Morien

I do not give Glory for childbirth to female knights. They are knights, they get glory for martial deeds, not woman stuff. Same reason why I don't give them extra 1000 marriage Glory that I give to lady characters: the female knights already got the 1000 knighting glory. Interesting suggestion, although I have two complaints from realism perspective: 1) The male's CON doesn't seem to matter all that much: men stay fertile even to advanced age. 2) I am not sure that the Aging table would cause the woman's CON to drop as steeply as the pregnancy probability does in real life. But this would be easy to fix by simply adding an Age modifier, say -1 to CON past 35 for childbirth purposes. Since you pretty much should add something similar to the current childbirth table anyway. It actually would work relatively well to just roll Woman's CON to see if she becomes pregnant. -10 if she gave birth last year, -1 per year past 35. Bad stuff happening on a fumble (another CON roll to survive), twins on a crit. I admit that I am warming up to the idea, especially as you said, one could just use the average cultural CON for NPC wives. (And roll a CON for follower wives, since you are keeping track of their skills anyway at that point...)

The only problem is that I would have to keep track of the NPC wife's CON and Aging, too, and since I am a LazyGM, I don't wanna be doing that. I only need to change the table once and I am done. Since I don't kill female PKs off at childbirth anyway, I have just been giving them a Major Wound on the death in childbirth result. Having them roll CON and take a Mortal Wound (3 major wounds) on a failure could be an option, and sailing through on a CON crit. Since it is a PK in this case, the player is already keeping track of CON & Aging, so I don't have to worry about it. On the other hand, it is a bit of 'piling on' in the case of Female Knights, who already risk life and limb same as the Male Knights.

One aspect that I really recommend you houserule is the childbirth and child survival tables. As you have already noticed, the childbirth is murderous for the (non-PK) women, ensuring that most of them die in childbirth within a decade. Combined with the child survival that kills 4 out of 5 children, this means that it is very difficult to get surviving children, and since the dynastic gameplay is one of Pendragon's primary strengths, this is a big problem, IMHO. My own houserules are a bit too long to include here, but here are two quick suggestions (assuming you use KAP 5.2; ESTATE already fixes the child survival with Family Survival): 1) Childbirth: Change the mother and child die in childbirth to a simple no pregnancy result. Then change the 'child survives, mother dies' into a 1d6 roll: 1-2 child dies, 3-4 both die, 5-6 mother dies. This lowers the death chance to 3.33% per year, which is still very very high, but at least gives a woman 50/50 chance of making it through 20 years of childbirth. 2) Child survival: Change the table so that 1 = death, and stop rolling once they reach 7 years of age. This gives about 70% survival rate, which is roughly historical. Naturally, with those changes, you don't need to apply any bonuses from higher Grade of Maintenance (or penalties for the low one... even at Poor, the knight's family is still eating much better than the peasants, they are not starving!). Instead, I would use any excess spending as Conspicuous Consumption: 10 Glory per £1 extra used, so someone living as Rich (£9) would get extra 30 Glory.

That is very close the way I handle it too for lady characters. 1000 marriage glory for the 1st marriage and then the extras for husband's title and glory etc.

Me three. As for the measurable bonus... depends. As I stated above, I would much rather just have the standard of living (above ordinary) as conspicuous consumption rather than give any child or horse related bonuses. That being said, I would be totally happy giving an APP bonus or a Courtly skill bonus if you are dressed well. One thing I have been thinking off and on is limiting the Glory Skill Bonus by the extra £1 you pay for your standard of living. So if you are living as a Rich knight, you'd get +3 to +5 if you have the Glory to back it up. If you are dressed like a scruffy mercenary knight, no bonus for you!

Yeah, seems strange that the vassal knight gets a check simply because the liege pays him a visit, but the household knights with the liege don't get a check. I wouldn't give Folk Lore, as the household knights don't have to deal as much with the peasantry. Instead, I would give Courtesy as they are witnessing examples of correct courtly etiquette all the time. Homage Lord would seem like a good one, too, as they are spending their time with the lord and hopefully finding him worthy of their loyalty (if not, I would allow a player to take -1 Homage, instead). Then add a forth check from the Vassal Service, and done!

@jeffjerwin I'd be very curious to hear more about your campaign & play. Do you have a campaign webpage, or would you be interested in starting a new thread discussing the Lady characters? I understand that it is a somewhat different dynamic when you have all the players playing, primarily, Lady characters. In our group, it has been more of a case of playing a lady knight (now 3 out of 6 knights), so it mostly plays the same way as a fully male knight group would, or one has played a lady healer type. The latter is obviously different when you have 5 (usually male) knights and 1 lady healer, the lone lady being more of a support character. Although in our first GPC playthrough, she managed to become quite influential, and the PKs became more of her personal bodyguards / henchmen.

I presume, Solo Scenarios, KAP 5.2 pp. 230-231 in particular. Own Land gives three checks (Intrigue, Folk Lore, Stewardship), and potentially a Just check or a sure Arbitrary check. Vassal Service, on the other hand, says: "For each activity, the character gains a check in any one from among a number of Skills and Traits (player’s choice)." And the subsequent lists make it clear that this is, indeed, 'pick one'. So, assuming that the Vassal Knight is doing 'Own Land', he gets 3+1 checks, while a household knight doing 'Vassal Service' gets 1 check. Of course, there is no rule that the household knight couldn't, say, roll 3 times for the 'Vassal Service' if the GM agrees.

I generally don't. In our campaign and in my experience (YPWV), Death happens infrequently enough and usually close enough to the end of the session, that the player has time to make a new character before the next session. It is also rare that there would be need for multiple characters, as usually that one big fight is the climax of the adventure, and the PKs have time to heal afterwards anyway. Also, it is occasionally the case that the one player whose character is all banged up can't make it into the game anyway, so it is actually a good excuse why the character stays home healing up. Now this is not always the case, and we did have a situation after St. Albans when stuff was going down, but half of the group were still unconscious or close enough after the battle. So in this case, we did create their spares, who had been left in Salisbury to garrison it, like Atgxtg suggested, and played an adventure with them. The problem with secondary characters is that they dilute the story, IMHO. It is already hard enough to give 6 players enough limelight within a game year to let their personalities shine through. Add the need for the secondary characters, and you either end up splitting the little time you have, or they might just as well not exist, since they are not being played*. Or you end up running twice as many adventure to give spares something to do, which gums up the works and slows the campaign even more. Now if you have less players, these problems are diminished, and the need for spares might be higher as even one knight missing from the roster is a bigger fraction of the whole 'party'. Other than that, I pretty much agree with what Atgxtg said. If I would have a need for spares, then that is pretty much the way I would use them. * One advantage of waiting until they are needed is that you are more free to fill in their backstory, even adding marriages and children if they are old enough for such. In particular, I tend to give the new characters a benefit of the doubt if they are old enough to have participated in some battles, and allow them to have some previous Glory from that. It helps to cushion the blow a bit, and give a sense that they were doing their bit, rather than having been always assigned to the garrison hell. I strongly, strongly encourage being liberal with checks. As Atgxtg says, it is going to take years anyway for the characters to improve significantly. My rule of thumb is that if I call for a skill roll and it is anything else than a failure, I give a check. I sometimes even give checks without rolling: "You spent a lot of time interacting with various faeries this year, all of you, check Faerie Lore. Oh, and you spent the summer riding back and forth through Britain, check Horsemanship as well, and thanks to all the visits to various courts, Courtesy and Intrigue." I usually ask the players at the end of the year to identify a trait or a passion that they think would deserve a check, and a couple of skills that they would have been practicing on the side, as it were. Often enough these are skills that they rolled but failed at. If the game year doesn't end with a few checks in Traits and Passions and 10 or so in skills, the player has probably been missing for most of it.

By RAW (KAP 5.2, p.130), the best set of the PK's clothing is halved in value. PERSONALLY, I use that rule ONLY if a PK has gone out of their way to buy especially fancy stuff and not having the Grade of Maintenance to back it up. In short, if the PK has Ordinary maintenance, then he is able to replace/repair his £1 clothing, no questions asked. By RAW, higher grade of maintenance gives bonuses to childbirth and child survival. PERSONALLY, I toss those modifiers out. The peasants seem to be breeding just fine. And if you use the Family Survival from ESTATE, that is already calibrated with historical data, so it works without the modifiers. However, if you are using KAP 5.2 p. 131, then by all means, give everyone at least +1 and for god's sake, stop rolling at 7 years old. 10% chance of death for 15 years = 20.6% survival rate, 1 in 5. Add the huge childbirth mortality for the mother, and you can forget about having the heiress you spent most of the campaign pursuing giving you any heirs. (Can you guess what my number 1 & 2 pet peeves with KAP 5.2 are?) So how do I PERSONALLY deal with grade of maintenance? Easy, it is just conspicuous consumption, full stop. Worth Glory, nothing else.

Nope, it is clear that you continue onwards to roll from the Family Member table to find who the promoted person is. No chance of the PK himself. Even if it was the PK himself, I still would not be handing off count positions on a 10% yearly random roll. No, I fully agree with you that if someone wants to play a high-powered game with the PKs as Barons or even more, they should feel free! In our Middle-earth campaign, one PK ended up as the son-in-law to King Anarion of Gondor, and they all would have been minor barons in KAP scale anyway. What I am arguing against is putting such a promotion on a 10% yearly random roll. It becomes distressingly common, and cheapens the work needed to get there. Now it is just random luck which will eventually happen to some lucky NPC.

That is the point. It is NOT the PKs, but Cousin Random over there. I don't want that to happen just because a Player rolled 19-20 in a yearly roll. That is way way too often to even be something interesting to throw into the mix. Now, if you do another 1d20 to see what kind of a promotion it is and then you roll 20 again, well then we can start talking about how he managed to steal the heart of the baronial widow or something... But 10% yearly chance per Player is way too common. You actually make it WORSE by moving out of Logres, since there are fewer barons. And as I am trying to get through here, it is not the PKs earning their promotions, but a random family member getting promoted thanks to a 10% chance per Player on a yearly roll.

Absolutely not. As Tizun Thane said, don't bother with harvest at all. The rules in BotE give you £1 per £10 (average manor) per year that you can spend as you wish. The rest goes to supporting the family and the retainers and the servants. If you ARE doing harvest, I highly recommend keeping it simple. £1d6-3 per manor works well enough, and I'd even allow Stewardship successes to add £1 to that. If you get less than £0, then the family drops to Poor, unless you can make up the lack with loot or hoarded treasure. This keeps the land producing some (usually), but not so much as to make loot immaterial.

Yes. See p. 7.

The thing is that this is a step to become a Baron (in Pendragon). It is not something I am just going to give away to a PK's family member 5% of the time. If you have 4 players, the chances are that one of them rolls this every 5 years or so. You'll end up with all of them having a baron in generation. Sure, if you demand that it would require more promotions (as it bloody well should!), even then you start getting into some problems. Sure, it takes longer, but you are again looking on average like one roll of 19 per 20 years. It is actually worse, since result 20 is that you can pick, so you get 19 or 20 every 10 years. Since the campaign is about 80 years, you have 8 picks collected! Per PK! According to your 3 pick promotion scheme, this would be 2-3 barons per PK. Even worse from storytelling perspective is that unless the PKs themselves are Barons, they end up eclipsed by their NPK relatives. (As it happens, this sorta happened in our playthrough, as one NPK became the head of the family and the banneret leader of all the PKs. They managed to join an invasion of Normandy and thanks to some critical rolling at the appropriate time, the NPK managed to lead them to victory which resulted in a baronial estate in Normandy. But this took a lot of doing across a few years by the PKs and the NPK himself, it wasn't a random family event roll.) My Players are averaging maybe one grant manor per generation. Certainly not one Baron per generation! And if there is a baron, it can bloody well be one of the PKs who has worked for it, not some lucky SOB relative since you rolled a 19 or 20 enough times! Oh, a quick shout-out also to the Personal Events (Table 10-9) in Paladin. I like! (Although I would not have a knightly bastard on a failed Chaste! Perhaps those Frankish noblewomen like to play fast and loose...)

Yep. Much superior to the default KAP 5.2 Family Events, I must say. Given the choice between the two, I'd just swipe the Paladin ones to use for KAP. The only result that I am not too crazy about is the promotion (19), simply because it seems like a too big a step for Pendragon and would usurp the leading role of the PK as the head of the family. In Paladin, the family clan is stronger and bigger, so it makes some sense there, but I would still be hesitant to include such an event. Instead, I might do a smaller promotion, like someone in the family gets knighted (adding a family knight) or one of the already existing family knights becomes a landed knight.

Well, YPWV, but in my little corner of the universe, not only do I separate Marriage and Title Glory for women (same for husbands, if they marry a widowed heiress, they get Marriage AND Title glory), but I even go a step further and houserule the whole marriage Glory shebang so that it actually matters how much Glory the husband has. Currently, any schlub who is a knight would max you out, no matter if it was Sir Lancelot or Sir Couch-Potato.

Yes, you are right. I got it confused with another chart, Expanded Manor Luck, which has LUC as an attribute that you roll from time to time, and can get modifiers on.

Found it. BotW, p. 5: "Note, however, that the maximum Glory gained for any title, including those gained through marriage, is 1000 points. This is the maximum amount of Glory that may be awarded for any single event in King Arthur Pendragon." I'll just dissent a bit from that. Not that it is that important, since it would only apply for Guinever, but I do think that she would deserve the 1500 Glory for becoming the Queen of the High King, rather than just an 'ordinary' Queen which is already worth 1000.

I separate Badon to its constituent daily battles, too. Then again, since I don't use BoB and I definitely would not use the multipliers for extended melees, it is less likely that I come up with a situation where the 1000 Glory rule would get broken in any single Battle. (As stated above, I consider Badon to be a series of battles rather than one long one. The first day is not even fought on the Badon Hill!) I would find it very difficult to deny someone 1000+ Glory if they have earned it like taking down a Dragon single-handedly, or some such. Of course you can claim that while the Dragon itself is just the RAW 1000 Glory, the extra for doing it single-handedly and achieving the quest goal are separate rewards, although at least the single-handed bonus is clearly related to the same event. Curiously enough, I just went through KAP 5.2, and I couldn't find where this max 1000 rule is stated. I know I have read it somewhere, but p.122 explicitly states that you can get more: "Those occasions from which more than 1,000 points can be gained are invariably unique and deadly (the Battle of Badon Hill, for instance)."

That is how I interpreted them as well. IIRC, the guy who came up with these charts had a house rule for a Luck attribute. Unfortunately, I can't remember the details, but maybe some other forumite can.

Glad you liked it. Yes. I am in favor of that too, as well as rewarding APP Glory for courtly skill successes, rather than a flat 10. It is not a huge amount of Glory, but it does help those who have invested some points to APP. In particular Ladies, who must rely on, mainly, for Court Glory since they are unlikely to fight in duels, tournaments, adventures or battles.

This is again one of those things where KAP 5.2 didn't update everything that it should have. 200 Glory is correct. When you get knighted, you get 1000 Glory. THEN you become a vassal and get granted land, earning you the 200 Glory. Two separate occasions, both give their full value: 1000 Glory + 200 Glory. Same if you marry a widowed heiress who has loads of Glory. You get 1000 Glory for the marriage and THEN you get the titles. Two occasions again.

You are tracking the FAMILY's politics (see pp. 15-16). So if the Grandfather is a Dissident, so will the rest of the family be, too. All the exceptions to this are mentioned in the text, including one where a Loyalist Grandfather is assassinated, and hence the Father grows up to be a Dissident.

I took that to mean that you roll Honor, and if you succeed in Honor, it goes down by one. Like Atgxtg says, it is not in the normal rules, but it is something I have seen floated as a houserule from time to time. The big benefit of doing it that way instead of a flat -1 Honor is that someone with Low Honor can act dishonorable and their Honor likely suffers only a little, while someone with high-ish Honor suffers more. Let's say that instead of -4 Honor, we would roll Honor 4 times and lower it by one for the successes. A has Honor 5, B has Honor 15. It is likely that A succeeds once and hence has Honor 4 afterwards (-1), where as B likely succeeds 3 times and hence has Honor 12 afterwards (-3). Everyone knows that A is already a bit shaky as far as the Honor is concerned, so hearing that he did something dishonorable is more of a 'shrug, again?' whereas B's actions would be met with gasps of surprise and disapproval.