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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ourph" data-source="post: 2262724" data-attributes="member: 20239">I do too.  I was agreeing with you.   <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />  No, I'm saying that most "wealthier" people in the manorial system achieved that status by somehow winning the right to contribute a smaller percentage of their overall work/wealth to the lord.  For example, a villein might have been entitled to a certain plot of land that the lord wants to reassign for some reason.  The villein might work out a deal where he takes another (perhaps less desireable) plot of land in trade for reducing his week-work.  Now, instead of paying a 50% contribution of his work/wealth to the lord, he's only paying 40% and can use the extra 10% to build his own wealth.  Many, many special-case contracts like this were entered into in the manor/village system (especially as villein's gained more rights in terms of having a long-term claim to the land they worked) and in a great many cases, the stipulations set forth were heritable.  So eventually the system ended up with some workers who were base villeins (basically contributing the maximum) and many who had some level of extended rights toward smaller contributions (to varying degrees) or to a share of the profits from communal taxation.  So the discussion of % taxes vs. number of peasants required to provide a certain amount of support needs to be informed by the fact that you could easily have two peasants living right next to each other on the same manor and paying completely different amounts in "taxes". The 4:1 ratio represents an average of what each peasant contributes.  It might only take contributions from 3 base villeins (each giving 50% of his work/wealth) to match the contributions of 6 villeins with extended rights (each giving something less than 50%).  So, in addition to the ratio changing based on the richness of the land and other factors, the average status of peasants on a particular manor has a significant impact on the ratio as well. Again, this isn't a question of wealth.  Free status indicates that you are free (or at least freer) of obligations that someone else must meet.  Those obligations take the form of what we're refering to as taxes (work, fees, fines as well as monetary or produce contributions).  But being free vs. being a serf isn't necessarily the same thing as being freer in terms of monetary/work obligations.  In fact, many freeholders in the medieval manorial system were just as poor or poorer than some villeins (who technically "belonged" to the manor but had certain rights that alleviated their total burden to the point where they could prosper).  So freedom and wealth were not always linked.  It was sometimes better to be a villein with lots of extra rights and priveleges than to be a freeholder (who by definition had a much looser relationship with the manor and was much less likely to win exceptions to his tax obligations). Yes, depending on how the land is used and what the economic climate is, it can have a huge impact.You're right, the discussion seemed to be getting sidetracked into a question of real-world facts and I'm afraid I contributed to that.  From a purely gameplay perspective, all of these details aren't really important.  While the details in the history books are important for understanding history, they don't really contribute to creating a workable gameplay solution, because the variables are so complex that anything remotely close to incorporating all of them is unusable.What I can say is that, historically, the profitability of a plot of land had almost as much (if not more) to do with the ability of the person managing it as it did with any measurable physical aspect of the land or economy.  If you're looking for a quick and dirty rules system, I would recommend assigning the lord's foreman or the peasant population as a whole a skill ranking (perhaps Profession: Agriculture) and base the quarterly or yearly income on that skill roll (modified, if you like, by weather/land/disease/economic factors).  In this case, an average skill roll (DC=15 perhaps?) would allow the manor to produce just enough support to keep the peasants from starving and allow the lord to meet all of his obligations and keep food on the table.  In addition, each point by which the roll misses or exceeds the set DC could indicate a 5% reduction or increase in the manor's overall production respectively.  So for example, if you determine the manor requires a 100gp per month production to break even and the skill roll is 18, then the manor produces 115gp that month, a 15gp profit.  Depending upon how detailed you want to get, a portion of that profit could represent a growth in the overall value of the manor (more animals, better tools, building upgrades, etc.) that would eventually allow increased ranks to the Profession: Agriculture skill.</blockquote>

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