Uqbarian

17 hours ago, Morien said:

As for the system, here is my suggestion:

1. Childbirth roll: Roll the Woman's CON. Modifiers: -10 if a child was born last year, -1 per year past 35. Critical: Twins born (roll 1d6 for the gender of each, and if the 1d6s are the same, they are identical twins). Success: A healthy child born. Failure: no conception. Fumble: Tragedy. Go to the next chapter.

It's a minor point, but that twin incidence strikes me as a bit high. Modern incidence for the UK population, for example, is about 15 multiple births out of 1000 births (2004 data), and that is likely to be higher than for historical populations. I'm counting it as a 1% chance per live birth event for my game.

I was just looking at the solo tables in the rulebook and thinking that for vassal service, a player could at least take one skill check and one trait check from the options (which would mean adding trait options for garrison duty).

On 9/4/2019 at 1:56 AM, Atgxtg said:

It can be, but depending on what you are trying to learn it could take a certain amount of knowledge before someone could learn something significant from a failure. For example, if you don't know anything about a language then you could try to read it for years and not pick up anything. 

But as far as general play goes, most skills are attempted multiple times, so getting a check isn't all that hard. The hard bit is the roll to improve, once someone has gotten good.

 

Fair enough!

On 9/3/2019 at 9:27 PM, Morien said:

We did consider that, too. However, we felt that it might result in players 'shopping' for rolls in their low skills just to get the check, and make it very hard to get a check in their high skills that really need the checks to advance.

We do give checks on Fumbles, which to us reflects more of a 'I won't do that again!' than a failure, which is more 'I dunno'.

 

I was thinking failures + crits, not just failures, but I see what you mean about potential 'shopping'. And your take on fumbles has convinced me to copy it.

Thanks for this, Scotty!

@jeffjerwin, your campaign sounds like great fun!

I'm running a single-player campaign, but not exactly multiple characters per player, though we may do that later once we're more comfortable with the system. At the moment, the player has one PK, and I'm running four NPKs who will mostly follow the PK's lead. These NPKs will also be something of an extra life mechanic: if the PK takes a death blow and an ally NPK is present (e.g. in a battle), I can say that the ally NPK dies instead (at least until the PK has an heir).

On 8/30/2019 at 8:20 PM, Morien said:

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.

A failure is a learning experience! I'd be tempted to say crits and failures get checks, myself.

On 4/14/2019 at 9:28 PM, Leingod said:

 

I actually had much the same idea for that kind of campaign a while back; I got overzealous with the backstory for a PK whose coat of arms I very loosely based on the name and arms of my maternal great-grandmother's family and ended up making this whole extended family tree full of colorful characters that went way beyond anything that would be likely to ever come up in the career of the "Knight of Starlings" (whose great-grandfather claimed to have learned a magic secret from the same starling that Branwen, daughter of Bran the Blessed, once taught to speak, and that this allowed him to understand the songs and cries of birds; this was to justify the "Good With Birds" trait).

Cool! That's a neat way to explain a family trait.

Awesome!

I think posts are fine, but a PDF would be cool too.

(Minor note: you have 'beet' for 'beer' twice under 'Ale & Beer'.)

3 hours ago, Morien said:

I'll let David answer the first one, but if you are getting ready to start your campaign now, it is probably not worth waiting.

That was my guess.

3 hours ago, Morien said:

As for the second question, generally when the topic shifts (like it has now), it would be better to start a new thread. After all, people would not be looking for Book of Salisbury discussion in a thread that is supposedly about squiring and family.

I was thinking that, but I've been on some forums where newbies are expected to not start multiple threads, and I'm still feeling my way around here.

Hey, does anyone have an idea of if/when the Book of Salisbury might be coming out?

(I'm not sure if I should just add queries in this thread or start new threads.)

Exactly!

13 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

 Well such armor for combat use doesn't make much sense. The knight would literally have bits of silver and gold flaking off or scratched off on impact but then I'ts not really designed to make sense functionally. I suppose a noble might just chalk that off to conspicuous consumption, but even then I would doubt it to be the "everyday" armor. Then again such nobles wouldn't need to wear armor all that often, if ever, and it certainly would have the enemy knights on the battlefield thinking of ransom. In fact ti might even get the enemy to pull their blows so they can capture you alive. 

Oh, definitely! I was thinking more like the 3x armour might be suited for wearing one day a year (or even just stick it on a stand in the hall and never wear it), whereas the 10x armour (with thicker gilding and better techniques) might be suited for wearing at the occasional big tournament. (You could also reduce a suit's apparent value by half each year it's exposed to significant wear, same as for fancy clothes.) 

4 hours ago, g33k said:

Um ...  Rules?

We don' need no steenkin' rules!

This is, after all, NOT the Orderium!  😉 

Ha!  Thanks for the advice, sounds good to me! 

Just for another reference point, KAP 5.2 in the price lists (chapter 8, page 190) mentions "For example, if a knight wished to buy gilded armor, the price might be triple the given amount or even more." That does seem a bit low to me, but going by Atgxtg's post, maybe you could say that triple value gets you a thin coating on a suit intended purely for ceremonial use.

22 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Practice fights are good here. You can run some training combats with the characters using withheld blows (half actual damage, but full score for knockdown). Or even a mock combat or two that doesn't really happen just to show the players how the game works. You can even do this without the players. Pick two characters or just take some stats out of the book and run a fight two or three times to see how it plays out. 

Definitely! I hope to get some practice runs in before we start. Fortunately the basic mechanics look pretty straightforward.

These are neat! Beer and ale would be nifty too.

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Yes, but then you have to wonder why the lord is willing to knight them in the first place. Loyalty Lord is key so if the lord is suspicious of a squire he'd probably wouldn't knight him. In my campaign I had several PKs up their Loyalty Lord to 16 so they could be in the running for some special positions. If I were a noble I wouldn't put a knight in charge of a castle unless I was certain that he was loyal to me. Anything else is just gambling with your demesne. If a castellan betrays you to a neighboring lord you are going to have a very tough time recapturing your own castle.  I'd sleep better if my castellans had Loyalty (Me) 20, and anybody not known for Loyalty (16+) wouldn't be put in that sort of position, unless absolutely necessary.

Indeed, but circumstances can change. E.g. Lord A used to like Squire B and knighted him, but since then Sir B has been seen talking to Lord A's unfriendly neighbours; maybe best to not let Sir B form too many connections with other prominent families. I'm not expecting it to come up very often, though, and maybe not at all.

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Well, it dpends. What RPGs do you have experience with. Pendragon can be deadly, and sometimes the dice can turn against a player, but there are more lethal RPGs. 

What I will warn you about is that Pendragon combat is fast, especially when characters don't have much in the way or armor and/or shields. Probably much faster than most experience RPers are expecting. A fight can, and probably will,  beover in a couple of rounds. This can lead some people, even some GMs to think that the fight wasn't dangerous. That can lead to the PKs getting cocky and taking greater risks or the GM believing he should up the opposition in order to get a "good fight". That can lead to a major disaster and Total Party Kill. 

Thanks for the tip! We're mostly used to D&D (4e and 5e). Faster combat will definitely be a plus. I'm planning on lowballing most opposition until I get a better idea of how things actually work in play.

Thanks for the replies, folks!

11 hours ago, Puckohue said:

According to the Book of the Entourage the squire is assigned by the knight’s lord, who considers such things as who among the boys should enter the career towards knighthood, and the political implications of the loyalties that will form between the families.

Thanks for that, I've found it. And the political angle just made me think of the flipside that sometimes a lord (particularly a suspicious one) might want to discourage bonds between strong vassals so they don't get too close. 

10 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Yes./ Part of the reason for that was because it was felt that father would be too soft on his own son, which would be a detriment to the lad latter on when he because a knight. Yo u don't want your son to die on the battlefield because you didn't train him hard enough.

That makes sense.

10 hours ago, Sir Mad Munkee said:

Not exactly an answer, but when I heard @sirlarkins run of Paladin on his podcast, I immediately thought it'd be pretty interesting to run a group of PKs that are all related, brothers and cousins. You'd have to ensure there are plenty of unplayed brothers and cousins for backup characters, and the whole Estate management thing might need some rethinking, but kinda fun to have them all working on the same family legacy, and their Love (Family) Passions would all apply to each other. Kind of like playing the Orkney mob.

Yeah, playing a proper clan of knights could be fun!

7 hours ago, Morien said:

I heartily encourage this. It ensures that there is some continuity between the PKs, even if one of them gets replaced by a younger brother. The younger brother would have been in the same adventures (as a squire) and would have had a Mentor/student relationship with another PK, too. Not to mention that it also helps to knit the other new PKs together, having been squiring in the same group and likely shared tips and chores.

Thanks. I am a bit worried about continuity, because I keep seeing people comment about how lethal the Pendragon system is. The best way to find out is through playing it, I guess!

I'm hoping to start a Pendragon campaign in the near future, and I'm thinking about the starting characters' social network. (I'm planning a Salisbury 485 start.) Do any of the supplements talk about how squires are chosen?

KAP 5.2 has this on page 48: "Usually your squire is a younger son of one of your lord’s other vassals, or perhaps the son of one of his allies’ vassals." So would they normally be assigned by the lord, or would the knight get to choose from known candidates?

My vague impression (from reading some medieval history books many years ago) is that the knight-squire relationship was at least partly about strengthening connections between families. A father probably wouldn't take his own son as a squire, but might send him to become squires for a brother (the boy's uncle) or a close friend; alternatively, he might angle to get a richer, more powerful or more famous knight to take the boy on. (Not unlike the considerations of knightly marriage, in a way.) So could PKs have each other's brothers as squires? I'm also thinking it could be neat if a couple of the PKs had been squires to each other's fathers before the latter's deaths.

Along a similar line, I'm wondering how likely it is that PKs might already be related. Vassal knights presumably tend to marry ladies from other vassal knight families. I'll leave that to player choice, though.

Thanks, rsanford! Is there somewhere I should be looking for the forum rules?

I may be running a Pendragon campaign in the near future, and this forum looks like the place to come to nowadays. Hello all!