Talk:Rules:Kingdom Races
Open Source Mentality
Ok, it looks like the pattern is:
Primary Benefit: -2 Primary, +1 Secondary OR -3 Primary, +2 Secondary. I'm not clear on your reasoning for this balance. I see that you did, however, make the Kingdom Check DC 10+ instead of 15+ as in Ultimate Campaign.
Secondary Benefit: Consumption -1 / BP +1 for a specific structure. Again, not completely clear on your reasoning, given, especially, that it provides a disproportionally huge benefit for one specific thing.
Tertiary Benefit: A form of favored terrain.
This holds, essentially, true for everything, and produces a sort of pure symmetry in game logic (much like games such as 4e bring a pure symmetry by having every progress in an extremely similar manner). A dirty symmetry could, however, be achieved - as when 4e released the Heroes of... series.
One other thing I notice is that you seem to building a number of these concepts outside the framework of the standard Kingdom rules, especially as regards government and race. I have developed, in the past year, a stronger sense of the Open Source philosophy which, as it applies to this, would suggest that, where possible, the systems you introduce ought to build on existing material, superseding it only as completely necessary.
My understanding, in part, was that the goal was to adapt the existing Kingdom-Building rules to, as it were, a Player-Character-free environment, and with rules alluding to the benefits of the Secondary Attributes, I think this made the strongest strides in that direction. A lot of this material, however, feels like the intention is to add material that may be apropos of nothing.
tl;dr: I think you should laser-focus on the necessities to run Kingdoms in a multi-user environment and expand on other factors later.
Response / Explanation
Concerning Primary Benefit: The purpose of the design method is to give each race more of a feeling of uniqueness. People and races are defined most (in my experience) from their flaws. The -2/+1 and -3/+2 design choice is to add a sense of cohesion and symmetry that is appealing aesthetically while maintaining a sense of balance and fairness. The character of each race shines through in how they will organically construct their society. For example: Dwarves. -2 Loyalty compels the dwarf ruler to build things that increase loyalty. What are some good cheap things to do that with? Brewery and Monuments will do that. Are there other methods of increasing loyalty? Sure. But the easy way is to play to the stereotypes and that is the direction I want to push in. Not forcefully or with massive penalties, but with more common sense impressions. I will point out however that the -2/+1 and -3/+2 bonuses are by no means balancing each other. The races are balanced but the abilities are not modular. Each race must be taken as a whole.
Secondary Benefit and Terrain: Purpose for both of these abilities is two-fold: Increase speed of play and define the terrain that a particular race tends towards occupying. Each race has a certain type of terrain that they are just better in. For this reason they will want to occupy as much of that terrain as possible. This will invariably result in conflicts of interest when encountering other races or others of their race. If there is nothing but peaceful cohabitation across the board then there will be no way to see how the game supports conflict in an email based, PC free environment. The bonus to terrain is so lopsided because that is the smallest large scale economic bonus that can be given without unbalancing the game. I want a large scale economic bonus because the game needs to accelerate beyond the slow turns to keep people interested.
Ultimately, the government and race rules are entirely a stand alone and unnecessary for the functioning of the game. Their only purpose is to give people a concrete identity for their kingdom to wrap their heads around. Think of these not as a core mechanic but as an optional rule being used from the start in order to generate interest in the game.
Asterisks
I've been meaning to ask: are the *'s after most of the entries just indicative that what follows is flavor?
Kobold Self-Affinity
Are you concerned that the kobolds, as written, aren't charged upkeep for small cities? That is, each city gives them a cavern hex, each cavern hex gives them a BP, this reduces that BP cost of cities to 0 for the first district.