The party now wants to play farming simulator 2017

[Zancloufer]

Same party from the last thread of mine (if you read it).

So the party has gone out of their way to essentially establish themselves as the leaders of a decent sized goblin warband. After seeing how effective the goblin hoard was a against 2 NPCs literally a level higher than the party (spoiler alert: Not very) and probably some advice from others outside of the game, they have (temporarily) given up their plan of town conquest.

They instead want to "start a new goblin town" with farms and houses and livestock and whatnot. Teach the goblins how to build better things and be stronger.

So my questions are:

1) What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.

2) How could I model village development in the background? How fast would it grow? Like the party is going out and still adventuring, they just have this "home base" thing they are trying to build up from scratch. No I don't need to actually turn this into a full time job, then I can just throw the villains at it, burn the village down and get the party back on track via some sort of revenge plot.

Not that I am being a **** DM about it, just they might have (unintentionally) ticked off a bigger bad and they need to deal with it lest it come back and burn their town down.

3) Unless there is a way to kind of do that without mass goblin slaughter. Or reason. I mean the town should probably be in some danger. Would villains even attack the town directly if the PCs are running around separate from it?

[SilverLeaf167]

1) Depending on your setting's version of goblins, they might be resistant to the idea of living in permanent housing and working the fields in jolly cooperation as opposed to moving around and killing things. They might get distracted easily, take out their stress on each other and end up starting even more petty feuds when they're supposed to be working. Perhaps they'll become easy prey for rival goblin tribes who start raiding them instead. They might not be physically suited to hard labor, either - for any crops to prosper, their fields need to be just as well-worked as humans', yet they have smaller tools and bodies without the patience or ingenuity to make up for it.

2) Unless your goblins literally breed like rabbits or there are more warbands willing to join them with no hassle, population growth obviously won't happen any time soon. With some (magical?) help from the PCs, they might get some basic farms running pretty quickly, but over the months and years they'll be expanding them, adding new structures and crafting new tools/furniture/trinkets. This is definitely long-scale stuff, though - the party might see some progress when they come for a visit, but on the short scale they have little reason to stick around and micromanage.

3) If the PC's aren't present and the village is giving them no real benefit, and the villains have better things to do, there's no reason they have to target the goblins - unless they're particularly petty, of course. They might not even know the village is there. If you want to throw threats at the village, your first priority should be for those threats to create good gameplay, not just "alright, the village is gone, get back to the real game". I'm not saying you can't destroy it, but you need to make it interesting somehow.

[Piranha424]

This isn't necessarily canon but I have always felt that there is a reason goblins never advance beyond small murderous tribes and bands. They aren't smart enough for it and aren't inclined to do it. They distract easily and don't see the reward of long term goals. THey aren't suited to farming as a rule because they would rather start fights and chase small animals through the dirt of their fields. They are more apt to eat the seeds than plant them, steal shiny nails instead of use them to build and so on. Oh and livestock? Yeah probably not, goblins seem to have an awfully hard time not eating anything they have captive for more than a day or so.
There are some world examples of smart goblins but as a whole they are highly uncivilized at their core and actively resist any sort of civilization. After all, if they weren't this way there are more than enough of them around that would would already see massive goblin kingdoms as well as a goodly amount of them in cities just being... people basically.
If you want to have them go ahead with it and make it a success you could maybe get a hold of the Kingmaker town building rules, you can modify as needed but it's a start anyway. I would have it all be VERY low tech and very ramshackle, play hard on the fact that the goblins just will not focus on a task for very long and tend to just make stuff up as it seems to fit, so maybe they plan a few blocks of buildings and come back to find that things are... not as they had hoped. You might also force them to use things like charms to get the goblins to cooperate with the PCs as they are somewhat xenophobic but if they are enough enamored with the person giving the orders maybe they would try REAL hard.
Even if you are playing more as say the LOTR goblins than the PF/D&D goblins who will at least massively organize and somewhat follow a hierarchy, they still don't ever build much of anything and their "civilazation" usually consists mostly of huge numbers (I always thought that goblins in general must not eat much and have a LOT of babies considering their mortatilty rate even when used seriously)

[dhasenan]

So it's a downtime activity, and you want to show the town evolving and improving over time.

Ask the players at the start of each downtime segment what they want to prioritize. Decide on the concrete manifestation of that priority. Pull a number out of your butt for how long it will take. When the adventurers return, you roll a die for how successful the town was on that front. Maybe a 1 means it's only half-finished, a 5 means it's shoddy, and a 20 means it's masterwork equivalent or they overdelivered. You asked for a palisade and they have an actual wall; you asked for a covered stockpile and they built a proper barn.

This will be faster than realistic, but it lets your party have an impact that they can measure.


What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.

Goblin warrior Gokhalbah can go raiding and get as much in a day as you'd have me produce in a season. That's what she's been doing as part of the warband for years. Why should she farm or mine instead? Even the PC party goes raiding.

Goblins who have mainly been raiding won't know much about how to farm or build buildings. They might need to rely on slaves, unless your party can find some instructors willing to risk living among goblins. Or maybe, in your universe, goblins have always augmented raiding with agriculture and have maintained the skills necessary for that -- smithing, but not mining or smelting; planting and growing and hunting, but not enough to feed an entire large town.

They might have an easier time if you can get them to worship a Lawful, orderly, or community-oriented deity. This would give them an influence that works even in your absence that will help them maintain order. It potentially helps with diplomacy with non-goblins -- they'll likely get more support for both training and trade from other species if there's a shared deity, or at least if they had a deity that is less likely to encourage your village to pillage, raze, and overtake neighboring towns. Bralm (Complete Divine) would be ideal.


Would villains even attack the town directly if the PCs are running around separate from it?

The town contains a goblin warband. They've presumably been raiding for a while. A posse trying to bring them to justice would possibly invade. Or a rival warband.

[GilesTheCleric]

I think that the PF Kingmaker campaign has rules for this sort of thing.

[Zancloufer]

Looking around I didn't see anything immediate for kingmaker (other than paid pdfs for the adventure path it's self) but Pathfinder does have a section on kingdom building (http://www.d20pfsrd.com/gamemastering/other-rules/kingdom-building/).

Though it does seem like it would take a LONG time and BP seem seriously overpriced in case of GP to gold ratio (even a simple farm is worth at least 2k GP for the smallest of kingdoms).

If I do use this are there any suggestions on things to look out for or tweak a little?

[daremetoidareyo]

Goblins breed really fast. That's like, lore, or something.

So the fastest way for the PCs to handle this situation is selective breeding for traits like docility and intelligence. Probably gonna want to a 10 female to male ratio.

Further, I don't know if its ever been tried before, but the players could force a matriarchal matrilineal society onto the masses of goblins too. Seeing as how they have the burden of reproduction, they are more likely to prioritize and articulate their cultural needs better than the expendable pollen that is a goblin male warrior. This will also allow you to remove males, except for your "bulls", and put them into battle.

Break the great matrilineal lines into groups. Those groups can be convenient for your selective breeding, each representing a trait that you want to maximize, and it will give your underhordlings things to be proud about, like a dystopian future battle royale type situation.

[GilesTheCleric]

Goblins breed really fast. That's like, lore, or something.

So the fastest way for the PCs to handle this situation is selective breeding for traits like docility and intelligence. Probably gonna want to a 10 female to male ratio.

"It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors from youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence, and a cross section of necessary skills. Of course it would be absolutely vital that our top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Naturally, they would breed prodigiously, eh? There would be much time, and little to do. But ah with the proper breeding techniques and a ratio of say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could then work their way back to the present gross national product within say, twenty years".

[icefractal]

Though it does seem like it would take a LONG time and BP seem seriously overpriced in case of GP to gold ratio (even a simple farm is worth at least 2k GP for the smallest of kingdoms).I think you could start with those, but scale the BP cost and time amounts down even smaller. Maybe a week for the "cycle" period instead of a month, and somewhere between 1/2 and 1/10 for the gp amounts.

The Kingdom rules aren't very well balanced as strategic gameplay (some buildings are just better, there's no incentive to make anything resembling a functional town), but they work ok as a progress marker type of deal.

[Grollub]

I would think with even the stupidest/chaotic tribe ever... the society they have wouldnt be 100% raid based. There should be some level of farming/growing/planting that exists within their knowledge pool. I do think that it wouldnt be prioritized, or prevalent within any village.

I would think if the party was 100% dead serious to do this, the easiest way (tho costly) is to magically enhance the goblin intellect (raise their int score) and start an education process to teach them what you need... that or mindwipe/rape them and re-write the thought processes, re-building their minds into what you want from the ground up, as a tribe. :smallcool:

[Bullet06320]

did a campaign like this once, the PCs where a group of spellcasters, mostly necromancers, where being used/manipulated by a couple of high level followers of loki for entertainmanet(a different group of PCs)

one of the followers of loki used some illusion magic to pretend to be a goblin diety and conned an entire tribe to go live like men, and learn from them and do as men do, and pointed them in the direction of the of one group, right after they took over a town and reanimated it, lol
the following morning a group of goblins shows up on their doorsteps asking to be taught to live like men, LOL, the looks on the players faces was great

lots of great roleplaying involved, lots of fun too, it ended up a bit of failure tho, the PCs ended up getting feed up with the goblins and they ended up being reanimated and joined the ranks of the undead and marched on civilization that way.

the upside is the group of loki followers had a good laff and cornered the market on grain prices that season

[Fizban]

1) What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.
Depends on what you mean by warband and civilized. How many gobbos, what skills do they have, what skills do they lack, why are they uncivilized?

2) How could I model village development in the background? How fast would it grow? Like the party is going out and still adventuring, they just have this "home base" thing they are trying to build up from scratch. No I don't need to actually turn this into a full time job, then I can just throw the villains at it, burn the village down and get the party back on track via some sort of revenge plot.
PHB2's Affiliation rules (3.5) could cover this in the abstract, assuming they're capable of doing it in the first place. You're founding a new affiliation "goblin village," which then grows. It doesn't give you any details about how many people or what exactly their resources are (since an affiliation can be anything), but it does cover their area of influence and interaction with a few other things. You can have the enemy running their own organization, or assign checks and encounters for the goblin village and the PCs to deal with in order to avoid being crushed/grow more quickly, with the simplest being cash infusions from taking over his stuff/ loss of capital from having your stuff destroyed (and losing capital means you take massive setbacks towards growing/eventually disbands you).

Buildings are quite expensive, take a while to build, and require more infrastructure the better you want them to be. Building a "town" takes years, and converting a tribe is a far cry from an economic boom town grabbing up entrepreneurs. I have a special hatred for the Pathfinder rules and how they treat farms. A Farm is an appropriate amount of land that is farmed by a farmer, and that's quite a bit of land. The DMG 2 business rules put a hefty price tag on it, but at least that can be explained as the price of buying your way out of serfdom to the king and thus owning the business.

If you can harvest the raw material yourself, provide the labor yourself, and feed yourself while you're doing it, there is obviously no cost but time for your buildings. If you're carving a settlement out of the wilderness you don't need any money, but you do need people with the skills to do the job and whatever bits you can't actually get there. In order to immediately stop raiding the goblins would need enough supplies to drop what they're doing to immediately learn and begin farming, along with enough seeds and livestock to get them started. Which they can only obtain by. . . raiding, unless someone is willing to sell it to them. Which is one of the reasons the "uncivilized" humanoids remain so: other humanoids don't like the look of them and the gobbos usually lack the diplomantic skills to overcome that. That and the fact that best areas for farming are already taken.

[Nibbens]

Same party from the last thread of mine (if you read it).

So the party has gone out of their way to essentially establish themselves as the leaders of a decent sized goblin warband. After seeing how effective the goblin hoard was a against 2 NPCs literally a level higher than the party (spoiler alert: Not very) and probably some advice from others outside of the game, they have (temporarily) given up their plan of town conquest.

They instead want to "start a new goblin town" with farms and houses and livestock and whatnot. Teach the goblins how to build better things and be stronger.

So my questions are:

1) What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.

2) How could I model village development in the background? How fast would it grow? Like the party is going out and still adventuring, they just have this "home base" thing they are trying to build up from scratch. No I don't need to actually turn this into a full time job, then I can just throw the villains at it, burn the village down and get the party back on track via some sort of revenge plot.

Not that I am being a **** DM about it, just they might have (unintentionally) ticked off a bigger bad and they need to deal with it lest it come back and burn their town down.

3) Unless there is a way to kind of do that without mass goblin slaughter. Or reason. I mean the town should probably be in some danger. Would villains even attack the town directly if the PCs are running around separate from it?

I'd say do the extra leg work and run with it. Pick an attitude of the way you want the gobos to act in this town. For example: maybe 50% are stuck in the war band mentality. Maybe 30% are willing to give farming a try. Maybe 10% are willing to actually try out politics and leadership roles, 5% craftsmen and 3% Pc classes, and maybe - if you even dare - 2% religious positions.

Then, remember the stages of group cohesion: forming storming norming performing.

Once you have these two bits of info, proceeded in a (perhaps positive, dm leniency fashion).
Example: 50% of the town remains violent, while 30% try farming. The 50% assault the 30 percent. which in turn activates the 10% politicals to try and reign in the 50%. Maybe one particularly tough Gobo steps up to be a sherif. Boom, now you have a town with a large (and perhaps savage) military presence. Maybe 80% agree to become city guards and mercenaries, while the remaining 20% pretend to do and set up a criminal enterprises.

You can see this spiraling from here. The point is, if your PCs get to see some of the action of this, they'll feel important when the town asks the for help or they get to shape the direction the town grows in.

The last step is creating NPCs. This is vital. Once you've determined the outcome for your storming/norming phases, give stats to the makers and shakers of the town. Make your PCs get to know them... love them even. So they are motivated to help when called upon, and devastated when your main story comes crashing into their own little town. Maybe it doesn't destroy it (actually, I'd advise against that) but make your PCs feel the pain as the beloved innkeeper gets his home burned down one evening. Etc etc.

Posibilities are endless here - and you've just walked into a very rewarding part of DMing, in my opinion. Your PCs just took some of the work off your hands in creating a new town. :D

[Gruftzwerg]

1) What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.
- need of resources/trade. and who "wants" to trade with them?
- diplomatic problems. Other races might fear a bigger and wealthier becoming goblin civilization. Maybe your players need to do diplomatic tasks to prevent war (and there is always on enemy king/nation with a very high DC to overcome because of he/they hate/s all goblins).


2) How could I model village development in the background? How fast would it grow? Like the party is going out and still adventuring, they just have this "home base" thing they are trying to build up from scratch. No I don't need to actually turn this into a full time job, then I can just throw the villains at it, burn the village down and get the party back on track via some sort of revenge plot.

Depends how good they command, teach and lead them. And natural circumstances (weather, available recources) can also affect the progress.


3) Unless there is a way to kind of do that without mass goblin slaughter. Or reason. I mean the town should probably be in some danger. Would villains even attack the town directly if the PCs are running around separate from it?

Slave-hunter. Or bandits, looking for quick money. A beast/dragon who likes to feed from humanoids. just pick something.

[Flickerdart]

1) What kind of problems would the party face trying to get the goblins more "civilized" and starting up a somewhat self-sufficient town.
Who owns that land right now? The local lord might not like that some goblins are establishing a settlement.
What resources are there? Is there farmland? If so, where are they getting grain to plant? Are they using wild grain? In that case, their yields will be awful. What about water? Can the animal population support hunting by a settled peoples?



2) How could I model village development in the background? How fast would it grow? Like the party is going out and still adventuring, they just have this "home base" thing they are trying to build up from scratch. No I don't need to actually turn this into a full time job, then I can just throw the villains at it, burn the village down and get the party back on track via some sort of revenge plot.

There are only two ways to grow the village - make babies, or attract settlers. Making babies takes a very long time, so the village will not grow unless they seek out other goblin tribes to come settle. And then they have to make sure there are enough resources to sustain them.




3) Would villains even attack the town directly if the PCs are running around separate from it?
Depends if they know about it. If it's a podunk village in the middle of nowhere, they probably don't. If they do learn about it, they'll send mooks to loot it. Actual extermination takes a lot of effort.

[Vizzerdrix]

If the drow can make vrill from goblins, it shouldnt be too hard to humanize them.

[dhasenan]

Breeding quickly, for a humanoid race, might be a six month gestation, or giving birth to two or three at a time, or those who can give birth being pregnant most of the time, or hermaphrodism (doubling the percentage of the population that can bear children), or by vastly decreasing infant mortality (especially if goblins use an r-selection reproduction strategy).

If the oldest goblins are sixty, adulthood might be at ten years...which means that natural births won't cut the mustard.

If you have a large enough collection of casters, you can Polymorph Any Object up a population at a cost of two eighth level spells per new member. Hope you don't need the village to operate in an antimagic field...