Law has no effect on taxation, other than allowing me to go to higher tax levels without suffering loyalty effects.
Province represents population in the rulebook, but as has already been noted, you simply can’t rule provinces up if this is the case.
So, if you are to rule up your administration of a province, and get more taxing power, you have a choice, either make the law holding the key to taxation (in which case, does Guilder Kalien tax the people of Caerwil or does Suris Enlien?)
-OR-
You need to seperate administration from the province rating, so you can rule something up.
Now you can decide its easier just to abolish the rule action for provinces.
And you can ignore the fact that by ruling up provinces you are creating people faster than Genosian cloners.
Since I want to allow people to rule their realms up, and I want to seperate population from province levels, and I don’t want to make Law holdings a super holding, I prefer Administrative holdings to represent the royal power to tax. It also reflects what gets taxed, because as the province grows, new kinds of wealth appear. An empty province has a few hundred men and herds of animals. The earliest taxation is some portion of the herd delivered to the big-man every quarter. Then farms appear, and crops are taxed. If the tax system did not adapt, then when towns grew, they would be untaxed, and as banking houses and great merchants grew up, they would be untaxed. Perhaps even mines would go untaxed. Ships entering harbors, trade goods crossing into the country, these things would have no tariff. But all the herds and crops would still be taxed. So increasing the Administrative level not only intensifies the taxing, but makes it more extensive too.
Okay, I guess I can see your reasoning, but I’m still not really convinced. If I interpret correctly, administration represents direct control by a regent and handles taxation instead of the province rating, in effect given you another kind of holding with a large income to rule up. Law holdings then represent, well what? The amount of control local authorites, minor nobles, whoever exert on the population? The sum of the fiefs controlled by minor nobles?
The latter might be feasible, but it still seems to me that this is a bit redundant insofar as both types of holdings exert essentially the same kind of control.
This is only partially true. Law does not have a direct effect on taxation, but not controlling law is a risky business for a regent taxing provinces, making him a target of law claims/seizures. This can be particularly devastating using the BRCS rules, as seizures here aren’t tied to the amount of GB generated by a province or holding. Whether this makes sense, is of course debatable.
This also answers the question on Caerwil: Legally, the taxes belong to Suris Enlien, but Guilder Kalien can use his hold on the province to divert a sizeable amount into his own coffers.
As a result, law holdings seem to be there to protect province taxation and this makes sense, I believe. Perhaps it would also be advisable or at least valid for a DM to enforce seizures from uncontrolled law holdings, representing bandits or just the inability of a province regent to enforce taxation. Sort of a ‘un-control’ level…
I don’t really see this problem, I must say. Granted, the BRCS strengthened law holdings somewhat by adding income, while lowering the income of temple and guild holdings, but overall I’d say the types of holdings are balanced.
If Brecht guilders control the law and the guilds, or temples get control of the law, if there is no Administrative holding, and Province level only means population level, what exactly does the land lord do? Maybe he collects regency (I am inclined to say no), otherwise he sits and watches.
I’d say 120 million is way too high. A few numbers:
Estimated population:
Europe 1340: 73.5 million
Europe 1450: 50 million
Europe 1500: 80-100 million (seems to be quite a leap in just 50 years, but these are estimates from different historians)
Sweden 1570: 750,000
Spain 1300: 6-7 million
Spain 1500: 11 million
England 1348: 3.8 million
England 1377: 2.2 million
I belief this conclusion is debatable just from the numbers above. For a fantasy world it might be more appropriate to look at the distribution of people in thinly settled regions like Russia or Eastern Poland instead of the comparatively populous regions of West and South Europe, i.e. I picture the Cerilian population to cluster in the most advantageous spots of a province.
In between these pockets of civilization lie stretches of more or less uninhabited land or outright wilderness. The larger the province level the more the pockets expand, reducing the distances between cultured areas.
That said, I agree that the overall population of Cerilia is way too low, but I don’t really buy the reasoning that the people are already there, but not yet controlled by the province ruler. This just doesn’t fit my view of a medieval society and picturing large number of medieval peasants running around free and uncontrolled with no lord above them strains my suspension of disbelief nearly as much as creating people out of thin air.
I find it much more feasible to tamper with the population number in relation
to province level. My current take on this is as follows:
Province level…Population…Percentage of cultured land
0…up to 1,000…Nil
1…up to 10,000…10%
2…up to 20,000…20%
3…30,000…30%
…
10…100,000…100%
This increases the population of Cerilia significantly, as most provinces are quite low-level and here the difference to the BR numbers is greater than at higher levels. Moreover, its also a linear increase and that fits nicely with the taxation rules which otherwise make no sense at all and last-not-least it’s simple. So far, I think its also believable and I have not yet found a problem here, but I’m interested to hear any comments.
Well, I end up with 90,000 people, a number I still find believable, even though it is significantly lower than your take. As a sidenote, the PS of Medoere speaks of about 40,000 people living there.
Well, that leaves the rule action to be taken into account. I think the wiki house rule on province growth is quite okay, it makes ruling up a province to the next level more difficult, but the rule action remains useful. Players will now probably focus on one or two provinces to rule up, depending on growth points already accumulated at the start of the game and on strategic considerations, but that’s fine with me. There are certainly still things missing, e.g. catastrophes are left to the whim of the DM, and the price is perhaps too high (at least it takes a while before ruling up a province pays off) and it might still not be that realistic, but for now I think it’s the best system we have.
Is Cerilia essentially static, with a small amount of growth during a campiagn, and regent in what is basically a zero sum game just exchanging peices of the pie? Or in Cerillia essentially somewhere that is developing?
The actual population of a province should be determined geographically. People, like any other population, will expand to the holding capacity of their ecosystem very quickly. We figure out how much habitation a province will support, and that’s its population.
Uh, so people cluster in warm, wet places instead of cold, dry places? Show me where this disagrees with what I argued. Eastern Europe had half the agricultural yield per unit labor, and when you factor out the seedgrain, that means less than half the carrying capacity. Of course Russia and Eastern Poland are thinly settled, they have poor ecosystems for dense human habitation, and comparatively low carrying capacities.
I ask you if you think Kansas would have people in it in a medieval world. I will reply that as late as the first decades of the 19th century the American pairie was called the Great American Desert, not the breadbasket. It was the mechanization of John Deere and International Harvester that made this inhospitable place into a farmland. Rather like Eastern Poland, Kansas would be mostly empty with some settlement along the rivers.
The large range of variation I gave is a function of population density times total area, both of which are uncertain. Cerilia has 840 provinces, which are supposed to range in size from 900 to 1600 square miles each. 840 x 900 x 30 (minimum realistic population density) = 22.7 million people, and 840 x 1600 x 120 (maximum realistic population density, if almost the whole darn thing were arable) = 161.3 million people. The number I favor is 840 x 1000 x 50 (since, for example, many provinces are plains at 100, some are steppe at 36 and a few are tundra at 4) = 42 million people in total, which accords well with your historical figures.
Ah, but that’s not at all what I think is happening. I think they have lots of lords above them – many of whom are working at cross-purposes. The same amount of total tax is still being collected, and the same amount of total political influence is still being generated, but as the control level drops a steadily larger percentage of it is lost to friction as the whole apparatus becomes ever more unwieldy and inefficient to operate. All the same GBs and RPs are still being collected by the same bottom-tier manorial lords, but at low control levels they and the barons (IMO, one per population level) and the counts (IMO, one per province, just like several of the official materials say) spend so much of it doing their own thing (sometimes even agitating and contesting against each other) or just keeping it themselves and not bothering to pass much of it further up the chain, that the ultimate regent has to spend almost all of what he does receive just keeping his restless and overpowerful tenants in line, leaving little left to spend at the domain scale to affect other realm regents. To me, increasing control level represents getting your own house in better order, reducing the amount of the total tax and influence which need to go to simply making the domain function at all on a day-to-day, manor-to-manor scale. These dozens or hundreds of minor lords and their sub-holdings are too small to see individually at the BR scale, so I simply abstract away the average success of the regent’s dealings with them, which is precisely what I measure by the control level. I see it not as increasing gross income, but as decreasing administrative (including political) expenditure.
It would hardly be the first time a PS was totally out to lunch. =) I suspect they fiddled that number to make it close to the numbers from the province population table which caused the problem to begin with, so I hardly think it’s independent or even terribly useful as a piece of evidence.
There is a third option to view law as a limiting factor on province taxation. The province ruler has legitimacy, the law ruler has the administration and coercive power. Ideally law and legitimacy are in the same hands, however if not the amount of tax a province regent can recieve is limited by the law holdings.
Thus Kalien would not be able to tax… but Enlien would recieve less tax without the support of Kalien’s law
Would also create some opportunities for deals: I will support your taxation if you give me a slice of the pie.
Thanks for the tip, the amount of stuff there is awesome. This model is not that different from the wiki house rule, but its even more expensive to rule up a province, probably really making this action useless.
Which is pretty much what happens under the normal taxation rules. =)
Historically, administering the court system was a major source of revenue for whoever operated it (lots of fines; some tolls and customary fees could also go here). Thus to the province ruler, increasing law holdings means not so much bringing law to the wild west, but increasing royal control over existing minor manorial courts or establishing a parallel system to steal the existing case load. Both this and province ruling (in my idea of increasing central administrative control) is the core of the life’s work of great kings like England’s Henry II.
=) So when did you really join? My join date ought to be April, 1998, and I should have a few hundred more posts to my credit, since this thing is just a continuation of the old mailing list. Of course, much the same could be said of other old fogeys like Duane, Gary and Kenneth, who don’t take breaks as long as mine…
See, I have to stop right here and disagree. I don’t see law and legitimacy in the same hands. I see a top ruler. Different cultures see different guys in this spot as the top guy. In Brechtur, the guilder is the dynamic, interesting guy, and the landlord is there too. The guilds should control the law, not the landlord. Otherwise the landlord is the more powerful dynamic guy and the Brecht decriptions of their society are, as Ryan put it, out to lunch. In Rjurik, the jarls feequently control the law, not the king. They got this right in Rjurik. Any sensible templar seeks law holdings.
Historically, there is canon law, feudal law, and commercial law. Each kind of holding leader should attempt to aquire law holdings to solidify their power. Read my history of Cariele, and how Mheallie Bireon took real control of that place, she got the guilds easily enough, but that was not the same as control. Now that she has the guilds and the law, she rules. The rest, her alliance with Larra her relationship with Entier is just gravy, or perhaps more properly, naturally flows from her power in Cariele. I doubt very much that Mheallie invented a new idea - guilders own law holdings. She just put it into practice.
If you invest too much power in the law holdling, shifting too much of the provincial power there, then Entier is a kind of source holding guy, collecting some RP, barely enough GB to staff his court, and he’s an observer. Rather, he should be a junior player, with a powerbase of one kind of power, while Mheallie has two kinds (or a one and two thirds kinds).
Thus Kalien would not be able to tax… but Enlien would recieve less tax without the support of Kalien’s law.
If this were so, who is not paying taxes to the ruler? Where is it going instead? At the very least Kalien’s followers are happy with Kalien for stopping the tax man. But there is no game effect except for less money for Suris.
If provinces are no longer power bases, but just records of how many people there are in a place, that power should move to a new, independent place, like an Administrative holding. I would be happy to see some of the revenue move to the Law holding (since I have been arguing that point since second edition), but it can’t all move to Law, since properly, the law should not always be assumed to be in the hands of the landlord.
Hmm. To keep the source level based on extent of civilisation / population I’d rather show the ‘true’ level and have ‘wastage’ law holdings blocking expansion than show a lower province level than is truly the case and explain the gap as inefficiency. That would mean tweaking province levels left right and centre I suppose to put in realistic populations but that doesn’t bother me.
You could then say that each ‘wastage’ law level reduces the province level by one for province taxation purposes and if nasty other holdings as well. In order for Suris to then centralise power as you suggest she needs to contest the ‘wastage’ holdings (I’d make the DC fairly high) and then rule up law holdings.
Of course the other regents in the area such as a certain guilder would want her to eliminate the wastage levels as well so that they can expand. (I’d say that only the province ruler can contest wastage levels just like only they can rule the province).
That then means that you can ‘grow’ your province either by ruling it (attracting settlers, increasing general wealth, births or health & safety, etc) or by eliminating the ‘wastage’ levels.
Kenneth: population and terrain
imho I agree that generally population should follow agriculture/fishing (people need to eat and if they can’t they leave or die) but where you have major external factors (i.e. monsters or war) you will also have at least temporary population movements throwing the results - and i see the canon as a snapshot not as a baseline.
Non-ruler law regents
I also agree that if other regents hold the law the province ruler doesn’t have much left to do - although if they still hold ‘macro’ power they can permit/ban trade routes, raise armies, charge import/export duties, do diplomacy… Will external regents deal with a mere guilder or will they demand to speak to the king (well, that probably depends on whether or not the king is a puppet but still).
I would agree that a number of Brecht realms should have a law level or two in each province held by merchants to indicate their influence, and temples should have some too. I would however give province rulers an edge in ruling/contesting law holdings to represent their ‘natural authority’ - and note that they are more likely to be a class with access to the skills needed to gain full benefit from them.
Perception of Cerilia
I see Cerilia as in flux following a period of stability. I need the chaos of war to create a really complex interesting setting where those of poor background (i.e. PC’s) can rise to the top (I’m not as good at diplomacy as you are; give me chaos, give me war, let us live in interesting times…).
Mostly however I think that wars etc should affect mostly the nobility in Anuire rather than the entire population - whoever conquers a province needs peasants to till the fields, merchants to pay taxes, and to a reasonable degree the peasants will work for whoever lives in the castle and has an army without particularly caring overmuch, other realms being more or less similar. I’d only expect to see major population reductions from goblin or other non-human raids. (Possibly from Vos raids on Khinasi or Brecht).
Though I still disagree with regard to province ruling, this is a great take on law holdings and quite well explains the income these gain under the BRCS rules.
Well, I don’t really know, but I guess sometime in 2000, at least well before 3E came out. However, I did not post that much, so I guess I’m missing 20 posts at most.
I do not really see a problem there; surely non-province rulers can legitimately control law holdings, which provide the control and the power over a province, but non-province rulers do not have the legitimacy to rule the province; one needs investiture to receive that kind of control. A law regent may also try to tax, but without the legitimacy of the province ruler, the law regent is forced to rely on his power alone: in birthright this is a seizure.
A king (province ruler) without law, is a sad figure indeed; he cannot raise troops, cannot impose his laws, and in my view has therefore no power to tax. Surely he has the right to tax, he is at the top of the pyramid and the taxes of the realm should go to him. However without any means to enforce it he will likely receive none; he may send his officials to the landlords, but without support of the law these officials will be returned empty handed, especially when the law regent decides to have them detained and sent back empty handed. Consequently, a king without any law is no more than a figurehead; he will collect some regency (legitimacy), but is essentially no more than a mere puppet to the real powers in the realm; his power will reach only as far as others allow it to reach.
Luckily for Cerillian Kings, being completely devoid of law holdings is rare. Though rulers may have a few difficult provinces within their kingdom, in which they do not hold the law, they are likely to have enough law in other provinces from which troops can be raised. Being the legitimate ruler of the land allows the king to freely move his troops within the kingdom, including in the uncontrolled province. If a conflict would erupt between the king and the law regent, the King could instate martial law as a last resort. Still, this would be rare seeing that the law ruler (actual control) and the King (legitimacy) have an incentive to come to an agreement; the King/domain regent sends out his tax collectors and the law regent provides the muscle in exchange for a slice of the pie.
