The seneschal went straight to where she pointed and saw the house, surrounded by gardens, trees, fields, mills, pools and fishponds, and enclosed by earthworks and palisades; and in the middle stood the finest tower you could ever wish to find.
First Continuation of Perceval
Vague Handwave of an Idea
Players everywhere want a way to customize their holdings. Pendragon has The Book of the Estate, The Book of the Manor, and several other variations on this. Other games abound with base-building elements, and they’re a pretty stock element of video games around the same idea too. You raise some resource to build or upgrade buildings, which give you perks or new resources.
What makes base-building fun? What’s the player fantasy? What do people want a base-building system to do?
I think it would include the following:
- The decisions take time and the effort feels meaningful: it feels like an investment.
- There’s reasonable options that make each character’s base feel like an extension of the character and the player’s personal interests and direction.
- There’s tangible benefits in the rest of the game, so it doesn’t feel like just a money sink or a separate minigame.
- More than individual character style or customizations, it feels like it integrates into the wider world and changes the setting (either because things are happening on and in these estates, or the world is reacting to them). It generates plot hooks for adventure (or for events that will happen on adventure), changes the way they interact with the setting, etc.
Improvements are the core “upgrade” or “buildings” to build onto the estate. You have 13 slots1 that can be filled in with a word and whatever iconography we need to indicate the benefits of each. You use Quests to fill in new ones, you only get as many as there are slots.
What can they do?
- At the very least, they’re something you can invoke for Advantage.
- Also, they at least give you new options for what you can do. You can propose holding a hunt on your estate because you built a deer chase, for instance. They’re a marker of some special tangible thing you have.
- They may specifically unlock specific things you can do in The Winter Phase or a Montage.
- They probably also produce Riches and maybe even Fame at the start of each year2. Maybe some could produce Doubt too (for improvements that maybe have a good benefit but with a drawback)
Footnotes
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Or maybe it would be interesting to represent different sizes of estates just by a different number of slots here. We could have a few different designs of “fields”. ↩
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Now, I don’t want this to be too high. Gaining 13 Riches just from a single estate is probably out of the normal bounds of the Fame economy. Maybe it works somewhat like Catan and tiles that are especially productive (Improvements aren’t trying to map every single field and resource - every estate has normal farms, but you may be able to push for especially productive wheat harvests, for instance) have a number. Each year starts by rolling that to see which ones scored. You want to have some diversity so you get consistent wealth, but also you want to be able to get some good winnings (and like Catan some numbers are going to be more likely to be rolled because it’s the sum of 2d6, which is weighted towards the middle values, so we can have a lot of nuance). ↩