Simple Houserule to Restore Feudal Economics

[mj6373]

The houserule idea: If a character owns multiple non-neighboring parcels of demesne land, do not track outliers on the expense budget. If you wish to tax these outliers, halve their income and apply it towards meeting servitium debitum (including officer pay) at the primary residence (caput major for barons), then any resulting deficit or surplus is applied to the discretionary fund.

 

Example: If a character owns a £50 estate and a £10 manor, they can draw £5 of income from the manor to their estate. (The other half goes towards everything necessary to make this happen - the expenses for the steward to keep the manor running, the cost of the ox-cart team(s) and guards to safely transport the material over long distances in a world with terrible road infrastructure and heavy tolls on the handful of good roads, etc.) Since the manor's income adds a £5.5 demand to the knight's servitium debitum (an extra household knight, squire, and three footmen) the remaining £0.5 must be paid out of the estate's discretionary fund.

 

Note that if you wish to use the outlier more efficiently by assigning a knight to maintain himself and a trio of footmen directly on-site and thereby avoid the significant expenses of transporting the assized rent to your estate, that's called "enfoeffment."

 

Justification: Feudalism exists because the communication and logistical realities of the medieval world make holding everything as demesne completely impractical, and serves to maximize military output within that context. Reducing vassalage to a strictly disadvantageous thing that lords do to reward their favorite people, and making it a point of disrepute if less than 80% of their lands are demesne, is nuts, and more importantly, not nuts in a way that I think improves the game. Historically the vast majority of landholdings are subinfeudated, and while household and mercenary knights do make up a significant minority, the majority of knights are landholding vassals or heirs thereof.

 

Using up half the income to transport the other half seems like a fair enough oversimplification on average, a bit too harsh for close parcels and a bit too generous for distant ones, to avoid getting bogged down in calculating distance and how speed is affected by weather and road quality between every parcel. And mechanically I think the outcome is advantageous - it's more cost-effective to infeudate your outliers, and entirely necessary to subinfeudate most of it across something as vast as an honour, but on a parcel-by-parcel basis it's inexpensive enough for a baron to very affordably hold a few extra demesne outliers, which has the benefits of consolidating some of his power (to keep him safer and deter unruly vassals), letting him benefit from Improvements built on those outliers, and of course having some on hand to enfoeff later as reward or dowry.

 

So... What do you guys think?

[Morien]

One unintentional problem:

A heroic PK gets awarded with a manor somewhere else, in addition to his starting manor. End result: His finances are now -£0.5, if he keeps the manor for himself, no benefit (well, some Glory). Gaining a manor becomes a poisoned pill, rather than the generous reward it is supposed to be.

Probably an easier way to handling this is simply change the subinfeudation percentage to 50% or so. With more plentiful vassal knights as a default to begin with, there will be more social mobility (more widows and heiresses), and you could easily say that any new estates with outliers would have the outliers already subinfeudated or something.

[mj6373]

Hmmm, an interesting thought. That said, I don't know if I necessarily agree. I feel like the natural thing to do when you hold one manor and get another, if it isn't close enough to your first one to personally manage both of them, is to promptly subinfeudate it to an unlanded younger brother, cousin, etc. Now your dynasty is stronger and the newly-landed knight of your family owes you a huge favor, and, while it isn't likely much help yet at only two manors' worth of holding, you have a vassal to help out in any future wars or to host feasts for you or whatnot.

[Leingod]

8 hours ago, mj6373 said:

Hmmm, an interesting thought. That said, I don't know if I necessarily agree. I feel like the natural thing to do when you hold one manor and get another, if it isn't close enough to your first one to personally manage both of them, is to promptly subinfeudate it to an unlanded younger brother, cousin, etc. Now your dynasty is stronger and the newly-landed knight of your family owes you a huge favor, and, while it isn't likely much help yet at only two manors' worth of holding, you have a vassal to help out in any future wars or to host feasts for you or whatnot.

The thing is, that still makes rewards of land much less special as a reward, and it kind of goes against the logic of the offer. A grateful lord you've accomplished some great feat for offers you land for two reasons: To reward you, yes, but also because he wants to bind you to him, since you'll have to swear fealty to him if you accept the offer. He's impressed at what you can do and he'd like to be able to call upon you again at need. So if the normal response to getting such an offer is "Great, I'll give it to little brother you don't know," lords have less incentive to offer land to questing knights who slay a dragon for them or what-have-you. And it's just not going to excite most players nearly as much if, as a reward for their deeds, rather than getting a manor for themselves, some NPC who's related to their character now has a manor.

Land is meant to be a very rare and special reward in Pendragon; it's something players are encouraged to spend a lot of their time and energy obtaining and, once obtained, consolidating, at least if that appeals to them. Making it a white elephant or a detached abstract benefit, by making it not worth the expense or giving it to an NPC, respectively, takes a lot of that away, IMO. At that point they'll probably just prefer getting paid in cash they can spend on improvements and mercenaries.