Converting ACKS Domains to 3e

[Shatner]

Are there mechanics for when the Malthusian limit is lowered and/or the economy tanks and can't support so many non-farmers? Do people leave? Do they revert to banditry? Do they revolt?

Having the Shire sacked by thugs while the adventurers are off fighting in Mordor is a thing that happens. So is having some evil druid or necromancer curse your soil so only locusts grow instead of wheat. And you could have the vital trade route that justifies and supports this particular town die out because some asshole invented portal gates or sufficiently large flying ships and/or the trading source on one end gets its shit ruined by an orcish Waaaaaagh.

[Username17]

The rants about dividing hexes into sub hexes seems completely insane to me. The idea that it would be important, beneficial, or even practical to map out where individual buildings are inside hex crawl hexes is so batshit that it defies ready analysis. The idea that you'd ever care what the coordinates of a specific 5' area were in relation to the hex as a whole is a paste eater idea.

The 10 kilometer/6 mile hex has the advantage that it's reasonable for characters to have rough scouting reports of adjacent hexes. And building on that, that it's reasonable for characters to use towers, mountains, and flying scouts to get reports from several hexes away. That makes it good from a hex crawling standpoint because the players are able to make choices rather than crash wildly around into blank hexagons. It also has the advantage that Athens and Aegina were only 27 kilometers away from each other, so there are enough hexes that the two cities could each have a control radius and not have to share a hex or something stupid. Further, it's pretty close to the size of the territory of a Bengal Tiger or Wolf Pack, so it wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption to have most major fantasy predators (like Basilisks or Owlbears) have a hex or two that they live in.

The disadvantage of course is that with each hexagon being only 32 square miles, it takes 283 hexes to cover Lorraine and even Corsica takes 104 hexes to map out. A character can force march 8 hexes in a day, and could plausibly explore three or four. Obviously you're going to have to have a bunch of hexes that are actually or essentially empty.

-Username17

[name_here]

I can see it potentially mattering whether a given structure is adjacent to another structure or two hours of walking away when the fight music has started and one side is trying to get from point A to point B. Though of course it's insane to actually do a continuous projection down to combat scale.

[codeGlaze]

Though of course it's insane to actually do a continuous projection down to combat scale.

I've considered doing that as a project to work with object/data models. >_>

[Username17]

3e Domain Rules
Costs and Wages

The economy of ACKS is remarkably internally consistent. It's a little bit GIGO (in that the demographics and production numbers are based on ideas that are simply wrong for Earth history and don't allow for any meaningful magic interactivity), but the numbers do produce the results that the author says he wants them to. So that's an achievement.

3e economics are pretty messed up. A lot of prices don't make sense. Some prices were assigned by throwing darts at a board and those which were researched are often as not are prices taken from wildly different places in space and time. What gets called out a lot is how various items cost less than their constituent materials. Pots and anvils that cost less than the iron they are made of, ladders that cost less than the wood they are assembled from, that sort of thing. And of course, there's the various adventuring equipment that costs way more than makes sense given the incomes of people – laborers needing to work for two weeks straight to afford a backpack and shit. But while these numbers are hilarious and “obviously wrong” they are not importantly wrong on the scale of characters wielding flaming swords and owning their own castles. Whether the cost of a length of iron chain is too little compared to the cost of a length of rope is an entertaining conversation to have at 3 in the morning in Denny's, but the difference between the listed cost and the “right cost” isn't going to make a meaningful dent in your budget for flying carpets or parapets.

The 3e cost charts say that the costs are very high for Land and Steel, and very low for Blood and Toil. And that implies an economy that is horrible, but not unimaginable. It implies a world that is lawless and depressed. One with few investment opportunities, huge unemployment, and very weakly enforced property rights. It is in short, an economy entirely consistent with a world where people feel that their best chance for advancement is to pick up a sword and try to capture some wasteland with ruins full of manticores in it. There's very little real estate on the market, and a lot of real estate that it is socially acceptable to seize by force of arms. Unemployment is very high, and demand for armor and weapons is much higher than supply. And that is why the equipment of a heavy infantryman costs as much as four years' wages for that same infantryman.

A soldier or guard's wages are 6 gold pieces per month. That's twice the wages of a maid, laborer, or other menial servant. And there's room to advance as a soldier. An elite or mounted soldier gets twelve gp per month, same as a clerk, librarian, or smith. An officer makes 18 gold per month, which is six times the wages of a normal servant. But for all that, the swords are considerably more expensive than the arms that wield them. The equipment of heavy infantry costs about 250 gold, while the equipment of heavy cavalry costs nearly 1,700 gold. A lancer could expect to pay off his investment in arms and armor in about 12 years. And we can imagine an economy where that makes sense. It's not even far fetched. If someone has scale armor and a ranseur, they can go become a soldier and make twice the wages they would have made working as a cook. But they can't easily cash out because the economy is depressed and it is hard to find a buyer. And cashing out wouldn't be a great plan anyway, because real estate is almost impossible to buy.

In short, there is very little demand for goods and services (wage earners all get crap, and minimum wage is a silver piece per day), and there is very little supply for real estate and weaponry. And these facts are why there's the whole D&D cliché of “followers” showing up when people build strongholds and start claiming land. There are unemployed people who have weapons, and they will just show up to live in the new baron's house and fight on his behalf. They do this because otherwise they have no way of affording a roof over their heads. And the new baron accepts them into the force, because soldiers who show up with their own weapons save a lot of resources. One can imagine families working around rules of primogeniture by gifting second and third children with armor and weapons to ensure that they have decent wages and a place to sleep for the rest of their working lives.

In short, the wage chart in the Stronghold Builder's Guide can be used as is for a starting point. And it tells us a number of things. Like how farmers have to make more than 3 gp per month (the floor wages of simply working as a laborer), and probably make less than 6 gp per month (the wages of a soldier). It also gives a decent floor for how much a month's food is worth, considering that laborers obviously get it (what with continuing to survive). So one month's food for one person is probably about 1 gp. And farmers get about 4-5 gp per month.

[Ancient History]

Keep in mind too that this would be before the niceties of war, so in addition to payroll soldiers would get a chance at plunder - and for high-level knights that would include ransoms for the nobility, or high-end arms and armor for the trials of arms. A lucky break in a siege and a soldier might make more than he'd see in a year - and spend it in a week, like a pirate in Port Royal.

[Seerow]

If the act of owning weapons/armor and knowing how to use it is what causes a soldier's wages to be so high, should there be mechanics in place for paying less in exchange for providing gear and training?

Say you as the Baron in charge put in the investment to have some smiths craft your 250gp gear package for 200 heavy infantry, round up some willing commoners, put them through boot camp, give them their gear... and now instead of paying 6gp a month, you pay 3-4gp a month.

These soldiers get the benefit of not having to do menial labor anymore, instantly getting a promotion up the societal ladder, without having to save for their own equipment, as the Baron fields that up front cost. In exchange the Baron gets a lower upkeep cost, and if you die he has claim to that equipment instead of your heir, and can hire on someone in your place.

[Username17]

I think the general idea is that contract law isn't well defined enough to make something like that work. Once people get training and a sword, they can just leave. You can't really enforce a student loan, because people don't have credit ratings or national IDs.

From a structural perspective, it means that it's cheap to get small armies because you spontaneously attract them and only have to pay for a roof over their head and monthly wages. But if you want an army bigger than what you get for your level and fame, you have to pay a hefty down payment for their equipment.

This cost ramp up to get larger armies is a good thing. It pushes large scale army maneuvering a few levels into paragon levels

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

The disadvantage of course is that with each hexagon being only 32 square miles, it takes 283 hexes to cover Lorraine and even Corsica takes 104 hexes to map out. A character can force march 8 hexes in a day, and could plausibly explore three or four. Obviously you're going to have to have a bunch of hexes that are actually or essentially empty.

-Username17

That's why you create the Megahex™ to fit 100 hexes inside

[Blicero]

Has anyone looked at the Domains at War books ACKS put out last year? One of them focuses on raising armies and strategic-level warfare, and the other details ACKS's mass combat minigame. I've skimmed through them, but I have basically zero experience with this sort of wargame, so I don't trust myself to provide any particularly insightful analysis.

They were apparently designed around a "magic as Napoleonic artillery" paradigm, under which most of the heavy lifting of a battle is still performed by tiny men on horseback. (And specifically horses instead of giant spiders or wolves or whatever; support for nonstandard mounted troops seemed woefully minimal.) But if the basis is mechanically sound, then the system might be worth salvaging for more modern stuff. I dunno.

[Username17]

3e Domain Rules
Taxes and Crop Yields

The United States produces over 150 bushels of corn per acre per year. The traditional koku was defined as the amount of rice needed to feed one person for a year and was 7.66 bushels. That works out to medieval people being rationed about 1,500 calories a day and the crop yields of the past (which promised one net koku per acre) being chocolate covered bullshit. Modern diets are almost twice as rich as those of the past, and grain yields are almost twenty times as high.

Nevertheless, we're going with dark ages numbers to start, and that means that an average fertility province produces 1 koku per acre of farm or pasture land. A koku is still 1,500 calories per day for a year worth of basic food. A meal is worth about 1 copper piece, so each person consumes about 1 gp per month, putting the yearly koku at 12 gp. Now this is turnip economy GP, obviously this is a largely barter economy produce that you couldn't literally buy magic swords or even heavy armor with (no one is going to “sell” a suit of plate straight across for 150,000 meals worth of potatoes, carrots, peas, cabbages, and barley). But demand is deep for such things, and it is reasonable to expect that if you had access to markets you could convert those koku into silver and silver could be turned around into gold economy purchases. Also, a lot of the things you're buying are construction and the wages of soldiers, and much of that literally is paid in salted pork and wheat flour. So long as the trade routes remain open and things are an “open” economy, we can work out the koku in GP rather than rice and herring, which makes things a lot easier. A koku is 12 gp per year, which makes it 1 gp per month, which means

A family of 5 typically can farm 20 acres, as was typical for medieval farming in many places for a lot of that period. This means that the total product is 20 koku per family, or roughly 240 gp per year. The family themselves will probably eat about 5 of those koku, and the take home of serfs would be 7 more koku, bringing their take to 12 koku (for a total yearly wage of 3 koku per adult and 2 per child). That gives 8 koku in rents to the lord. Yeoman farmers would expect to receive 11 in wages and still eat 5, so the well-paid farmer family only throws 4 koku up the pyramid.

Farmer Status	Family Disposable Income	Tax Revenue
Oppressed Serfs	3 koku	12 koku
Serfs	7 koku	8 koku
Tenant Peasants	11 koku	4 koku
Free Peasants	15 koku	0

With the exception of Free Peasants (those who don't owe any tax to local lords or government), changes in soil quality do not affect peasant incomes. The amount that peasants are allowed to keep is based on their status, and everything else they produce is taxed. This is actually the opposite of how it is experienced by the people in the world – who make a profit sharing agreement based on how much is to be taxed with the farmers keeping everything left over. But for game terms, if people are only allowed to keep 7 koku, they will be as unhappy as Serfs in standard lands where they are getting a very small amount of abundant harvests or a middling amount of crap harvests. Abundant land produces 20% more than normal, and Poor soil produces 20% less. This translates to the landlord taking in 4 more or less koku per farm.

• Special Note: Plant Growth. In D&D land, any Druid, Ranger, or Plant Cleric capable of casting 3rd level spells can bless crops with plant growth. That increases the crop yields from 1 koku per acre to 4/3 koku per acre, and affects 500 acres per casting. The production is over 160 koku, and would thus be worth 2,000 gp in total increased income. Since a casting of this spell nominally costs 150 gp as a service, you can see how any possible distribution of the increased yields between farmers, landlords, and druids would make these crop blessings beneficial for all. It can be assumed that any sufficiently advanced economy figures out a way to get plant growth cast, and those benefits and costs should kick in automatically when access to that kind of magical might is attained.

[DrPraetor]

In the same sense that agriculture is what makes you a civilization instead of a horde of barbarians, blessing crops and keeping agricultural calendars is what makes you a priest instead of a shaman.

So of course with a polytheistic religion, there is a world-wide priesthood of Pelor, god of Sun and Agriculture, and blessing the crops of every single farmer in the world is *clearly* their job.

Now this is one of many reasons that the D&D setting just doesn't make sense. Europe underwent a dark ages because these Christians showed up and announced that it was more important to starve, shivering piously in the dark for Jesus than to keep the priest of Saturn around telling people which crops to plant when in what soil. If on top of that the orgy in December magically boosted crop yields and you stopped doing that, you'd be up shit creek and heading into the rapids.

So having a dark ages and keeping the tolerant polytheistic religion just doesn't make any sense, it's an either/or thing. For D&D to hold together, the suppression of the cult of Pelor in many or most areas needs to be the major element of the last 500 years.

[ETortoise]

I have the domains at war books. The book lists several different ways to raise armies. Hiring mercenaries, conscripting peasants, training militia, and buying slave soldiers. Mercenaries are professional soldiers who are already trained and equipped. A typical party has been hiring small groups of these guys for several levels by the time they're thinking about realm management. Conscription and militias work similarly in that peasants are taken from your realm's families and equipped and trained. The book has a breakdown of what percentage of peasants can be trained as each type of unit. So, out of 120 human conscripts, 60 can be trained as heavy infantry but 90/120 orcs can serve as HI. The difference between conscripts and militia is that conscripts a drawn from surplus population - they don't reduce morale or income when conscripted, and are professional soldiers - once trained they get a monthly wage and are effectively no different from mercenaries. Militia on the other hand do reduce income and morale in their home regions while they are being trained and while they are mustered. When militia are at home they don't need to be paid and are presumed to pass on their weapons and skills to their descendants.

Some classes also get followers in the old-school D&D fashion, but these are fairly insignificant. My players are still a few levels away from their free 5D6X10 followers but they'll have enough gold by then that those followers would only comprise a small part of their army. If the players had more control over what kind of followers they received then they would be a cool personal guard, but there's a good chance of ending up with s garbage troop on the random table.

[Grek]

I don't understand what the relevance of the first paragraph is, nor can I parse whether "chocolate covered bullshit" is supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. I mean, it's a chapter about farming, bullshit might be a plus here. Paragraph two is cut off half way through.

1 koku per acre is perfectly fine for farms, but unrealistic for pastures. Feed to meat ratios are a thing, and pasture land generally isn't being producing feed as fast as farming does. My environmental science books give 20:1 for beef, 15:1 for horse, 10:1 for goat, 8:1 for pork, 6:1 for mutton, 5:1 for eggs, 2:1 for poultry and nearly 1:1 for milk. We can assume these roughly double if you're using grass feed instead of farm grown grain feed, and becomes 10x higher if you're an orc or something trying to breed carnivorous animals like worgs or giant spiders as mounts.

You can abstract this (your farmers are growing a "reasonable" number of livestock for their available land and this is already accounted for in their fertility numbers), make it a policy setting (converting farmland to pasture decreases food production per acre, but gives bonuses to peasant morale and the recruitment of cavalry) or make it so that you have to cultivate the land by building infrastructure before you can farm, but allow grazing on uncultivated land to be free.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Matt Riggsby has done a fairly complete treatment on crop yields, as well as subsistence vs cash crops, for GURPS Low-Tech. I could put some of that up if there's any interest.

[Dean]

Wages in D&D domain rules should be higher than in the Stronghold builders guide. D&D's wages don't just seem absurdly low on instinct and on comparison to the price charts they are also against D&D's own skill rules on making money. The skills chapter tells us that anyone with even a single rank in Profession, Craft, Perform, Sleight of Hand, Balance, or Tumble can use those ranks to make weekly checks for gold. Using these as a guidepost we can say that wages should look more like this

Monthly Wages
Untrained Laborer: 4gp. Anyone can aid another a profession or craft check. Doing so adds 5sp per weekly check so paying someone 5sp a week to do that job just makes sense as it adds to the quality of your business and pays for itself. This means the untrained laborer wage of 1sp per day is sadly accurate but is only the wage of someone with literally no training or skills of any kind.
Trained Laborer: 20gp. Anyone with a single rank in a profession can make about 5gp a week. A 20gp monthly wage is an insurance policy for your average worker. The Bricklayer works for 20gp a month under a more senior Bricklayer even though he might be able to make a little more striking out on his own because he also won't starve if he hits a patch of bad luck.
Professional: 30gp. Someone who's maxed their ranks in a craft or profession at first level can expect to be paid a little more for delivering more quality craftsmanship or service on a consistent basis. This should also be the starting pay point for professional soldiers because they took the Warrior class and it only makes sense to make life choices that put you in danger if the pay is higher than an average commoner can pull.
Expert: 50gp. Someone who maxed their ranks in a craft or profession, has a skill focus, has masterwork tools, and probably has a couple laborers under him can make this much with Profession rolls alone. Experts can expect to have more than +10 to their checks even at level 1 allowing them to perform useful and (relatively) rare tasks in society like crafting other masterwork tools for people.

Stronghold's Guide just doesn't work because it has people with +7 Profession checks working for 9 gold a month when peddling their services on the streets would net them that much a week. By moderately increasing wages to what is already presented in the rules you get an economy that still sucks to participate in but isn't nearly as comically nonfunctional as the 2sp a day trained workers in the DMG. By increasing the cost of soldiers such that 30 men plausibly cost a thousand dollars a month you push back the point that characters want to hire dozens of Warriors to do their job for them. I think it's very important to try to push that point past 6th level if we don't want players walking around with troops all the time. It's even more important to drive the cost of soldiers up a bit so that adventurers become economically feasible. Four 5th level Adventurers cost a shitload of money to send at an Ettin and if hiring 50 Mercenaries is cheaper and just as effective then adventurers don't have a place. If Soldiers cost 30-50 gold per month (contracts being one month minimums) with a Veteran officer or two thrown in then hiring Adventurers becomes a reasonable risk vs reward scenario for those in charge.

[Username17]

1 koku per acre is perfectly fine for farms, but unrealistic for pastures.

The assumption is that peoples' koku are made out of a mixture of grain, vegetables, eggs, dairy, and meat, and that acreages are given in some reasonable percentage to rice paddies and swine wallows. There are less calories per acre from meat, but the meat calories are more expensive, and the total value works out to about 1,500 calories for 1 person per day per year and/or 1 gp/month from each standard acre.

Since 1 koku per acre of net calories is actually incredibly low by the standards of either modern days or the Iron and Bronze Age empires, that's fine. There's a lot of wiggle room for some of these acres to be growing apples or sheep rather than barley and corn.

D&D's wages don't just seem absurdly low on instinct and on comparison to the price charts they are also against D&D's own skill rules on making money. The skills chapter tells us that anyone with even a single rank in Profession, Craft, Perform, Sleight of Hand, Balance, or Tumble can use those ranks to make weekly checks for gold.

The Profession rules are terrible. Getting paid more cleaning toilets because you have more ranks in profession janitor than you have in profession lawyer is the kind of thing people would say about an RPG as a joke. The idea that we would give two shits what kind of batshit crazy economy was implied by the completely nonfunctional Profession rules is simply not credible.

Having the wages of most people with no leverage in the economy (that is, people who do not own castles or swords and lack irreplaceable skills like sorcery) be set close to subsistence eating levels is both reasonable and good for the game. Having peoples' wages set by how many ranks they have in "Profession: Maid" is bullshit.

-Username17

[tussock]

The rules for 3e PCs making money with skills (or spellcasting) are very poor.

d20+mods in silver/week for skills fit the economic model quite well. As does spell level x caster level in silver for spells, if they are to be competing with the peasantry on price.

[OgreBattle]

There should be a way for communities of common folk to collectively perform 'rituals' that appease local spirits to get plant growth effects, like say giving offerings consistently for the entire year+special festivals.

[Username17]

The 780 family maximum for farming of ACKS is actually not unreasonable. If you give people 20 acre farms, that 780 family cap involves about three quarters of the hex being given over to farming. With the existence of underdarks and cloud islands, it is trivial to imagine scenarios where five hundred percent of the land area is given over to farming, but absent such fuckery you could imagine that between cities and roads and duck ponds and mysterious boulders and such, that it wouldn't be unreasonable for a quarter of the land to be variously "not farms" even in flat grasslands. They describe it as being "the most the land can support," which makes it extremely wrong on a bunch of levels, but the number wasn't completely pulled out of the ass.

Where I part ways is in how you get to that maximum, and what that maximum actually is. The limit on farms should simply be how much agricultural land is available. So in a flat grasslands hex, the number is 780. While in a rough swamp hex, the number should be like 150 or less. The key is that you don't raise the limit by securing the area (or by having a major city be physically closer, as is mysteriously the case in ACKS), but by agricultural investment. If you drain a swamp or irrigate a desert, the limit of family farms goes up.

The important thing is that people who are working resources or in the urban population don't count against this limit. After all, the maximum number of farmers farming is producing over fifteen thousand koku. Which does mean that absent a magical food source, that really major cities of 100,000 people and more would take like a hundred hexes to feed. But of course, as previously noted magical food source supplementation is so ubiquitous that it would be a lot less than that.

-Username17

[Username17]

Disregard me, I suck cocks.

That math has the dumb, possibly because I was switching between million person settlements, hundred thousand family settlements, and hundred thousand person settlements.

The bottom line is that a hex of average fertility and full farmability makes 15,600 koku and has only 3,900 mouths to feed among the farmers and their children. That means that 11,700 koku get shuffled around the economy until they find their way into the bellies of urban and miner populations. But both increased fertility and plant growth increase the gross rather than the net. If you have both together, the total production is 24,960 koku while the farmers still only actually eat 3,900.

So a city of 100,000 can actually feed itself on five hexes. Which isn't even all of the hexes adjacent to the city itself.

That being said, the game should still not normally have adjacent cities, because that would be kind of dumb. After all it's four hexes from Nottingham to Derby or Southampton to Portsmouth. The basic plan is that if urban population gets generated in a hex, and there is a higher development level in an adjacent hex, the population goes to the more developed hex. The only way you can have two cities next to each other is if you build up equal development level in two adjacent hexes. Then you can have Buda-Pest scenarios.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I thought Buda and Pest had something to do with German speakers and Hungarian speakers making independent settlements?

Anyway you could have some feature were urban population goes into better-developed adjacent hexes UNLESS the environment is racially hostile? Or do you not want to admit that's what AD&D races mean? Or do you not want to admit that level of detail?

[Dean]

The Profession rules are terrible. Getting paid more cleaning toilets because you have more ranks in profession janitor than you have in profession lawyer is the kind of thing people would say about an RPG as a joke

You are the joke! The idea that people should get more per skill rank for writing down "Profession:Batman" is bad. If you were planning on writing more material for the Profession/Craft/Perform rules such that being a Lawyer or a Watchmaker takes more startup ranks but pays more money that's....ok. That's an OK idea I guess. But without spending the extra time to add lots of sub rules to profession it is definitely a better idea that 1 rank equals the same result no matter what you mtp into it. If you are 1 rank of Maid or 1 rank of Royal Jeweler you make the same amount of money because that's what that rank is worth. Presumably you are a better Maid and a shitty Royal Jeweler or an apprentice or something.

The profession and craft and perform rules create an economy that is viable and better than one where trained professionals are all at subsistence levels. The written rules create an economy where your basic laborer has a shitty peasant life but the shop owners and blacksmiths live a decent life. Not wealthy but decent. That's good because it fits the brush D&D is painted with.: Where the hamlets and townsfolk are slightly idealized, living out generally good and simple lives disrupted occasionally by threats that require hero's to beat. D&D villages and their people are more presented as this...



Than this..



And the Profession economy better simulates that than the nightmare economy.

The other reason making worldwide poverty is bad is it makes hiring soldiers something so practical that people only don't do it out of politeness. Hiring 100 Soldiers to do your adventuring for you makes so much sense in D&D that everyone has just had to agree to not do that so we get to play at all. 4th level characters are expected to make 1200gp per encounter. If soldiers cost 6gp for a months service then a 4th level PC can hire 100 soldiers to kill an Owlbear and STILL make 600gp out of the deal. He also now has 100 Soldiers for a month and that was from a single fight. Soldier wages are absurdly low. If Soldiers cost somewhere in the 30-50gp a month range that they reasonably should then that same character would only be able to get between a dozen or at most 20 men, and that's a group that could plausibly take real casualties and be played out on the table rather than being something made illegal by gentleman's agreement and nothing else.

You've already written decent rules on running a business. You called them Running A Business. If you add a few mechanics into the Profession/Craft rules such that they better simulate real earning potential that's way better than circumventing all economic complications by declaring that everyone's in poverty. It will make a stepping stone system where players can decide how important their businesses are to their game. As a business venture becomes more central to a game it can move from using Profession checks, to using your Business rules ,to eventually using Domain rules once the parties East Eberron Trading Company is taking over land.

[Ancient History]

The Profession rules are written such that an epic master of Origami may daily earn the GNP of the entire kingdom, with no question of who is paying her or why. It's an abstract system, and necessarily so, and like all abstract systems at a certain level it makes no fucking sense, especially when you try to figure out how it fits into the economy.

[Username17]

If you were planning on writing more material for the Profession/Craft/Perform rules such that being a Lawyer or a Watchmaker takes more startup ranks but pays more money that's....ok.

Or we could do the thing that the Dungeonomicon already did and take out profession ranks altogether and just treat them like a language. And then simply accept that profession: magistrate pays a lot more than profession: maid, and then not give a shit because player characters are the only people you care about game balance for, and none of them make a significant portion of their income working 9-5 because they are fucking adventurers.

All we have to do with the Profession rules is wipe our asses with them. Because they are worse for the game than if they simply didn't exist.

-Username17