Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

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Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

Post by Username17 »

3e Domain Rules
ACKS Inspired

ACKS is a really interesting and innovative system. It's also full of deliberate retro-stupid to appeal to the neckbeardiest elements of the OSR movement. So there's race/class and class/building determinism that serves no purpose other than to give stiffies to people who used to play BECMI D&D. That makes it not readily usable by people who want to play something that isn't a retro-clone of ideas that were obviously bad when they were first put on paper in the Carter administration. So moving forward, to make these things usable for modern games, it's going to need some ground-up redesigns in addition to some simple porting.

Hexes

In ACKS, a hex is defined by it's height rather than by its diameter or side. That is the shortest distance from one point on a side to a point on the most distant side, and not really a number that is immediately obvious. You'd think that you'd define it by the distance across one of the sides or the distance from corner to corner. But it doesn't. And you get this information by looking at the area the book claims that hexes have and then attempting to reverse engineer the math.

Image
ACKS defines a 6 mile hex as a hex whose “a” is 6 miles, which wouldn't be your first or second guess.

But you know what? That's fine. We can keep those definitions, we just have to tell people what they are rather than ask players to remember how to divide by the square root of three to go from diameter to height of a regular hexagon. It's a reasonable enough hex size – it takes two hours to cross on foot and there are an average of 32 of them in an English County (note that the average county is therefore Dorset). It makes a hex large enough that cities are features in hexes rather than filling hexes. In our average county of Dorset, the smallest district by land area is Weymouth and Portland, and that's half a hex. On the flip side, what we think of as cities today actually do extend to fill hexes and multiple hexes. Prague's urban area is exactly 6 hexes today, but Old Prague (that is to say: Prague 1, or the “Old Town”) is only 2.1 square miles and thus about an eighth of a hex. Buildings and strongholds are so tiny on that scale as to be negligible. The largest castle in the world is actually in Prague, and it's just 2.7% of a square mile, making it about 8 percent of 1 percent of a hex.

What this means from a playability standpoint is that a single hex can have a major and a minor terrain, and it can have as many “features” as you want. Features can be things like resources, lairs, temples, forts, ports, rivers, and mysterious obelisks. The maximum size of a domain in ACKS is 16 hexes, which is straight bullshit because that forbids you from actually owning a county larger than Greater Manchester. Seriously, that's half of our previously announced average County of Dorset. The largest English County is North Yorkshire at 104 hexes, and the Île-de-France is 145 hexes (French administrative districts are larger than English Counties because there are only 27 of them). That's a large enough number that there's obviously no point in worrying about a maximum domain size at all. Conquering over 60 hexes and putting your flag on them would be a pretty epic campaign, but that still makes you Northumberland rather than, say, Italy.

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As for population maximums, a 32 square mile area with the population density of Manilla would have over three and a half million people in it. Really, there isn't much reason to worry about hex population maximums at all. Remember, this is a D&D world, where a hex might contain twenty floors of underdark and a cloud island. The population density of Manilla wouldn't have to be a ceiling for D&D land, even though global populations are lower than ours. However many people you have, you can put them in however many hexes you have. Only the largest of D&D cities will meaningfully fill hexes. Menzoberranzan's footprint is less than a tenth of a hex and it's located in the underdark and covers literally zero percent of the surface.

Now in ACKS, you generate an income level per family for the domain when it is secured by rolling dice. Then you're supposed to magical teaparty the reason why your domain is wealthy or poor. Needless to say, that's deeply unsatisfying and pointlessly retro. In the long run, it would actually be worth it to secure a domain, then ditch it to build next door if you got a poor roll. Obviously characters who have scouted areas and made appropriate knowledge rolls should be able to know how much wealth they are likely to be able to take in from an area before they build their fortress and call it home. A Druid should not be surprised at the fertility or lack thereof of the soil. Now having hexes produce things that in any way “make sense” is something that's necessarily going to be more complicated than “roll a die, lol,” but the gains in verisimilitude and player interactivity could be well worth it. As such, hexes now have Fertility that determines how much food they can make, Resources that determine how much wealth they can make from mining/logging/whatever, and Development that determines how much wealth the urban population makes. This being medieval inspired stuff, food is fungible as wealth but not storable (go go turnip economy!) while production is not backwards fungible into food unless you have a trading partner with a food surplus.

Fertility, Resources, and Development levels have caps on how many people can profitably work them. It's pre-industrial, so things are Malthusian. This also encourages you to conquer more hexes and put farmers and miners there – because there are absolute caps on what you can get. Farmers and Workers beyond the hex's Fertility and Resource caps get shunted into Urban Population. Urban Population beyond the hex's development level live in shanties and produce no wealth but still eat food. All they are good for is being drafted as soldiers.

And finally, we have to do something about ACKS' definition of civilization ratings. ACKS wants domains to count as “Civilized” if they are within 50 miles of a city or large town, and “Borderlands” if it is within 25 miles of a “Civilized” area. But that's hugely problematic for a bunch of reasons. First of all, people playing the development game are going to be creating and building cities. Secondly, those numbers don't actually work out into hexes properly. Thirdly, since any Domain big enough to wipe your ass with is going to be several hexes, it doesn't make much sense to consider “borderlands” on a Domain basis rather than a Hex basis. And finally and most importantly, it's fucking terrible if large fantasy cities can't be meaningfully adjacent to wilderness areas. Bladereach is next to the Banemires, Mirkwood has a Wood Elf city in it, and so on.

So the new definition is that hexes are Wilderness if they haven't been secured. Any secured hex adjacent to a Wilderness hex or adjacent to a hex that is adjacent to a Wilderness hex is Borderlands. To be a Civilized hex, a hex needs to be secured, have no unsecured hexes within two hexes of it, and have a civil administration.

Holdings

ACKS gives a short but minimally acceptable list of building types. Then it falls short of being minimally acceptable by predefining what kind of building you get to build and where you get to build it based on your race and class. And that's dumb. Obviously we need to go a little bit farther into the Crusader Kings direction and let people build different kinds of holdings in hexes in their domain. And the rules of what kinds of holdings can be built in what kinds of hexes need to be seriously relaxed. It's just weird if a bandit hideout can't be put in a wilderness area. I mean, Robin Hood needs to be able to put his Forest Hideout in Sherwood Forest, fully 2 hexes away from Nottingham and do his banditry on the roads between Nottingham and Derby and Leicester. And he needs to be able to do this without being an Elf.

Here is actually where we bust out the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook. Yes, really. The room bonuses are acceptable and the costs are actually pretty much in line with 3e D&D economics. What has to go of course is the wealth by level assumptions of 3e D&D. D&D 3e does not give you enough gold pieces to meaningfully own land. Which is something you have to address if you're going to have a domain management minigame at all. We solve this issue by instituting the 8 item limit and the wish economy – you get a tremendous amount of gold relative to early level bullshit once you start collecting taxes every year, but you also rapidly fill up your magic item slots with things you can buy on the market for gold and investing your large amounts of gold income back into land and followers is useful in a way that buying backup swords simply isn't.

Now the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook gives you a shit tonne of options to play Dungeon Keeper or (ironically) Stronghold with, and we all acknowledge that it probably isn't going to matter where you place wooden and iron doors or how many arrow slits you have. What to do there is to simply put in requirements that holdings of a certain level have “structural” elements with a certain total cost. If you want to blow all your budget on having an iron tower full of high quality locks, you can do that. If you want to blow all your money on having a big courtyard and high walls, you can do that. Because you need to be evaluated at 60,000 gp for a level 1 holding, 150,000 gp for a level 2 holding, 250,000 gp for a level 3 holding, 500,000 gp for a level 4 holding, and 1,000,000 gp for a level 5 holding. You can build them out of wood or stone or ice, and have barbicans or arrow slits or whatever because it's the value that makes it count as the next level of holding or not. If you want to treat the forts as mansions as black boxes you can, and if you want to bust out the graph paper you can do that instead.

ACKS has nine types of holding (more if you count the fact that an Elf Nightblade's Hideout functions differently from an Assassin's Hideout). That's too many for a system where you don't get to choose what you build, and too few for one where you do. So what's going to happen instead is that you get to pick a holding type: Military, Commercial, Magical, Covert, Cultural, or Administrative.
Holding TypeSample Holding NamesBonuses
MilitaryGarrison
Stronghold
Castle
Increase Morale
Increase Military Recruitment
CommercialOffice
Warehouse
Port
Increase Income
Increase Development
MagicalSanctum
Necropolis
Laboratory
Special Monster Access
Bonus Ritual Magic & Research
Does Not Increase Immigration
CovertHideout
Vault
Observation Post
Choose One Bonus
Does Not Secure Area or Increase Immigration
Can Be Placed in Uncontrolled Hexes
CulturalTemple
Performance Hall
Academy
Increase Morale
Increase Income
AdministrativeCity Hall
Court House
River Dam
Increase Development
Civilize Area

Each domain has a capitol. This is a holding designated as the leader's primary holding. No holding in the domain can be built or upgraded to a level higher than the capitol. A hex gets a development bonus equal to the total level of all the holdings in it (the level of any Commercial or Administrative holdings are added twice). In addition, all holdings except Magical and Covert Holdings increase the hex's ideal population. Each year, if a hex has less people than its ideal population, it gets to roll for immigration.

Population and Growth

As mentioned earlier, the idea of population caps are completely out the window. ACKS puts a hard cap of 120 people per square mile outside cities, which appears to be taken from a piece of gibbering madness from 1993. Those numbers get passed around a certain kind of gaming circle, but they are retarded. The original author appears to take from the fact that there are vast areas of Scotland that no one farms or lives in, that the United Kingdom doesn't have soil rich enough for London to exist. For fuck's sake, Sumer managed to support over five hundred farmers per square mile of farmland (plus another nearly 800 non-farmers per square mile of farmland eating the food surplus). The limits on how many farmers you can have in a hex need to be based on how much arable land there is in the hex. A hex that was all fertile and flat could plausibly have over fifteen thousand farmers working in it, even if they weren't being goosed by magic (which obviously they could be). That's way more farmers than you're going to want, but it's not more farmers than you could realistically have.

Keeping track of farmers in terms of “families” rather than individuals is a good idea, and we're gonna keep doing it. It lets us avoid thorny questions of exact birth rates. However, we're going to want to give players a bit more input into the issue of population growth. ACKS lets you essentially “buy” people by spending gold on agricultural investment, but that doesn't make a lot of sense. Players should be able to get policy choices with real differences. The first one is Serfs versus Free Peasants. Serf families pay more food in taxes, because they are owned. If you have Free Peasants, you get an extra roll on the immigration chart as long as the province fertility cap is higher than the number of farming families that you have. Similarly for urban populations and worker populations. If you are under your Development cap for urban population, then you get to roll on the immigration chart if you have desirable policies. If you are under your resource cap in workers and you have desirable policies, then you get to roll on the immigration chart for that too. So if there are all forms of work available, you could roll on the immigration chart three times.

But then there's the growth itself. ACKS has population growth as a percentage of current population drop as populations rise. That's weird and not really how things work. Instead, endogenous growth will just be a fixed percentage (1% plus modifiers), which means that it will be quite trivial when populations are small. Thus, newly claimed wilderness relies on rolls on the immigration table or the capture of slaves (or other more MTP sources of new people) to drive population increases.

Next is the races of hexes. In ACKS, a hex is either an Elf Hex or a Dwarf Hex because OD&D neck beards. D&D these days is a lot more multi-racial and multi-cultural. For this purpose a race will be “significantly present” in a hex. Every populated hex has at least one race with a significant presence, and as minorities come in through immigration, there can be more races tagged. So you can have Orc and Lizardfolk populations living in your originally Dwarven Fortress region.

Garrisons and Upkeep

ACKS gives a garrison cost per family as a linear value. Garrisons should be a requisite number of soldiers (or soldier equivalents) doing patrols. The number is a minimum for the hex and its civilization level plus 1%, 2%, or 5% of the population (for Civilized, Borderland, and Wilderness hexes respectively). If you don't have enough soldiers in the Garrison, the province isn't secured. And yes, this means that the amount of soldiers needed to secure a hex in the first place is higher than the amount needed to hold it right afterward.

Upkeep can stop being based on fractional percentages and instead be flat values for the level of a holding. Because holdings have standardized costs and you can just work out the amounts without having to have the players deal with dividing by three digit numbers. The stronghold resource cost percentages from SBG can likewise go fuck themselves because resources and farmlands and urban development have actual minigames attached.
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Post by Orca »

6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.

Anyway, I'll be interested to see how this works.
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Post by Orion »

Is this a continuation of an ACKS thread elsewhere?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Orca wrote:6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.
20 miles makes a lot of sense, because that's about the diameter of control of a fortress (historically speaking). In this setup such a fortress would exert control over the hex it's in and the surrounding ring of six, which also works.

Definitely excited to see where this is going.
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

"6 Mile Hexes" is actually three different pieces of retro stupid, and I only see a defense for one of them.

The scale can be preserved by using "10 Kilometer Squares" instead. And while that gives you slightly more irregularity of calculating straight line distances via counting (instead of measuring like a sane person) it lets you use regular office supply store graph paper and free drawing apps instead of having to go to yee olde wargaming shoppe and use dedicated mapping software. More importantly for a realm management minigame, it lets you use a spreadsheet as your map and send draft mockups by plaintext.

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I could put alphanumeric codes in each of these and wow, a map.  
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

There are totally free hex-mapping tools, some of them are even in-browser.
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Post by OgreBattle »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Orca wrote:6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.
20 miles makes a lot of sense, because that's about the diameter of control of a fortress (historically speaking). In this setup such a fortress would exert control over the hex it's in and the surrounding ring of six, which also works.
Where can I find out more about that?
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

I think I read it in an Osprey book (European Medieval Tactics), but the short version was that a group of knights could ride out of a castle, travel up to 10 miles, kick some ass, and still expect to get back inside the castle before nightfall and so be secure from reprisal. That assumes acceptable but not ideal terrain, so the control range would be longer along roads and shorter across swamp or other treacherous ground, but a 20 mile diameter was a standard assumption if terrain details were unknown.

D&D fucks with those assumptions, what with flying mounts and castle-obviating magics, but a lot of that will come down to details of the specific setting.

edit: diameter
Last edited by angelfromanotherpin on Sun Mar 15, 2015 6:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by Maxus »

OgreBattle wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Orca wrote:6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.
20 miles makes a lot of sense, because that's about the diameter of control of a fortress (historically speaking). In this setup such a fortress would exert control over the hex it's in and the surrounding ring of six, which also works.
Where can I find out more about that?
Twenty miles sounds about as far as people could go in a day and still have time to do stuff once they got there.
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Post by Blicero »

Do you have a citation for the Sumer statistics?
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

angelfromanotherpin wrote:There are totally free hex-mapping tools, some of them are even in-browser.
Please point me at the ones you would recommend for this sort of realm management game.
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Post by Chamomile »

Josh_Kablack wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:There are totally free hex-mapping tools, some of them are even in-browser.
Please point me at the ones you would recommend for this sort of realm management game.
I can't remember a damn thing about the free version of Hexographer because I've had the paid version for like five years. However so long as the free version has the ability to place hexes (surely it must) and draw lines (not so sure) that should provide you with basic functions.
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Post by angelfromanotherpin »

Yeah, I think free Hexographer was the one I wound up using. I can't check until I get home, though.
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Post by Grek »

Josh_Kablack wrote:

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I could put alphanumeric codes in each of these and wow, a map.  
No, you can't. Go ahead, try it. I'll wait.

You need something like

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+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
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for your plaintext square map to be writable. But you can do the same with hexes:

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 /FR\  /  \  /  \  /  \  /  \  /  \  /
 \DB/  \  /  \  /  \  /  \  /  \  /  \
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Except better because it ends up being more compact because you can fit 4 characters of information into each tile given the tile density.
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Post by Username17 »

Blicero wrote:Do you have a citation for the Sumer statistics?
Just wikipedia at the moment. It's sort of neither here nor there, because we're nominally talking about medieval stuff. And for medieval stuff, we get stats like this:
The village of Elton, Cambridgeshire is representative of a medieval open-field manor in England. The manor, whose Lord was an abbot from a nearby monastery, had 13 "hides" of arable land of six virgates each. The acreage of a hide and virgate varied, but at Elton a hide was 144 acres (58 ha). A virgate was 24 acres (10 ha). Thus, the total of arable land amounted to 1,872 acres (758 ha). The abbot's demesne land consisted of three hides plus 16 acres (6.5 ha) of meadow and 3 acres (1 ha) of pasture. The remainder of the land was cultivated by 113 tenants who lived in a village on the manor. Counting spouses, children, and other dependents, plus landless people the total population resident in the manor village was probably 500 to 600.
That works out to a population density of about 200 people per square mile, and that's for a manor that was a food exporter.

More generally, the medieval concept of the acre was that it was the land required to feed one person. A square mile has 640 acres on it, so the upper end of carrying capacity for fertile land for medieval people is over 500 per square mile (it's considerably less than 640 because there are houses and shit).

Of course, while one acre feeds one person, one person actually works more than one acre. Doing it with ox plows put about 1 farmer to 16 acres, and there are obviously ways to get that number up considerably. So while you might get 500 people to a square mile, only like 40 of them would be farmers. The rest would be like wainwrights and shit.

What that would work out to is that if you claimed the entire hex as agricultural land, you could employ 750 farming families. That would produce enough food to sustain an urban population of 9,000 with average fertility level and no magic, underdark, or special investment.

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Post by Grek »

So how would you represent Mirkwood in this system?

It starts out as the Woodland Realm a multi-hex forest full, with a single Underground Elf City somewhere in the middle hex and some mountain hexes off to one side. There's three multi-hex features in the Woodland Realm: a river that runs the length of the wood, a road that runs from the Forest Gate in one hex to the Underground Elf City in another, and a second road that goes straight through the forest and out the other side. Then an enemy faction curses all the hexes to be dark, creepy and full of giant spiders that eat people. Rather than fight off the spiders or flee, the elves retreat to their Underground Elf City and secure the Forest Gate Road, leaving the rest of the hex as howling wilderness full of giant man eating spiders. The forest gets renamed "Mirkwood" as a result.
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Post by momothefiddler »

Chamomile wrote:
Josh_Kablack wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:There are totally free hex-mapping tools, some of them are even in-browser.
Please point me at the ones you would recommend for this sort of realm management game.
I can't remember a damn thing about the free version of Hexographer because I've had the paid version for like five years. However so long as the free version has the ability to place hexes (surely it must) and draw lines (not so sure) that should provide you with basic functions.
I just recently started using the free version and it does have the ability to both place hexes and draw lines. IIRC the things it doesn't do are let you import your own tilesets and... uh... maybe something else I haven't encountered.
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Post by Username17 »

Grek wrote:So how would you represent Mirkwood in this system?

It starts out as the Woodland Realm a multi-hex forest full, with a single Underground Elf City somewhere in the middle hex and some mountain hexes off to one side. There's three multi-hex features in the Woodland Realm: a river that runs the length of the wood, a road that runs from the Forest Gate in one hex to the Underground Elf City in another, and a second road that goes straight through the forest and out the other side. Then an enemy faction curses all the hexes to be dark, creepy and full of giant spiders that eat people. Rather than fight off the spiders or flee, the elves retreat to their Underground Elf City and secure the Forest Gate Road, leaving the rest of the hex as howling wilderness full of giant man eating spiders. The forest gets renamed "Mirkwood" as a result.
Mirkwood is an example of losing control over an area. Mirkwood itself is 41 hexes across East to West, and the Elves had secured the whole thing. That meant it was all borderlands or civilized. But then Orc Raids and hostile magic increased the garrison requirements of the forest hexes beyond what the Elves could supply. That caused all the hexes except a few that they put concentrated forces into (basically just the road and the main city) to revert to wilderness. And even the main city is borderlands now rather than civilized because there is adjacent wilderness.

The big thing there is that the road itself needs to be a thing that lets you project force along it so that the Elvish garrisons can keep the hexes along the road from also reverting to wilderness.

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Post by codeGlaze »

OgreBattle wrote:
angelfromanotherpin wrote:
Orca wrote:6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.
20 miles makes a lot of sense, because that's about the diameter of control of a fortress (historically speaking). In this setup such a fortress would exert control over the hex it's in and the surrounding ring of six, which also works.
Where can I find out more about that?
Once again I need to point out how I love your insane curiosity and research when it comes to the conversations here.

I really hope you're putting together a grimoire or catalog of your notes. (On github? :o)
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Post by Dean »

I thought we all worked under the knowledge that D&D is closer to the Bronze Age than the actual Medieval era. Why wouldn't we use Bronze age estimates? For one thing they would be lower and that would be helpful because keeping the numbers as low as is feasibly possible fits better when slotted into a wargame about small unit scales. If your population is six figures you won't even mark down how many people the Manticore attack killed. It wouldn't even blip your radar nevermind get you to go there and kill them yourself like a good adventurer conquerer king.

I don't think we should ignore logic and reason to make numbers low but in a world of Wyverns and Manticores and Wights we'd have a lot of leeway to push numbers down to the kind that one motivated Fellowship could interact with meaningfully.
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Post by Chamomile »

A manticore might have a relatively small body count, but that doesn't mean its economic impact will be trivial.
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Re: Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

Post by tussock »

Bunch of good stuff. And hey, you're only getting started, so I'm sure you're going to make more of the new content more directly useful to adventure at some point, but a bunch of comments regardless.
FrankTrollman wrote:In ACKS, a hex is defined by it's height rather than by its diameter or side. That is the shortest distance from one point on a side to a point on the most distant side, and not really a number that is immediately obvious.
It's also the distance from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of any adjacent Hex, so you basically travel 6 miles between hexes (in the abstract) when travelling.

Hexes are for hex-crawls, you see.
It's a reasonable enough hex size – it takes two hours to cross on foot and there are an average of 32 of them in an English County
Counts and Countesses have vassals, and there's the church land, the monster preserves forests for hunting, bogs and wetlands not yet drained, places for the Wizards and their dungeons, etc.
Conquering over 60 hexes and putting your flag on them would be a pretty epic campaign, but that still makes you Northumberland rather than, say, Italy.
But the ACKS limit is 16 hexes per fortification (in a big splat, where it should be just spread anywhere you can get an army to). You then move onto your next castle and start another domain within your realm. Further domains are not run by the player though, your vassal runs it you and get 20% as a tax. p130.

The King of England thus has a limited number of loyal Dukes as henchmen (less Charismatic Kings struggle with numbers and need to give each loyal Duke more power), they each have their own Counts as vassals, and so on down to Barons and Knights, with each ruler having a small personal estate scattered around the place, and also collecting tax from their vassals, and paying tax to their liege (or the local city if without one).

Only ACKS is smaller scale, dark ages, so there's a King of Wessex, a King of Essex, and a King of Sussex, with London parked in the middle.

I think the main point is you might still care about 16 hexes, especially after handing off the rough ones to vassals, but 60 hexes or 600 is just accounting and you shouldn't be letting players spoil their own fun like that. Vassal domains only need to update if you play some time as the vassals.


@Population. Greyhawk is really low and full of monsters that you can kill and settle their lands, while the Realms is really high and full of Elminster and Khelban and they might give you quest or something to keep you out of the way but everything is already claimed by someone.

Low population and very sparse epic folk is a requirement for hexcrawling and establishing your own stuff, if players are to be proper protagonists. Or I guess you could settle the Isle of Dread or whatever.
Now in ACKS, you generate an income level per family for the domain when it is secured by rolling dice. Then you're supposed to magical teaparty the reason why your domain is wealthy or poor. Needless to say, that's deeply unsatisfying and pointlessly retro.
The point is you don't generate and carry around forever a bunch of numbers you're not using. It's more playable because you only generate detail that you're using.
A Druid should not be surprised at the fertility or lack thereof of the soil.
I never understand why Druids are telling settlers where the good land is, so they can clear the forests, scatter the faerie, set up a monoculture. Why isn't the Druid telling you to settle in the fens? Maybe that's what your low roll indicated? They really need a different mini-game anyway, growing the faerie population.
Urban Population beyond the hex's development level live in shanties and produce no wealth but still eat food. All they are good for is being drafted as soldiers.
Who's giving food to the poor now? Because that's a sign they could be paying more tax instead. Or is this another temple of the fiscally irresponsible elves thing? :wink:
So the new definition is that hexes are Wilderness if they haven't been secured. Any secured hex adjacent to a Wilderness hex or adjacent to a hex that is adjacent to a Wilderness hex is Borderlands. To be a Civilized hex, a hex needs to be secured, have no unsecured hexes within two hexes of it, and have a civil administration.
While that has advantages in creating pretty things in great detail, it's also a much larger amount of bullshit to generate and keep track of on your notes. Might it be easier to say that some towns and cities no longer civilise things? A single tag per city that it either dominates out 8 hexes (clear, civilised), or only holds the major roads and rivers (pressed, borderlands adjacent), or only holds a single port (besieged, wilds adjacent).

Then the costs are per town, and a party with domains in the surrounding hexes can contribute with the standard tithes. Everyone pays, it stays civilised. Less people paying gives a random chance it all turns to shit, and your fortress ends up in a wild hex again.
Players should be able to get policy choices with real differences.
Man, what does that add to the game, the D&D bit, with the dungeons and the dragons and the hex crawling and pushing back the darkness. You've got to generate content that gives us incentives to adventure and find treasure, like trade routes and tight margins on upkeep. Not just in theory either.
But then there's the growth itself. ACKS has population growth as a percentage of current population drop as populations rise. That's weird and not really how things work.
It is if you assume minor immigration and emigration are happening that the player doesn't need to care about, like it says. Secure a sparse population and more people move in, secure a dense population and they still leave for the city because all the best land is taken anyway. Things working about right without players having to care too much, even though they can do a bit more if they really want to.
D&D these days is a lot more multi-racial and multi-cultural.
Again, ease of recording and play. It's not that there's no one but Dwarves, it's that we don't normally use the extra detail so we don't generate it, other than procedurally as strictly needed.


It's very easy to end up with great spreadsheets of data no one is ever going to want to see or care about using. Crunch it all back down again so it works per city and you get huge areas and multiple players and vassals covered with minimal notes. That's why it's by-family for taxes, one number covering so much stuff, you grow taxes by attracting population, which happens by adventuring, which you're going to do anyway because D&D. Domain on a page or GTFO.
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Post by Username17 »

Tussock wrote:While that has advantages in creating pretty things in great detail, it's also a much larger amount of bullshit to generate and keep track of on your notes. Might it be easier to say that some towns and cities no longer civilise things? A single tag per city that it either dominates out 8 hexes (clear, civilised), or only holds the major roads and rivers (pressed, borderlands adjacent), or only holds a single port (besieged, wilds adjacent).
I applaud the desire to make things simpler rather than more complicated. However neither what you are suggesting nor ACKS' system actually does that. The thing is that the number of soldiers you garrison each place has to be a known quantity anyway. So setting garrison costs to a per-family rate or something might seem like a simple formula, it's actually a complication for no purpose. You still have to itemize your soldiers and figure out their wages, because those are the things you're going to potentially take into battles with you.

Putting the onus on cities to spread civilization in fixed radiuses similarly sounds easy, but it's actually bullshit. Because you are going to end up needing to do Mirkwood later on. And that means you're going to need to quantify the amount of wilderness push-back against a quantity of security. So your securitization of the hexes does need a quantity. Which means the simple answer really is to use the actual number of garrison troops you have (on the grounds that you do in fact need to know that information anyway).

Similarly, the "tiny domains" that ACKS posits don't actually make things simpler - because you end up needing hundreds or thousands of separate domains.
Tussock wrote:Low population and very sparse epic folk is a requirement for hexcrawling and establishing your own stuff, if players are to be proper protagonists. Or I guess you could settle the Isle of Dread or whatever.
Low population in areas that are being conquered and/or explored is often helpful. But large population centers still need to exist somewhere so that you can raise armies and get immigrants.
Dean wrote:I thought we all worked under the knowledge that D&D is closer to the Bronze Age than the actual Medieval era. Why wouldn't we use Bronze age estimates? For one thing they would be lower and that would be helpful because keeping the numbers as low as is feasibly possible fits better when slotted into a wargame about small unit scales.
Well, D&D is weirdly ambiguous, speaking of adventure in alternately Iron Age, Crusades, and Age of Exploration terminology. But the big issue here is that populations in these periods weren't actually all that different. The Bronze Age saw populations in the millions for a country like Greece, and it rose during the Iron Age and then fell in the Dark Ages and had more than recovered by the Late Medieval. But through all of that we're looking at lows of like 5 million and highs of like 10 million.

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Re: Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

Post by momothefiddler »

tussock wrote:It's very easy to end up with great spreadsheets of data no one is ever going to want to see or care about using. Crunch it all back down again so it works per city and you get huge areas and multiple players and vassals covered with minimal notes. That's why it's by-family for taxes, one number covering so much stuff, you grow taxes by attracting population, which happens by adventuring, which you're going to do anyway because D&D. Domain on a page or GTFO.
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Post by Antariuk »

Thanks for the hex-goodness. Since I'm trying myself at hexcrawling right now this is perfect timing to get some planning done before the players decide to set up shop somewhere in the wilderness.

About the weird hex size calculations in ACKS: it appears that ACKS uses what an OSR blog once described as the near-perfect hex size (numbers break down nice and easy).
Orca wrote:6 mile hexes are kind of small by old school standards. I remember 12 and 20 or 24 mile hexes (measured in the same way IIRC; if you're moving from the midpoint of one hex to the midpoint of adjoining one it makes sense) on a bunch of old D&D maps.
Yeah, beginning to like my 12-mile hexes a lot since they scale so well with 3E's tactical movement (which 6-mile hexes would obviously also do) and provide the ideal compromise between bookkeeping on my side and making a single hex something the players can seriously explore and clear out in a single session. 6-miles would be to fiddly for my tastes, and anything larger than 12 miles IMO defeats the purpose of having hexes in the first place.
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