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  1. #11
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    Osp:

    True, you wind up with Guilds and Temples getting a bit too much gold in alot of campaigns. What if Temples were reduced to 1/2 GB income, and Guilds had to pay for the maintenence of roads and ports? (also adding some ships to alot of the guilds would help to drain their coffers through the maintenence there...
    "It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion -- and usually easier."

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  2. #12
    Senior Member Osprey's Avatar
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    Athos,
    I honestly like that solution better, although "requiring" guilds to maintain roads and seaports isn't something I'd make mandatory. If I were writing the book, I'd write in a section that mentions the fact that "guilds typically pay for the construction and maintenance of roads and seaports, as these are necessary to establish trade routes."

    Landed regents might build roads for military purpose, and they might build roads and seaports and then tax any guilders using them for trade. I like to leave such things open for players and DM's to decide how to handle, while writing in suggestions and "the ways things typically are" in the campaign setting.

    Given the profit generated by trade routes, I wouldn't mind if both temples and guilds made only [1/2 x level] GB per season. Having less money floating around in the the campaign world would be a good amendment to the revised BRCS, in my opinion. Thanks to the removal of maintenance costs (compared to the 2e version), most regents seem to wind up with more money than was previously true. So the armies get bigger and more elite, castles spring up everywhere, and stronger regents with big treasuries get unrealistically generous because "Hey - what else am I gonna' do with all this money?" Such is the problem in my current BRCS campaign.

  3. #13
    Birthright Developer irdeggman's Avatar
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    "What am I going to do with all this money?"

    Well, typically the guilder used the money by "loaning" it to the realm regent in order pay for his armies. This was done in exchange for "favorable taxation" or "favors to be named later". This system led to a lot of the intrigue that is inherently a part of BR. Balancing things out isn't necessarily a good thing, if all regents end up being independent of each other and not "forced" by situations into kind of codependency.

    A realm regent can set up special usage fees for roads, and typically does. If he wants, the realm regent can "shut down" the road at pretty much any time and choke the life out of a trade route.
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  4. #14
    Birthright Developer Raesene Andu's Avatar
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    Exactly...

    If a guild or temple is collecting vast sums of gold and the ruler of the provinces is poor then said ruler isn't going to sit by and let all that gold go to waste (or at least he shouldn't). He will raise taxes and start using the extra money to fund more armies or ships and buildings for his realm.

    It is true that guilds and temple do end up with a lot more money than a king, but this is not that unrealistic when you consider that the guild control most of the mercantile activing in a kingdom and the priests own land, farms, etc and are given money by the citizens. All the king has are his taxes, and you know how much people complain about them.

    It is the DMs job to find something for all that nice gold the temples and guild collect to be spent on, or to find ways of taking it away from them without them realising that is what you are doing. The easiest way to do this is through conflict, either war or a battle with another major guild or temple. Nothing eats through your treasury like a war. A wealth realm is always going to the target of those who seek its wealth.

    Other ideas could include a natural disaster, where the regent is forced to spend some of his wealth to help the people. How about a rebellon, something like the French revolution. No one likes to see a wealthy merchant sitting there in his palace while the poor suffer and if your regents have huge treasuries then that is going to cause some friction with the people who will start demanding a share of the wealth. If a lot of regents have huge stashes of gold then this rebellion could grow and spread across a wide region, not only upsetting the PC realms, but also NPCs. If the people fell in behind a charasmatic blooded leader and the military started deserting (they are promised a share of the plunder when the evil grasping PCs are driven from power) then you have a major problem and it could be something that carries on for turn after turn, as the PC strive to reclaim their realm from the rebels.

    Corruption is also a good one to use, starting small with just a few hundred gp going missing, but soon large amounts of gold start vanishing from the treasury.

    Then you can look at new things for regents to spend their money on. If a temple has a big treasury its priests might start asking for a new, grand temple to be built, one that will cost oddles of gold. And of course, then you have all the problems associated with building the great temple, labour shortage, material shortages, earthquakes, and so on.

    How about giving your regents something to spend their gold on that they actually want. If they are wizards or priest and have item creation feats, then you can suck away quite a few gb that way without upsetting your players. New spells to research for wizard (although they don't usually have gold problem). How about new assets, as someone already mentioned. There was a post on the forums recently about specially holdings, let them build some of those. Or maybe a spy network, let them set up one of these, they are always expensive to run with bribes etc.

    The posibilities are endless, if I thought about it long enough I could probably come up with a hundred completely different ways to take money away from regents who have too much, enough to keep the game fresh and interesting for a long while.
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  5. #15
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    Its ironic in most games that i've seen along the lines of a DM controlled strategy game, I have never seen teh problem with too much money. Landed regents as suppost to tax people who live in their realm. So while guilds and temple to pay maintiance they do that "fees" to pay and that is taxes.

    Also I have come up with 100 hundreds of ideas of spending money that are not covered under the conventional rule set. Thats why BR should have a DM. You say I want to do X and then the Dm says it will cost you Y. You then can increase the regency spent and/or gold and get Z result. The regancy rules are just a guild line to ajudicating each turn. Hell I've had more then one player come up with the idea of small elite units used to disrupt things in a war yet there really inst a rule for the creation of such units as they are more military in scope than espionage. The key is a DMs role is to determine what effects and what cost such "non-standard" action incure.

    If players have no imagination then its really their fault. And if DM dont allow non-standard action then they really shouldnt be DM for this style of game.

  6. #16
    Site Moderator geeman's Avatar
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    Airgedok writes:



    > Also I have come up with 100 hundreds of ideas of spending money

    > that are not covered under the conventional rule set.



    Care to list any? We probably don`t need hundreds, but a few dozen might be

    useful....



    Gary

  7. #17
    Senior Member Osprey's Avatar
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    One possible way to allow for increased spending is to allow GB to be spent to increase bonuses to domain actions other than just Agitate. Airgedok alluded to this in his post, and I have allowed it from time to time when it makes sense.

    The problem is that the rules flat-out don't allow it, yet this makes very little sense other than saying "Regency is king, not gold."

    But the reality is that allocating extra resources to nearly any project is bound to increase its chances of success. This is basic economics of investment - more capital allows more options.

    A house rule I decided on, though was to say that regents could match their RP expenditures with extra GB (1:1, after base GB cost), based on the idea that extra cash was only useful if properly allocated (represented by RP). Naturally, Rule Province remains the exception in my BRCS-based game.

    A quick example: the landed regent of a 4/1 province has a Law(3) holding, and an opposing regent has a Law(1) holding there. The landed regent wants to clear the bandits out of the province, and spends 5 RP and 6 GB to Contest the Law(1) holding (including the 1 GB base cost), giving him a net +10 to the Domain Action check.

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