Settlement Ability Scores
You know, thinking about settlements as having ability scores has me thinking about growing communities like advancing characters. What do most characters want? Health and prosperity, I imagine — like the communities they build.
Ninety-five percent or more of all the characters inhabiting a given world are noncombatants — not adventurers. Likewise, I think the majority of settlements will lack a military, or more than the most basic defenses — a small militia, or a police force perhaps, made up of its citizens — but certainly not a full-time army.
Most communities will lack a “class” that confers combat abilities.
Instead, they require a number of abilities that help convey who they are, what they do, how well they do it, and what happens in the event of a catastrophe — often, that’s when the true character of a community is revealed (as with people).
Here’s what I came up with for “community ability scores.”
Under other circumstances population might be considered another type of “resource,” but in this case I mean population to refer to the overall health of the people in a community (as suggested in my earlier post), not a raw number.
Incidentally, there’s nothing in these scores to suggest that a community itself couldn’t relocate — and there’s nothing to suggest an age or even the size of the community. I figure those details are unimportant when determining the value of the community to the PCs — all of those details are merely implied.
Now, I keep saying this stuff is supposed to be for player use, but what does any of this actually mean to the PCs? Well, I’m glad you asked!
See, these scores — when combined with other randomly generated, or hand-selected features — should play well with the Trades system I’ve been talking about recently, giving PCs a direction to go in when deciding on a set of non-adventuring goals. So, what happens when a community levels up?
For starters, I imagine it probably gets “bigger.” There are a lot more questions to be asked, but seriously if dungeons, characters, and settlements can all be generated in roughly the same manner — to be populated by random monsters and loot, we’re well on our way to a nice, concise tabletop Roguelike.
Discussion (5) ¬
Towns are always hard for me. They are the manifestation of society and civilization coming together to meet specific economic needs of a regional populace, often growing in an organic way emergent from the routines, desires and behaviors of each individual in the populace. Trying to conceive of how these relationships are formed, how the needs are being met and how best to meet them is a lot for one person to wrap their head around (part of why large-scale social planning is usually met with disaster).
Sometimes I can spin a small community out of a basic economic aspect (next to flowing water, a mill community; orchards, maybe brewing; near mines, smelting and industry), but anything more intricate than that sort of comes piece-meal. “Does the community need/have this? Okay, well, how do they get it?” and go from there.
Something that could easily create a town with a sensible economic structure around a theme would be a godsend not only as a gamer but as a writer.
3e had a lot of fun, esoteric systems that came out of the woodwork — the Player’s Handbook 2 had an “affiliation system” that I reference a lot, which seemed like a fantastic idea to me… however its foundation was in another system that was fundamentally flawed.
The affiliation system was dependent on the settlement creation guidelines presented in the DMG — which never worked for me. I tried rolling up communities using the tables, but they never made sense to me.
What the affiliation system could *do* however, was provide a framework for growing an organization that had reach across a kingdom, a country, a region, a continent, and eventually the planes themselves — offering missions and guidelines for working one’s way up the ladder.
I figured to make something like the affiliation system work, one would first have to fix the framework for creating settlements — and the system I’m talking about in my post here, is my latest stab at doing exactly that. :)
I always come back to old games like Serf City in my mind when trying to imagine the way a settlement grows: You’ve got a wheat farm that grows wheat… they need a mill… once you have a wheat farm and a mill, you get flour… once you have a wheat farm and a mill, you can have a devoted baker. Before you can have a smith, you need a foundry to smelt the ores that you pull up from the mine, unless you can trade for your raw materials.
So, a community as it grows is able to eventually meet more complex economic needs, but certain things have to be in place before more specialized professions can exist. Maybe having something like a tiered ‘tech-tree’ would help. Once a town reaches a certain ‘level’ or populace, it can support these industries/professions, or, with trade routes or other external factors in place support other higher levels of the economic chain.
One of the complicating factors is trade — sometimes a demand for a thing (sometimes self-imposed, sometimes external) causes people to drop what they’re doing and change en masse to some other thing.
And sometimes receiving some new item or commodity causes a bunch of people to jump ship and build an entirely new industry around a thing that’s come totally out of left field. People are weird.