- -----Original Message-----
From: Pieter Sleijpen
Date: Sunday, November 08, 1998 3:44 PM

>
>Have you ever tried to run a small country? They always have shortages
>in money and RP. The problems arise in the larger countries who get huge
>ammounts of RP en GB. I am DM'ing a BPEM now and one player is playing
>Colier Caernson (Brecht). He has got a treasury of 96 GB and earns about
>34 GB each turn. That is what you get with a combination of land ruler
>and guild ruler (or temple) combined with the +1 GB bonus per collecting
>holding.
>


In the real world expansion is an excercise in diminsihing returns. Some
realms might be well placed to take on new holdings, or lands, but for most
realms, the next holding will be less valuable then the average of their
existing holdings. This gets really complicated because states gradually
adapt to circumstances, so what was true at game start is not true by game
start +10 years. My suspicion is that no one wants to get into the kind of
administrative realism that this would require, but for perspective I'll
offer some of my ideas.

1) Revise the maintenace chart, so that after (say) 18 holdings, the
maintenance cost for each additional two holdings is 1GB, and after 40
holdings, 1GB per holding (so only large holdings are worthwhile). This is
the easiest thing to do.

more daring DM's might also consider:
2) Encourage players to use the decree action to reform and improve
government, often involving the establishment of new bureaucracies. In most
places, Late medieval government was pretty stable, and began to undergo
significant change between 1400 and 1450 (England was later). As realms go
from being part of the household of the regent (administered by his
chamberlain & steward) to modern bureaucracies run by professional
administrators rather than trusted administrators, revise the maintenance
chart, so the player can now have 20 holdings according to the rulebook's
maintance chart, and doesn't jump to 1 GB for two holdings until after 20.
This second option may be more than you want to bother with. I like to suck
up alot of my players time with running the government, so this works for
me.

Kenneth Gauck
c558382@earthlink.net