Lyre of building solved

[Linearblade]

This has been done a few times before. But nobody has yet to my knowledge applied it to actual castle construction time

https://www.guedelon.fr
Reasonably detailed map:
https://pierrickauger.wordpress.com/2015/08/20/le-chantier-medieval-de-guedelon/amp/

This is a modern, in progress and on schedule project.

They have apparently been building a modest castle for the last 20 or so years using solely 13th century methods and tools.

The project is scheduled to go until 2023, when it will be finished . Their team consists of 40-50 dedicated builders.

Anyhow, this is very convenient for us, considering the lyre of building constructs things with a 100 man team.

So let the conversions begin!
Assumptions
Guédelon man days of production:
1) presumably the modern team works 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. (In the past, it was believed the annual work hours totaled 1620, or about 135 days a years, but let’s keep it simple for now)

2) the total man days of labor produced by a 50 man team in a week is 250 hours

Lyre of building man days in production
1) the lyre produces 100 x 3 days per use, or 300 work days. You can play twice without a check, so 600. In other words, using the lyre 60 minutes a week, you can build Guédelon in about 10 years, including the materials.

2) assuming you can take 10, or otherwise auto make dc 18 with a 1, and you easy button 8 hours only, that’s 600x8=4800, or 19.2 times as fast, or 68 weeks.

3) assuming you have the slightest amount of gumption in life to do something other than build a castle for the next year, let’s say you hire/cohort/follower whatevs and power through this at 16 hours for 1 day a week, or hire a bard to do it for you (and why wouldn’t he, he’s free to wank off for the rest of the week) that’s 38.4 times the regular speed.

4) That means 38.4 x 50 = the equivalent of 1920 laborers

Or 34 weeks of construction.

Guédelon construction info. Not directly applicable currently. I’m including it as a reference.
1) 25 years of build time INCLUDES materials. They source all their own materials with their crew, AND build the castle.

2) 3.5e assumes 30% goes to material cost.

Guédelon In dnd 3.5 strong hold space terms.
1) by the looks of what I could find , the site consists of 5 3-4 story towers, a keep, and a larger 5- 6 story tower.

2) the keep is 3 stories.

3) I am estimating the strong hold spaces to be 40. 5 small tower x 3, 1 large tower x 5, keep = 15, extra like a couple courtyard, basement stables etc = 40

4) curtain wall is 30 ft tall, about 5 feet at the top, therefore, it’s 3 wide at the base.lets add packed earth to the middle of the base. Meaning 5 units of hewn stone for each 10 foot section. Or 3k/10 feet

5) the curtain wall is roughly 155ft by 175ft. I have not excluded the towers from the curtain, nor the keep. there are 66 sections of wall. Costs 198k gp (really, less)

6) 40 ss x 6000 hewn stone (were adventurers, and build times in dnd are absurdly fast, so let’s just go with the best-ish) = 240k gp

7) price for shell structure: (without furnishing the stronghold spaces with the actual space) 438k.

8) 40 ss space. Let’s add 1k (likely overkill) per space, 40k

9) total cost = 480k, or 48 weeks of production in dnd land.
———————————————-
Conclusions:

Dnd production assumes the Use of magic / alchemy/ mythical beasts / whatever to speed the construction times. These costs are baked into the overall labor cost, and not materials. .Yet it is still 1.41 times slower than what the magical rockstar bard can achieve.

However, for those who want to know how many laborers are involved in a no magic world, we can make the following estimate.

Manual construction is 1.41 times slower than max speed strumming of a lyre.

Lyre reasonably utilized at 16 hours per week is 1920 laborers.

1920 x 1.41 is 2707 laborers on site to bang this out in the dnd time scale.


An easy solution to using a lyre buildings castle with curtain is.

(Desired stronghold spaces) / 40 * 34 weeks = your construction time, INCLUDING the materials.

I’ll break out the materials cost later and provide that (1:30 am currently)

[Tiktakkat]

The Stronghold Builder's Guide entry on the Lyre of Building explicitly notes that a stronghold's cost is 30% labor, 70% material.
No particular explanation is given for this distinction from the Craft skill rules, most likely because there is no specific DC associated with building a stronghold.

If one were to assign such a skill, it would likely be DC 15. With the DC 18 Perform check required for subsequent hours of playing the Lyre, the result would be 32,400 cp of production per hour of playing at the per day rate for using the Craft.
It would be 32,400 sp using the weekly rate multiplied by .6 to reflect only 3 days of work instead of 5.

Going with your cost of 480K, it would require a bit over 148 hours of playing to produce that much value.
That is 2 years and 10 months working 1 hour/day, or 19 weeks for 8 hour sessions.
Of course that would still have to be reconciled with the different base cost for strongholds.

If you need to use the Lyre to produce the building materials, assuming it can actually be used for such raw material gathering and general manufacturing in the first place, you require either 160K (using standard Craft rules) or 336K of such (using the SBG cost).
That is 50 hours of playing for the PHB cost, which is just short of 1 year as a spare time project, or 7 weeks of serious studio work.
It is 104 hours of playing for the SBG cost, which is 2 years or 13 weeks.

So 26-32 weeks total, or 7-8 months.
If you insist on abusing a cohort or hireling, you can cut that in half, but outside of undead or significant healing magic I do not think 16 hour sessions should be possible.

[Linearblade]

The Stronghold Builder's Guide entry on the Lyre of Building explicitly notes that a stronghold's cost is 30% labor, 70% material.
No particular explanation is given for this distinction from the Craft skill rules, most likely because there is no specific DC associated with building a stronghold.


Yea, I didn’t do that yet In the calcs. It seems reasonable to do so,

But since there is a castle that is presently being built, and they are sourcing their own labor and constructing it, with the entire workforce of 50, I decided to go with that as the baseline.




If one were to assign such a skill, it would likely be DC 15. With the DC 18 Perform check required for subsequent hours of playing the Lyre, the result would be 32,400 cp of production per hour of playing at the per day rate for using the Craft.
It would be 32,400 sp using the weekly rate multiplied by .6 to reflect only 3 days of work instead of 5.


Going with your cost of 480K, it would require a bit over 148 hours of playing to produce that much value.
That is 2 years and 10 months working 1 hour/day, or 19 weeks for 8 hour sessions.
Of course that would still have to be reconciled with the different base cost for strongholds.

If you need to use the Lyre to produce the building materials, assuming it can actually be used for such raw material gathering and general manufacturing in the first place, you require either 160K (using standard Craft rules) or 336K of such (using the SBG cost).
That is 50 hours of playing for the PHB cost, which is just short of 1 year as a spare time project, or 7 weeks of serious studio work.
It is 104 hours of playing for the SBG cost, which is 2 years or 13 weeks.



Seems reasonable, gotta run the math. How is 104 hours of playing 2 years tho ? Are you saying 104 hours of playing for 1 hour only a day?


So 26-32 weeks total, or 7-8 months.
If you insist on abusing a cohort or hireling, you can cut that in half, but outside of undead or significant healing magic I do not think 16 hour sessions should be possible.

I included the 8 hours of play, since I think this duration of play will get some differences of opinion.

I think it’s certainly gonna be harder. To justify without assistance. But then again many people pull longer than 8 hour work days.

In fact medieval labor pulled 12 hour work days, and worked only 135 days a year.

So clearly manual labor is possible, so I think playing the lyre Likely is too, but mileage obviously varies on this section.

[Tiktakkat]

Seems reasonable, gotta run the math. How is 104 hours of playing 2 years tho ? Are you saying 104 hours of playing for 1 hour only a day?

That is using the lyre without having to make a skill check. That first hour is "free".


I included the 8 hours of play, since I think this duration of play will get some differences of opinion.

I think it’s certainly gonna be harder. To justify without assistance. But then again many people pull longer than 8 hour work days.

In fact medieval labor pulled 12 hour work days, and worked only 135 days a year.

So clearly manual labor is possible, so I think playing the lyre Likely is too, but mileage obviously varies on this section.

It is possible in real life for sure.
That game tends to assume 8 hours for pretty much all labor tasks, from ordinary crafting and work to magic item creation, and often imposes that as a hard limit in later rules. While none was ever assigned to a lyre of building, I would Rule 0 it if a player tried building his palace in a week with one.