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Old 06-01-2021, 09:09 AM   #1
RedMattis
 
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Default Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

I've personally only got Realm Management. Those of you who are familiar with the others, when would you use them/pros/cons?

Technically Realm Management is somewhat workable already for PCs that want to work their way up from having bought some farmlands and got people to work the land, but perhaps the other two are better at that level of detail?

How about organizations, if the PCs start a little company, or perhaps get hold of a small space station and tries to make it double a little space-port for passing traders, would either of them be good for those kinds of cases?
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Old 06-01-2021, 11:38 AM   #2
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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Originally Posted by RedMattis View Post
I've personally only got Realm Management. Those of you who are familiar with the others, when would you use them/pros/cons?

Technically Realm Management is somewhat workable already for PCs that want to work their way up from having bought some farmlands and got people to work the land, but perhaps the other two are better at that level of detail?

How about organizations, if the PCs start a little company, or perhaps get hold of a small space station and tries to make it double a little space-port for passing traders, would either of them be good for those kinds of cases?
I haven't gotten any yet but I was definitely thinking city stats might come up on my radar. I somehow missed Realm Management but I will check it out.

Last edited by Emerikol; 06-01-2021 at 11:55 AM.
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Old 06-01-2021, 12:33 PM   #3
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

Realm management feels sort of like a second edition of City stats, and pulls in some stuff from boardroom and Curia as well. Its a lot bigger than the two of those, and its best parts are probably refinements of stuff it pulled from there.

If you want to work with something less abstract than "Realm Points", then Pyramid 3/54's article "City Management" is actually my engine for settlement management of choice, because it runs improvements through cash (and because I learned the system pre-realm management, but I'm not sold on realm point yet). Though you need city management for it, because the option to crash your economy isn't in realm management, and it sort of drives that system (at least it did the time I ran it). If you go that route, the blog series Orphans of the Stars has great advice. I've run a game on that once, its probably the game my players loved the best, and I'm planning to run another game based on it in a few months.
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Old 06-01-2021, 12:52 PM   #4
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

They're different kinds of works for different purposes. Boardroom and Curia and City Stats present organizations and polities as, essentially, environments in which adventuring happens. How corrupt are the officials? What goods am I likely to find? How happy (or not) are the people I'm likely to encounter? Realm Management treats is about polities as playable entities, something manipulated by players rather than simply encountered. If PCs are going to build empires, you need Realm Management. If PCs are just going to adventure in and around polities and organizations (visiting cities, infiltrating organizations), you want one of the other ones.
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Old 06-01-2021, 02:12 PM   #5
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

I haven't read the others, but GURPS City Stats is not a book about how to build or run cities. It's strictly a book about how to summarize cities into stat blocks. When you've done everything the book says for a particular city, what you end up with is a stat block for that city and the knowledge of how it informs your rolls when characters are in the city: How easy is it to find things? What range of Status does the population have, and how Wealthy are they? What is the Control Rating and how easy is it to bribe officials? These are the sorts of things a City Stats stat block can answer.
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Old 06-01-2021, 02:16 PM   #6
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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I haven't read the others, but GURPS City Stats is not a book about how to build or run cities. It's strictly a book about how to summarize cities into stat blocks. When you've done everything the book says for a particular city, what you end up with is a stat block for that city and the knowledge of how it informs your rolls when characters are in the city: How easy is it to find things? What range of Status does the population have, and how Wealthy are they? What is the Control Rating and how easy is it to bribe officials? These are the sorts of things a City Stats stat block can answer.
All worthwhile stuff but I'd definitely not stop at that point if it was in the "sandbox" where my PCs might wander.
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Old 06-01-2021, 06:12 PM   #7
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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All worthwhile stuff but I'd definitely not stop at that point if it was in the "sandbox" where my PCs might wander.
GURPS isn't suggesting that you do. It's just that the purpose of the (very short) PDF is not a deep treatment of cities in RPGs; it's just a bunch of things to calculate to summarize a city.
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Old 06-03-2021, 06:25 AM   #8
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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GURPS isn't suggesting that you do. It's just that the purpose of the (very short) PDF is not a deep treatment of cities in RPGs; it's just a bunch of things to calculate to summarize a city.
Oh yeah I wasn't questioning their intent. It is useful for detailing out those cities that are outside the sandbox and only background references to your group. It might provide some useful information about the city that might influence events inside the sandbox.
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Old 06-03-2021, 08:20 AM   #9
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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Oh yeah I wasn't questioning their intent. It is useful for detailing out those cities that are outside the sandbox and only background references to your group. It might provide some useful information about the city that might influence events inside the sandbox.
There is some discussion in City Stats of how to go from the bare stats to a more detailed portrait of a city, and the example cities have such elements as interesting citizens and possible adventure themes.
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Old 06-03-2021, 08:26 AM   #10
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Default Re: Boardroom and Curia, City Stats, and Realm Management

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GURPS isn't suggesting that you do. It's just that the purpose of the (very short) PDF is not a deep treatment of cities in RPGs; it's just a bunch of things to calculate to summarize a city.

Its got a few more things as well, I've mentioned the rules for possibly damaging the city economy through taxation. That drove the one realm-management-ish game I played.
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