Logistics and Dragons [No Kaeliks]

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Ancient History
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Post by Ancient History »

...which is sort of where I was headed with Gil, but I'm not happy with that yet.
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Post by Kaelik »

It really does seem like every single step involves you guys wanting to play Logistics and Dragons less, and Dominions more. Which is honestly kind of impressive, since you already looked like you were playing Dominions earlier.

(Or apparently, HoMM, but the general point remains that you are basically just creating a TBS with basically no interaction with actual D&D rules.)
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Post by Username17 »

Since Kaelik has literally nothing constructive to say about this project at all, I move that we put a "Kaelik stay out" on the thread. I don't agree with most of what PL has to say, but he has made some actual contributions and suggestions.

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Post by name_here »

I concur. I am not convinced he is even reading the thread.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I think you probably want at least somewhat more granularity than 'production points.' In D&D, you have Ogres, who are great for mining and hauling, but not good at fine work; you also have kobolds, who can do elaborate machines but are crap at anything requiring brute strength; and you also have shit like Delvers, who can't use tools of any kind, but who make most tunneling and stoneworking extremely trivial.

I think people are going to want the asymmetrical tradeoffs that come with crazy kitchen sink fantasy.
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Post by violence in the media »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I think you probably want at least somewhat more granularity than 'production points.' In D&D, you have Ogres, who are great for mining and hauling, but not good at fine work; you also have kobolds, who can do elaborate machines but are crap at anything requiring brute strength; and you also have shit like Delvers, who can't use tools of any kind, but who make most tunneling and stoneworking extremely trivial.

I think people are going to want the asymmetrical tradeoffs that come with crazy kitchen sink fantasy.
So what if you assigned production point values on the basis of the relevant stat modifier for the task in question, and assign tags [strength][intelligence] to tasks? So an ogre might generate 5 [strength] production points per turn, but only for projects that have a [strength] tag. An ogre could dig out a new dungeon room for you, but would probably be less than helpful weaving the magic rug you're going to put in it.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I think you probably want at least somewhat more granularity than 'production points.'
I keep my "production points" simplified and just have build crews, and they build one "thing" per strategic turn each, period no varying costs, the build crews time comes free with the payment of the building's cost, communities like villages etc... provide a fixed very small number of build crews, or you can build a building to house one of your own. Technically if you really want to ramp up rapid building you can house a whole bunch, but mostly you just house one or two and you do it not for build speed but for added security (since the workers who build your base hang around under your control instead of living off site to be questioned), and because...

The added thing that kobolds being good at machines bullshit would do is that the build crews, or the guy leading their build for the strategic turn determine what buildings they can build based on their background culture/knowledge. The equivalent in your case would be having access to kobolds open up access to special kobold buildings.
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Post by Username17 »

I acknowledge that on a personal scale it would be nice to declare that Araneas excel at weaving and that having some of them make you super awesome at hanging tapestries in your rooms while Stone Giants excel at hefting heavy stones and shit and are good for making walls and moats and so on and so forth... you're going to potentially end up scaling the system to having a population base in the thousands. And when it comes to the aggregate production, you're not going to be physically able to discuss what craft skills all the people do and do not have.

You're going to have to do some GDP style aggregation. Some of the people in your fortress are going to be miners and some are going to be potash makers, and you aren't going to bother statting all of them.

And remember that some of the outputs are also rather fuzzy. When you set a stronghold space to be a Bedroom Suite, Fancy or an Alchemical Laboratory, Basic, the game is quite agnostic as to whether the ink pots are made of glass or stone or tin. An weirdly obsessive computer game like Dwarf Fortress could keep track of all that, but in D&D it simply doesn't matter and the materials of the wall hangings and cutlery is entirely flavor text.

So just for starters, when you have resources like giant weasel wool or giant spider silk it is entirely appropriate that they be entirely fungible. Your barracks are going to have blankets in them, and if they be woven from spider silk or assassin vine pulp that is entirely flavor text. The players have the right and the responsibility to tell stories about what their infrastructure is built out of and why based on available materials, but game mechanically it doesn't matter and it's a waste of everyone's time to try to figure out exactly how many bolts of various kinds of cloth are being made.

The Stronghold Builder's Guide really falls down on the job when it comes to describing what you get for having access to unusual labor. It just says "In most cases unusual laborers don't affect the cost of a stronghold, because particularly efficient workers charge correspondingly more for their services." I mean, that's true, but it's lame. You're going to want to get unusual laborers because it's a fantasy game, and that's awesome. But the book does have a point, which is that the marginal product of dwarves who mine twice as fast as humans is subjected to the same economic forces as the slower workers. Making things cheaper isn't likely. But there should still be ways to make things faster and better.

My suggestion would be that weird ass laborers and resources should give you binary special abilities on a case by case basis. That is, having access to resources should mostly work like in Civ 4 or MOM, where a fortress that has adamantine can tautologically produce stuff that requires adamantine to make. But for the most part, it's all flavor text. If you're making your candles out of abeil wax, good on you. But since we aren't actually tracking the number of candles being used, it's largely a moot point.

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Post by Avoraciopoctules »

PhoneLobster wrote:[The added thing that kobolds being good at machines bullshit would do is that the build crews, or the guy leading their build for the strategic turn determine what buildings they can build based on their background culture/knowledge. The equivalent in your case would be having access to kobolds open up access to special kobold buildings.
FrankTrollman wrote:My suggestion would be that weird ass laborers and resources should give you binary special abilities on a case by case basis. That is, having access to resources should mostly work like in Civ 4 or MOM, where a fortress that has adamantine can tautologically produce stuff that requires adamantine to make.
A system like this would make it very easy to build on whatever stuff was in the playspace at the start. You don't need to worry about what the Yuan-ti add to the basic game until they show up, since that just adds their new tree of options to the available choices.
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Post by Ancient History »

And, let us not forget, d20's Craft and Profession rules are among their least great. Without nerfing them outright, you don't want to roll all of those to see how well your minions did this week. You could work from the Take Ten/Take Twenty perspective - where you just assume a certain amount of basic competence and an average skill-per-level/HD for minions - or you could suspend the Craft DCs entirely, as I was playing with in my quick'n'dirty outline, and measure output on a much higher granular level (i.e. +0 to +10 gives 50gp worth of stuff, +11 to +20 gives 100gp worth of stuff, etc.)

The quick'n'dirty is not perfect. I haven't even given much thought to magewrights vs. experts yet, and that's a thing people are going to want, and I think Kobold Fortress is definitely going to need to find some way to do that.
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Post by Username17 »

Tome rules straight up nuke the Profession skill from orbit, and jobs have pay scales which are based on the Stronghold Builder's Guide and the Arms and Equipment Guide.
Acolyte 5+ gp
Alchemist 10+ gp
Artisan 5 gp
Bartender/Innkeeper 15 sp
Barrister 8 gp
Butler 2 gp
Clerk 3+ gp (includes more influential administrators)
Cook 1 gp
Courtesan 5+ sp
Farmer 5 cp (Farmers also feed themselves)
Fisherman 3 sp
Groom 1 gp
Guard 15+ sp
Laborer 1 sp (note: this means no profession at all)
Laborer, Skilled 2 gp
Librarian 3 gp
Janitor/Maid 8 sp
Military Officer 5+ gp
Miner 2 gp
Porter 6 sp
Runner 1 gp
Sage 10+ gp*
Sailor 2 gp
Scribe 2 gp
Servant 8 sp
Shepherd 2 sp
Smith 15 gp
Smith, Master 150 gp
Soldier 15+ sp
Tailor 1 gp
Teamster 2 gp
Torturer 2 gp
Valet 15 sp
Wage Mage 10+ gp
There are some bug fixes and additions, but by and large it's the Stronghold Builder's Guide chart for hiring staff.

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Post by Prak »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I think you probably want at least somewhat more granularity than 'production points.' In D&D, you have Ogres, who are great for mining and hauling, but not good at fine work; you also have kobolds, who can do elaborate machines but are crap at anything requiring brute strength; and you also have shit like Delvers, who can't use tools of any kind, but who make most tunneling and stoneworking extremely trivial.

I think people are going to want the asymmetrical tradeoffs that come with crazy kitchen sink fantasy.
You can also bind a beholder into a pick and play Minecraft.
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Post by Kaelik »

Prak wrote:You can also bind a beholder into a pick and play Minecraft.
You want to use your actual D&D abilities to construct effectively infinite rooms in a single strategic turn? Gee, I wonder how Frank and AH are going to respond to that idea?

1/1 Make it have no effect on the construction of holdings whatsoever.
1/2 Declare you can't even do that.
1/2 Admit that maybe possibly that might reduce the number of workers you need on your production team but for "simplicity" insist that you can still only build one holding per turn.

Certainly it seems like already having a room for whatever you want that is the right size and maybe even has gross furniture should make production of your holding's easier than having to literally carve it out of rock.
Last edited by Kaelik on Fri Oct 09, 2015 3:00 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Prak »

Er, actually I'm referring to making a pick that disintegrates 10' cubes of rock when you swing it.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Ancient History wrote:...or you could suspend the Craft DCs entirely, as I was playing with in my quick'n'dirty outline, and measure output on a much higher granular level (i.e. +0 to +10 gives 50gp worth of stuff, +11 to +20 gives 100gp worth of stuff, etc.)
Whut? Look you already have a "money" currency unit. Why isn't that in Gil if it's quick and dirty instead of just needlessly complex and dirty. Hell if it's quick and dirty why isn't it just "bunch of workers/a factory of them = 1 Gil (fix the scale of gil in process)"? Hell anything that in anyway prevents a multi-step conversion of skill points->table lookup for output per workerXnumberofworkers=GP/GP to Gill conversion rate=Gill EVERY TURN on your god damn spreadsheet. And possible more for each category of worker/craft/whatever and of course extra steps if you have mixed workers of differing skills.

And what do you mean "goods worth"? I hope you mean you only track it as a money value. Because if the ongoing spreadsheet now has to track how many carpets are produced and stored (or even break down your savings into raw cash and the value of strategic carpet warehouse reserves without technically counting the number of carpets) I'm very not happy with the added needless obsessive compulsive complexity overload in a system with too much already.

Add to that the briefly touched on stuff about having a market exchange rate (possibly at a variable rate?) (with a possibly variable cap on available exchangeable resources?) to exchange Koku and Gil and that being not just a possible thing but a somehow simple possible thing... and again, all I'm seeing is risks of even more ridiculous accounting blowouts. If Gil and Koku are exchangeable at anything like a flat unlimited rate you only actually need ONE of them, if they are exchangeable with a variable exchange rate or a capped market supply you have added way too much additional complexity for way too little benefit AND very likely created problematic game play outcomes in the process.

At what point does "quick and dirty" or "managed abstraction" ever result in you deciding to actually ever simplify anything instead of going for the most complex possible option? Because I keep seeing language acknowledging a desire for simplicity but I keep seeing mechanics firmly headed further and further in directions that appear to have no recognition of that whatsoever. You seriously think that just not rolling for each individual worker but instead taking 10 or (for nothing more than cosmetic difference) looking up a skill to output table for each individual worker is the quick option? A simplified one? Even an actual practical achievable one?

And not to keep on harping on the completely flawed point of focus issue. But is this Kobold Dungeon Manager the D&D adventure... or is this Kobold Factory Manager the Anno 1404:Fantasy Expansion Pack adventure?
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Post by MGuy »

How 'will' your system take care of potentially industrious PCs? Like, a lot of this stuff sounds like it might work as long as PCs don't personally use their abilities to do 'stuff'. While I 'really' REALLY hate to sound like kaelik, there seems to be very little thoughts on this project being aimed at answering the question of what happens if PCs personally do stuff instead of delegating everything. I mean what if the people who play in your game decide to think up a new age of industry, fucking around with their abilities until they can do something industrious not unlike the 'create food trap' idea from before? What if the PCs think up some other kind of workable fabrication scheme that fucks with how much koku they can spend/extract/benefit from or what happens if the PCs dream up a way to simply improve their koku yields or something?
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Post by Username17 »

When you have abilities that make things, and you use them, you figure out how many Koku, Gold, and/or Production points they are worth in a turn and then you get that many. Since the numbers are aggregates, it's assumed all your generic workers work around whatever you're making and make other things. So if you're using lithomancer powers to put up stone walls, the generic laborers are presumably spending their time putting in doors and shelves. If you're using your jebus powers to make lots of wine, your farmers are going to be making less grapes and more onions. Or whatever.

The whole point of using simplified aggregate numbers is that we don't have to worry about how many masons your lithomancy is displacing. We assume the invisible hand reallocates all the craftsmen to productive labor so long as you're still able to feed and pay them.

Kaelik is just thread shitting, and has been for a long time. The shit he is complaining about is the opposite of true. I assume he's still butthurt about the fact that people shot down his earlier plan to cover all food needs with create food and water by pointing out that that spell doesn't make very much food.

But if you took a fifth level Cleric and had them cast create food and water every day, then you would absolutely get... 15 extra Koku for that period. There are very few circumstances that would be worth doing, but you could do it.

People who want to take their ball and go home as soon as you tell them that they aren't going to be able to exploit vague poorly written guidelines to "go infinite" at the start of the game and ignore all the building and production should definitely take their ball and go home right now. Because that's not even a desire to play the game, that's a desire to shit all over the game and ruin it for everyone.

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Post by Kaelik »

FrankTrollman wrote:The whole point of using simplified aggregate numbers is that we don't have to worry about how many masons your lithomancy is displacing. We assume the invisible hand reallocates all the craftsmen to productive labor so long as you're still able to feed and pay them.
And then you can produce only one building per turn even if you can personally make like 600, because Dominions/HoMM more important than actually Logistics and Dragons.
FrankTrollman wrote:Kaelik is just thread shitting, and has been for a long time. The shit he is complaining about is the opposite of true. I assume he's still butthurt about the fact that people shot down his earlier plan to cover all food needs with create food and water by pointing out that that spell doesn't make very much food.
From page 1:
Kaelik wrote:
FrankTrollman wrote:No. Create Food and Water can feed anything, but not very many things. A fifth level Cleric can sustain 15 people for one day per spell slot. That's enough that an adventuring party (although not their horses) can persist indefinitely in the desert or whatever, but it's pretty much meaningless on the Logistics and Dragons scale. It's basically the koku output of one family farm.

Player characters have abilities, but the ability of clerics to act as extra farms or whatever is nearly meaningless. Plant Growth is a much bigger deal.

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Create Food and Water is for carnivores. 7 Cubic feat of Rice seems like kind of a fucking lot for one spell.
Like I get that literally any possible system for using abilities to bypass KOKU makes you and AH sad, because you want to play KOKU IS A COOL NAME, FUCK LOGISTICS The Game, but the truth is that you can totally just do like 50000 things to bypass all koku in the game, ranging from using undead, constructs, outsiders, to just creating enough rice to feed like 2000 people with a single spell. If your goal is to use actual D&D abilities to completely eliminate KOKU from the game, they can just do that. But you get super pissed at every possible attempt to do that, because you really really really really want to talk about KOKU, and it sure seems like that is literally the only possible justification you can give for your hard on for making KOKU an essential resource management that people are just not allowed to bypass at all.

But I'm sure you have a totally good reason for throwing a shit fit when someone takes as the cohort for a leadership feat you wrote, a CR 5 Genie who permanently creates enough rice in a single standard action once per day to completely negate KOKU from the consideration until you are running around with like 3000 omnivores. And then when they start making Undead Dragons and shit, and calling outsiders, you will continue to throw all the fits, because what kind of asshole tries to use D&D abilities in a logistics and dragons game to bypass the need to spend half their time managing PRECIOUS KOKU! Because to you PRECIOUS KOKU is more important than any actual interaction with D&D abilities.
Last edited by Kaelik on Fri Oct 09, 2015 6:35 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Username17 »

Seriously AH, put a "No Kaeliks" on the thread title, because he's not going to stop thread shitting until you do and possibly not even afterwards.

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Post by GreatGreyShrike »

Kaelik, can I ask where you got feeding 2k people out of a 7th level casting of minor creation? Because running the numbers I get like 320 at most.

I mean, if you make 7 cubic feet dried rice and then supply ~14 cubic cubic feet water to make ~21 cubic feet rice as a finished product for human consumption, you make 656 kcal of rice, which at 2k calories/day per person works out to ~328 people. At a casting cost of 280 gp for the spell to feed ~300 people, this works out to rather more than the 1-5 silver pieces meals cost in standard so it seems like a pretty terrible bargain? I mean, you can cast it yourself, I guess. But feeding a large number on a diet that won't cause them to die of malnutrition probably would take a lot of spell slots. Because you are going to need a bunch of non-dried-rice stuff if you don't want everyone to get scurvy and shit, and you probably want fancier meals than "3 bowls of rice a day" if you want to avoid dissension and revolts...
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Post by Omegonthesane »

Undead are limited by the caster level of the spellcaster animating the undead (and/or their HD, if they use Necromantic feats instead of or in addition to Animate Dead). Skeletons can just not take up koku and instead require an up-front GP investment of 25*HD plus the price of the corpse (or the GP effectively lost by diverting labour to harvest corpses).

Constructs seem to be better at avoiding the Logistics in Logistics & Dragons, as they're soft-capped by the amount of GP and time you're willing to divert to building them instead of hard-capped by the properties of player abilities.

I somehow suspect "my cohort is a Djinn" would get refused out of hand at level 7 before even considering how it lets you create 20 cubic feet of rice a day.
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Post by Kaelik »

GreatGreyShrike wrote:Kaelik, can I ask where you got feeding 2k people out of a 7th level casting of minor creation? Because running the numbers I get like 320 at most.
I took Grek at his word about 2341 man days of food. I don't particularly care if the amount is lower, because I have a hard time imagining that if you were actually running a dungeon you would even want that many people.

Although, for the record, a CR 5 genie creates 20 cubic feet of rice.
GreatGreyShrike wrote:At a casting cost of 280 gp for the spell to feed ~300 people, this works out to rather more than the 1-5 silver pieces meals cost in standard so it seems like a pretty terrible bargain?
Since you would be getting it for free for your D&D logistics abilities, and not spending money, and using it to feed your entire non undead omnivore section of the dungeon, it certainly seems more than worth it as compared to having to apparently actually farm the land around your dungeon.
GreatGreyShrike wrote:I mean, you can cast it yourself, I guess. But feeding a large number on a diet that won't cause them to die of malnutrition probably would take a lot of spell slots. Because you are going to need a bunch of non-dried-rice stuff if you don't want everyone to get scurvy and shit, and you probably want fancier meals than "3 bowls of rice a day" if you want to avoid dissension and revolts...
So now you are saying that people who feed their dungeon with farms in the dungeon are all going to get revolts? Food diversity doesn't seem to be in any way a promise of this system, or even related to it. If you think people are going to reject the concept of having most or all their food come from rice, then you should probably be super anti koku, because the system implicitly treats all giant piles of food as the same.
Omegonthesane wrote:Undead are limited by the caster level of the spellcaster animating the undead (and/or their HD, if they use Necromantic feats instead of or in addition to Animate Dead). Skeletons can just not take up koku and instead require an up-front GP investment of 25*HD plus the price of the corpse (or the GP effectively lost by diverting labour to harvest corpses).
Uh... not really? I mean, each person in the party can have HDx4 HD in skeletons or zombies. Anyone spending necromantic feats can have more, anyone taking undead leadership can have more. Anyone with rebuking can have literally infinity. Like, a level 6 Cleric can have as many 1hd skeletons as exist in the universe if he really cared.

Now, if you are animating the undead yourself with animate dead, you might be paying 25gp per HD, if you are a sucker who didn't just spellstich yourself or your first undead to just animate dead every day and the follow that up with rebuking everything below your limit, to go with your vampire minions.

Bone Sphere just gives you as many zombies as living things you can find or Call.

I mean, infinite undead armies aren't even really hard. Your limit may or may not be corpses initially at level 6, until you find a corpse creation engine, whether that involves stone to flesh, or lesser planar binding, or genocide.
Omegonthesane wrote:I somehow suspect "my cohort is a Djinn" would get refused out of hand at level 7 before even considering how it lets you create 20 cubic feet of rice a day.
I mean, by what standard? By the MUST BE ABOUT KOKU standard of this game, sure. But Command is a leadership feat that explicitly allows you to have CR 5 monsters as your cohort. Most leadership feats do. I think someone made an outsider themed leadership feat too. The Tomes may or may not explicitly state that cohorts are changed to be based on CR for regular leadership, but every new leadership option explicitly bases it off CR, and aside from allowing you to create 20 cubic feet of rice once per day and feed a bunch of people, I can't think of a single other thing anyone would object to a CR 5 Djinni doing that anyone would complain about.

And of course, in a standard D&D game, no one would complain about the rice either.
Last edited by Kaelik on Fri Oct 09, 2015 8:36 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Post by Ancient History »

PhoneLobster wrote:
Ancient History wrote:...or you could suspend the Craft DCs entirely, as I was playing with in my quick'n'dirty outline, and measure output on a much higher granular level (i.e. +0 to +10 gives 50gp worth of stuff, +11 to +20 gives 100gp worth of stuff, etc.)
Whut? Look you already have a "money" currency unit. Why isn't that in Gil if it's quick and dirty instead of just needlessly complex and dirty.
It is Gil, if you read the quick'n'dirty at all. The thing is that Gil is currently set that 1 Gil = 100 gp worth of stuff, and my Craft/Profession conversion was at 0.5 Gil per +10 or part thereof. So it's pretty easy to go back and forth. And I'm still not married to gil, I just like the distinction between $CURRENCY and "shiny yellow metal."
PhoneLobster wrote:Hell if it's quick and dirty why isn't it just "bunch of workers/a factory of them = 1 Gil (fix the scale of gil in process)"?
Because unlike Kaelik's mad ranting, we're not looking to abandon D&D and its bullshit economics entirely - although I think Frank's suggestion about using the set labor prices might be simpler - and people are going to want to be able to distinguish between an orc with a hammer (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +3) and an Orc Expert 10 (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +20). And you'd really want that distinction if your PC wants to get involved.
And what do you mean "goods worth"? I hope you mean you only track it as a money value.
You absolutely never read a line I wrote in the "bare bones" outline, all those pages back, did you? Normally, skilled minions just generate Gil, which goes into your hoard - representing gold, trade goods, gems, metal ingots, whatever passes for $CURRENCY or can easily be turned into such for buying things. Alternately, if you want to produce something specific - like setting your weaponsmiths to forge weapons - you can convert their production directly into an equivalent value worth of goods.
PhoneLobster wrote: I'm very not happy with the added needless obsessive compulsive complexity overload in a system with too much already.
It is Logistics & Dragons.
PhoneLobster wrote: Add to that the briefly touched on stuff about having a market exchange rate (possibly at a variable rate?) (with a possibly variable cap on available exchangeable resources?) to exchange Koku and Gil and that being not just a possible thing but a somehow simple possible thing... and again, all I'm seeing is risks of even more ridiculous accounting blowouts. If Gil and Koku are exchangeable at anything like a flat unlimited rate you only actually need ONE of them, if they are exchangeable with a variable exchange rate or a capped market supply you have added way too much additional complexity for way too little benefit AND very likely created problematic game play outcomes in the process.
It's d20. If you don't like mindless complexity, go play sportsball.
PhoneLobster wrote: At what point does "quick and dirty" or "managed abstraction" ever result in you deciding to actually ever simplify anything instead of going for the most complex possible option? Because I keep seeing language acknowledging a desire for simplicity but I keep seeing mechanics firmly headed further and further in directions that appear to have no recognition of that whatsoever. You seriously think that just not rolling for each individual worker but instead taking 10 or (for nothing more than cosmetic difference) looking up a skill to output table for each individual worker is the quick option? A simplified one? Even an actual practical achievable one?
D&D lacks a logistics management system for building and running dungeons. So you're going to have to add some stuff. The key is to throw in some tools that let them manage it to the degree they desire. Getting really micromanager is actually d20's default. Rolling everything for every minion is the default - and D&D doesn't tell you about the feeding and care of your minions, not really. A lot of it is mindcaulk.
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Post by PhoneLobster »

Ancient History wrote:my Craft/Profession conversion was at 0.5 Gil per +10 or part thereof. So it's pretty easy to go back and forth.
What? You think that's acceptable? Really now? REALLY? You're just going to throw in fractions of units in there? Yeah, THAT will clear up the already overly elaborate mess.
and people are going to want to be able to distinguish between an orc with a hammer (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +3) and an Orc Expert 10 (Craft (Weaponsmithing) +20). And you'd really want that distinction if your PC wants to get involved.
NO THEY ARE NOT. I don't know how much this point can be hammered home for you to stop fucking ignoring it, but this is supposed to be the backdrop to a D&D game not a god damn Anno 1404:Fantasy Expansion game. The players are NOT supposed to care about minutia of minor crafting bonuses on individual god damn minions. This isn't about production lines and markets and trading, it's a D&D fantasy adventure about fighting and looting, but with a sweet dungeon that a lot of it should happen in.

Bogging down in the insanely detailed trade goods and homewares production hole is bat shit stupid to an INCREDIBLE degree. I don't see how you could possible defend it, and I note you just fucking don't you just go ahead and dig your god damn pointless complexity hole deeper and deeper into territories you should NEVER be dragging your D&D/Dungeon Keeper knock off into.
It's d20. If you don't like mindless complexity, go play sportsball.
So utterly unable to actually address the entirely avoidable giant fucking tangled mess in your plans that some proposed "simple" overly elaborate currency exchange plans almost certainly WILL generate? Just going unquestioningly adopt them and then to resort to that as a defense of why you are doing so hey?

"Currency exchange plans have to be insanely complex and will motivate bad game play, OR they will render multiple currencies redundant"
"Fuck you play sports ball!"

Yeah, brilliant reply right there.
D&D lacks a logistics management system for building and running dungeons. So you're going to have to add some stuff.
You aren't adding stuff to do that though, you are adding stuff to run an incredibly elaborate profitable kobold production line for crafting saleable orc plushies in incredibly elaborate and detailed granularity.

THAT IS NOT SOMETHING ABOUT DUNGEON MANAGEMENT WE SHOULD GIVE A FUCK ABOUT.

That apparently needs repeating in caps for some reason.

Not to mention if you are pissed with Kaeliks whole rice genie bullshit you are just totally opening yourself up to a whole world of bullshit with your detailed crafting of cash goods shenanigans.
Rolling everything for every minion is the default - and D&D doesn't tell you about the feeding and care of your minions, not really. A lot of it is mindcaulk.
That in no way addresses the basic fact that your "quick" and supposedly simple substitute is wildly over elaborate. The sins of the portions of the system you are changing have dick all to do with the sins of the mechanics you are proposing to entirely substitute in place of those portions. Rolling everyone's craft check IS insane, but your plan is also insane.
Last edited by PhoneLobster on Fri Oct 09, 2015 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Username17 »

A cubic foot of grain is 38 pounds of grain. That's a lot for a person, but remember that's something you could buy at Safeway for less than 30 dollars. Making grains by the cubic foot simply is not efficient. A djinn can do much better making spices, medicines, and silks, and using the gold from sales to buy food.

A cubic foot of grain per day for a year is like 15 koku. And remember, the smallest grain storage room the game recognizes holds one THOUSAND cubic feet.

Now Djinn are ill suited to l&d games that aren't of the highest power because every one of them is a sultan and their personal economic output is that of a village or small town. The gdp of a djinn is such a bulky and unwieldy amount that it makes tracking extra population growth largely meaningless.
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