Rules Questions / FAQ

Q: How do you acquire settlements and defenses?

A: Settlements and defenses come directly from your stats. That mean at the beginning of your game, if your Defense score is 20, you already have 20 points worth of defenses. As your score rises and falls, you'll adjust your holdings to reflect your score, and that's where your posts will come from.

just quickly adding the rules link here so I can find it when I have time, if that's ok :D

Fine with me. I was going to do that and forgot.

BTW, how do you select territories with the red borders?

that was a paint program. If you don't have a good one, Pixlr works. It's online.

Question about status use against factions, what are the limits or drawback of using multiple plots of only 1 status?

Is there a mechanical reason to choose a city over having 2 villages? Both give 2d6 military dice, but a city costs 25 population, while the villages cost only 20. I think this might be a holdback from that change you made clarifying the capital's role.

so... bowl just pointed out that the rules under defense mention: For every 10 land you have, you can build one of the following fortifications, as long as your total fortification cost does not exceed your Defense score.

Does this means that we can have 1 fortification per each 10 lands and these are limited by the defense stat?
I read it has per each 10 defense... so I may have too many forts :(

Oops, me too. I only have 22 land, so I should only have two fortifications even though I have enough defence for 3. Please remove the tower from the inland village in the crown lands. I'll keep the tower at the coastal village and the keep in the capital.

Falconloft explained on Discord that those rules don't apply anymore after all. So you can keep your fortifications :)

...then what is land for? Please don't tell me I placed all my points into a stat that doesn't get used.

It's for how expansive your land is

Which does what exactly, besides boosting my ego?

It does a few things.

1) It's a buffer between your border and your settlements, which means they're less easy to disrupt. It also helps you either keep wars going longer if you want, or end them early.*
2) Your location (determined by your land, or course) decides whether you're affected by any given GM event. (both good and bad)
3) Land sort of helps determine who's in charge in each region, and ultimately in Scymira as whole. The larger you are, the more likely you are to be noticed in hierarchy.

Now, if none of these things are important to you, then land isn't a priority, and I don't mind if you swap up.

* So say you have 50 land, and you're attacking a House that has 20. You want 2 cells from them (That's 10% of their land). They need to either prevent you from attacking their territory for a whole turn, or control 5 of your cells (10% of your land). Now turn that around... Say you're defending, and a house with 20 land wants 2 of your 50. That's 4% of your land. If you occupy even one of their cells (5%), you end the war.

The amount of status you use determines how likely you are to beat the opposing roll. You start of at just over 50% with a one-point spend. Plus, the result is your roll divided by two, so the less you spend, the more likely you are to get the 3 result, which is disruptive, but not actually negative.

I could also have a crisis that only affects small houses, or only large ones. >__>

It says to use the original roll to divide by two, if you keep the status bonus, you would end up with more chance of causing a victory than anything else :p

I guess we could eventually think of how the stats could be interconnected, so that land would produce wealth and status and limit population and so on...
It that is another layer of complexity and would start to look like a computer game ;)

Should there be a consequence or limit to the status move? You could do it once with 10 status, but if you do it 10 times with 1 status you will likely weaken a house 5 times on average, that's -30 points! It seems way better to do it many times as possible unless there's a limit or consequence.

RE: the fact land doesn't "mean" anything and creating relationships between the stats.

I think this comes down to the philosophy of the game. At the moment, the mechanics are good for creating random changes in circumstance to prompt us to generate fiction to explain it. For a truly domain-level "game" you need some sort of economic engine that work like a feed-forward loop (e.g. lands > resources > population > military > more land > etc). If land is limited then houses will come into conflict and with multiple factions you'll get alliances/politics that hopefully balance because if one house starts becoming powerful, the other houses team up to stop them until things even out again. I think we're missing the feed-forward loop aspect in the stats. I'd love to have that aspect in our game, but I think it can be extremely complicated to make in a simple and balanced way and at this point, it would be hard to engineer fairly because we've already made so many decisions to create our houses. Also, the more complex the system, the more of an accounting game it becomes, which might turn off some people if it's too much. I'm happy to try to help with suggestions on how we might try to accomplish this within the scope of the current system and with as few modifications as possible, but it might be tricky at this point. Otherwise, we need to just continue with the game as is and treat it as a way to generate fiction, as opposed to a true "game", if that makes sense.