Tony Bath Campaign Rules #4

What is roleplay, and how do we wrestle it?

Here we get to, probably the most interesting part of Tony’s Rules: the roleplay.

Lets talk very briefly about the process of building up a world, then we will talk about the genius and (still?) groundbreaking way that Tony told us to roleplay through the situations and how to ‘do’ politics.

A very quick flyover:

Start with a map

Start with the base geography. The most important factor that will determine how much resource a given group of owners of that space will control.

Where are the rivers, the oceans, the mountains, the mines, the horses, the forests, all of these things are extremely important.

Add Countries and People

A great rough guideline, is to follow large physical features when defining borders between countries. Large rivers, mountains, marshes, etc…

Tony also gives guidance for randomly rolling up cities and their populations.

He then gives great advice to use real world civilizations as inspiration to organize the governments and political structures of the countries.

The most important thing…

Is money. Now we take each country, and we divide it up into hexes, and attached a value to each of those hexes.

We get a total income of a country by adding these all together.

We then divide that money, and into layers of taxes for the nobility.

THIS IS EXTREMELY IMPORTANT It automatically gives the barons, dukes, kings, and whatever their own money, their own cut of the pie. If the bishop says that god told him to build a fleet, he needs to get that money from somewhere, and forcing other leaders to have some of that money instead of ‘the state’ in a giant blob forces interactions.

Now some leaders might not give him the money, and we have politique.

Characterization

This is where we have the meat and potatoes of this discussion.¹

Within each country, there is an assumed structure. King, Duke, Count, Marquis, Baron, etc…

Within that set of leadership, we have split up moneys (via taxes) to give each person a piece of the pie.

This is where we introduce personalities.

In my current playtest game, it looks like this, the first two are drawn from playing cards and the rest are thrown from a d6.

Bishop Paul Smith : CD 13 65 52²³

• First letters are what is most important to them.

  • CD stands for Clubs/Diamonds

    • Clubs - War/Patriotism

    • Diamonds - Wealth

• First numbers are morality / Loyalty

  • Our bishop has NO morals and average loyalty

• Second numbers are looks / popularity

  • He is very handsome, and quite popular

• Third numbers are intelligence / activity

  • He is quite smart, but a little lazy

With this template, we can easily, at a glance, see the bishop for the type of man he is.

You are smart

I am not going to ramble and ramble about every implication of Tony’s system. I have only scratched it surface, but it is immediately obvious that these ‘braunstein’s that are all the rage, the ‘freeform roleplay’ between rival factions vying for power, the fog of war between them, the juice that is squeezed from allowing players to roleplay characters in the world in a lawless state of limbo where the referee needs to manage interactions back to the game world and the rules to keep it coherent, is all here.

Tony gave it to us, in 1973.

I am going to give an example from my small playtest game, I assume it will enlighten you to the power of this system. I am still building up a much larger test, and I am extremely excited to see this system in action with more complex relations and nations around them.

An Example Illustrates Best

It is a new month. I draw my income. I levy my taxes. I draw my monthly event card.

“Treachery in High Places”, with a magnitude of 2/6⁴

I look down at my leaders⁵, and immediately one jumps out to me.

My Knight Commander of a small village to the south, has 5 morals, but only 2 loyalty.

I look back to my baron, and he is a greedy, selfish man that only wants money and power.

The situation that immediately pops into my head is one of the knight commander traveling along a road, and coming upon some kind of dispute. Some kind of local enforcement, loyal to the baron, is engaging in some kind of disruptive act with a local, that is clearly resulting in the local losing money to the baron’s purse.⁶

It is then obvious to me, the Knight Commander with his high moral standards would not let this stand, he is a man of faith and is loved by his people.

I rule that the money would be taken by the knight commander, instead of to the baron.⁷ In actual mechanical sense, I took a percentage of the baron’s income from this month and gave it to the knight instead.

Later in the month⁸, the village that the Knight ruled over was going to repair some of its roads, improve them, in hopes to bring in more men and trade to their somewhat secluded area.

The state treasury having far more money, he asked for the funds as it is a collective improvement of the land.

The Baron, obviously upset, told the knight he must pay for the roads from his own pocket!

The Baron, though didn’t say it, would keep in mind that these new roads are actually HIS property. This will probably come up in future relations with this increasingly errant knight from the south…

The tests shall continue!

1. Tony actually gives a couple different versions of this, I am using a small combination of two of them. It has worked very well for what I have asked of it so far.

2. I also have an extra + 00 00 on some leaders, those numbers being political skill/experience, and military skill/experience. I am not sure if I want to keep them or not. Currently skill is just a die roll, and the experience as a cumulative set of years ruling/military campaigns/battles fought against a chart to get a 1-6 value.

3. I havn’t used the numbers literally for anything yet, but I am thinking if I really wanted to, I could use the numbers as half of a 2d6 roll to compare. I am not sure yet, I think the entire system doesn’t need hard numbers or rolls, but one could be available.

4. This is ALL the information you get. The card doesn’t say ‘gain 200 light footman’, or ‘there is an earthquake, pay 400gp per 2000 population in X cities, or whatever. The cards are completely agnostic to details, the entire situation that arises from that card is up to the roleplay.

5. I am using index cards for every settlement and leader, listed alphabetically. It is a little time consuming to set up, but once it is ready to go things like this are a breeze to sift through the cards.

6. I didn’t flesh this idea out to the exact specifics, and I don’t think Tony expected me to. This level of detail is enough for getting the balls rolling.

7. He is being nice, but lets not pretend that feudal society would let him give it back to the locals. Obviously.

8. Each month starts with income/upkeep, then the event card, then 4 weeks to engage in activities.