At 11:36 PM 1/12/2005 +0100, Thomas_Percy wrote:
> This is five general observations about Birthright rules, which can be
> rearranged. I’m interesting of yours opinion about this.
A few folks have chimed in on this, but I thought I`d throw my opinion into
the mix…
- General idea of heroes-kings is controversial. Regents have no reason
for adventuring they can make the world better from the office. They
have too much duty and gold, to close the castle and go to the dungeon. A
regent on the adventure is easy target for asassination. Adventure is a
job of lieutenants and minor nobles, such as a baron of the province or a
knight.
This is one of my personal favorite aspects of BR. I`d like to note a
couple of things about how things actually are in BR and, perhaps, one or
two about how they should be. First, though the hero/king thing is a bit
of a leap from standard D&D (or just about any RPG, for that matter) it is
the meat of the setting. In many ways it is what differentiates BR from
all other campaigns/RPGs. With that in mind, I don`t know if delegating
adventuring to LTs or minor nobles is such a good idea. Second, the
nobility in BR are, for the most part, relatively minor. There really are
very few “kings” in the sense that they are administrators and figureheads
who occupy primarily figurative positions. Most BR regents are themselves
just a tick above the lowest ranks of nobility, making them in many cases
the characters still very closely connected to having to personally
interact at the adventure level.
This is one of the more difficult things for people who are used to the
standard D&D adventuring system to incorporate, but adventuring at the
domain level is very doable and IMO much more satisfying than regular D&D
adventuring. For one thing, as you note, the rewards for D&D adventuring
are mostly monetary and/or things to go into their inventory. In BR, the
reward is power and influence, which is really only handled in a DM
fiat/murky “favor” system in D&D. If one adventures out the domain actions
or, at least, role-plays them heavily they wind up being much more
interesting than a dungeon crawl and the end result of play is domain level
holdings and effects for which BR has game mechanical ways to portray. In
the end, that`s the best way to play the setting, and the thing that makes
it IMO the best published setting there is.
>2. Strategical system for domain (several provinces) rulers is excelet,
>but there is no system for minor rulers, such as a baron of the province
>or a knight. It looks like gold and regency of domain regent comes from
>emptiness. There is no rules to play regent’s vassals.
There is definitely a gap between the adventure level and the domain
level. I dont know if its as abstract as all that, though. There are
some rules in the original materials about how many physical buildings and
characters are represented by province and holding levels, for instance,
and once one gets access to those numbers one can (if there`s some need) do
the math to determine where the gold comes from, how the regency is
determined, etc. At that point, the function of vassals (small “v” in
order to differentiate these characters from “Vassals” who are themselves
regents who have a vassalage agreement with another regent) is comprehensible.
Though it never expresses this kind of thing outright in any of the BR
materials that I`ve ever seen the best way to portray the activities of
non-regents/LTs at the domain level is by making them equivalent to a
random event. Most random events are negative, but a few have positive
effects, and one can then use that system to portray the effects of
characters who are bridging the gap between the adventure level and the
domain level.
>3. Whole world is too small. Adventures based on travelling are hard to
>make, because everything is near. Armies are too fast you can conquer
>whole continent in a year.
Couldnt agree with you more on that one. Its a bit difficult to simply
go with more real estate for provinces, however, for one main
reason. Cerilia is really already very sparsely populated if one uses the
numbers most often associated with province population levels. Assuming
those numbers are meant to portray actual, individual civilians there is
somewhere in the neighborhood of 1/4 to 1/10th the population in Cerilia as
is reasonable for a late medieval culture, depending on who you ask and
what kind of numbers they see as accurately depicting the population
density of such a culture. (The range of Cerilian cultures is really
between that of an early medieval culture like goblins to what a sort of
early Renaissance level culture among the Brecht with a few weird, magical
cultures like that of elves and dwarves thrown in, making any assessment of
the development of Cerilia on the whole somewhat shaky, but “late medieval”
works as a good general estimate.) If one increases the size of provinces
the numbers represented by population levels get even further thrown out of
whack with the assessments of realistic population density.
If one resizes the provinces then it starts making sense to re-evaluate the
province population levels, which in turn makes it logical to revise the
way holding levels work, not to mention the size of military units, and
those things mean a shift in the value of the GB is necessary or the
revenue tables need to be drastically altered… the list goes on. All of
a sudden the whole system pretty nearly needs to be revisited. I don`t
personally have a problem with revisiting everything, but it is more than
most folks want to take on.
- Realm Spells are not compatibile with PHB spells. I don’t know, if a
regent-wizard cast Mass Destruction, what damage it makes to the single
target creature.
With a couple of odd little exceptions, of one takes a look at the caster
level of all the original realm spells they are set according to when the
caster gets access to a particular spell. A long time ago I associated all
realm spells with an individual D&D spell, and defined realm spells as the
casting of that spell over and over again over the period of a month using
the power of a holding to store the effects until they are finally released
over a province wide area at the end of the month using RP to disperse the
effects outside the range of a standard, D&D level spell. It works pretty
well as an interpretation, and allows one to see specifically what is going
on when in the transition between the domain/realm spell level and the
adventure level. In my experience, one is best off assuming that the
effects of a realm spell represent a single casting of the adventure level
spell upon individuals.
- Strategical system has some bugs, such as possibility to rule province
to the level 10 (Constantinpole-like) in 2 years, or muster maximum number
of units from the same province again and again and again with no respect
for demographics.
This is one of those things that the long-time BR fans have been banging
their heads up against for a very long time… 
It makes us all a
little insane, I think. In short, there`s yet to be presented a very
adequate way of addressing how regents can suddenly “create” a massive
population.
Personally, I`ve been thinking of splitting province population level from
the domain system and making population a more static figure–not unlike
the source potential of a province–for a long time now, but haven`t really
had to cross that bridge yet. That way population would be more easily set.
Gary