----- Original Message -----
From: “Ryan B. Caveney” <ryanb@CYBERCOM.NET>
Sent: Friday, September 06, 2002 3:33 PM
> > In fact, to portray non-BR rulers in D&D I think you need an entirely
> > different system.
>
> Entirely different in in-game justification perhaps, but not I think all
> that different in player-visible mechanics.
To illustrate Ryan`s point, we could take 15th century France. The status a
person had, and their ability to collect and store political favors, was
tied to their decent, their marriage, their title, any office they held, and
any special achievments they claimed.
Calculating status through decent is pretty straitforward with the BR system
as it is. For historical Europeans, youd need to keep tract of something we might call "native bloodline", which is your unmodified bloodline. This measures how closely related you are to peolpe who are very great, or have long pedigrees. Second youd get a bump from marriage. This could be
handled any number of ways, but it all comes down to either an investure
proceedure (as part of the marriage) or an achievment bonus the reverse of
those described on page 48 pg of the rules. That is, instead of losing 1
point of bloodline strength and 25% of your regency for a failure to respond
to a minor event, youd get a bloodline point and maybe some regency for seccuring a marriage alliance. Same rule, novel interpretation. And, I have mentioned using this system in reverse before. Third, and for Europeans, this one is one of the larger modifiers, a big chunk of ones
status comes from your title. This is one of the ways I interpret the
Land`s Choice phenomena, however, so again, nothing alltogether new. People
have mentioned investiture as being the common or only way to transfer
bloodlines, and they are already more or less in this camp. There is no
mention of offices other then Chamberlain in the rules, but one must assume
that there were other Imperial offices that nobles once used to gain status
over their peers. At the level of small nobles, there are the offices of
chancellor, steward, marshal, &c of various realms. These could be a boost
to effective bloodline scores based on the rough size of the realm, the
status of the office, and any other characteristics which are relevant.
Finally, there is the personal achievment of the noble. This involves the
spending RP to build your bloodline, heroic actions that increase your
bloodline, defeating blooded enemies, and so forth.
So without having to start from scratch, by using either already extant
house rules based on printed rules, certain interpretations of existing
rules, and novel uses of rules intended for something else, BR could be
modified to handle late medieval status. It wouldn`t change rulers very
much at all. Their calculation of the effective RP collection is a bit more
complex. But once its worked out, its as stable is it normally is. The
real change is for non-ruling scions.
In a non-magical game, blood powers could be exchanged for normal feats,
reflecting the superior training and education of the titled nobility.
Its not perfect, but its a lot better than systems I`ve seen invented to
explicitly describe late medieval noble status.
Kenneth Gauck
kgauck@mchsi.com
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