Building a city with Leadership?

[Tvtyrant]

Why does everyone keep claiming that stronghold spaces have a defined size, and then citing a passage that explicitly says "a stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage?" It even says the rough approximation it's giving doesn't apply to all stronghold spaces. Only "most" of them.

Seriously, saying "things may or may not be about this big" is giving literally no information. It's like when a car insurance commercial says "save up to X, or more!" That combination of words is doesn't mean anything.

Probably because they give a general definition which aligns with a common sense definition, and the alternative given is to violate both the example and common sense definition entirely?

Imagine if I said "a Pizza is usually defined by layering bread, sauce, cheese and meat" and the other person immediately says "a hotdog is a pizza" so they can utilize a tax break on pizza sales because the "usually" can be stretched to mean anything. I could define the stronghold as being the sky and ground and the stronghold space everything between if we want to play that game. Why have an example if it meets nothing?

[Toliudar]

Functionally, what's the difference between having followers from Leadership, and having devoted followers from a series of good diplomacy checks? I would have thought that you would have analogous levels of control. Followers aren't thralls, after all - they still have autonomy.

[Doctor Despair]

Functionally, what's the difference between having followers from Leadership, and having devoted followers from a series of good diplomacy checks? I would have thought that you would have analogous levels of control. Followers aren't thralls, after all - they still have autonomy.

I'd think it's in the fact that Leadership specifies you have X followers for your leadership score, right? After the initial -1 tick for having caused the death of other followers, folks who die or cease to be your followers would be replaced, right?

[Blue Jay]

Why does everyone keep claiming that stronghold spaces have a defined size, and then citing a passage that explicitly says "a stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage?" It even says the rough approximation it's giving doesn't apply to all stronghold spaces. Only "most" of them.

You're deliberately reading the rules in bad faith, and you're surprised that nobody wants to go along with you on it?

[AvatarVecna]

A stronghold space isn’t rigidly defined in terms of square footage, but most stronghold spaces take up a 20-foot-by-20-foot-by-10-foot space; a simple one-room cottage takes up one stronghold space.

Stronghold Space: An abstract measure of volume within a building. While stronghold spaces don’t have a fixed size, an average stronghold space is equivalent to a 20-foot-by-20-foot room with a 10-foot-hugh ceiling.

Forbiddance
This spell is great for characters who have powerful enemies—and what character worth his salt doesn’t? Once cast upon an area, it prevents anyone with a different alignment from the caster’s from entering the area. It also seals the area against all planar travel into it, preventing people or monsters from making a surprise visit. Finally, it’s huge. You get a shapeable 60-foot cube per level—and each such cube is enough to cover fifty stronghold spaces.

"Most stronghold spaces are X" and "average stronghold space is X" aren't quite the same statement. The latter is about averages, the former is about frequency. To have an actual majority means 20x20x10 needs to be more common than all other possible volumes put together - that is to say, make up more than 50% of all cases.

If you had 10001 stronghold spaces, 5001 or more would have a volume of 4000 cubic ft. If 4998 of them have a volume of 1 cubic ft, 1 of them has a volume of 2 cubic ft, and 1 of them has a volume of 19995000 cubic ft, that would technically have "4000 cubic ft" as both the average and the clear majority, but at the same time you're purporting the idea that a 1x1x1 room, a 1x1x2 room, a 20x20x10 room, and a 310x430x150 are all equally valid "stronghold spaces" for the purpose of determining how much it should cost to build a "stronghold space" with this or that effect.

The point of saying "most" or "average" isn't to say that literally any volume is valid, it's more just to say that "stronghold spaces" don't have to be exactly precisely 20x20x10 as long as they're close (21x21x9 has similar total volume, but if SBG said "all stronghold spaces are 20x20x10", there's nitpicky chuckle****s in this community who would insist that such a volume takes up three stronghold spaces.

But more to the point, that kind of reading of the rules is kinda pointless. If you're willing to stretch definitions and "the rules don't say I can't" just to get a cheap stronghold, you could've just as easily gotten the equivalent of infinite money to build whatever kind of stronghold you want with all the bells and whistles you want, rather than tying yourself to a single city-sized courtyard with no additional buildings for the massive discount. Dying on this "you can get 99.9999999% off" hill is harder than dying on a different hill that gets you a 100% discount, so if you're going to be disingenuous anyway, why not go big?

EDIT: Oh and the Forbiddance quote was pulled mostly because, if we're gonna be persnickety and say that "most" doesn't mean all and therefore a space could be anything...the Forbiddance quote lays out that the spell grants [CL] volumes of 216000 cubic ft each, which are shapeable as you desire, but that this 216000 volume should cover 50 stronghold spaces. So even if you wanna be disingenuous, 216000 cubic ft is the maximum volume for a space - since going beyond that means you can't fit another 49 stronghold spaces of any size into that area.