20 réponses à ce sujet

[The Fred]

OK, this might sound like an odd NWN2 topic, but what I'm doing is making a "Noble House" system for my oriental-themed campaign, much like (well, related to) the Crossroad Keep stronghold system. The idea is for a player to be able to be a samurai/daimyo/lord etc as if in Feudal Japan (or something like Feudal Japan). However I wanted to get some opinion on balancing the mechanics in terms of realisticness (realisticity?) vs gameplay.

What I have at the moment is a sort of income tax, where the player gets income based off how many peasants they have, and then pay a fraction of that on to the Emperor. While this is easy to understand in real life terms, I'm not sure it's either historically accurate or best for gameplay.

What I think would be best for gameplay would be for players to pay a tax based on how much money (or rice, or whatever) they have in total - this is because it would apply a "restoring" effect which would get bigger as the player's wealth grew, stopping it from spiralling out of control exponentially as it could in Crossroad Keep. However, this doesn't really seem either realistic or, to my knowledge, historically accurate (a tax on land, maybe, but on savings, maybe not).

A flat tribute rate or amount based on number of peasants and/or land would probably be more likely, and it would stop exponential growth of the kind in CK, where more peasants = more money = better stuff = yet more peasants, since more peasants and land would mean more tax... however, players would still be able to amass a lot of money, since all a peasant tax would effectively do would be to lower income (this is also a problem with income tax).

So, basically, I need some sort of financial system which:
A) Is reasonably simple
 Makes real-life sense
C) Helps prevent exponential growth (and, preferably, makes life easy on poor players)

Of course, there will be other costs, like maintaining assets, armies, etc, but I just wanted to know if anyone had any suggestions about how to make the financial system "work", so to speak. I mean, things could even change in-game as the Emperor decides to re-hash the system or whatever (perhaps going from a lax system which lets the player get to grips with things to a harsher one), but I need something which "feels" like Feudal Japan (even if it isn't 100% historically accurate - this is a custom fantasy setting, after all).

[kamalpoe]

cap the number of peasants, periodic disaster such as flood requires a large expenditure, daimyo requires a large contribution to fund fighting elsewhere

[The Fred]

I don't really want actual caps, they feel too artificial, but large populations could cause famine which increases death rates etc. However, at this level, the player will already producing a lot. I want them to be able to make gold and be successful (and obviously a noble will probably be a lot richer than a peasant), but I don't want to create a goldmine (think SoZ trading system) which diminishes the trading side of the RPG aspects of the game. Disasters are probably a good idea, though, they'd make things more dynamic (and the game is not meant to be a purely strategy-based one, so developments in the story will probably change things, too).

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

If you do tariffs, a tax on trade goods moving through a checkpoint, then you can add in smuggling.

Historically, though, I think the local lords would go around to each peasant's bit of farmland, estimate it's crop yield, and then demand a certain percentage of that estimate come harvest. So you estimate a peasant has a field with a 100-bushel yield, and then you demand 25 from him at harvest. He gives you some sob story about the bad weather, so you shave down the tax to 20 bushels, and try to make it up someplace else.

Meanwhile, the daimyo knows your fiefdom should produce 1000 bushels a year, so he demands 200 or so come harvest. So that's essentially a flat tax, readjusted whenever the daimyo sends a tax assessor out to re-resurvey your lands. If you manage to get really rich, though, the big man might think of some other way to squeeze money out of you, by demanding a gift or a bribe.

As for a rubber-band to keep exponential finances in check, I think you just need to set a (Malthusian) limit on the productivity of the farmland. Say the fiefdom has 1000 acres, and needs 1 farmer per 10 acres. Once you reach 100 farmers, a rise in population doesn't lead to any increase in income, though the extra bodies still eat up more of your harvest each year. Additionally, the excess harvest can only be converted to gold through trade with a market town. The market levies a tariff, which may rise as the game progresses, and bandits may arise that steal your produce on the highway.

And then there's rats. They can eat up stored grain, reproduce exponentially, and so provide the world's first decent justification for a rat-killing quest.

[kamalpoe]

Peasants pay there taxes in rice (measured in koku if you want to be feudal Japan compliant). Heroes need gold, not rice, to buy things from the merchants. The gold/koku exhcnage rate can vary. In seasons where plenty of rice is produced it will take more rice to get a gold.



"What I have at the moment is a sort of income tax, where the player gets income based off how many peasants they have, and then pay a fraction of that on to the Emperor."

The tribute to the daimyo required is going to normally be relatively steady amount, say 1000 koku, regardless of your income. You're paying for the daimyo's stuff, and keeping your family in good quarters in the daimyo's capital (assuming you're like Japan and the daimyo requires you to keep your family there). These expenses won't vary based on your income. There should be a good balance of years where the tribute is more than the income the lord gets from the land. Daimyo wanted to make sure no lord got too rich/powerful.

[The Fred]

I know they used rice a lot back in the day, but I'd planned on having rice and gold pretty much synonymous (since rice was used kind of as a currency). A variable rice-to-gold rate might work, though; that way, as you get more farmers, rice becomes more plentiful and so worth less, so your income doesn't actually increase that much. The point about there being a limited amount of land makes sense, too.



Possibly I could just have tax bands, so to speak, so if/when you get too rich, the next guy up the line (probably the daimyo, since I will probably have the player as only a minor lord, at the start at least) ups your taxes, but otherwise they're a more or less flat rate (I guess this could be a flat rate per land or something though).



Obviously I can use rats, thieves, bandits, bad crops, natural disasters etc to help keep things in check, and to come important you're probably going to want to bribe the Emperor etc but it looks like the best bet for keeping things moderate on a day-to-day basis will probably be diminishing returns from peasants and an exchange rate or something (this might be quite nice in that players could acquire rare resources etc to - partially - get around this).



Part of the issue is that I want people to be able to play as either a lord, or not a lord. So, while I'm happy for nobles to be richer and have an easier time of certain aspects than peasant players, I don't want them to be swimming in gold as it'll screw up balance. Maybe this is a bit ambitous, but I was never very sensible in that respect ;-)

[kamalpoe]

I ripped Crossroads Keep out of the OC, have you looked at it?

http://nwvault.ign.c...s.Detail&id=297

[BartjeD]

A tax from the Bakufu and Emperor based on the amount of land seems sensible. Certainly richer provinced would be more heavily taxed. The state of the empire also influences it. In years of peace the tax will be lower.

Ofcourse you'd have to keep in mind administration back then was retarded compared to what we have now. (computers, excel)
Perhaps the player could get an imperial audition every few "periods" to assess if his lands have grown wealthier. This way you'd pay a fixed tax until the next audition. You could even include hiring Ninja's to ambush the auditor. Ofcourse after a few times the Emperor / Bakufu would get veeeery suspicious and perhaps angry about the wanton banditry against imperial servants in your lands.  

Perhaps as the game progresses you can introduce a way to influence national politics / events and keep the taxes low.

Another cost mechanism could be diplomatic relations with neighbours (gifts, expensive ceremony etc..), military expeditions, hiring Ninja's to influence politics, maintaining a navy to keep piracy at bay, storms that ruin the merchant fleet, hosting kabuki theater to keep the population happy, having festivals which cost money, rogue samurai, Taifoon's impacting weather and ruining crops & shipping, mongol invasion, civil war, war taxes and many other things I think.

[Edit:]  I'd love to see Ninja's!! 

Modifié par BartjeD, 20 décembre 2010 - 07:14 .

[The Fred]

It seems like a more-or-less flat rate tax is going to be the most realistic... I'll probably have to keep things like population limited with death rates etc and hope the finances follow from that. Of course, there's no reason there couldn't be both income tax and property tax, but until they discover Mordenkainen's Marvelous Spreadsheet it might be a bit much. Between "artificial" money-lowerers like distasters and so on (and maybe stealth taxes, like stamp duty, magic licensing, quill tax, daisho tax etc). ;-)



I have looked at the Crossroad Keep mod, though it doesn't seem to be working 100% (I think it's using one or two expansion textures and things).



And yes, Ninja are in (maybe not as assassins as per say, but they're definately in).

[dunniteowl]

Just also bear in mind, for those lords, the rice to gold rate would be, on the whole, pretty low. Though NWN2 only has gold in it's system, the traditional methods of currency and rates exchange included much less precious metals, copper, silver and even brass (and if I recall, a lot of the older yen my dad brought home from Japan were brass hammered extremely thin and stamped/cut so that they were very light and the holes in them reduced the amount of metal required to make each one.) So, to reflect this multiple currency metals exchange, you might consider a sort of raw formula that Xn (gold) = Yr x .25 or something *(Yield in Rice koku) so that those who wish to play lords don't get too fat off the land, simply because the value in rice to gold isn't so artificially steep as NWN2 would have it be due to no other currency rates.

Just a thought.

dunniteowl

[The Fred]

Well, like I said, I had planned on having them earning some arbitrary wealth which translated directly into gold (i.e. everything works in gold, even when it's rice), but now I'm getting the itch to put in a whole supply-and-demand exchange system in... and this isn't even meant to be a strategy game ;-)

[Banshe]

One of the things that has always struck me about historical societies is that they were really barbaric in the way they handled things. To us, their actions and behavior can be seen as atrocious, cold hearted and even, inconceivable.



In ancient Rome, if a vote was to take place in the Senate that you didn't want to take place, you could send in your armed thugs to drive all the Senators out and disrupt the vote.



So my suggestion would be let the player decide how much he wants to tax the peasants. Give him a range of options:



1. Take very little and the peasants love you

2. Take an average amount and the peasants are indifferent to you

3. Take a lot and the suffering of your peasants could lead to serious problems.



Then turn it on the player. How much do his superiors demand of the player. Make it random: the player's superior demands a lot/an average amount/just a little.



What a player's superiors demand of him can influnece what the player demands of his peasants. The player's superior could be raising funds to go to war.

[Dorateen]

Banshe wrote...

In ancient Rome, if a vote was to take place in the Senate that you didn't want to take place, you could send in your armed thugs to drive all the Senators out and disrupt the vote.

 

Wait... I actually like that idea.

Harumph!

[Banshe]

Dorateen wrote...

Banshe wrote...

In ancient Rome, if a vote was to take place in the Senate that you didn't want to take place, you could send in your armed thugs to drive all the Senators out and disrupt the vote.

 

Wait... I actually like that idea.

Harumph!

Pretty cool, huh. I got that from a book called "Cicero" which is one of those historically reconstructed biographies . It is chock full of things like that which really blow your mind. The governments back then were well and truly primitive.

[The Fred]

I'm quite tempted to give the player a short, introductory period to let them get to grips with things before cranking up the taxes and stuff and having them have to adjust... since I was planning on having some sort of Imperial shake-up as a plot node anyway, it might be a good excuse to give the player something to think about.



Later on, I hope to have a whole bunch of agents and things you can employ - this might not be Rome, but using covert means to get what you want should be perfectly possible (and, given it's NWN2, maybe even darker means, too).



P.S. Cicero *was* a pretty awesome guy.

[The Fred]

OK so one thing I need to think about is the rice/gold exchange rate, and maybe about having the player have resources of various types. Then, farmers could produce rice, merchants gold, miners ore or something etc. The only problem is that I don't really want players to have to keep selling rice... maybe it could happen automatically, or the player could set how much of their rice they want to be sold each "turn" or something. At the moment, though, everything's still in gold.

So, some number crunching:
I'm still not sure how often a strategy "turn" will be... maybe a quarter, but I'm thinking at the moment a month. Now, the Koku is historically the amount of rice required to feed one person for a year, but in a month one person will eat less than one koku, so let's use a masu (apparently, rice for one day). Then, in a month, each peasant will east about 30 masu.

Now, if you imagine that players will probably have to spend a few gold pieces to stay a night in an inn or have a meal, 1 masu would probably cost them more than 1 gold, but that's at the end of the supply chain; I expect selling in bulk to the rice merchants would probably net you

At the moment I also have the player starting with only about a dozen peasants, too, a number which I'll probably increase. That means they probably ought to be making somewhere in the region of 1000 gold per year from farming (though they would get extra income from things like trade etc). The thing is that this probably only equates to a few koku, an amount which seems a bit small. What I'll probably do is start the player off with a slightly bigger estate, but balance it with more tax (though if the player is not actually a daimyo but working underneath one, it's not too unrealistic to imagine them running a small holding - more than the dozen I've been using to test the system, though).

Modifié par The Fred, 23 décembre 2010 - 03:12 .

[kamalpoe]

The Fred wrote...
Now, if you imagine that players will probably have to spend a few gold pieces to stay a night in an inn or have a meal, 1 masu would probably cost them more than 1 gold, but that's at the end of the supply chain;

Probably not, the adventurers are eating at what would be a fancy restaurant and staying in a hotel. Versus the peasants who are probably eating some rice, veggies from the garden, maybe an egg or a bit of meat. A masu won't be very expensive, but adventurers won't typically be eating it. As adventurers/lords they are going to be eating more expensive things.

I had an old pnp rulebook that gave a weekly upkeep cost to just being an adventurer, hanging out in the inns and taverns, getting training in adventuring stuff and whatnot. After a certain level it was assumed you're spending more and more time hobnobbing with the high end of society and costs would go up, importing roast griffon from Halruaa is expensive. Basically the idea was being a hero has certain costs that go with it, these drain your finances as you live the "high life", and provide an excuse for more adventuring.

I'd make the koku/gold conversion happen automatically and not make the player decide if they want to store koku for the future unless you really want to expand on the governing the land aspects.

[Lugaid of the Red Stripes]

I would just have each peasant generate Xgp per day, and then the PC has to go around to each peasant and beat the money out of them. Later on you could hire a tax collector character to collect the rents for you.

The scripts to handle it are pretty simple. You just have an integer on the peasant that records the last day rent was collected. The next time the player comes around, you use that number and the current date to calculate how much gold has accrued, and add it to the peasant's lump sum. Reset the saved date and you're good to go.

To balance things out though, collecting peasant's rent shouldn't be too profitable. The real profit should come from investing that money in some other venture, like mining or a trade route. Then you could adjust the profit rate of the secondary venture to control for 'inflation'. For example, you take the gold collected by the peasants to buy sake from a local vintner and then sell the sake in a market town. As the player gets richer, the vintner demands more money per bottle and the market offers less.

[The Fred]

kamalpoe wrote...
Probably not, the adventurers are eating at what would be a fancy restaurant and staying in a hotel. Versus the peasants who are probably eating some rice, veggies from the garden, maybe an egg or a bit of meat. A masu won't be very expensive, but adventurers won't typically be eating it. As adventurers/lords they are going to be eating more expensive things.

This did occur to me, but I expect even L1 peasant adventurers would have to pay a couple of gold at least for an inn (in BG you could get a room for 1gp but I'll probably set it a tad higher); yes, what they'd get for this is probably better than just a day's worth of rice, but still, saying a masu is ~= 1/2 gp or something is not too much of a stretch... either way, 1 koku will be worth a few gold (maybe 100?).

kamalpoe wrote...
I'd make the koku/gold conversion happen automatically and not make the player decide if they want to store koku for the future unless you really want to expand on the governing the land aspects.

This I'd agree with. As I mentioned before, I had considered having the player be able to gather various resources etc, but it's too much faff to have them mess about with selling rice. I want them to be able to make lots of decisions, like how much to tax the peasants and so on, but I don't want them to have to micromanage boring things.

Lugaid of the Red Stripes wrote...
I would just have each peasant generate Xgp per day, and then the PC has to go around to each peasant and beat the money out of them. Later on you could hire a tax collector character to collect the rents for you.

This is a nice idea (well, not for the peasants). At least, I might make the taxing happen more or less automatically, but you have to hire enforcers or so it yourself, or a portion of your taxes never arrive (and law and order goes downhill).

Lugaid of the Red Stripes wrote...
To balance things out though, collecting peasant's rent shouldn't be too profitable.

This is very much my intention, too. Having a big load of land with loads of peasants on it will probably produce quite a bit of wealth (at least by their standards), but balanced with the taxes you have to pay to the next guy up the line. I'm still toying with the idea of a tax per peasant or something, to keep the overall profit low, but a flat rate will probably do, and I'll just crank it up periodically throughout the game. If the player can't manage their mini-economy well enough to pay, fine, they'll just be stripped of their lands and titles and sent to work in the fields with the rest of their ex-serfs.

...possibly to lead a peasant revolt against the daimyo... the gameplay possibilities are almost endless.

Modifié par The Fred, 23 décembre 2010 - 06:32 .

[The Fred]

Oh and I forgot to mention, of course you will have to pay for your soldiers, and the more peasants you have and the wealthier you are, the more you're going to need soldiers to protect them and yourself from thieves and bandits... plus, if you tax people a lot, you may have more money, but you'll need to spend more on having more soldiers and enforcers to quell uprisings. So, it will probably balance out that way, too.

[The Fred]

Well, thanks guys, those are some good ideas and I've built up a bit of a better system. Sadly my PC refused to come out of sleep mode a few days ago and in protest the toolset chewed up my whole module - thankfully I had a backup from about three days back, and all I really had to rebuild was this system.



Anyway, I now have a tax avoidance rate which will reflect how much the peasants think they can lie to you (going around beating them up and things will lower this) and mean to add law and order rates and things too. I've got a pretty decent system to handle birth and death rates etc too (though things probably happen on a smaller timescale than they ought to, but whatever - any odd changes can be expalined by movement of peasants between villages, I expect). I've settled on just sticking to gold as a resource, but I might put in some limitation so that you need a certain number of farmers to feed non-farmers (like soldiers, or miners).