Hi,

As some of you know, I have been DM'ing a BR-BPEM since two months. I
should have done this before, because it pointed out several, in my
opinion, flawed logics in the rules. One of the strangest rules is that
a landed regent can occupy his own provinces and destroy the holdings of
other regents. It clearly states destroy and not reduce to 0. All this
costs is 1 GB extra for upkeep and a -1 loyalty. The -1 loyalty is
absolutely nothing, because each unit counts as 1 law holding, so
chances are high you have more then enough law to ignore this. When just
glancing over this rule, there appears to be nothing wrong with this.
When you think about it, you realise that it ignores two very important
things: (1) economic, (2) you can't buy faith.

Destroying all the guilds should have severe economic consequences or at
the least in loyalty. The Players Secret of Ilien actually points out
that fighting the guilds is a very stupid thing to do, because of the
economic consequences of such an action. I do not see that back in the
rules. Sure, you need money to rebuild a guild, but in the mean time a
regent does not get a lower income by taxes. It is as if the income of
the people you tax, did not suffer under the dissapearance of trade or
whatever you think the guild holdings represents. In fact it is very
easy for a landed regent to destroy enemy guilds in own lands. You might
state that it will destroy the leaders of the guild and leave the
individual merchants and craftsmen alone. Even if that is the case, you
destroy a network and that will have economic effects. It will certainly
have a stong loyalty effect, because the reason the guilds formed in RL
was to oppose the rulers.

Even stranger is the fact that a regent can destroy all temple holdings
and an other temple can immidiatly raise their holdings. Suddenly the
people who were worshipping for instance Ruornil will worship Haelyn?
Sure, people might come to the temple, even donate money, but they will
not worship there and weren't the realm spells based on the energy
created by faith? In RL the Spanish did something simmular in the
Netherland to the protestants, it was one of the reasons there started a
rebellion against the Spanish. At that time the Netherland gave the
Spanish more gold then America, so you can guess what they lost (the
Dutch did win the rebellion).

For the temple I have a suggestion: it will drive the other faith
underground, so should we reduce the temple holdings by 1/2 and make the
rest secret. An other suggestion would be to reduce loyalty immidiatly
to poor and keep it their for several turns. The last would not be that
realistic when fighting against small guilds or small and impopular
temples (like the evil White Hand in Danigau).

Do you have any opinions on this?

Pieter Sleijpen

But what about the economic consequences?