Domain Rules

[Grek]

I think so. The model here is that your Law buildings allow you to spend Manpower to obtain other currencies, with the different specializations giving you side benefits on every Manpower converted. Suppose (as an example, numbers not final) that a Level 1 Law Building (of any kind) lets you convert up to 100 Manpower into other currencies at 50% exchange rate, and that a Courthouse in particular gives you a bonus 10% of the converted Manpower as Culture regardless of the trade you do. So if you spend all 100 Manpower on Culture, you get 60 Culture, but if you elect to spend it on Gold instead you get 50 Gold and 10 Culture. If you built a Tax Office, that 10% bonus goes to Gold and if you recruit a Personal Guard, it gives you some free Garrison even in places you don't have troops. A higher level Law Building would let you convert up to 1000 or even 10000 manpower at the same exchange rates, so your Halls of Justice gives you a free 100 Culture every month that you max out your Manpower conversions. If you want to be really fancy, you can all these month to month conversions Edicts.

Converting Manpower into Culture with a Courthouse isn't as good as having a Culture building do it, but A] you're only allowed a single Culture building, and B] when you hit your Culture target for your Domain Size, you have to start invading places or spending Culture on diplomatic actions to make that Culture building useful again. Whereas a Courthouse can just be told to make Piety (at 83% efficiency compared to the Oracle variant of the Law building) without committing you to a war or fiddling with your foreign policy.

[Username17]

Administration being a thing that manages Manpower is certainly a thing that could happen. Manpower accumulates and if you don't spend it, it can turn into banditry. So having a large admin domain allows you to have uncommitted manpower without turning into a civil war. This in turn allows you to conduct other projects like building dams and shit.

Alternately, you could build up forts and keep rolling over your manpower into military units so your free manpower is never large enough to get ideas. That would be the typical AD&D savage village - with 40% or more of the population under arms.

I could see that naturally leading to the players having much smaller and more elite armies than the lizardfolk and hobgoblin forces of nearby domains. Which is what I think most players want.

-Username17

[Username17]

I have thoughts about scaling costs.

So the equipment for a Bullywug Slinger costs 20 gp and the equipment for an Elvish Pegasus Rider costs twelve thousand gp. We don't for a moment expect that a Pegasus Rider is actually six hundred times better than a Bullywug Slinger, so we must imagine that it is acceptable and even desirable for players to decide at some point that spending gp to preserve mp is a good deal. Just for starters, Bullywug villages don't usually even have six hundred manpower to draft.

And we can see that emerging from agricultural incomes. A farm hex at Development 0 has a GDP of 20,000 gp per month. And at Development 6, that's 50,000 per month. The amount people need to eat doesn't change, so the amount that can go back to rents is higher at higher development levels. Essentially, agricultural regions can and should have progressive taxation. Our base 20,000 gp monthly product for a base but full hex is sending 2000 gp per month to the government without whipping any slaves. And the 50,000 gp per month level 6 development hex could be kicking back up to 23,000 gp per month with the farmers living in the same barely acceptable levels of poverty. Presumably they'd want a significant share of the wealth to stay with them, but you're still looking at profits, which can be much more freely taxed than peoples' seed corn.

Development Level	GDP	Normal Tac Income
0	20,000	2,000
1	25,000	3,000
2	30,000	4,000
3	35,000	5,500
4	40,000	7,000
5	45,000	9,000
6	50,000	11,000
7	55,000	13,500
8	60,000	16,000
9	65,000	18,500
10	70,000	21,000

For players who've done some 4Xing in the past, it's clear that getting your hands on some decent farmland and reinvesting in it could rapidly get you to the point where arming Pegasus Riders is a thing that makes sense. And of course, it's not actually unreasonable for development levels to hit 10. Our high yield historical Japanese rice lands had a functional development level of twenty, and modern corn fields have a functional development level of sixty four.

But of course, that still pales before the gold fountain that cities represent. Your economic level affects gold per person, and a decent sized city could have a hundred thousand people in it. A city like Menzoberranzan (population 60,000, high development) is probably worth around 210,000 gp a month to whoever runs the place. Granted there are significant expenses and shit, but there's also no fucking way you'd bother drafting any of the manpower into military cohorts without at least outfitting them with some frickin Elvish Mail.

Meanwhile, the basic Fort in the SBG is 70,000 gp, there's also a much beefier Redoubt at 600,000 gp which is probably a couple of levels higher. These prices seem pretty reasonable.

-Username17

[Username17]

So one thing I noticed was that developing individual hexes ended up having people shipped to crowd into the dense farmland and I found myself asking what the cost to ship all 50-100 households in every Goblin village you conquer to be next to the mill and that's dumb. So instead, Agricultural Improvement can affect 24 hex regions just like fortification does. That way farmlands can develop in parallel rather than having everyone crowd to capacity next to the irrigation canals while the entire rest of the kingdom is empty wasteland.

Anyway, ballpark fort level costs are doable.

Level	GP Cost	Manpower
1	70,000	100
2	200,000	200
3	500,000	500
4	1,000,000	1,000
5	2,000,000	2,000
6	3,000,000	3,000
7	5,000,000	5,000
8	7,500,000	7,500
9	10,000,000	10,000
10	15,000,000	15,000

The idea with manpower requirements is it's the manpower required to build it in a year. You can do less Manpower and take longer to build it, or more Manpower to speed up the process.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

It would make sense (in a number of ways) for the Fort to use up manpower just by existing, even once it's built. For one thing, I assume that forts are also how you get province defense, since you're not counting out province defense chits for individual hexes?

[Dean]

While it's too early to worry about images I'll note that in my own Domain Game work there was no area I received more demand for example pictures and explanations than in forts and fortifications. That makes sense when you think about it given that players can shrug off "Agriculture 3" as representing "Mills, Bakeries, or other efficiency increasing technology" but they genuinely might need to care about individual 5ft square measurements in their Fortification when combat time comes. The granularity is just much higher for player bases. So players were much more demanding about having example Forts/Castles/Palaces of each rank both in description and images when possible. So that's something to be aware of. That specifically the Forts and Fortifications part of the rules will have to be an exception to handwaving the levels to nonspecific improvements. Without a description and, ideally, image representing a fort of each fortification level the players will just pick whichever ones have those because those are the only ones they can make guaranteed plans around.

[Username17]

The pre-fab fortresses in the Stronghold Builder's Guide came in at 70k, 375k, 600k, and two weird magic forts at 2.6 and 2.8 million. Roughly speaking that seems like one example at level 1, two examples at level 3,and two examples at level 6. The first three I'm actually pretty OK with, and the magic forts seemed pretty underwhelming in terms of creativity and function.

Anyway, the "Cheap Keep" from the SBG is a decent enough template. You have stone walls, basic living quarters, room for about 10 guards and some staff. While architectural differences will surely exist between a Dwarvish border fort and a Drow wizard's tower, I think the capabilities are going to be pretty similar. 70k gets you a pretty "no frills" fort and while it might be round or square or have a moat or not, the functionality isn't going to be much different.

I do think that you're going to end up fighting in level 1 forts fairly often, because those are things that Troglodyte villages and Ogre bandits and shit could potentially make. So there's a good argument for doing up a couple different versions - including the all important dungeon version where it's all on one floor because it opens into a cave and you can't go in the back way without a Thoqua to tunnel through solid rock for you.

One thing I do think the SBG was right about was that higher tier forts are going to need magical defenses. A level 4 Fort can't just be fourteen times the size of a level 1 fort with 140 guards instead of 10. It needs teleportation interdiction and defenses against invisible intruders and shit. But of course, such things also can get way more out-there. By level 5, your fort might literally be hovering above the ground or some shit. Some of the options can and should be pretty weird. But even the "standard" level 4 castle is going to have a set of magical defenses because it's a fantasy world and you wouldn't invest a million gp into a fort if the whole thing could be brought low by a scry and die attack.

-Username17

[Username17]

Imagine for the moment that the base cost of developing an agricultural region is the same as the base cost of making a fort of the same level. Because that's easy.

A 24 hex agricultural region could have up to 24,000 farms or an equivalent amount of manors/plantations. Let's look at the amount of time it would take to "pay off" based solely on basic tax income:

Level	GP Cost	Monthly Income	Pays Off In...
1	70,000	24000	3 months
2	200,000	24000	9 months
3	500,000	36000	14 months
4	1,000,000	36000	28 months
5	2,000,000	48000	42 months
6	3,000,000	48000	63 months
7	5,000,000	60000	84 months
8	7,500,000	60000	125 months
9	10,000,000	60000	167 months
10	15,000,000	15,000	250 months

That seems like a pretty reasonable progression. Players obviously won't have full regions to start off with, but the first couple of levels of agricultural development will pay off quickly enough that people will do it. The later stages require players to have relevant abilities before the investments are remotely worth doing, which seems fine. It explains why full agricultural development hasn't already been done when the PCs take over.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

You should probably default to taking over a territory via military resets the development to 1 - farmers flee, they take things and opposing armies scuttle their defenses - or reduces it.

Having a way to take a territory without causing regression (cultural victory) could be valuable.

[Username17]

Urban economy improvements are a bit more complicated. Like, we can look at maximum agricultural capacity and see that the players are going to hit reasonable rate of return limits even when they are full - and also too acknowledge that the actual borderlands the PCs claim are going to be at like 10% capacity or less when the campaign starts. The numbers look like they work out OK.

But Urban Population is functionally uncapped. Menzoberranzan has sixty thousand people in it. Waterdeep has one hundred and thirty thousand people in it. Teotihuacan was larger than either almost exactly one hex in physical land area. The normal urban population cap is going to be like 200,000 people per hex, so even stupidly titanic planar metropolises like the City of Brass or Finality are going to fit into a single region (although only barely - the 4 million inhabitants of the City of Brass take up 20 hexes with the city itself).

The point of course is that economic investment into Menzoberranzan (12,000 households) and Waterdeep (26,000 households) is going to hit a different payoff point. But oughly speaking, I think that economic development having a payoff of 1 gp per household seems pretty reasonable.

-Username17

[Username17]

Level	GP Cost	Manpower	Base Tax
0	0	0	2
1	70,000	100	3
2	200,000	200	4
3	500,000	500	5.5
4	1,000,000	1,000	7
5	2,000,000	2,000	9
6	3,000,000	3,000	11
7	5,000,000	5,000	13.5
8	7,500,000	7,500	16
9	10,000,000	10,000	18.5
10	15,000,000	15,000	21

That's base Tax is Koku per farm for agriculture and gold per month per household for urban population. For ease of use the karmic income from temples and culture income for social buildings as well. Karma costs can be simply adjusted to gold equivalents and so can culture effects.

I don't like that some of the aggregates are somewhat unwieldy because the base portions are weird numbers. It's not a good thing that you might end up with an urban population of 23167 households paying an average of 13.5 gp per month into state coffers. Maybe I should fiddle the numbers a bit so that the numbers being multiplied are a little easier? With calculators and computers and shit, I'm not sure it matters.

-Username17

[Username17]

Things are done when there's nothing left to take away. I think farms don't have to be localized to individual hexes for the most part. That is, you can simply have 'Rural Population' and 'Urban Population,' with GDP, population limits, and tax receipts based on the assumption on single household farms for all the unassigned Rural Population.

The maximum Rural Population of a Domain can be based on the hexes and their terrains, but you don't have to keep track of where exactly your Hobbits are farming. Thus, the Polity description of the Bullywugs can be that the Rural Population cap for the Domain is 200 households higher per Wetlands hex but you don't get to count non-Wetlands hexes at all unless you have another Polity that can do so.

-Username17

[Dean]

I like that idea. It also performs the narrative function of directing players and GM's to think about what stories one might tell in the outlands of the Banemires and then the stories one might tell in the Walled City of Bane and how those might connect.

[Orion]

I like it. The biggest pitfall I can see is that by collecting lots of polities people might end up "double-counting" some bonuses. Like, if rural goblins got extra population in hills, while rural dwarves generate valuable beer on hills, then if farms go on hexes, you have to divide up your hills between dwarves and goblins. If each polity just checks how many hills are in your domain, you can double-exploit them.

[Shatner]

The double-counting issue is a good one to preempt. As the others have said, I quite like that abstraction of looking at the hexes in aggregate rather than tracking things individually. So what if you had to apportion the hexes based on the polities present.

For example, if there are 8 hill hexes and you have both dwarves and goblins then you have to say that 3 are being given over to the dwarves and 5 are being given over to the goblins but you don't care enough to specify which are which.

Ditto for if you have 20 swamp hexes and both Bullywugs and Lizardmen in your domain: you can move your 20 swamps between the Bullywug column or the Lizardmen column as you like. And if there's no mechanical difference then you don't even bother tracking it beyond the fact that you have swamp-adapted polities present and they're working those swamp hexes.

Hmm. You could even make this apportioning system an element of the larger harmony/order/administrative rule of your domain. Like, your stretch of barely-settled wilderness can have two polities (say, human farmers and orcish hunter-gatherers) without incident. But if you try to get dwarves in there to mine the hills then you'll go over your administrative soft cap and problems will start coming up even though the hills are getting you little-to-nothing worked by the humans and orcs. But once you raise your administrative infrastructure, you can support a more diverse realm and thus maximize hex yields.

From a micro standpoint, sure, your frontier town has a dwarven blacksmith and an elven fletcher and shit. But until your admin improves, you have only token populations of those polities, with the rest of your realm being humans and orcs.

Then it's even possible to simulate conquering a fractious realm. The racial enmity between dwarves and giants means that having both of those present makes them count as 3 polities instead of 2 in terms of overhead. So the moment halflings move in to farm your plains, you count as having 4 polities and things get tense. Or until the PCs undertake a diplomatic mission/quest/action/what-have-you your orcs are feuding along tribal lines and count as 3 polities instead of 1.

[Username17]

I like it. The biggest pitfall I can see is that by collecting lots of polities people might end up "double-counting" some bonuses. Like, if rural goblins got extra population in hills, while rural dwarves generate valuable beer on hills, then if farms go on hexes, you have to divide up your hills between dwarves and goblins. If each polity just checks how many hills are in your domain, you can double-exploit them.

That's... a really good point.

I think the way to do it then is to have each Polity have a list of Hex preferences, and you get to treat all the hexes as whatever your best Polity treats them as.

So Grasslands are S-Rank for Halflings (1000 Rural Households), C-Rank for Elves (200 Rural Households), and Wasteland for Bullywugs (5 Rural Households). If you have 5 Grassland hexes, that's 5000 Rural Households to your cap if you have Halflings whether or not you also have Elves or Bullywugs. And it's 1000 Rural Households if you have Elves and no Halflings, whether or not you also have Bullywugs.

This also allows the existence of polities whose only purpose is to add buildings or military units by having polities who have no terrain that they treat as better than wasteland. If like Needlefolk or Yakfolk or something just have a line of Ws, their addition won't change your terrain affinities or your rural population cap. But having those polities would provide whatever build options they unlocked.

-Username17

[Emerald]

I like it. The biggest pitfall I can see is that by collecting lots of polities people might end up "double-counting" some bonuses. Like, if rural goblins got extra population in hills, while rural dwarves generate valuable beer on hills, then if farms go on hexes, you have to divide up your hills between dwarves and goblins. If each polity just checks how many hills are in your domain, you can double-exploit them.

I think the way to do it then is to have each Polity have a list of Hex preferences, and you get to treat all the hexes as whatever your best Polity treats them as.

Is it necessarily a bad thing to let things stack (at least to a limited extent), given that to be in that position in the first place you have to do a bunch of adventuring and once you're in that position that gives you more dials in the upkeep minigame?

To use Orion's example, hill goblins give you more population and hill dwarves give you more whatever-resource-is-fluffed-as-beer and that's cool, but in order to stack those benefits you have to go to a goblin polity and a dwarf polity and convince them to cohabitate or at least put up with being right next to each other, when dwarves and goblins traditionally hate each others' guts. If the party can gain the trust of both polities, drag both sides to a negotiating table, resolve any issues they have (more plot hooks!), and have everyone come to a reasonable consensus on things, then "...and now your farmlands have dwarves and goblins working together in harmony and give you XYZ mechanical perks" is a nice, concrete, ongoing reward for that effort, more so than just "The dwarven chieftain gives you a fancy axe in thanks and you never think about his clan again."

Even in situations where two polities might not hate each other to that extent (humans and halflings, orcs and goblins, whatever), they're still different polities with different wants and needs. Maybe the wood elves and forest gnomes are totally chill about sharing a forest, but they're stuck splitting the power of one mystical glade between them due to the presence of a black dragon corrupting the other one, and you can't get both gnomish dire badger cavalry and elven eagle rider skirmishers out of the same forest until you take care of the dragon problem for them.

And then once you've dealt with various issues and integrated the polities, that gives you more flavor options for events down the road. You'd mentioned potentially having an excess of an unused military resource going rogue and turning to brigandry and screwing with other resources; in the above scenarios, maybe that takes the form of goblin recruits starting fights with dwarf recruits and thereby reducing morale/stability/etc. in some hill hexes, or an excess of dire badgers overeating their food sources and thereby reducing food output in some forest hexes.

Stacking things likely wouldn't be a huge issue in this case, because to stack things to an excessive degree you first have to establish multiple sets of nearby polities with synergistic benefits and then the party would have to go around completing all of the different adventures for all of the polities they want to stack. And of course the default case is "Stacking isn't a problem because there are no goblins near hill dwarf territory" and you can set up whatever random generation rules you want to use to avoid those cases to leave that scenario as something the DM has to deliberately opt to include.

[Username17]

Is it necessarily a bad thing to let things stack (at least to a limited extent), given that to be in that position in the first place you have to do a bunch of adventuring and once you're in that position that gives you more dials in the upkeep minigame?

Some things can stack, terrain affiliations can't stack.

Consider the Gold Dwarves and the Mountain Dwarves. Or the Gray Elves and the Wood Elves. It's entirely possible that you might end up with a lot of expansion Polities that were minor variations on basic Polities. So like, the Gold Dwarves are different from the regular Dwarves only in that you can unlock some Mind Hunter troops instead of unlocking Stone Giants. They are almost exactly the same, but for Forgotten Realms flavor reasons you can get Gold Dwarves.

But both the Dwarves and the Gold Dwarves have a bonus Rural Population cap in Mountain hexes. If that stacked, your Rural population cap would be able to get to truly stupid levels just by collecting various colors of Dwarves. That would be dumb.

If instead the different flavors of Dwarves all have a Mountain Affinity rank and you use the best one, then there's no problem. If you collect a bunch of different flavors of Dwarf into a Dwarf metropolis you just have access to different flavors of elite troops. It's fine.

And the same goes with Moon Elves and Wood Elves and Gray Elves and shit when it comes to Woodlands hexes. If all the Elves have Forests at C, then you have a decent Rural Population limit if you own a bunch of forest hexes - whether you have one flavor of Elf or 8. But if the increased cap was expressed as a numeric bonus, having eight different flavors of Elf would let you have more farmers in the woods than there are acres for them to farm.

-Username17

[Shatner]

With that being the case, having more polities is obviously better. Each new polity does one or more of the following: nothing, give you better hex yields, give you more troop recruitment options.

And that means that the optimal state for any domain is to have any and all polities present, period, regardless of whether it's a sprawling magi-tech megalopolis in the middle of a demiplane or a pastoral duchy full of rolling hills and humble farmers.

So... is there some opportunity cost to attracting new polities? Is there anything that needs to be done to make your domain be able to accommodate your 1st wave of new demihuman settlers? How about your 2nd? Your 10th?

When your Minister of Culture goes out and bards it up in the surrounding kingdoms and attracts a bunch of hopeful new immigrants, that should be seen as a success. But right now, unless those immigrants are Snow Goblins or Thri-Keen, you don't give a shit. You've already got your earth types so Minister Ash Ketchum needs to stop bringing you more dwarves and geodudes.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

But right now, unless those immigrants are Snow Goblins or Thri-Keen, you don't give a shit. You've already got your earth types so Minister Ash Ketchum needs to stop bringing you more dwarves and geodudes.

Kirk, please. I've already been tantalizingly eyeing this thread wondering how to apply it to large-scale Pokemon habitations...

[Grek]

So... is there some opportunity cost to attracting new polities? Is there anything that needs to be done to make your domain be able to accommodate your 1st wave of new demihuman settlers? How about your 2nd? Your 10th?

My understating of the situation is that, by default, you only get immigration from domains that you share borders with. If you want to attract immigrants from anywhere else, that is an action that one of your Council members takes instead of whatever else they could have spent their Domain turn doing.

[Username17]

The intention would be that integrating a Polity would have a social cost, which in many ways means that you're effectively 'buying' the extra Polities as equipment with the 'income' you make from libraries and theaters.

But also too that you aren't normally going to the store and selecting Polities, you're getting them to move to your domain or get conquered by your domain through in-game events.

This also means that early in conquest when you don't have culture to spend to integrate peoples, you may conquer a region with Hobgoblins and then just leave them as a separate region.

So let's consider an area of forests and mountains. There are some Dwarves and Elves. The Dwarves are C in he Mountains, the Elves are C in the Forest, with both being E in he other. You start out without enough Culture to integrate them, so you have two small regions in your domain - one for Dwarves (that has a Rural population cap of 200 households per Mountain and 50 households and one for Elves. When you get enough Culture to buy them into integration you have a single region.

The main benefit of regional integration is that you only need a single Castle, Rural Development, Urban Development, and Temple holding to level up your military, food, gold, and Karma income from all that population. But the fact that combining the Elves and Dwarves lets the C-Rank Dwarves 'see' all the Mountains and the C-Rank Elves 'see' all the Forests and also lets you be C-rank for both Forests and Mountains at the same time, allowing you to count 200 households to Rural population cap for any Forest/Mountain hexes. So your total Rural Population cap would go up by 150 households for every relevant hex.

-Username17

[Username17]

Temples. Since Karma buys stuff that isn't on the list of things you can buy with Koku or Gold, there is no necessity for it to be on the same scale. I think it's helpful for it to be on the same scale, because it means that you can do rough comparisons easily and it makes 'sacrifices' to get Karma during festivals be something that is a lot easier on the math brain. While the list of available goods are different, to a first approximation 1 gold piece = 1 Koku per month = 1 Karma.

The production of a Temple holding can be based on the total population of Urban and Rural, and the base Karma income can be the same as if the relevant population were that combined amount as the Koku or Gold income of a similarly leveled holdings for just the Rural and Urban population respectively. But, Temples only produce Karma on festivals, which means that they generate income one month in three.

What this means is that if your Urban and Rural population are equal, then the Temple is your third most productive income building. And if either your Rural or Urban population are more than double the other, the Temple is your second most productive building.

-Username17

[Dean]

I would allow the possibility that someone would want their karma at a continuously pooling rate for games that have less of a sense of the particulars of time. I think a lot of games still have the 2nd edition vibe where it's been "a month or so" since your last adventure and making a simple math conversion for accumulating karma every month rather than the more detailed, though likely more fun, approach of having particular festivals would probably make the rules more widely useable.

Also the 1 Karma to 1 Gold is a good idea at base. The only reason to do otherwise would be if the minimum possible karma investment would be quite large. If Pegasus Riders are the cheapest troops you can get with Karma and 1 Pegasus Rider costs 1000 Karma then it is arguable that you might change your math so that 1 Karma buys 1 Pegasus Rider and you just accumulate Karma 1/1000th as quickly.

[Username17]

You'd definitely want cheap troops you can buy with karma. The standard D&D humanoid encounters implied that villages also had small amounts of monsters in them. Dwarves had cave bears and wolves just chilling, Gnolls got them some Hyaenodons and Trolls. Derro have small numbers of Gargoyles and Lamias. Grimlocks have Medusas.

This sort of "and a few monsters for variety" thing can happen completely organically by giving polities some monsters they can buy with Karma. This can include stuff like skeleton warriors and dretch demons. This can and should feed back around into the encounters for the basic adventuring stuff. A lot of the Karmic troops won't surrender, so your typical adventure can involve attacking the shrine of the Orcish village and fighting a mixed group of Orcish Warriors, Undead, Giant Pigs, Ogres and Demons. When you're one there will still be a village with Orcs in it, and you can either pry the rubies out of the snake altar and ride off or conquer the place and have 50-100 households join your Domain.

This creates the kind of mixed groups of adversaries we actually want, as well as making it such that we aren't remotely expected to go through the Kobold hatcheries slaying baby Kobolds and smashing their eggs.

Anyway...

I would allow the possibility that someone would want their karma at a continuously pooling rate for games that have less of a sense of the particulars of time. I think a lot of games still have the 2nd edition vibe where it's been "a month or so" since your last adventure and making a simple math conversion for accumulating karma every month rather than the more detailed, though likely more fun, approach of having particular festivals would probably make the rules more widely useable.

I get what you're saying. It is substantially easier in a lot of ways if you aren't require to track the seasons and each adventure can happen nebulously one month or so after the last one without ever explicitly having to remember how many you've done. This is true. And it's especially true for ad hoc games or games where you alternate with a different campaign or with boardgame night or take weeks off because of school holidays or whatever.

However, I think that having seasons and festivals is valuable. Also, if Temples give payouts based on the combined Rural and Urban population, then either they are just better than Agricultural development, or their payout is reduced in some way. If it's reduced in payout per turn, then you have to have multiple income numbers on the chart. But if it provides the same payout but doesn't give it every turn, then it's still not "the best" but you don't need the income numbers to be different. Which is why I favor that.

Also it means that getting your Karma can be a festival action and you can do mighty rituals of vast power to get more of it - which is a good thing for heroes to try to stop. Again that creates an organic standard D&D adventure. The Lich King really is going to do a mighty ritual of vast power and summon a bunch of demons on Midwinter's Night. Because that's just how Karma accumulation and spending works.

-Username17