Silveras said:
I'm still waiting for ENWorld's RPGShop to ship my copy of the Book of Strongholds, but in the meantime, maybe we can get at this indirectly, with Cavalorn's kind cooperation
....
I live to serve.
Silveras said:
Local Production of arms & armor could be used to outfit troops you mustered.
You will find this in S&D; it's an important part of the warfare concept. You can hire mercenaries with the revenue you get from trading off your local production, or you can equip your own army with the metal/leather/horseflesh goods you produce, or you can sequester goods for your army's use. The level of goods production (in refinement as well as quantity) that you reach affects what you can give your troops.
Silveras said:
This particular tie-in between the mass combat rules and the domain management rules usually gets abstracted out in the form of production being "it is all money".
I know, and I wanted to avoid that. There's not so much reward in reducing everything to a sea of homogenous 'points' which you then draw from. By contrast, the system found in S&D lets (for example) kingdom A trade its worked metal goods (such as swords and armour) for some of Kingdom B's thoroughbred horses, so that both kingdoms can create cavalry units. I thought that would be more interesting to play.
Silveras said:
I like this particular detail, as it lends a strategic element to production (a la Civilization III's "strategic resources").
Yes, exactly. In S&D, you're limited to what your kingdom can produce (or ship in) in terms of raw materials, but what you DO with those materials is up to you. You can't produce metal goods if there's a dearth of ore in the land, or building stone if you live in a swamp.
One feature I was quite happy with is that the DM keeps the undiscovered resources hidden, because he keeps the province sheets. It is therefore quite possible for a newly discovered source of (say) precious metals to change the balance of power. Not unlike what happened with Athens and the silver mine that funded its navy and ultimately led it to challenge ancient Persia, really!
Silveras said:
2) The mass combat system is not locked into one troop size. Creating larger or smaller units (i.e., with more or less than the "default" number of creatures) is a somewhat new approach (at least out of the books I have looked at), and I thought it made perfect sense. The approach was well thought out, and integrated nicely with the other elements.
That's exactly what we've done with the OCMSII. A given 'counter' is composed of a number of creatures, and a given unit is composed of a number of counters.
Following on from a post made earlier in the thread, I now find myself itching to write a quick battle system - the kind where you can resolve less important battles with a few rolls. The kind you'd click 'quick combat' for if you were playing a top-down battle game. I'm guessing that such a supplement would probably be more likely to make its way into Signs & Portents (the Mongoose magazine) rather than warranting a whole book to itself.
Silveras said:
Does the Book of Strongholds & Dynasties address scaling ? Does it address the placement of strongolds/population centers, and does that have any effect on the production in them ?
The Book of Strongholds and Dynasties largely avoids addressing the scaling issue, which was a deliberate choice on my part. Pretty much all that we do is address the population of an area and how it's placed into settlements. (I actually advocate placing quite a wodge of the population into 'unmapped hamlets'.) Here's why I took that route.
Firstly, when writing kingdom management mechanics, you're looking at established campaigns a lot of the time. One simply can't expect a GM to retroactively change everything on the map to fit the demands of a given rules system. What I strove to do with S&D is to make it as *flexible* as I could, while remaining internally consistent and simple.
Secondly, there is what you might call a tactical map detail issue at work here. In the early days, the map was really the thing at the foundation of D&D. The game involved the players interacting tactically with the dungeon map or the wilderness map. The DM had to prepare *everything* in case the players should encounter it. These days, it's not nearly so structurally defined. The tactical interactions are between players and more fluid situations as dreamed up by the DM, not necessarily between players and the raw data of a map and its references.
The important thing with S&D was to a) trust the DM to supply some measure of the consistency and plausibility of what is in a kingdom, rather than anchoring the whole thing in scaled limitations and b) not oblige the DM to detail everything down to the last cobblestone.
Hope that helps.
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