Level Up (A5E) The followers and strongholds features that are going to be included in LU... how detailed are they going to be?

[Faolyn]

I'm reading an old review of the old Birthright AD&D setting and it got me wondering--we haven't really seen all that much beyond the bit in that one blog post. In Birthright, apparently they went so far as to include rules on taxing your peasants and spending the gold on maintaining your holdings. It doesn't look like that's going to be a thing in LU (since you said that your stronghold can be as simple as just a feat on your charsheet), but I'm wondering just how detailed the Strongholds are going to be. Any chance we could see another sneak peak at them?

 

[Steampunkette]

From what we've seen, followers are gonna be kind of "Get out of Jail Free" card type things.

Have a follower Cook? Get a meal cooked. Have a Squire? Get your armor on faster. Have a Cobbler? Increase your walking speed or something.

But outside of that specific interaction, they're not -really- there. No stats, no combat utility, never attacked by monsters, something like that. Though they'll probably count toward Resource-Use during Journeys?

Though having Journey Events that -specifically- target Followers would also be damn cool. Because it lets the event have a deadly component without it screwing the entire party over or devolving into a combat.

Strongholds, though... I feel like it might be Stronghold Builder's Guidebook style from what we've seen? Getting "Spaces" and then deciding what they are after the fact.

 

[dave2008]

I'm reading an old review of the old Birthright AD&D setting and it got me wondering--we haven't really seen all that much beyond the bit in that one blog post. In Birthright, apparently they went so far as to include rules on taxing your peasants and spending the gold on maintaining your holdings. It doesn't look like that's going to be a thing in LU (since you said that your stronghold can be as simple as just a feat on your charsheet), but I'm wondering just how detailed the Strongholds are going to be. Any chance we could see another sneak peak at them?

I am pretty sure that in their surveys they found that strong and detailed mechanical support for strongholds and followers was not something the majority of people wanted. I personally would like them, but I am intrigued by the light-touch approach LU is apparently going to use.

 

[Waller]

In Birthright, apparently they went so far as to include rules on taxing your peasants and spending the gold on maintaining your holdings.

That does not sound like my sort of fun.

 

[Faolyn]

That does not sound like my sort of fun.

I've never played it myself, and it definitely seems to be a very different kind of D&D. You can do your adventuring and killing monsters, or you can do your political intrigue, or you can do your nation-management, which includes a lot of war with other nations (which is one reason why you need taxes).

I'm not sure that level of management would be my cup of tea either. But OTOH, I can imagine that some people would enjoy it a lot.

 

[cbwjm]

That does not sound like my sort of fun.

Ive been reading about birthright recently. It was fairly light in that it didn't worry about the number of people but the size of the holdings. In between adventures you manage your holdings which generate gold bars every season that are used to maintain your armies. There was still some paperwork but most of it would have been present and only altered based on your actions during the realm management phase. If you didn't want to control holdings, you didn't have to and could therefore ignore the realm management part of the game

 

[Argyle King]

There's no indication that this is part of how LU will work. These are thoughts I had while reading the thread.

A relatively rules-light way to manage a stronghold could look similar to how FFG Star Wars (Edge of the Empire, Age of Rebellion...) handles owning a ship or having an X-wing squadron available. In the case of a ship, the ship has it's own character sheet and you can buy various upgrades for it. In that game, there are also ship battles so the ship is built like a PC, but that needn't be the case for a stronghold.

A similar idea could be having a stronghold sheet which details some general details about the stronghold: name, resources of note and/or notable nearby features (i.e. squad of elven archers; nearby silver mine,) list of purchased upgrades (i.e. reinforced drawbridge; fire-enchanted ballista on the North tower).

There could perhaps also be some vague broad-strokes details to help the DM roll on some tables to inform the PC that some aspect of managing the stronghold has resulted in a boon or a concern which requires attention. Rolling wouldn't be necessary, and a DM could just go with what makes sense, but having a few tables might help spur things forward. Using what I already typed out, a good event coming from the silver mine could be that some extra money is available to the PC. A bad event could be that a monster had taken up residence in the mine. A messenger informs the PC that the squad of archers are able to keep the monster away from the stronghold, but the resources of the mine won't be available until the problem is fixed.

Managing the stronghold becomes a D&D Downtime activity.

The City Stats pdf for GURPS might be something to look at for ideas too.