Feast house rules.

[Voord 99]

A while back, I disappeared down a rabbit-hole doing a lot of exploration with different ways to house-rule the Book of Feasts.  To recap, the problems, for me, basically come down to two.

• The glory award for “winning the feast” is very high, and compares favorably to other things.  Also, it is always a PK who gets it — no matter who else is at the feast.  This is, I understand, because Mr. Larkins intended the feast rules to see very occasional use, and if so, it’s not a problem.  But I think it’s helpful to have a version of the rules which can see routine use.  There are several scripted feasts in the GPC and feasts are useful things for plot purposes, plus they were also a major part of medieval culture.   Also, there are a lot of fun cards, and a lot of them won’t come up if you have feasts only a handful of times in the campaign.  These problems will increase if you have fewer players.  (I have two.)
• This is less important, but as far as I can tell, the APP roll for where you sit steamrollers entirely over how things were supposed to work, which is that people sat in the appropriate place for their rank in society.  This is purely a historical-accuracy point, and so does not matter as much, but it’s still bothersome to me that one of the great lords of the realm can end up sitting below a poor mercenary knight if the APP rolls go that way.

So this is what I ended up using, and having played through quite a lot of feasts at this point, I think it’s worked well.

1. I’ve eliminated the concept of “winning the feast” entirely.  There is no Glory award for accumulating the most Geniality.  Instead, PCs get their Geniality as Glory at the end of the feast (x2 for royal feasts or other situations where famous people are observing, on the usual principle).  But they can also acquire Glory for things like performances during the feast.  This is in the Book of Feasts (p. 9: “In addition to other benefits listed on the card, Glory from successful Skill rolls is awarded as normal”)— spotting this is one of the things that persuaded me that trying to preserve the “winning the feast” concept was unhelpful, as there are plenty of opportunities to win Glory without it, and if a GM is giving out Glory for successful skill rolls on top of allowing someone to win the feast, the amount of glory at a royal feast could be stratospheric.
2. The APP roll does not affect your seating.  You sit where you sit: knights sit with knights, as they are supposed to.  If you’re seated wrongly, that’s a matter of a failed (or more likely, fumbled) Stewardship roll of the person organizing the feast.  However, mechanically, the APP roll has the same effect as in the BoF, by giving you a bonus on Geniality or, if unfortunate a minus.  It represents, not where you sit, but whether or not people are paying attention to you admiringly in the context of where you sit.  The only difference is that, unless you are sitting at high table (because that’s where you should sit), you can draw cards, and if you are sitting at high table, you have an automatic +1 on top of this.  The APP roll is APP modified by Glory, which makes criticals a bit more common, but as there’s no “winning the feast,” the main effect is that it makes other rolls easier, if they’re modified by Geniality.  It makes a difference e.g. if you’re trying to loosen tongues to make an Intrigue roll to find out some plot-important information late in the feast — it’s not terribly important in itself, although in a five round royal feast a critical APP is a not too shabby 20 Glory, all other things being equal.
3. Being able to draw multiple cards is not based on Glory, but on APP modified by Glory.  (The basic idea here was suggested by Tizun Thane.)  This is divided by 10 (with rounding).  This might seem a little stingy, but the rationale is as follows.  One of the goals of the “winning the feast” idea is to incentivize APP, and I think that’s a good idea.  As I’ve eliminated “winning the feast,” bringing APP in here seemed like a way to compensate.  At the same time, I don’t want to eliminate Glory entirely — it both makes sense, and is desirable in game terms.  So the threshold for 2 cards is 15, so that if you have mediocre APP you need to be really distinguished to get the choice between two cards; but a player who wants, can get that from the beginning of the game, or near it, without sinking too many points into APP.  13 APP means that you only have to wait for 2000 Glory, for instance.  3 cards will probably never come up, but I’m OK with that, as it speeds things up.
4. The 100 extra glory for attending any royal feast is gone, as is the 100 Glory for sitting Above the Salt.  Of course, there are scripted GPC feasts that come with Glory awards for witnessing something important, and that sort of thing still applies.

I wouldn’t recommend exactly this for every campaign, but if you’re going to have feasts often, I think something like this is probably a good idea.  I find that the combination of the varied incidents on the cards and having specific things that the PKs are interested in finding out through Intrigue, along with various pre-planned events and challenges, do a good job of keeping players motivated without the Glory awards needing to be very large.

Edited June 22, 2021 by Voord 99

[Tizun Thane]

I like your houserules, except I think you should keep the bonus for the winner, for the competition between players. Maybe with a threshold as I suggested elsewhere?

On 6/22/2021 at 4:18 AM, Voord 99 said:

(The basic idea here was suggested by Tizun Thane.)

Nice to be noticed ^^

My own houserules can be found here :

 

[Voord 99]

I’m thinking of having the bonus for the winner be possible for some special reason at some point, to enliven things.  But I do a lot of feasts, and I have only two players, so it’s not something that I think will work as a routine thing.

It’s also a little too minigamey for my personal tastes.  In the social reality of the world within the game, there would not necessarily be some single individual who stood out above everyone else as the winner, every single time.  It would be more fluid and contestable than that.   Some feasts might have someone whom courtly consensus judged the best, but others might have more than one, and in others people might disagree and no consensus would form. 

When and if I do have a winner, there will be an intradiegetic element that it represents, with Guinevere or somebody similarly authoritative making an announcement that Character X — who might not be a PK! — was the exemplar of courtesy.  This might become a routine practice at one royal feast a year, assuming that there was a threshold level of Geniality required to be in contention — the “only PKs can win” is probably the single biggest problem with using the BoF often.  (If it does become routine, this formal contest to be the winner will definitely become poisonous in some way during the Twilight period.)

I really do find in my game that I just don’t need “winning” — the players seem to look forward to and enjoy feasts fine without it.  It probably helps that I have a lot of politics, secrets, and intrigue — I often comment that the autocheck for Intrigue in the Your Own Land Solo is redundant in this game, because it’s really odd if the PKs don’t already have a check in that by the end of the year.   But mostly, I think it’s the cards: the big success of the Book of Feasts is the cards, which are so varied and fun.

Edited June 23, 2021 by Voord 99

[The Wanderer]

On 6/22/2021 at 4:18 AM, Voord 99 said:

The APP roll does not affect your seating.  You sit where you sit: knights sit with knights, as they are supposed to.  If you’re seated wrongly, that’s a matter of a failed (or more likely, fumbled) Stewardship roll of the person organizing the feast.  However, mechanically, the APP roll has the same effect as in the BoF, by giving you a bonus on Geniality or, if unfortunate a minus.  It represents, not where you sit, but whether or not people are paying attention to you admiringly in the context of where you sit.  The only difference is that, unless you are sitting at high table (because that’s where you should sit), you can draw cards, and if you are sitting at high table, you have an automatic +1 on top of this.  The APP roll is APP modified by Glory, which makes criticals a bit more common, but as there’s no “winning the feast,” the main effect is that it makes other rolls easier, if they’re modified by Geniality.  It makes a difference e.g. if you’re trying to loosen tongues to make an Intrigue roll to find out some plot-important information late in the feast — it’s not terribly important in itself, although in a five round royal feast a critical APP is a not too shabby 20 Glory, all other things being equal.

Then, I'm asuming you do not give bonus on Geniality for seating but you give it "only" for the APP (modified by glory) roll, right?

What do you mean with "and if you are sitting at high table, you have an automatic +1 on top of this"? Automatic +1 on what?

Also, if there's a fumble on the roll, what is the result? -1 or -2 Geniality?

[Voord 99]

If you’re sitting at high table, it’s +1 extra Geniality, irrespective of what you roll.  So if you critical, that’s +3 Geniality per round. This definitely would not be compatible with the very high Glory for “winning the feast” RAW…. But the occasional situation where a person gets 15ish Glory just from being the centre of attention and seated among the most prominent people is fine, IMO.

A fumble is -1 — I simplify the rules and leave it at that, with no second APP roll.   If for some reason someone was actually relegated to the lowest position (probably as a calculated insult, i.e. it would be part of the story, not the result of a random roll), then I’d impose the -2, and probably also call for a Modest/Proud roll.  The Honour loss (p.6) is tricky, because Honour loss is a big penalty — I’d probably let that depend on how the PK reacted.