Yora
2013-06-01, 06:19 AM
So, this book is out since last week and the pdf is available since wednesday. Also, as it is Paizos policy, all of the crunchy bits will be added to the PRD eventually (it simple takes some time to do all the linking and formatting), and this is a very crunchy book.
I really like it and I seem to be agreeing on that with the vast majority of people posting in the paizo forums. I think this really has the potential to become heavily used in the future, as there are many great things in it.
The first and largest part of the book (at 68 pages) is Character Backgrounds, which is all about Traits and randomly generating Traits, and some Story Feats. Story Feats are mostly like regular feats, but they include a story prerequisite, like having some event happening to you, or having certain Traits. They also include a specific goal and once that goal is met the benefit of the Feat improves. I'm not a fan of Traits and think they shouldn't have been introduced in the first place, so there isn't really anything for me in this part of the book. But that still leaves 180 pages of greatness.
The second section is called Downtime, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer, because there's really a lot to do while not killing monsters in a dungeon. Most of these options are actually in the third section. The second section itself is all about creating and running your stronghold and assembling employees, followers, or even your own private army.
Instead of doing it all with just gold pieces, these businesses and rganizations run on four resources, similar to an RTS. Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic. Goods is simply material stuff. Building material, food, trade goods, equipment, supplies, and so on. Influence is basically a measure of how many favors you can call in to help you with getting your base or business established and running. Be it paperwork, business contacts, or your reputation with the populace when it comes to get people to work for you. Labor is similar to Influence, but simply applies to getting laborers to build your buildings. Finally Magic is a specialized form of Goods and represents stocks in magical ingredients, minor potions, and scrolls, that are not counted individually.
These resources are generated by your businesses and employees as they work, but I think they also make for great treasures or quest rewards. If you complete a quest for the people of a town, you should not only get your payment in gold pieces, but also increase your Influence for the region. Similar, if you kill an evil wizard in his tower and loot his place, you not only get magic items as treasure but could also increase your Magic by 4 or 5 points by raiding his alchemy lab. Finally, if you really need a resource that you just can't wait for to earn, you can always offer someone a big amount of gold. Getting resources in cash takes no time, but costs twice as much as the investment you would have to make if you would have your workers generate it for you.
Your businesses consists of rooms and teams. A room is something like a bar, infirmary, or alchemy lab, that comes with all the neccessary equipment and supplies, as well as unskilled laborers that can provide the absolute minimum of services. A team is a group of 1 to 5 specialists that you can either send out into town to find someone who needs their skills, or you can have them work in one of your rooms. If you hire them out, they only bring in half the profit you would make from having them work from a room you are providing. A team is in addition to the generic unskilled laborers (which are neither counted nor tracked in any way) and does not replace them, which makes tracking the whole thing a lot easier.
Every day, your rooms and teams generate some gp, but you can also order them to special tasks, which result in generating Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic instead. For example, you could order the soldiers of your bodyguard service to go hunting for bandits outside of town, generating Influence. Because of that, they wouldn't make any money that day from their regular work, so you don't get any profit in form of gp for that day. But you still would have to pay their wage, food supplies, and so on for the day, so you actually have to pay some of your own money, depending on how much Influence they made for you that day. Or as another example, you could have a bar that normally sells drinks to customers generating money for you, but you might order them to host a special event at your cost where the drinks are half-price or for free. You get Influence with the locals, but you have to come up for the expenses and loss in profit.
Even if you don't really want to run a business, the system still looks quite fun to simply build your own stronghold. The rooms and teams all make good interiors and staff for a small keep you are building just for yourself. Simply don't rent and hire them out to the public. I keep thinking that there should be some cost involved to have a bunch of guards sit around your front hall all day, but as of now there doesn't seem to be any rule for that. A simple solution would be to have them cost the same amount of profit they would have made if they had been working. Since that's not a lot of coin, high level PCs should be able to afford it easily. (For example, 5 elite guards generate about 14 sp of profit every day. Having 10 of these guys in your stronghold would be only 48 gp per month with that fix, no problem for a 10th level character.)
The system is kept relatively simple and people have pointed out quite a number of things that are not entirely clear or require some handwaving from the GM, but I think that's overall more of a strong point than a problem. As a fun activity at the side, these things should be very easy and quickly to run, as they are still side activities to your primariy vocation as adventurer, mercenary, and so on. It all seems very easy to simply wing it.
The third section is called Campaign Systems and consists mostly of optional and alternative rules to cover certain things. There's things like bargaining, contacts, honor, investment, lineage, retirement, and retraining, as well as more elaborate explainations for magic item creation. Many of these seem to overlapp in some way and I don't see any group using all of these at the same time. But there's a couple of interesting ones and most groups should find something they could be using in their games.
The last section is Kingdom Building and Armies, which are an expanded version from the Kingmaker Adventure Path. Running a Kingdom is pretty similar to running a business. Many things have their analog in the Downtime system, with the major difference being that you also control territory on your land. There is only a single resource called Build Points, which you use to pay for everything. Your lands and the businesses within your realm generate Build Points in form of taxes and so on, but you can also convert gold pieces to more BP if you are running short on resources. There is no direct way to convert the Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic from the Downtime rules into BP, but you could always look up how much it would take to buy said resources, convert them into gp, and convert those into BP.
Army rules are very simple and a single army works basically as a simplefied swarm. As I see it, it's not meant to be a separate wargame, but rather a way to very quickly convert whatever NPCs and monsters you have into easy to manage units that are ready to go almost instantly. What I like is that an army can consist of a single creature, so you can for example have a hundred elven archers try to fight a dragon without ending up in endless dice rolling. I see myself using army rules probably quite a lot, just to see what is going on while the PCs are off doing their special missions at the side of the battle. In your Magnificent Seven Samurai scenario, you could have the PCs defend the front gate of the town, while you have villagers and raiders having two army battles on the pallisades in other parts of the town. Only when the villagers are about to loose, a runner comes to the PCs to tell them they need backup, at which point the army battle becomes a regular encounter in which the PCs take part as individual combatants. Army rules seem like a good way to run fights in which the PCs are not actively participating themselves.
That said, I'd like to hear what other people here are thinking about it. Or you might ask questions which I and probably some others could try to answer.
I really like it and I seem to be agreeing on that with the vast majority of people posting in the paizo forums. I think this really has the potential to become heavily used in the future, as there are many great things in it.
The first and largest part of the book (at 68 pages) is Character Backgrounds, which is all about Traits and randomly generating Traits, and some Story Feats. Story Feats are mostly like regular feats, but they include a story prerequisite, like having some event happening to you, or having certain Traits. They also include a specific goal and once that goal is met the benefit of the Feat improves. I'm not a fan of Traits and think they shouldn't have been introduced in the first place, so there isn't really anything for me in this part of the book. But that still leaves 180 pages of greatness.
The second section is called Downtime, but I think that's a bit of a misnomer, because there's really a lot to do while not killing monsters in a dungeon. Most of these options are actually in the third section. The second section itself is all about creating and running your stronghold and assembling employees, followers, or even your own private army.
Instead of doing it all with just gold pieces, these businesses and rganizations run on four resources, similar to an RTS. Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic. Goods is simply material stuff. Building material, food, trade goods, equipment, supplies, and so on. Influence is basically a measure of how many favors you can call in to help you with getting your base or business established and running. Be it paperwork, business contacts, or your reputation with the populace when it comes to get people to work for you. Labor is similar to Influence, but simply applies to getting laborers to build your buildings. Finally Magic is a specialized form of Goods and represents stocks in magical ingredients, minor potions, and scrolls, that are not counted individually.
These resources are generated by your businesses and employees as they work, but I think they also make for great treasures or quest rewards. If you complete a quest for the people of a town, you should not only get your payment in gold pieces, but also increase your Influence for the region. Similar, if you kill an evil wizard in his tower and loot his place, you not only get magic items as treasure but could also increase your Magic by 4 or 5 points by raiding his alchemy lab. Finally, if you really need a resource that you just can't wait for to earn, you can always offer someone a big amount of gold. Getting resources in cash takes no time, but costs twice as much as the investment you would have to make if you would have your workers generate it for you.
Your businesses consists of rooms and teams. A room is something like a bar, infirmary, or alchemy lab, that comes with all the neccessary equipment and supplies, as well as unskilled laborers that can provide the absolute minimum of services. A team is a group of 1 to 5 specialists that you can either send out into town to find someone who needs their skills, or you can have them work in one of your rooms. If you hire them out, they only bring in half the profit you would make from having them work from a room you are providing. A team is in addition to the generic unskilled laborers (which are neither counted nor tracked in any way) and does not replace them, which makes tracking the whole thing a lot easier.
Every day, your rooms and teams generate some gp, but you can also order them to special tasks, which result in generating Goods, Influence, Labor, or Magic instead. For example, you could order the soldiers of your bodyguard service to go hunting for bandits outside of town, generating Influence. Because of that, they wouldn't make any money that day from their regular work, so you don't get any profit in form of gp for that day. But you still would have to pay their wage, food supplies, and so on for the day, so you actually have to pay some of your own money, depending on how much Influence they made for you that day. Or as another example, you could have a bar that normally sells drinks to customers generating money for you, but you might order them to host a special event at your cost where the drinks are half-price or for free. You get Influence with the locals, but you have to come up for the expenses and loss in profit.
Even if you don't really want to run a business, the system still looks quite fun to simply build your own stronghold. The rooms and teams all make good interiors and staff for a small keep you are building just for yourself. Simply don't rent and hire them out to the public. I keep thinking that there should be some cost involved to have a bunch of guards sit around your front hall all day, but as of now there doesn't seem to be any rule for that. A simple solution would be to have them cost the same amount of profit they would have made if they had been working. Since that's not a lot of coin, high level PCs should be able to afford it easily. (For example, 5 elite guards generate about 14 sp of profit every day. Having 10 of these guys in your stronghold would be only 48 gp per month with that fix, no problem for a 10th level character.)
The system is kept relatively simple and people have pointed out quite a number of things that are not entirely clear or require some handwaving from the GM, but I think that's overall more of a strong point than a problem. As a fun activity at the side, these things should be very easy and quickly to run, as they are still side activities to your primariy vocation as adventurer, mercenary, and so on. It all seems very easy to simply wing it.
The third section is called Campaign Systems and consists mostly of optional and alternative rules to cover certain things. There's things like bargaining, contacts, honor, investment, lineage, retirement, and retraining, as well as more elaborate explainations for magic item creation. Many of these seem to overlapp in some way and I don't see any group using all of these at the same time. But there's a couple of interesting ones and most groups should find something they could be using in their games.
The last section is Kingdom Building and Armies, which are an expanded version from the Kingmaker Adventure Path. Running a Kingdom is pretty similar to running a business. Many things have their analog in the Downtime system, with the major difference being that you also control territory on your land. There is only a single resource called Build Points, which you use to pay for everything. Your lands and the businesses within your realm generate Build Points in form of taxes and so on, but you can also convert gold pieces to more BP if you are running short on resources. There is no direct way to convert the Goods, Influence, Labor, and Magic from the Downtime rules into BP, but you could always look up how much it would take to buy said resources, convert them into gp, and convert those into BP.
Army rules are very simple and a single army works basically as a simplefied swarm. As I see it, it's not meant to be a separate wargame, but rather a way to very quickly convert whatever NPCs and monsters you have into easy to manage units that are ready to go almost instantly. What I like is that an army can consist of a single creature, so you can for example have a hundred elven archers try to fight a dragon without ending up in endless dice rolling. I see myself using army rules probably quite a lot, just to see what is going on while the PCs are off doing their special missions at the side of the battle. In your Magnificent Seven Samurai scenario, you could have the PCs defend the front gate of the town, while you have villagers and raiders having two army battles on the pallisades in other parts of the town. Only when the villagers are about to loose, a runner comes to the PCs to tell them they need backup, at which point the army battle becomes a regular encounter in which the PCs take part as individual combatants. Army rules seem like a good way to run fights in which the PCs are not actively participating themselves.
That said, I'd like to hear what other people here are thinking about it. Or you might ask questions which I and probably some others could try to answer.