fulk

...whatever works in your campaign. I prefer to follow the more historically based costs and to impose (partly out of game) social restrictions on things like reducing your household. They make more sense to me. In part, the fact that the RW did not follow your reasoning, suggest it doesn't reflect the medieval mind and economics. It isn't the real world, of course, so whatever works. Historically, lords continuously tried to reduce their SD and the crown had to shift to paying armies to get them in the field. But KAP doesn't model that because it doesn't seem very knightly in a romantic sense. So perhaps the lower RW costs reflect availability of knights who previously would have responded to a feudal summons. In the KAP world most knights and soldiers are already obligated, so you have to pay significantly more for mercenaries?

It also works for nobles who just go back to their brother's household where they were all the time. Noble families didn't just dump members out on the street. They maintained them in some way. Your steward is probably your younger brother or a cousin. Taking wages for the campaign season has advantages even at the lower wages. That 1L the merc picks up saves his uncle 1L in upkeep over the same period. The merc might capture a horse or ransom and make his way in the world, which is the big advantage. Lower wages also answers the question of "why hire mercenaries?" instead of just supporting a larger mesnie. It is more cost effective. Social expectations, and perhaps security and logistics, require you to maintain 1 knight per 10L, but you can hire troops when necessary. As an aside, at high merc costs, a schemer would increase his mesnie prior to a campaign (because it is more cost effective for that year) and anticipate that some portion of the mesnie will be KIA. Then, just don't replace them and the mesnie drops back down to around the normal expenditure. There are all sorts of machinations one can do to subvert and dodge the set up system. In the end, whatever works in your campaign. A lot has to do with how players (not characters) think. Players will come up with ideas that would never have occurred to a character in the same situation. I once had a player demand to create drilled pike infantry during the Uther period. He wanted to mix them with longbowmen, who didn't exist. I said no.

Obviously, YPMV. I like the lower wages. For one, there aren't really large mercenary companies running around Logres waiting to be hired. For me, hiring mercenaries involves recruiting your unlanded cousins and second sons of tennants etc. The campaign is a chance to make it big. They just go home afterwards if they don't. It's Lorgres not rinascimento Italy. As for numbers, I just wouldn't allow a run-of-the-mill vassal knight to attract large mercenary followings regardless (without a lot of story effort and adventure). He doesn't have the status for it in a status sensitive word. A knight might hire a few foot soldiers and a cousin or two. I just don't see him hiring 100 foot soldiers. I also just wouldn't allow PKs to mess with the BoEstate/Warlord economics. Some things are just done that way. If you're a lord, you need those knights and foot soldiers for administrative purposes and showing up at court with too small a retinue is embarrassing. Historically, of course, lords did increase and decrease the size of their households. But they often tried to maintain as large a following as possible for the status related to a large following. But that is just me.

One reason to not hire and fire from your household or mesnie is that, it is not done. As Morien noted, their are honor penalties. But realistically, every action doesn't need a game mechanic modifier to force players to do things. Reducing your mesnie is embarrassing because it means you cannot support it. It also violates oaths of fealty etc hence the loss of honor. Drop a bunch of people from your mesnie and you're the topic of gossip at court. You can arrange a good marriage because you can't be trusted to honor your oaths and you seem to be in financial difficulty. Mercenaries in KAP generally cost too much in terms of historical equivalents. Wages for knights (obviously vary with period) but typically weren't much higher than "normal" and were really only mean to cover expenses during the campaign. The knight would profit from raiding and ransoms. So if a knight needs 4L per year, he should cost about 1L per quarter, depending upon various factors. Mercenary wages tended to go up when the king was hirinig because lesser lords had to compete for available soldiers. In the same sense, there is nothing that says a PK with 100L MUST support 10 knights. You could try to economize. The assize of arms (both real world and I think KAP) list the number of hauberks, spears etc, that a lord must have, not the number of knights. One could certainly support fewer knights. Perhaps there would be a loss of honor, and you would certainly get in trouble if you showed up for a muster w/o the proper servitium debitum. But you would also be vulnerable to raids and bullying by your neighbors. Likewise, showing up to some event (court) with fewer than the expected mesnie would be embarrassing. NT

To save money in the off years. Realistically, in some periods, I think lords would be likely to maintain large a mesnie due to the general unrest. In others, they would want to save money for manorial development or whatever. It would depend on the level of unrest and potential for armed conflict. I think mercenaries are also overpaid (relative to historical levels) in KAP.

This was the whole point of switching from BoManor to BoEstate/Warlord. All the knight really needs to know is that his 10L manor covers him and gives him 1L to spend (was 2% in BoE but 10% in BoW). All of the tables on where the $$ goes are really just fluff, although fun and potentially useful.

I do like the 1/2 dex as a default weapon skill, although I might make it something like 1/2Dex +3, just to give a little bump. That would give your average knight a default of 8-9 on most weapon skills and gives the DEX 18 knight an advantage (WS12). Both the benefit and the problem with KAP is that the system is really so simple that it is hard to apply more complex calculations to it. That said, I think a lot of other "problems" like fighting without armor or defensively would be better served by applying a negative modifier to your opponent rather than giving a positive modifier to the PK because it would reduce the incidence of critical hits. Just a thought early, pre-caffe.

This is an endless argument that is not really worth pursuing here. It comes down to how big a modifier you chose to impose. No one is saying that they are exactly the same (hence not just having 1h weapon & shield as a skill). I just can't see a fully trained knight being essentially incompetent with other contemporary weapons. One thing that a lot of historical manuals do show is how the principles of use of one weapon (longsword) are can be applied to another (poleaxe). But again YPMV.

It is a tough one. IT depends on how you want to play it. One option would be to convince various magnates to help. Perhaps Countess Ellen will have some sympathy for another beleaguered countess. The two together would make a formidable pair in central Logres. When we played it, the PKs got the King of Forest Sauvage to help. They had to run a whole series of Adventures for him and then owed him a favor in the future, eventually taking their forces (when they had some followers) into the forest to fight a battle. You could also run it more like an Arthurian adventure. Don't run a siege. Have the PKs fight one-on-one with the userpers. The Custom of the Castle is a common theme in Arthurian (and some later literature). Associate some 'evil' custom with the userpers' holding of each castle. Every knight who passes with a damsel has to fight the userper. Whoever wins, keeps the castle. At the same time, the people judge the damsels. Whoever is prettier becomes the lady of the castle. The PK then fights the current holder of the castle, kills him, then ends the custom. The trial should include some combat vs the current holder plus some trait challenge (Just vs Merciful for example). Given the custom it might be Just to kill both the knight and the uglier lady, but Christian Mercy will break the evil custom when the knight refuses to behead the lesser damsel. Or some think like that. If the knight wins the fight, and beheads one of the damsels, it is Just, because those are the rules, but now he's stuck fighting every knight who passes by with a damsel. (Might have read something similar but not exactly the same somewhere...)

I have nothing against DEX/2. I've done that too. Nevertheless, is seems low to me. If you're 15 Sword, I can't see being Mace 5 (assuming DEX 10). Nevertheless, YPMV. Whatever you like.

My feeling is that weapon skills for knights should all just start at 10. Think of it as general training. Mace 10 seems reasonable. Remember that dropping from Sword 15 to Mace 10 is a pretty big drop. Even if it makes buying up weapon skills to 15 fairly easy, those are points that could have been used elsewhere. I just wouldn't stress over complicated details in a game that has a fairly simple combat system. NT

In the end, it's just a game. I like all three books for various reasons. I don't like the funky place names. In terms of handing out manors, when it is time, I'd suggest letting the knight have the manor that the player wants. I just always liked the name Netheravon. My PK doesn't really care about the name, but I do...so that is the manor I got. It had no real affect on the game, I just liked the name.

AAAA-PERSON. 😃 I wonder what it would take to 'find and replace' all the place names...and update the files...I'd even buy new hard copies.

I agree with Morien, although I don't follow that advice! Greg constantly tinkered, so there are a lot of inconsistencies. Many of the PK manors listed in KAP 5.2 and earlier are not worth 10L in the Domesday data. It is hard to make some things match up properly. It is a gran roturre di palle. I kind of hate all the KAP place names. It makes everything difficult. I would pay good money to have Uther, Estates and Warlord redone using the modern place names, so everything is easy to find on a map.

Hmm. they seem to not work well any more.

The format of the Open Domesday has changed. You used to be able to see the geld for each settlement when you looked at the hundreds. Now it shows households. I think at the time, Greg just cut and past stuff into an excel file. There is an API. I used it ages ago do download the Domesday data to make a Book of Estate spread sheet. You might try the API. There are some examples if you follow the API links. The data are nice to have because they include Lat/Lon data so that you can also map out the locations of larger holdings. One thing I can't remember is what data Greg used for the values. The Domesday Book lists value to the lord in 1066, 1086, and the geld. Greg used some percentage of one of those for the value of the settlements in a hundred.

We have canceled games. Bit of a bummer, but in the grand scheme of things, not that bad.

I think in the end, Greg (we) decided it was too much of a pain and not really what the game was about. Cost does seem to have gone up. You can see the absolute values of income to "qualify" for knighthood go up historically, but I'm not clear on whether the relative cost really went up. Certainly, the cost of plate dropped over time. Horses varied a lot, but were often in the range of the annual income for a knight for the better animals. NT

Part of the point of BoE was to not have to do a lot of economics. That said, Warlord and Estates are supposed to be Early Phase. Perhaps one day we'll do some sort of later phase supplement. At one point, Greg had thought about doing a Book of Economics or something like that, which would have detailed changes through time like introduction of the heavy plow/plough, 3 field rotation, increasing $$ required to be a knight, etc.

There would be Manorial Courts, not just the Hundred Court. Those would cover the Your Own Land bit for vassal knights.

Your Pendragon May Vary. Play it how you want. I tend to agree that the PCs in an RPG are supposed to be successful overall as long as they don't do stupid things. However, different games are different. In RPGs like DnD or Palladium, PCs are supposed to be better than the average joe. They are heroes. In Pendragon, knights are, by design, better than everyone else because that is the genre. In Chaosium-BRP games, PCs are often much more realistically powered. If your group is perfectly happy having your PCs die all the time, that's fine. Might even be fun to change characters more frequently. As a corollary, I think one of the things that made Game of Thrones interesting was that major characters could die and often did. It add real risk to your PK and make 'winning' more satisfying. I also think that a good way of thinking about NPCs it to understand their place in the story and purpose in the game. In some cases, they're just mooks to let the group have a fight and win. If might be essential to the story that the PKs defeat a bunch of bandits and move onto some mystery uncovered while searching the bodies. In other cases the NPCs are major elements and are as powerful or more powerful than the PCs. I don't think that worrying about "fairness" really matters all the time. Other times, the PCs should lose...running away can be fun too. I mean half of the Lord of the Rings is the Fellowship running away from orcs. That said, after some though...if you want to make spears better, I might give the spearman's opponent a -5 modifier (or maybe -2). That gives the spearman an advantage of reach, but doesn't make a critical by the spearman more likely (at higher skills).

So, I've been away from KAP for a while, but I tried to read through most of this thread as it interested me. A couple of thoughts/points. (1) KAP is a genre game so a lot of the design choices are based on the genre, not reality (Greg and I used to email a lot re Book of Castles and other topics, including weapons). In KAP, the Sword is the best weapon because it is emblematic of knights. The whole thing with it breaking maces etc, is meant to give it an Arthurian advantage. Greg said it was a conscious design choice (I was arguing at the time that I thought the whole sword-breaks-mace type rule was unrealistic). Obviously YPMV and you can easily ignore the sword-breaks-mace and similar rules, which are not really realistic. Nevertheless, knights in the sources fight either with lance on horseback or sword. Basic spears are for peasants...in the genre. (2) I think of KAP combat mechanics as quite simple. It isn't clear to me that the range advantage of a spear is worth modeling. However, if I did, I might just give a +2 to the attack roll or something like that. (3) In these various arguments, I think it is always worth recognizing the original poster's intent. I don't think more realistic combat rules are relevant for KAP, but if that is what you want, I can be interested in how to implement it. (4) Cost of armor and horses. The rising costs were also a specific design choice by Greg. In part, PKs have probably amassed some wealth by the later periods and the rising costs of horse and armor is supposed to mimic historical trends and stress the player finances a bit. If you want more complicated combat, I think it would be quite easy to use a Chaosium/BRP cousin. I've toyed with the idea.

If one were to update the BGB, my main request would be to keep the format as black print on matte, white paper. I find all the glossy stuff or anything with a background hard to read, esp with glare etc. But, my eyes are old. Otherwise, I'm not sure what I would really change. The BGB is pretty...big. So adding stuff might be difficult. However, I could see adding Stunts and similar options form varius BRP pubs, and perhaps adding something like advantages and disadvantages. A non BGB option might be instead to produce a Compendium of these additional rules.

I would be inclined to disagree. Clothing is just part of your annual budget. If you live at a Superlative level, you have Superlative clothing, which is replaced every year that you can maintain that level of spending. Display is important and clothing is a primary form of display. One could obviously limit this effect to degradable items. So an ermine-lined cloak is part of your Superlative clothing budget, but a gold ring, which would retain value, is not. Alternatively, a gold ring could be part of the Superlative budget but go out of style over time also losing value, even though it's gold. Depends on how much tracking of small stuff you want to do. We could argue about whether or not simple knights are allowed to wear superlative clothing. There were certainly various sumptuary laws and traditions about who could wear what. So perhaps your simple vassal knight isn't allow to wear an ermine-lined cloak. Then I suppose one could limit the value of clothing actually worn. I'm not a huge fan of minor book-keeping, so I prefer to let most that the small stuff just fall in the annual budget and assume that the knight has the same value of clothes each year that his spending is the same.

True. But you can't have everything. Plus, I'm not sure if that is a quirk or a feature...