Mid-to-high level D&D 3.5? (Basically Full)

[PhantomPistoleer]

Urr... these rules seem to make everything top heavy.  Are these flavor or are they pivotal for game participation?

Would it be wiser for me to just join up with someone?

[WyzardWhately]

Kat said our Security and Trade are actually Bad, not Good. So that's going to really hurt your trade ratios...

I have no idea how I misread that.

Well, I need to edit it anyway. 

ff is right, we should not be attempting to trade with the outside world if we can make any kind of half-assed attempt at self-sufficiency among ourselves.

[ff]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/equipment/goodsandservices.htm

Also has some interesting 3.5 benchmarks.

For example untrained hireling labor is 1 sp/day, but so are 'Meals, Poor', so I wonder if the average guy can even feed himself. (I doubt the economics of these values were thought out overmuch.)

A chunk of meat is 3 sp so most people can rarely afford it. Hunk of cheese is 1 sp and bread is 2 cp per loaf. Dunno how the average grunt can sustain himself; or maybe these are 'adventurer prices' and locals tend to get better prices, or buy in bulk, or subsit off even cheaper stuff.

[TheGlyphstone]

The D&D economy 'rules' are completely borked by default, pay no attention to them. ;D

[WyzardWhately]

Those are the prices at the Company Store.

[ff]

Holy shit, I am stupid.  That is *exactly* what we should be doing.  Trade between PCs is free.  I'll provide culture.  One of y'all figure out how to provide food, one person do Wealth, one person puts their cohort on Security Detail and we'll all be safe from anything that isn't HUGELY SCARY, etc.

I can do food, since other people seem to be more highbrow (universities, research, culture, lots of magic and psionics, etc.) and the followers I have in mind are like druidic hunter/gatherer/farmers who are not very civilized/learned except in natural lore (i.e .K(nature)).

They can also do some Culture, or whatever category being 'landscapers' for everyone else would be - the botany, making pretty gardens, etc. would fall under.

[WyzardWhately]

Excellent.

Katina:
Chicken are 2 CP apiece.  So, they are 50 per GP. 

If I bought a couple hundred chickens, would that help my food situation?  Chickens are pretty good at scavenging crap off the ground, and produce eggs.

I could also obtain goats for milk, they are much hardier than cattle.

[TheGlyphstone]

Holy shit, I am stupid.  That is *exactly* what we should be doing.  Trade between PCs is free.  I'll provide culture.  One of y'all figure out how to provide food, one person do Wealth, one person puts their cohort on Security Detail and we'll all be safe from anything that isn't HUGELY SCARY, etc.

I'm not even certain that'll be enough (though admittedly, part of that is because my horde outnumbers everyone else combined).

You've got 30 followers, including your cohort. Let's pretend I don't have Extra Followers, so I've got around 60. For simplicity's sake, let's say FF, Phantom, and Aether each have 20. We need to produce a total of 450 'units' between each of us. If I pump everything and everyone into Wealth, I can get produce the 150 Wealth units, with 30 left over for Culture. If you focus on Culture exclusively, you can crank out 90 culture, putting us 30 behind. Even if the remaining three 'party members' devote exclusively to Agriculture, they can make 150 Food and 30 culture.

So between all of us, and my horde cut in half, we barely break even...

[WyzardWhately]

What it boils down to is that we need to focus on keeping them fed, and just suffer the deficits on wealth and culture until we can get a few legs up.

I agree that your gigantic horde is a bigger problem...you need to focus on acquiring more parcels so you don't hit diminishing returns so quickly.

Katina:  My cohort can cast create food and water once a day and basically feed the entire stronghold by herself.  (She can feed 27 people with one casting, everyone there plus Rygel is a population of 30.  The remainder is pretty easy to make up.)  Also, goats and chickens as mentioned above.

[ff]

Livestock seems like a great idea, also cows for milk.

My followers may all have Survival ranks  so they can usually forage for themselves and others - in fact you can turn a 'profit' by proving food for others as well (quoted below).

One might reasonably infer that the land has a limit to the amount of foraging it can support - druids I presume are quite good at doing it in a 'sustainable' way, and so limiting themselves consistently per day to some number per square mile of Survival-checkers, which may be number that's in the rules or Katina has thrown out somewhere in the thread for our 'bad' land. They can also travel outward and forage from nearby terrain to our own lands, at the cost of some delay in their traveling (and possibly riskof harm.

In the DC below, you can move half your overland speed (24 mph pr day for a human, 32 if they have a level of Barbarian) which means that followers could go 6 miles out and back in all directions and still bring food in the whole day; they could also go further and make overnight trips to forage. They'll consume some of their own food on the trip but they have to be fed that day anyway. 

This is course is just class pre-agricultural-revolution hunter-gatherer behavior, as well as realistic medieval behavior where guys would go hunting in addition to the farming. Suddenly I feel like I'm playing D&D meets Sid Mieir's Civilization, or anthropology class.

Hopefully this tactic will ease the 'Parcel' limit we have, by making use of surrounding lands. The main hindrances I can think of are how Katina might rule on 1. the level of forageability of the land and 2. followers getting picked off by monsters. I guess I'll just have to see what 'conditions on the ground' look like in the RP with respect to how monster-ridden the lands seem and how much we've cleared them out before doing this.

"Survival DC   Task
10   Get along in the wild. Move up to one-half your overland speed while hunting and foraging (no food or water supplies needed). You can provide food and water for one other person for every 2 points by which your check result exceeds 10."

The nature of this check is the followers probably do NOT want to take 10, since if they exceed it by a lot they get a lot of food, but no matter how much they fail it, the worse case scenario is tey get nothing and just consume their own daily rations (i.e. -1 output). If my typical follower had 4 ranks in Survival,  a mod of +2, and the +2/+2 skill feat,  that's an average role of 18-19 for 4 'extra' people per day (avg is higher do the aforementioned downside limit at 9).

[TheGlyphstone]

I'm thinking I'll just get rid of the Extra Followers feat, since it's hurting me more than it helps, and was mainly for flavor anyways. That reduces my upkeep, but it's still punishing. Expanded Knowledge (Fiery Discorporation) is usually my preferred pick, because it's awesome if you carry around an Everburning Torch.

If I recruit 2 5th level clerics and a 6th level cleric as my top 3 followers, they can crank out between them 48 'units' of food per day for all of their 3rd-level slots. If they all have the Creation domain, they get CF+W as a domain spell and +1CL on Creation spells, so they can make (2x3x6)+(3x3x7)=36+63=99 units of food per day.

I suggest everyone else do the same, getting as many 5th+level clerics as you can.

My leadership is (CL10+6 Cha+4 Thrallherd+2 Stronghold)=22, with my +1 mod for Special Powers cancelling my -1 Mod for Aloofness, so I have 91 people that need feeding. That puts me +8 food surplus, without any workers allocated to labor yet (aside from the clerics taking 1 minute out of their day to restock the larders).

[WyzardWhately]

Unfortunately, my leadership score is only 16 (level + charisma + Stronghold), so I don't have any fifth-level ones.  However, it also reduces the number of people for whom I must provide.  We'll see how it turns out when I recalculate.

[ff]

I'm thinking I'll just get rid of the Extra Followers feat, since it's hurting me more than it helps, and was mainly for flavor anyways. That reduces my upkeep, but it's still punishing. Expanded Knowledge (Fiery Discorporation) is usually my preferred pick, because it's awesome if you carry around an Everburning Torch.

If I recruit 2 5th level clerics and a 6th level cleric as my top 3 followers, they can crank out between them 48 'units' of food per day for all of their 3rd-level slots. I suggest everyone else do the same, getting as many 5th+level clerics as you can.

I think my Leadership score was

10 + 5 (Cha mod) + 2 (stronghold)=17, but need 19 for the first 5th-level follower.

I'm not sure about the 'special powers' etc. modifiers, but maybe she can get both 'special power' +1 for being a half-orgy and 'fiarness and generosity' +1 for being all goodly and paladinic stuff.

If truly necessary, I could give her a Cha boositng item, adjust point buy distribution, and/or switch the human base race for one like LA +0 feytouched, which already fits her theme, and gives +2 Cha.

I'd been trying for a 5th level follower earlier, either for a spell like CFAW or the druidic Plant Growth, which 'improves crops'.

"Enrichment
This effect targets plants within a range of one-half mile, raising their potential productivity over the course of the next year to one-third above normal."

So with a 5th level druid we can raise everyone's crop output by one-third, even if we have a lot of land, since she can cast it 1/day but it lasts a year.

[TheGlyphstone]

Ooh, yeah, +30% to our total Agriculture output can be very nice indeed.

If I read it right, production is based on CR, correct? So I allocate one CR5 to, say, Culture in each 2 parcels, and the CR 6 in a third. The 2 CR4's together take Parcel 4, being CR6. I've now got 22 Culture cranking out, 24 if my crazy-rich keep gives a 10% bonus.

2 CR3's each go into two parcels for Wealth, being CR5. 3 CR 2's take parcel 3 for CR 5, and 4 take parcel 4 for CR 6. That's 21 Wealth production, 42 with Economy as an area specialty.

I've still got 75 level 1 dudes to assign, though. Throwing 5 of them into each parcel for Agriculture nets me another +20 Food surplus, for a total of +28.

With my personal specialty of Research, I can spend another 20 mooks to manufacture 40 research points, which are all surplus for the moment. Spending 20 mooks on Trade, though, gives me a total trade buffer of 40 as well, so I can trade that research for Wealth.

At the end of it all, I've got 15 mooks left (put them on Security, I guess). I have a Wealth deficit of 9, a Culture deficit of 67-69, and a Food surplus of 28. My Security rating is 10 (CR8+2), CR12 if my cohort is currently at home to lead them on patrols.

[WyzardWhately]

Okay, Peeps basically need to produce 3 units apiece, on average, to break even.

I'm producing 22 food and 72 culture (94 units) out of my total of 30 citizens (including my PC, which I'm not sure if we include them as needing wealth, etc.)

So, I'm 4 units up, provided we can evenly distribute production.

I really need 8 food, and need up to 29 wealth.  I can trade Culture 1:1 for any of these.

This is all subject to modification depending on the rulings on the questions above.  If someone has a druid casting that extra production spell, then a 33% bonus is enough to push me over the top of food self-sufficiency.

[TheGlyphstone]

Yeah, someone supplying a lvl5 Druid will give me a total Food surplus of 35, which I can trade for Culture or Wealth at 1 to 1 as well.

[ff]

I'll try to make sure I have a 5th level druid then, or a 5th level cleric with the Plant domain - Plant Growth is its 3rd level spell - so she has both Create Food and Water, and Plant Growth. Though I might stick with druid for variety of options if others' followers are clerics only.

Ir failing that maybe one of gylph's several currently-cleric followers could choose Plant domain. (But the Reputation modifiers I suggested seem reasonable to me...)

[WyzardWhately]

Yeah, someone supplying a lvl5 Druid will give me a total Food surplus of 35, which I can trade for Culture or Wealth at 1 to 1 as well.

You *might* be the only one with L5 followers, since it requires a leadership of 19 to get even one.  I'm not sure who else, if anyone, has that.  My cohort is an archivist...hold on, let me check something.

[WyzardWhately]

Yep.  She can have that in her prayerbook easy.

Kayla the Archivist will handle fertility treatments for the area.  Welcome to +33% food production, everybody.

Between the Lyre and this, everyone but the artificer owes me one. 

;D

So, my current figures are:
Surplus/Deficit:
Food: 0
Wealth: -29
Culture: +43

I have 43 culture to trade for wealth and/or to contribute in return for someone providing security.  If someone can manage a security rating of even 8, they can give everyone else a 7, and I think that's pretty decent.  It keeps the riff-raff out, but gives the PCs enough to do to keep themselves entertained.  We probably want to have the occasional fight at CR 8 or 9 to keep ourselves sharp.

Incidentally, I'm still not calculating my character into the food/wealth/culture stuff, just his followers...it's probably going to matter how food-producing magics affect the calculus

[TheGlyphstone]

My Leadership score is 22. Unfortunately, all of my clerics' top-level slots are currently devoted to Create Food And Water.

Then again, if followers with class levels use the Elite array for stats, then they could have Wis 16, and another 3rd-level slot each.

Now I can produce:
5th level cleric with Creation, Wis 16: 2 3rd level slots plus domain: (3*3*6)=54 units of food.
5th level cleric with Creation, Wis 16: 2 3rd level slots plus domain: (3*3*6)=54 units of food.
6th level cleric with Creation, Plant, Wis 16: 3 3rd level slots: (3*3*7)= 63 units of food.
The cleric's domain slot goes to Plant Growth, adding 30% to everyone's Agriculture output.

Now my Food production is 171, and I only need 91. that's +80 surplus food, though it'll take 27 cantrips worth of Purify Food and Drink per day to keep it fresh indefinitely, and it's not tradable with anyone except maybe other PCs. Food is not our problem by any means, our deficits are going to be in Wealth and Culture. Heck, the 2 5th level's can handle my food needs on their own, letting the 6th level do whatever he wants.

I have enough guards to provide CR8 security+2 for a total of CR10.


Everyone is drastically short on Wealth, it looks like...and we're adventurers. What gives? :)

[WyzardWhately]

Wealth isn't nearly as easier to fake as food is, sadly.

But that's actually good, in a way...being able to pay dudes who starved to death would be worse than having well-fed and moderately-cultured people who just happen to be broke.  :P

What we need to do is put together a list of short-term goals we can collectively or individually achieve. 
1.  There's a river adjacent to my domain.  Big irrigation project?
2.  There is also an untapped resource tile adjacent to my domain.  It's a place where valuable metals could be mined, but it's infested with monsters and suchlike. 

Anyone else?

[TheGlyphstone]

3. Find some Monster dens, raid them for phat lewt.

The modifiers for either failing to meet or exceeding any given need are as follows, and stack for each need you either fail to meet or exceed:
4+/person: +2
2-3.9/person: +1
1-1.9/person: +0
.5-.9/person: -1
less/person: -2

This passage needs clarification, because it can make or break us. By the strictest reading, failing to meet two categories of needs for all of our people for even one month basically drops our Leadership to 0, though we can each afford to let one category suffer indefinitely.

[WyzardWhately]

My understanding of it is as such:

I am producing no Wealth.  At 0 wealth/person, that's less than .5.  It gives me a -2 to my Leadership, because no one is getting paid.

However, if I don't trade more than 13 or 14 Culture away, I'm expending 2 units of culture per person.  That's +1.

So, that would put me at a total of -1 to my leadership score, and thus I lose people if we don't fix the situation by the end of the month.

Which is pretty sucky, straight off the bat.

[TheGlyphstone]

Me, on the other hand, I'm at a deficit of -2 for my culture (0.24/person), and -1 for my wealth (exactly 0.9/person), while putting all my clerics on maximum food duty gives me a food output of 192 for +1 (2.1/person). I've still got the 20 surplus Food points, but I doubt anyone is going to have leftover Wealth, so I can't break even.

Kat, any chance you could maybe modify Trade so that in addition to increasing the amount we trade, it can increase the rate of return above 1-to-1? As it stands, all of our math is showing us in a steady decline that we can't stop and will continually get worse and worse until it's just us and our cohorts - heck, if I even lose 1 point of Leadership, my Clerics will start vanishing, and my entire population is utterly screwed, because it's impossible to feed them non-magically.

[WyzardWhately]

Hmm.  Maybe we could just start the game, and get all this ironed out within the time-frame of the first in-game month?  We've been doing chargen, designing and paying for strongholds, and now managing domains for, like, days now.  And the fact is, I think maybe only me and Glyphstone are really all that interested in pursuing this amount of bookkeeping.  ff wanted to just take some stronghold out of the book, someone else also said they didn't want to deal with building one...I am not seeing a great deal of commitment to this degree of domain management from anyone else, either.

I mean, seriously.  I have a mighty tolerance for high-level sim stuff in comparison to the average player, but even I'm starting to feel like I've signed up for a game of Agribusiness and Accountancy.  I would feel infinitely better if we could get to some of the payoff for this work.