What skill is use for farming?

[Pao]

Is it a Craft specialization, or Knowledge?

[SDLeary]

38 minutes ago, Pao said:

Is it a Craft specialization, or Knowledge?

Depends on the aspect of farming that you are talking about. For the bulk I would say Knowledge (Agriculture/Husbandry/Ranching) [RQ3 Plant Lore, Animal Lore or a combination], but with a healthy dose of Knowledge (Natural History) [RQ3 World Lore], and Craft (Carpentry/Leather Working/Stone Working), Devise/Repair. Other skills that might come into play would could be related to bee keeping (I would class as knowledge)...

SDLeary

[Squaredeal Sten]

On 6/8/2024 at 9:34 PM, Pao said:

Is it a Craft specialization, or Knowledge?

It is listed as a Knowledge skill in RQ, for what that's worth.  

Bur what is the context of your question?  What is the issue in play?

Craft seems to be for specialized manual production of goods which vary in design and quality according to the crafter's skill, and many different items may be produced from the same raw material  It also implies the possibility of a degree of artistry in the finished product, by which I mean an aesthetic  element of quality.     While in contrast farming is production of goods that fundamentally  produce themselves. by which I mean plants (re)produce themselves and the farmer may irrigate and weed, affecting the amount produced, but what is produced depends on what seeds were planted.

 

Edited June 10 by Squaredeal Sten
shortened, spelling/typing

[Atgxtg]

I believe there were rules for running a famstead in RQ3 Vikings. Like SDLeary pointed out, it was mostly handled with Plant Lore skill (for the crops) Animal Lore (for the livestock) and possible augmented by other skills such as World Lore (for knowledge of when you can plant crops, the duration of the growing season and such). But it was RQ Viking that broke it down into how man many hours to run a farmstead (although I can't seem to find it before coffee).

Edited June 9 by Atgxtg

[jean]

 

The rules for running a famstead in RQ3 were in Dorastor Land of Doom (no need to search RQ3 Vickings for them)

I think it is best to have craft(farmer) (or profession (farmer)) with assistance from plant lore/ animal lore/world lore/devise//various craft to represent which skills a farmer has to use in ordre to thrive.

 

 

 

 

 

[Gundamentalist]

2 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

But it was RQ Viking that broke it down into how man many hours to run a farmstead (although I can't seem to find it before coffee).

I had a quick look for the farmstead rules.... I couldn't find it but tripped over snowshoe rules which was a nice surprise. So maybe not in RQ Vikings?

[Atgxtg]

2 hours ago, Gundamentalist said:

I had a quick look for the farmstead rules.... I couldn't find it but tripped over snowshoe rules which was a nice surprise. So maybe not in RQ Vikings?

Yeah, maybe not. I remember that it took so many hours and a skill roll to keep the farm up, but now I'm not sure where. Maybe in HEROES magazine? RQ3 was generally too late for articles to show up in Different Worlds.

The hunt is on!

[Nozbat]

3 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

The hunt is on!

@jean has already identified the article in Doraster: Land of Doom.. I don’t have it anymore so can’t check

I did use farming rules in my RQ3 Vikings game.. (30+ years ago) and seem to remember roles for weather that impacted on crop yield and animal husbandry .. along with skills as summarised by @SDLeary.. but I’m wondering if I got it from a different game system.. perhaps the Palladium (?) Vikings source book?

I do recall one of the players saying of a particularly bad year that he “planted the cows too deeply”. And to this day, I still look at cows that are lying down and wonder if they haven’t been planted too deep

[SDLeary]

3 hours ago, Nozbat said:

I do recall one of the players saying of a particularly bad year that he “planted the cows too deeply”. And to this day, I still look at cows that are lying down and wonder if they haven’t been planted too deep

My brain is so warped. I immediately visualized this as a comic panel for The Far Side!🙃

Back to serious mode though; if you find out your source for certain, post the answer, I’d like to know for something that I’ve begun.

SDLeary

 

[Atgxtg]

13 hours ago, Nozbat said:

@jean has already identified the article in Doraster: Land of Doom.. I don’t have it anymore so can’t check

Dorastor? Doraster!!???. I'd have bet real money that it wouldn't have been it that book.

But you're right, it's in Doraster: Land of Doom. You win the prize. Use it well. Don't lose your head.

13 hours ago, Nozbat said:

I did use farming rules in my RQ3 Vikings game.. (30+ years ago) and seem to remember roles for weather that impacted on crop yield and animal husbandry .. along with skills as summarised by @SDLeary.. but I’m wondering if I got it from a different game system.. perhaps the Palladium (?) Vikings source book?

Pendragon springs to mind, as does Harn Manor.

13 hours ago, Nozbat said:

I do recall one of the players saying of a particularly bad year that he “planted the cows too deeply”. And to this day, I still look at cows that are lying down and wonder if they haven’t been planted too deep

Udderly ridiculous.

10 hours ago, SDLeary said:

My brain is so warped. I immediately visualized this as a comic panel for The Far Side!🙃

Titled: Why does it take so long for the cows to come home?

10 hours ago, SDLeary said:

Back to serious mode though; if you find out your source for certain, post the answer, I’d like to know for something that I’ve begun.

SDLeary

 

Doraster: Land of Doom, page 96.

 

In a nutshell you multiply the hours worked plus the hours spent "on alert" times your skill % to get the Weekly Steady Labor Factor (WSLF).

<100 WSLF means you lose the farm (liteally)

>100 WSLF means desperate poverty; need a lot help from clan

>200 WSLF means marginal existence; need a little help from the clan

>300 WDLF means substantial existence; can actually help others in the clan

>400 WSLF means comfortable existence; can make great contributions to the clan.

Note that this assumes that you can spend 50 hours a week working plus another 50 doing "alert work" (standing watch, cooking, sewing, basically anything other than farming that isn't too strenuous).

The example give had a stead run by three couple (100 hours each) plus 4 kids (50 hours each). 

 

 

 

If I were to adapt it for more general RQ use:

• I'd link the WSLF to the RQ3 standards of living. Since the standard income for a landed peasant in RQ3 is 4p/day, 7d per week, 1440p/year), and  beggars make around 1p/day, I'd go with something like:
  • WSLF 50 = 1/8 penny per day per adult; half that for the children, for 1d/day total
  • WSLF 100 = ¼ penny per day per adult; half that for the children, for 2d/day total
  • WSLF 150 = ½ penny per day per adult; half that for the children, for 4d/day total
  • WSLF 200 = 1 penny per day per adult; half that for the children, for 8d/day total
  • WSLF 250 = 2 pennies per day per adult; half that for the children, for 16d/day total
  • WSLF 300 = 4 pennies per day per adult (1440p/year); half that for the children, for 32d/day total (11520p/year)
  • WSLF 350 = 8 pennies per day per adult; half that for the children, for 64d/day total
  • WSLF 400 = 16d/day per adult for 128d/day total - enough to live at the next economic level

But I'd probably do up a spreadsheet  would mean a table with Pennies = 2^(WSLF/50)/16 and have it on hand.

• I'd add skill rolls and success level to the equation. Say half output for a failure, full for a success, 50% more for a special, and double for a critical. 
• I'd change the way the work weather to a die modifier to the skill roll.
• I'd change Weekly Steady Labor Factor to something like Farm Output. 
• And then I'd look at a way to simplify it. Say assume each person works a full week and makes 1p/day on a success, double the success level modfier I posted above, and treat any hours less than a full week as a skill modifier.

 

 

 

Edited June 10 by Atgxtg

[Greville]

Mythic Iceland also has a farming as a separate skill (on P25):
Farming (15%) [Manipulation]—This skill measures the character’s ability to successfully run a farm, including the keeping of animals, cultivation of any crops, and the best possible utilization of the resources of the land such as rivers and sea fishing grounds. See page 201 for details on how the Farming skill influences a character’s Status score.

You roll a farming skill roll once per season to see how well you go and the result raises (or lowers) your status with your neigbhours:

• Fumble - subtract 2 points of Status
• Failure - subtract 1 point of Status
• Success - add 1 point of Status
• Special - add 2 points of Status
• Critical - add 3 points of Status

[Nozbat]

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Pendragon springs to mind, as does Harn Manor.

I had Pendragon but I'm sure I didn't use it. I never had Harn Manor, but having looked at it on DriveThru. I'd say it would have everything you need. I also thought I had a similar Harn production on farms but can only find the Wool Merchant one. It might be on my Desktop which is presently in storage and suffering Separation Anxiety (I keep getting notifications that I left it there on my phone.)

6 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

Udderly ridiculous.

This is a 'Dad' joke... and you need to be severely sanctioned .. despite my initial guffaw it then turned into a groan as is the proper response to all 'Dad' jokes

 

6 hours ago, Greville said:

Mythic Iceland also has a farming as a separate skill (on P25):

I like this idea of one general roll. Simplification for me is good, although if you do it in the Harvest phase, a bad roll, and the Harvest could be  disaster, so multiple rolls over the planting/ growing cycle (possibly quarterly) could even things out.

I tend to hand wave things like that and bad harvests happen as plot devices to get the sedentary bâtards off of their comfy chairs and out into the wild blue yonder where danger and peril lurk.

However, the idea of plot devices came back to bite me in my last game. The PCs are on their Journeyman year, and not allowed to go within 25km of their home for a year and a day. As a bit of fun, I thought that they would be offered the chance to sneak out of the rather monastic Kontor to have a night carousing and gambling. Maybe, I thought, they could earn bragging rights as the last person standing in a chug-a-lug (from RQ3 Vikings) or improve their meagre wages to buy the latest à-la-mode pointy shoes. 

Did my players take the opportunity? Absolutely not. They all had the view that I was going to purposely get them in trouble. I'd other ideas for trouble as they soon found out when their Meister was horribly murdered using a bust of the Kaiser (it was the Kaiser wot killed him, sir).. never be predictable is my lesson to be learnt.

 

[Atgxtg]

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

I had Pendragon but I'm sure I didn't use it.

Nack in the KAP3-4 days, when they game didn't have a land management system (the one from KAP1 wouldn't work with KAP3 economics) I cam up with a very simple system for handling land. Each Manor produced £2d6 income, with things like the weather, stewardship rolls, raids and magical blessings/curses applying modifiers to the roll.

It was very simple and easy to use, and handling multiple manors easy as rolling 6d6 isn't that much harder than rolling 2d6.

It would be easy to adapt to RQ too, as historically £1 was worth 240 pennies (we could use 250 for easy of play). So we'd just need to decide what the average income of a farm would be and set the die roll to average that amount. For instance the WSLF 300 rating for the farmstead in Doraster farm is the average RQ3 income level, of about 1440 pennies (£6)per year per person, or 48/year. So something like £12d6+6 or £8d10+4, or even £9d10.

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

I never had Harn Manor, but having looked at it on DriveThru. I'd say it would have everything you need. I also thought I had a similar Harn production on farms but can only find the Wool Merchant one. It might be on my Desktop which is presently in storage and suffering Separation Anxiety (I keep getting notifications that I left it there on my phone.)

Like all Harn stuff, it's good, but it might be a bit too detailed for most people. It comes down to how much time you want to spend running the land versus other things. It's one of the reasons why I banned the Book of the Manor from my Pendragon games. We spent more time rolling the land that playing. 

 

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

This is a 'Dad' joke... and you need to be severely sanctioned .. despite my initial guffaw it then turned into a groan as is the proper response to all 'Dad' jokes

But planing the cows too deep was high humor? Besides that couldn't be the problem since planing the cows deep would just mean you had self fertilizing crops. 

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

I like this idea of one general roll. Simplification for me is good, although if you do it in the Harvest phase, a bad roll, and the Harvest could be  disaster, so multiple rolls over the planting/ growing cycle (possibly quarterly) could even things out.

Me too, but it depends on what sort of game it is and what I'm trying to do. If keeping the farm going is a major thing in a campaign, as with Dorastor, then I'd want there to be more to it, since the game success is going to hinge on it. In the other hand if the PCs are off adventuring and we just want an update on how things went as home while they were away, a single roll is fine.

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

I tend to hand wave things like that and bad harvests happen as plot devices to get the sedentary bâtards off of their comfy chairs and out into the wild blue yonder where danger and peril lurk.

Again, it depends on th game. In Pendragon, bad harvests can force a knight to tigher his belt and cut expenses which can lead to banditry and social problems.  Since the land is what gives a knight his income, it's important. Well, unless the knight's just came back from a tournament or war with a wagon full of treasure. 

46 minutes ago, Nozbat said:

However, the idea of plot devices came back to bite me in my last game. The PCs are on their Journeyman year, and not allowed to go within 25km of their home for a year and a day. As a bit of fun, I thought that they would be offered the chance to sneak out of the rather monastic Kontor to have a night carousing and gambling. Maybe, I thought, they could earn bragging rights as the last person standing in a chug-a-lug (from RQ3 Vikings) or improve their meagre wages to buy the latest à-la-mode pointy shoes. 

Did my players take the opportunity? Absolutely not. They all had the view that I was going to purposely get them in trouble. I'd other ideas for trouble as they soon found out when their Meister was horribly murdered using a bust of the Kaiser (it was the Kaiser wot killed him, sir).. never be predictable is my lesson to be learnt.

 

You can lead a player to an action but you can't make them act.