Mines & Quarries in W&E

[KungFuFenris]

Erhm.

The table of Improvements is... well. It's a bit off compared to prices between the listed entries.

Like, the Quarry is 500L to create, compared to 50L in the text.
Also, this is not an error, but there's zero context for output/benefit of having a Mine or a Quarry. Is that supposed to be something for the Gamemasters Sourcebook?

And is it ever worth having a improvement that have a greater maintainance than your hide's income?

Edited January 11, 2022 by KungFuFenris

[Joerg]

46 minutes ago, KungFuFenris said:

And is it ever worth having a improvement that have a greater maintainance than your hide's income?

If your improvement supports more than one of your hides (or those of your clan), yes, it is. You might have to convince your clan (or guild, or whatever) to chip in on the maintenance, or you need a sufficient number of hides benefitting to make it pay.

 

In other words - a single tenant farmer won't be able to carry the maintenance cost of a mine. A few of them might easily do so.

And a productive improvement will become a new economical hide to take income from, rather than just an ornament.

[Akhôrahil]

Just now, Joerg said:

If your improvement supports more than one of your hides (or those of your clan), yes, it is. You might have to convince your clan (or guild, or whatever) to chip in on the maintenance, or you need a sufficient number of hides benefitting to make it pay.

But they tend to just affect the one Hide of land, so that doesn’t work.

[Joerg]

20 minutes ago, Akhôrahil said:

But they tend to just affect the one Hide of land, so that doesn’t work.

That hide of land doesn't necessarily cease to be pasture or hay-making area, although an active quarry or mine may reduce its worth as such even more. But the way I see it, you generate a new economic hide as long as you produce.

Having a quarry nearby will greatly reduce maintenance cost for Sartar-style roads or buildings as the material is provided with much shorter carting time.

I guess expanding a quarry or a mining operation will come with less initial cost, too, so it may be more than one hide of economic activity you might open up.

The way I read it the maintenance cost are for when you don't have any income from the investment, e.g. in years without functional work-force like the Windstop. And if a mine high up in the mountains cannot be operated in Dark and Storm Season, it had better be an excellent product you get from there, like bronze or a more valuable metal. Same with a quarry for artist-quality marble.

Edited January 11, 2022 by Joerg

[soltakss]

I would allow the quarry to be an entity in itself.

That means you use Manage Household/Craft (Quarrying) or whatever to see what comes out of the quarry.

It then becomes something that exists alongside the hide, generating extra income.

[KungFuFenris]

That is an excellent solution, I'm just still a bit baffled that this basically says: "This is what it would cost - everything else is up to you"

If the listed price of being 10% of the Table price is correct, then I'm getting what's going on

[Squaredeal Sten]

I think your problem is that the W&E table does not say how much the quarry or mine produces.  To me, that depends on how many miners you have working it.  Each of those miners is like a tenant farmer on agricultural land.  You as proprietor get a proportional cut of the income.  I would also think that income does not vary with good or bad harvests, nor with magic that enhances the harvest, but would vary with things like chaos invasions. 

An advantage would be that you are not mining the arable land, so when your mine operates you effectively have two or more hides / sources of income: One hide of arable land, plus a mine that can accommodate any reasonable number of miners.

Edited January 12, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
An advantage... and as always, punctuation.

[Tupper]

I think the issue can be summarised as follows.  Say you get +5% on an income roll from the land.  That means:

• You're 0.25% less likely to roll a fumble (which entails losing 150% of regular income).
• You're 4.75% less likely to roll a fail (which entails losing 50% of regular income).
• You're 4% more likely to roll a success (which entails nothing special happening).
• You're 0.75% more likely to roll a special success (which entails getting an extra 50% income).
• You're 0.25% more likely to roll a critical success (which entails getting an extra 100% income).

If you multiply these together and add them up (-0.0025*(-1.5)-0.0475*(-0.5)+0.0075*0.5+0.0025*1), you get 3.375% extra income per year on average.  Even if you're farming a hide yourself (regular income 80L), that's only 2.7L per year on average.  If your stables that gives you that bonus costs you 6L per year, you're on a hiding to nowhere with the investment.

The above math "smooths" the skill table.  Even if you're lucky and the 5% increases the critical probability at the expense of the fumble percentage (e.g. going from 69% to 74%), then you'll get:

• 1% less likely to fumble.
• 4% less likely to fail.
• 4% more likely to succeed.
• No change in probability of special success.
• 1% more likely to critically succeed.

That makes you (-0.01*(-1.5)-0.04*(-0.5)+0.01*1) 4.5% extra income (on average), or 3.6L, which is still a long way shy of 6L.

[Akhôrahil]

500L is in the right ballpark for a Hide of land or a Hide's worth of flocks, so in the case of Mine/Quarry, you could argue that it "creates" a hide for a stead of miners/quarrymen to work on (at probably 60 to 100 L yearly income out of which the people at the stead get half, and with maintenance baked into that). This at least makes some kind of sense, and has a sensible RoI. It would require both a suitable spot and a market for the product, so it couldn't be "spammed". 

(This is just an attempt to retro-construct something that works from the text, though. Improvements are poorly designed when it comes to outcomes and economy.)

Edited January 13, 2022 by Akhôrahil

[brionl]

If you don't have a Quarry, it reduces the income of the hide of land by 15L anyway. I would think that if the table cost to build is 10x too high, the maintenance is likely 10x too high as well. A 50L fee to avoid a 15L loss doesn't make sense, but 5L maint still leaves a 10L gain.

I'd look at it as guidelines for somebody who seriously wants to play Lord of the Manor. Put in a quarry at the cliff, and use the stone to build a bridge across the river, then a road to the nearest major market to drive trade to their caravanserai, etc, etc. Basically Farmville, Glorantha edition. 🙂

 

[DreadDomain]

On 1/14/2022 at 1:30 AM, Akhôrahil said:

Improvements are poorly designed when it comes to outcomes and economy

I have not read that section yet but only based on this thread, I really hope @Jason D will review it to make sure it all makes sense. I generally like these management systems and I don't really need them to reflect economy accurately but they do need to hold up (aka investing in something cost up front but they do have the reasonable potential to bring extra profit longer term. Otherwise why bother?

[KungFuFenris]

Erh. I am not so sure about that.

To quote him from the Corrections thread.

4 hours ago, Jason D said:

I would like to urge readers to keep in mind that trying to reverse-engineer a functional economic model out of these prices is not the point of this sourcebook.

The prices are examples, etc. and can be either used as-is, modified, or ignored entirely.

Adventurer starting incomes from the core rules, as well, are for adventurers, and do not represent a Dragon Pass-wide standard for incomes.

I have no idea what that means, other than we might have to make shit up.
Which is fine, but then I rather have spent those pages on something that was actually coherent.

[Jason D]

The revised sourcebook is up and the improvement costs/upkeep costs have been revised. 

[brionl]

It looks like, for Quarries specifically, that the text price was changed to reflect the table price (in Wheels now), but the upkeep is only 1/3 as much now.

 

[KungFuFenris]

On 1/18/2022 at 9:06 PM, brionl said:

It looks like, for Quarries specifically, that the text price was changed to reflect the table price (in Wheels now), but the upkeep is only 1/3 as much now.

 

Well. It's better... still weird.

[Squaredeal Sten]

On 1/17/2022 at 9:30 AM, KungFuFenris said:

Erh. I am not so sure about that.

To quote him from the Corrections thread.

I have no idea what that means, other than we might have to make shit up.
Which is fine, but then I rather have spent those pages on something that was actually coherent.

Well that leaves it up to us to make at least the GM'ing pieces of 'a functional economic model" - the pieces that will make it smooth to GM for players or a campaign dedicated to - or that at least enables -  either:

a) "Playing 'lord of the manor'", as brionl said Jan. 15th - with adventurers who decide to make economic improvements to their hide or 5 hides of land, when they get to the position of having those hides.     Like those who become Thane of Apple Lane and take the idea of roleplaying as part of a community seriously.  Those who see that they need to attract some more people to have Apple Lane recover from the Lunar occupation.

b) Running an Issaries caravan campaign.

These don't require creating the macroeconomics of Glorantha, but they do require suggesting for the GM and players, how some perfectly reasonable player actions should be given reasonable in-game responses. 

Like what you should expect to gain when you make improvements to the land, or when you have Ernaldan rune spells cast to improve crop yields, or how to handle the trade part of the caravan, even what might happen if your merchant takes ship to the islands or to Pamaltela.  Consistent stuff, rules of thumb and models for calculation that the GM can apply, that will enable the players to make a profit at the end of a successful adventure (and a loss at the end of an unsuccessful one).  Not an unreasonably large profit either. 

In the end, a model or models and checklists for the GM to decide what is a reasonable range of results and how economic, (non-combat) choices and character skills might affect those results.  Why should every GM have to re-invent the wheel?  Won't talking this out make it easier and smoother?

And I recognize that some people don't want to do this, don't see these things as a basis for the mythical fantasy campaign that they want to run, or don't have the personal experiences that make it interesting or even that make it make sense.    Or who, as i suspect  Jason D does, do the business of gaming past satiation and just want to play when they play, not do business.   They don't have to run it, I'm not trying to force it. 

 

 

Edited January 23, 2022 by Squaredeal Sten
name; last paragraph ....

[KungFuFenris]

Well, I'm going to be looking up the finest RPGs with trading rules at a point.

And, from Impromptu Con I learned that they're doing a Sartar Clan Management system in the Sartar Book, focused on Generation of Adventure.

[Squaredeal Sten]

4 hours ago, KungFuFenris said:

Well, I'm going to be looking up the finest RPGs with trading rules at a point.

And, from Impromptu Con I learned that they're doing a Sartar Clan Management system in the Sartar Book, focused on Generation of Adventure.

Check earlier discussion of trade in these forums. 

[Akhôrahil]

On 1/22/2022 at 5:53 AM, Squaredeal Sten said:

a) "Playing 'lord of the manor'", as brionl said Jan. 15th - with adventurers who decide to make economic improvements to their hide or 5 hides of land, when they get to the position of having those hides.     Like those who become Thane of Apple Lane and take the idea of roleplaying as part of a community seriously.  Those who see that they need to attract some more people to have Apple Lane recover from the Lunar occupation.

Or even with your one hide of land, if your campaign is based on a farm, such as in the Risklands Campaign model.

What's necessary here is for improvements to make economic sense - an initial investment is fine; maintenance that's higher than the additional income isn't. From the implicit economic model in RQG, it seems you typically get about 8% Return on Investment, when things are going well. Of course, things won't always be going well - there are raids, cattle-rustling and unnatural disasters, but that's just adventure fodder.

On 1/22/2022 at 5:53 AM, Squaredeal Sten said:

b) Running an Issaries caravan campaign.

This is a completely different beast. It might be most easily handled by having a number of trade routes (including potential ones the PCs might establish), each with a different level of payoff and risk, and what goods are involved. I think this would be easier than having an actual market system, but if you're willing to go all out on spreadsheets, you could model a bunch of goods, supply and demand for them, how the PC traders fulfilling demand will lower the prices temporarily, and so on. The computer game Star Traders does this really nicely, but it's going to be a major load on the GM to set up and run this.

[Squaredeal Sten]

18 hours ago, Akhôrahil said:

This is a completely different beast. It might be most easily handled by having a number of trade routes (including potential ones the PCs might establish), each with a different level of payoff and risk, and what goods are involved. I think this would be easier than having an actual market system, but if you're willing to go all out on spreadsheets, you could model a bunch of goods, supply and demand for them, how the PC traders fulfilling demand will lower the prices temporarily, and so on. The computer game Star Traders does this really nicely, but it's going to be a major load on the GM to set up and run this.

Actually what I favor for a caravan is a rule of thumb for how the price of goods increases with distance, IF the goods are chosen well.  Not building an economic model of all goods for all regions, the worldwide spreadsheeting project is not what I would advise anyone to do.

And 'chosen well" should be something that is

A) Not contradictory to the Gloranthan background information - and there is some canon info on trade between regions.

B) Role played, that is the merchant player should have a decent reason for choosing his goods, possibly researching them, even better if he has been to his destination(s) before and evaluated what he can buy cheap and what will sell dear.  

in this way your profit does not depend on hot bargaining dice, instead bargaining is just the icing on the cake.