a few little problems of his- but the PCs could also decide to use their wealth to sweeten the deal, at whatever cost the DM decides is reasonable.
In no case is there ever a simple "X Wealth = Y Gold Expenditure" mapping. Gold gets spent in the course of actions and adventures, and the costs are only ever subject to what the DM thinks is right and reasonable for his game. I considered this a lot more likely to produce an easy, reasonable result than chaining the DM to a table of equivalencies that may have nothing to do with his campaign.
QuoteSince I'm running an AD&D 1st ed campaign including a megadungeon and really, all the classic tropes of the game, I need to be able to transition with the PCs as they reach name level, or before, depending on the campaign's circumstances. If I can't make equivalences like this, wouldn't it feel like I'm just changing game systems entirely, and the loot suddenly doesn't matter at all when you get your stronghold? Hm.
It's possible to use AER rules without the players even realizing that you're doing so. They just tell you what they want to do and you mentally translate that into a particular domain action or an adventure attempt. They tell you, "We want to build a castle on the edge of the wilderness." You decide that it sounds like the Layered Walls and Tower military assets and check your index cards. You see that the other locations they control have enough spare Wealth and Social to afford the upkeep, so you tell them, "Sure. Your estates can afford it, but it's going to take a long while to build it. You can speed up the process if you help push back the ogre tribes in the area or spend extra money on the laborers and materials." If they carry out the adventures successfully or throw what looks like a sensible amount of gold at it, you just skip the usual Establish An Asset checks and tell them that the castle is finally ready.
OK. I see what you mean. So for instance I could still calculate the salaries of the workers based on the DMG, have a total investment cost in that regard, which then gives them the work force to build the fortifications, which then in return affects the defensive capabilities of the town, affecting the Military rating of the domain.
Something like that.
Likewise with the castle. They can build a castle on their own funds following whatever price list I have in mind, but in the end what really matters is that there'll be a castle which will affect the domain ratings themselves.
Correct?
Quote from: Benoist;515129OK. I see what you mean. So for instance I could still calculate the salaries of the workers based on the DMG, have a total investment cost in that regard, which then gives them the work force to build the fortifications, which then in return affects the defensive capabilities of the town, affecting the Military rating of the domain.
Something like that.
Likewise with the castle. They can build a castle on their own funds following whatever price list I have in mind, but in the end what really matters is that there'll be a castle which will affect the domain ratings themselves.
Correct?
Yep. You could use the DMG costs- or heck, you could use the ACKS costs without change- and they'd automatically succeed at their Establish an Asset checks, producing the castle as fast as you thought was practical.
Or they could rely on their estates' spare labor and resources, spend nothing from their personal loot, and just deal with however long it takes to succeed at the necessary checks. Or they could hunt around in the western mountains until they found a monster-infested ancient citadel and kill everything inside it to win a free castle. It's however they decide to play it and however the DM thinks is reasonable.
The end result in all cases is the same; a Location with a Layered Walls asset and a Tower fortification, which drains the domain's Wealth to a degree but seriously boosts its Military, allowing it to recruit more troops and succeed more often at Military value checks.
Quote from: SineNomine;515067Unless 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... 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.
I will be linking to this every time someone asks "why is ACKS its own system instead of just a supplement?" Function dictates form: ACKS needs to be self-contained to pin down its economic grounding, AER can be a supplement because its top-down approach can subsume many different sets of details.
The awesome thing is that the top-down and bottom-up approaches are complementary rather than contradictory. A campaign using ACKS's pegged prices could turn AER's abstraction into so many orc's purses, and just as usefully describe a city as Impoverished and then work from that down to the coins in the mayor's coffers only at the point when the adventurers were thinking about robbing them.
Great thread. Thank you all!
Sounds like AER is a less detailed system that's more likely to work with different rulesets (as opposed to ACKS, which rebuilds the engine almost from the ground up, the better to fine-tune the name-level domain game).
Even though I already own ACKS, I'm getting AER. But given my endless fascination with PCs who claw their ways from rakish adventurers to mighty lords, that was a foregone conclusion.
I just want to say that it's really nice to see how the two authors in this thread described their products and compared them to each other and I've purchased PDFs of both ACKS and AER because of this thread.
Quote from: John Morrow;515210I just want to say that it's really nice to see how the two authors in this thread described their products and compared them to each other and I've purchased PDFs of both ACKS and AER because of this thread.
I hate posts that just quote someone and add, "me too," but yeah, me too.
Quote from: two_fishes;515211I hate posts that just quote someone and add, "me too," but yeah, me too.
Me thrice.
I'll be straightforward and say I'm an AD&D DM. I don't think I would ever run ACKS as is and have more of an attraction towards AER at this point. But I want to see what the former does to see how that could be extrapolated to AD&D's core system of hirelings, workers and so on, so that maybe the higher levels game play can benefit from its approach. So in the end, I think I'm going to get both.
Quote from: SineNomine;515128Not quite. Wealth points are a measure of how much your domain can support rather than a resource you spend and lose. If you have Wealth 8, you can handle up to 8 points worth of wealth upkeep costs, but those costs don't actually lower your Wealth score.
Interesting. I've worked with systems like these before. They look good in theory, but in actual practice they tend to fall apart whenever there's a need to actually discuss or utilize resources in terms of the game world.
For example, the bad guys kidnap Bob's sister. They demand a ransom of $1,000,000. Bob's player says, "Can I afford to pay that? What impact will that have on my holdings?" The GM looks to the system and... it tells him nothing. There's a deep and meaningful disconnect between the information provided by the system and the ways decisions are actually made by characters.
Quote from: John Morrow;515210I just want to say that it's really nice to see how the two authors in this thread described their products and compared them to each other and I've purchased PDFs of both ACKS and AER because of this thread.
Ditto four.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;515316Interesting. I've worked with systems like these before. They look good in theory, but in actual practice they tend to fall apart whenever there's a need to actually discuss or utilize resources in terms of the game world.
For example, the bad guys kidnap Bob's sister. They demand a ransom of $1,000,000. Bob's player says, "Can I afford to pay that? What impact will that have on my holdings?" The GM looks to the system and... it tells him nothing. There's a deep and meaningful disconnect between the information provided by the system and the ways decisions are actually made by characters.
Well, that's the price you have to pay for having a system that's independent of any specific campaign worlds. Imagine that I'm running two campaigns for two different groups. In both, the party controls a prosperous small town with a good fishing industry, a lumber camp, an inn (town is along a trade route) and a trading post. In a setting-independent system, like AER, both would have the same numbers for Wealth and the Assets or whatever.
However, imagine that one of the campaigns is in Greyhawk or any other "standard"
solid-gold-layer-three-feet-underground setting, and the other is a historically correct Anglo-Saxon Britain plus wizards. There is NO WAY that the exact same town with the exact same population and industries will produce even remotely the same amount of profits vis-a-vis actual coinage. If the system assumes that the setting's economy involves a pint of ale costing a gold coin, it will immediately become useless for all campaigns where a pint of ale does not cost a gold coin.* And I personally think that's probably too high a price to pay, at least with my own DM-ing practice - I'd just rather make up my own mind about the matter on a setting-by-setting basis.
*Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, because hypothetically you could just divide all prices by 200 across the board. But in practice, D&D economy tends to be crazy bollocks and fall apart as soon as you say
"X units of commodity A are worth Y units of commodity B, where neither commodity happens to be cash." But that's a whole separate issue and beyond the range of this thread.
Yeah double sale here as well. The only reservation I have about AER is that the last thing I want is my players worried about the Meta. I don't want them to interface with their lands as an "abstract system", which means the system is going to be 100% behind the scenes and I'm going to have to translate everything into emulative terms.
Note: I fully understand there's no way Kevin could have done otherwise without making it campaign specific, I'm just saying that there could have been a framework that anticipates I might want to bridge the gap to a detailed economic system and gives guidelines on how to do it. Otherwise it kind of assumes "This is D&D, you handwave that shit anyway brother, else you would be playing Harn", another meme that I think is over-propagating game design.
It does, however, fit in perfectly with other "Neo-OSR" products like Vornheim.
Quote from: Justin Alexander;515316For example, the bad guys kidnap Bob's sister. They demand a ransom of $1,000,000. Bob's player says, "Can I afford to pay that? What impact will that have on my holdings?" The GM looks to the system and... it tells him nothing. There's a deep and meaningful disconnect between the information provided by the system and the ways decisions are actually made by characters.
In AER, a Domain's ruler automatically gets 100 gp per turn per Wealth point in goods and services, a sum intended to cover the handwavey bits and frills you'd expect a ruler to just be able to afford automatically. He can also use the Withdraw Treasure domain action to siphon cold hard cash out of his domain- by default, it's 500 gp per Wealth point per Treasure spent, but that can be slid to whatever's appropriate to the campaign.
If it's a big-ticket item and you're not sure the Domain can cover it, you have him roll a Wealth saving throw with whatever bonus or penalty you think is sensible. If he blows it, it means the Domain hasn't got the money. Or maybe it does, but paying it will result in an Obstacle dropping into one of his holdings. "Sure, Bob, you can pay it- but your capital of Furstenburg is going to say hello to a Demagogue if you squeeze it out of your locals."
The system is meant to leverage GM creativity and discretion. It doesn't try to codify a specific gold piece peg, because a GM is a lot better judging that for his own campaign. Instead, it tries to make it quick and easy for him to turn a question about a domain into an answer that he can use at the table.
Quote from: CRKrueger;515321Yeah double sale here as well. The only reservation I have about AER is that the last thing I want is my players worried about the Meta. I don't want them to interface with their lands as an "abstract system", which means the system is going to be 100% behind the scenes and I'm going to have to translate everything into emulative terms.
One of the advantages of a top-down system is that it's light enough for this tactic to actually be practical at the table. A player really doesn't need to know anything about the framework behind his holdings- he just says what he wants to do, the GM decides if it falls under a domain action or a general-purpose bit of adventuring, and it goes from there. He doesn't need to make any detailed decisions about his domain's operation beyond "What am I trying to build next?", "Where should I send my troops?", and "How do I fix this problem here?"
AER sounds interesting. Now that you explain the differences Birthright sounds like it leans more towards AER from what I understand, while utilizing some ACK ideas. The connective feature from Gold Pieces to Birthright's abstraction of Gold Bars was the conversion standard of 2000 GP = 1 GB. Which sounds like AER's connection of 500 GP = 1 WP, if I'm reading it correctly.
These games seem interesting to mine for ideas...
I haven't read either of these systems, how do they compare to the system from the new Game of Thrones RPG?
RPGPundit
Yeah, I picked it up. Thank goodness for the sale or I might have waited.
I kickstarted ACKS, so I imagine I'll see that at some point. Just waiting on my hardcover.
valis, you have the PDF dontcha? If not let me know, all ACKS hardbacks (whether through the Kickstarter or any other source) give you the PDF for free but we've had some embarrassing snafus trying to deliver those. I thought we'd gotten it all worked out...
To not threadjack with customer service, I've seen some really great writing about AER and the awesomeness it's capable of on G+. I never know if it's OK to share stuff from G+ more publicly, but if you're on there try searching for AER and see if you can turn it up.
Quote from: Tavis;520488valis, you have the PDF dontcha? If not let me know, all ACKS hardbacks (whether through the Kickstarter or any other source) give you the PDF for free but we've had some embarrassing snafus trying to deliver those. I thought we'd gotten it all worked out...
To not threadjack with customer service, I've seen some really great writing about AER and the awesomeness it's capable of on G+. I never know if it's OK to share stuff from G+ more publicly, but if you're on there try searching for AER and see if you can turn it up.
IMO everything from Sine Nomine is kick-ass, and I have everything he's put out so far except the full Mongoose version of SwN (I'd love the extra rules, but don't wanna pay Mongoose prices for a book I already own most of in print). AER is no different for sure, great stuff as far as i can tell from the reading. On the other hand, ACKs is also awesome as far as I can tell from the reading, and I love that it comes across to me as a complete D&Dish system, with a great setting and many directions players can take their characters. On top of that, it's close enough to the other D&Dish systems to adapt without overwhelming amounts of work, same as SN's stuff. You guys are both putting out awesome shit, and I'm glad I own both, and am also looking forward to my print copy of ACKs. That reminds me, I have to make sure I get my backer status into the Player's book before the deadline :D
Kevin, have you read Alistair Reynold's books? Your SwN isn't exactly like his stories, but the game, to me, has the same flavor and feel to it. Just finished Century Rain (great book) and whenever I read SwN stuff Reynolds and especially Century Rain comes to mind. Could all be in my head, but since I love both SwN and Reynolds' books, it's a good delusion if so :D
Yes SN is dope, I just printed out all the DM specific material from SWN, RT, and AER and comb bound them in one book. The setting stuff is cool and all, but the DM tools are fantastic. I'll put up a picture soon.
I originally found this thread on my phone and thought it was on the big purple, which really surprised me. "How did the purp get such an interesting conversation, and how what is the Benoist doing there?" Then I realized my mistake and realized me b dumbz.
Cheers
Bottom up or top down? Nah, this is micro vs macro economics!
I really love AER for the scope of what it allows, but I also really love ACKS' ability to account for the tremendous wealth that high level PCs generate (giving them both a reason to continue accumulation and something concrete to do with the money once they have it).
Is there any easy way to use the two systems together (or at least map ACKS troops to the mass combat system)?
Also, I may have missed it, but are there any guidelines for the experience that characters can earn in mass combat in AER?
All of this has me thinking of running a modified AER pbp where the players are the rulers of small domains with big dreams who might groom adventurers into vassals and expand their power base...
Anyone interested?
Oh, and hats off to Kevin and Tavis -- it's a joy to watch you each discuss your approaches and products. I'm a huge ACKS fan, but find I like using the AER domain rules.
-V
Welcome to theRPGsite, Veilheim!
RPGPundit
Still wrapping my brain around Red Tide and An Echo Resounding. It seems like a great toolbox that complemented with a few other tools, like the One Page Dungeon, 5 Room Dungeons, some parts of Vornheim and Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook or Ultimate Toolbox, could make for very nice location based adventure designs. In addition, as the tools are rather light, you could make a cool domain/adventuring location in a couple hours that could possibly be publishable.
Then it is just digital prepress work and art. :p
I am interested to see the next book En Sine is doing, I believe Kevin is synthesizing all he has developed in his three main books into a unified framework for a post apocalyptic game.
Quote from: Teazia;525473Still wrapping my brain around Red Tide and An Echo Resounding. It seems like a great toolbox that complemented with a few other tools, like the One Page Dungeon, 5 Room Dungeons, some parts of Vornheim and Mythmere's Adventure Design Deskbook or Ultimate Toolbox, could make for very nice location based adventure designs. In addition, as the tools are rather light, you could make a cool domain/adventuring location in a couple hours that could possibly be publishable.
Then it is just digital prepress work and art. :p
I am interested to see the next book En Sine is doing, I believe Kevin is synthesizing all he has developed in his three main books into a unified framework for a post apocalyptic game.
Very much looking forward to his PA game. I LOVE SN's stuff, and Red Tide is frickin cool. I love, also, that it would not be difficult to use the tools in Red Tide for many other games, and he gives great advice and guidelines for running sandbox games of all types. Truly great stuff. The only thing I'm going to change is that I will run red Tide games with S&W complete rather than LL (although I really like LL too).
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but I'm so glad I found this discussion as I have been running an ACKS game since Oct 2011 and have found the Domain system much too "numbers based" as well.
I love the attention to detail that Alex put into the maths, but the Domain system lacks all the stuff I want out of it. The vassal table is about the only thing that's pushing the game into interesting directions other than the need for yet more gold (useful, but not compelling). And, managing spreadsheets just isn't catching on with my players.
We've started up some house rules for our own campaign using the ACKS math, but pushing it to the background a bit so people can focus on the "story based" stuff inherent in ruling a Domain. Our goal is to keep all the math as close as possible to core ACKS but do a lot of that upfront and focus on Domain intrigue and whatnot.
We've got a little ways to go, but you can check out our progress here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WeZhgyUuf3phCGeMv6ggFQiDF9Mb1JiEmY0yUPr4AXw/pub
Our final product will probably look like a mix of ACKS and AER, though I'll have to check out An Echo, Resounding. First I've heard of it. Could probably pillage some inspiration from it. We're also using Season Turns and have implemented an idea for unique "add ons" for cities and strongholds that grant your domain a unique boon. We also have a "Seasonal Events" table (not in the document yet) that will have things like disasters, plague, invasions, insurgency, marauding monsters, offers of alliance, discoveries in your domain, offers of fealty, etc. that act sort of like random encounters for your domain each season.
Other inspiration we've used: Birthright, Houses of the Blooded / Blood & Honor, Pendragon, REIGN, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, Stars Without Number, etc.
Any feedback / ideas appreciated.
Your post is point on but I have some comments.
Quote from: SineNomine;514959The 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.
My reading of the system that the feudal aspects are all fluff. There little to change if you wanted to model alternatives. For example if the society is largely consist of freehold farmers all the holder of a domain may get are the taxes and revenue off of his personal land.
Personally I would have added some notes at the end explaining how to adapt the rules to other types of cultures and societies
Quote from: P1NBACK;730423Other inspiration we've used: Birthright, Houses of the Blooded / Blood & Honor, Pendragon, REIGN, A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, Stars Without Number, etc.
Any feedback / ideas appreciated.
Don't overlook the Pathfinder rules
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/kingdom-building
They are perhaps overly complex (it is Pathfinder), but still, provide a lot more detail/flavor than ACKS or the Companion set that it was based on.
Especially the settlement building aspects of it. All the different buildings you can buy can really make it seem like you're doing something tangible, not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Quote from: JeremyR;730580Don't overlook the Pathfinder rules
http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/kingdom-building
They are perhaps overly complex (it is Pathfinder), but still, provide a lot more detail/flavor than ACKS or the Companion set that it was based on.
Especially the settlement building aspects of it. All the different buildings you can buy can really make it seem like you're doing something tangible, not just numbers on a spreadsheet.
Wow! Awesome resource. Thanks man.
Like you said, maybe a little too fine-grained, but definitely useful!