MarauderX said:
Silvaras, the FoB system doesn't have a 1 hex = 1 domain system per se, but uses that as a start. The rules can be changed per how you want to run your game, and they note that villages and towns dotted the countryside, and to account for each becomes a record keeping hassle. The scale can be ramped up to cover a kingdom easily, and you can leave holes in what you want to cover and just stat out what's important. I agree it doesn't include the political intrigue and influence from churches, guilds, other sources, but this is up to the DM to put together as political pressure on the rulers. I find that it has enough free form with a loose skeleton of rules that you can read 1/4 of the book, understand less, and still introduce and run with it in your game. Should the players become interested enough to become rulers simply give them the book - there is nothing super-secret and they can do as much of the stats as they wish.
I said 1 hex = 1 province, not 1 hex = 1 domain. The author, Matt Colville, and I discussed this when the book came out and I made the same comment. He had
thought he had set the scale to be the same as a BirthRight province; however, measuring on the map says no. A 12-mile hex is a little bit smaller than the smallest BirthRight province: Ilien.
Problem 1: I have a campaign world with a 20-year development history. This includes 512 provinces already set up in BirthRight-style descriptions. No, I do
not feel like re-drawing the maps to conform to Fields of Blood's sense of scale.
Problem 2: Assuming I wish to adjust to Fields of Blood and re-define my Provinces with "counties" or the like on the 12-miles-across hex scale of Fields of Blood ... the maintenance costs escalate at a realm size of 7 hexes. 7 hexes just barely converts 1 of my larger provinces. True, I can adjust the point at which the maintanence begins to ramp up, but that's just more work to achieve the balance I already have. Additionally, now the armies in Province 1 are not the same distance away (in terms of movement required to reach the nearest "enemy" province) than they were before -- most are considerably more "distant".
Problem 3: Assuming I scale the area of a FoB province up to something closer to the size of my existing provinces, I then have to think about how the movement scales. Movement is tied to province size. Also, the tactical movement when 2 armies meet is scaled specifically on the 12-mile campaign hex size.
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Now, before anyone goes and says I am unfairly trashing Fields of Blood, please remember that original comment was:
Creating a world from scratch with that in mind works well; adapting a previously-mapped world to fit that pattern can be quite frustrating.
Someone seeking a good, thorough system for describing the military and politics of a new campaign world cannot do better than to pick up Fields of Blood. This is especially true if the DM wants questions of "logistics" to be part of the design: how many troops *can* the city support, etc.
However, someone looking to add Fields of Blood to an existing campaign world, especially one that already has a lot of these relationships mapped out in another system, is in for a lot of work.
Empire, in that sense, is "better", because it is more abstract and scaleable "from the ground up". Empire has its own shortcomings, though, in that it *does* very much feel imcomplete. In another of my threads discussing domain books, a couple of us started talking about how to add things to Empire ... like trade guilds, and making organizations into their own power bases instead of just "accessories" in settlements.