Mundane and Stronghold Building Costs

[IronScholar]

There's a guy (Shiftkitty)over on the WotC forums who's put together a brilliant catalog of costs for building structures and strongholds according to the D&D 4th edition economy, and I'm curious as to whether anyone around here has done anything similar, or if they have any links to places that have.

My players are starting to settle into some lands they've been granted, and are eager to build fortifications and lairs. I'd like to get as many resources as possible for putting it together, and any help or insight into working with them to accomplish this in 4th edition would be a huge help.

Here's the link to the WotC thread...

http://community.wizards.com/go/thr...Rod_Noddenberrys_Emporium_of_Niggling_Details

Thanks in advance!

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The Rod Noddenbury thing? Yeah, its basically a composition of stuff from previous E's.

There are actually a few different ways to skin the cat of "player owned stuff."

1) You can do the retro thing and cost it all out in gold etc. This is fine but really tedious for most players (and DMs). It also has a significant problem in interacting with 4e's character wealth system. The more detailed your economics gets the harder it becomes to keep it believably consistent and yet keep characters in the zone on how much gold they have around.

2) You can make it a more abstract system. There are a bunch of similar approaches to doing this.

One would be to simply fiat that property is revenue neutral. Your land collects N taxes and it requires N upkeep with a net gain of 0. If you think about it, this is in the long term pretty logical, governments don't make money, nor can they actually lose money except in the short term. In the case of a business kind of property it obviously isn't quite so much true since hopefully the point of a business is profit. OTOH its an adventure game, not a business simulator, so unless the PCs really want to play accounting 101 its still a decent way to go. They can have plot hooks, but there's no long-term profit involved.

You can make owning property an adventure in and of itself. The DM puts various skill challenges in front of the players related to their property. Success nets treasure, failure can cost some. This is all pretty much within the bounds of what is normal for SCs anyway. Of course these don't HAVE to be SCs either. They can be full adventures or whatever the DM wants to make of them. The property then basically just serves as a vehicle for explaining how and why the PCs were motivated and the justifies the resulting riches (or lack thereof).

The only final challenge that exists is explaining why the PC can't simply sell their property and use the resulting loot to stock up on magic items, etc. The usual (and I think best) answer is that a Medieval style economy simply isn't a cash based system. You can't sell your farm because its a feud. You can't sell your business because charters and guild standing and such aren't fungible either (IE the Middle Ages didn't have a concept of private property like we have today). Ergo you really basically can't transfer property readily. Its possible, but requires a whole lot of jumping through flaming hoops, which magically nets you a return remarkably similar to doing the same amount of adventuring...

 

[IronScholar]

Hey AbdulAlhazred –

First off, thanks for the response.

My players are pretty fastidious, and we love the nitty gritty details of day to day life in the settings we play in. It helps to immerse ourselves in our characters and the worlds they’re engaged in. We’re the kind of players who want to purchase almost every stitch of clothing in our character’s armoire and every piece of furniture in our lairs. We put trophies on our imaginary walls, and know the title of just about every book on our shelves in our libraries.

I’ve sourced a handful of other books from 1E through 4E, and the monetary differential between them is so varied, there’s no decent way to formulate a transfer rate from one edition to another. It seems to be a very judicious process. Most of the items in the D&D worlds don’t follow real world medieval economies… nor should they, really, since they themselves were so varied.

I dunno. I just wanted to put my feelers out to see what other people had put together or used in there games. The Rod Noddenbury list is pretty detailed, but I’d like even more granularity for buiding things, and I’d like to avoid having to work it all out myself.

Anyone else out there have any additional resources?

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Odd, I actually would say that the various price tables are fairly consistent between editions. Some individual items vary, but overall you could drop 1e prices into 4e and hardly notice any difference.

In any case there have been a LOT of sources within published D&D material itself. I couldn't even begin to list them all, though ShiftKitty probably picked up most of the major ones. I think AD&D Battlesystem has some too. There are also various books published by 3rd parties, starting with a bunch of Judges Guild stuff from the mid-70's which you probably cannot get anywhere anymore. I seem to recall there was some sort of 2e castles source book as well. I have no idea about 3e stuff. Palladium Press is a good source to try, they published dozens of books on weapons, armor, castles, etc. with real world numbers attached to a lot of it. These were good reference works. I'm not sure how much of that stuff is still in print anywhere, but you may still be able to dig up copies.

 

[Saeviomagy]

In general it's a bad idea to charge characters their combat currency for roleplaying and story elements unless those roleplaying and story elements are going to be vital to the character's survival.

I'd recommend placing some sort of artificial split between the money players use for buying magical items that they use day-to-day and the money players spend on their castle. Otherwise you end up with the situation where one or more of your characters hog game spotlight because one or the other aspect is emphasised more during the campaign.

For instance, it's entirely possible for someone to plow his entire character resources into becoming a landed noble. At that point the other characters are reduced to lackeys when dealing with high society.

Conversely the guy with no magic items is liable to contribute little in combat.

Since you're unlikely to realistically flip between the two during a single session, someone is going to feel like he may as well not have come that night.

If, on the other hand, everyone has their land (or other roleplaying commodity, be it a guild, church, what have you) and their combat prowess as seperate elements, this is not a concern.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

In general it's a bad idea to charge characters their combat currency for roleplaying and story elements unless those roleplaying and story elements are going to be vital to the character's survival.

I'd recommend placing some sort of artificial split between the money players use for buying magical items that they use day-to-day and the money players spend on their castle. Otherwise you end up with the situation where one or more of your characters hog game spotlight because one or the other aspect is emphasised more during the campaign.

This was why I came up with the "non-fungibility" concept. You can be granted a castle from the King, but you simply cannot sell it. Same with a business, etc. At best if you put some of your own treasure into improvements, etc you could extract that as treasure again. Of course if you pass an SC related to your property you get real treasure/XP for that. Your property otherwise just pays for itself. The DM can let you "build it up" or he can "tear it down" in whatever fashion he wants, it doesn't relate to your adventuring gear.

 

[Turtlejay]

I toyed with the idea of tying some of the treasure parcels in with this, too. I don't DM any longer, but I had plans for the castle/airship/dimentional pocket to have some hidden secrets. One might be an arcane lab with homunculi ready to do your bidding. . .if you knew how to bid them, and had the materials. Basically every so often you could get an item or two off of your 'wish list' by spending some time trading random arcane materials to the formulary, and gain a useful magic item in return.

I had other plans as well, but that was the most fleshed out. Might I add to the discussion as well, lands are nice, but something fantastic is nicer. Lands on another plane, perhaps?

Jay

 

[Roger]

To mix together some ideas of previous posters, I might be tempted to use the Stronghold Builders' Guide from 3e, and give the party a gp budget every level (or per quest, or whatnot) to buy what they want.



Cheers,
Roger