Guilds

For those of you who don't know, the time period referred to as 'medieval' stretches a rather huge swathe of time, beginning in the 5th century and ending in the 15th (thanks, Wikipedia!).  Lasting over a thousand years means that there are some rather significant differences between the early Middle Ages and the late Middle Ages in both technology and infrastructure.  For example, the Catholic Church did not dominate all of Europe until after Charlemagne's campaigns united Europe in the late 8th and early 9th centuries, and Luther's 99 Theses were nailed to the church door in the early 1500s.

On an economic level, over the Middle Ages, we see the rise of the guild system, which is essentially the beginning of the idea of a middle class.  In pure feudalism, there are two classes of people - the leader/protector class and the peasant/serf class.  As feudalism developed, the tiers expanded: the leader tier gained additional lower-status ranks (King to Duke to Marquess to Earl to Viscount to Baron in the English system), while the peasant group grew upwardly with the rise of towns and the increasing need for dedicated craftspeople.

The urban framework was one of the most important developments of this period (as opposed to the castle-town system wherein a central point of defense was surrounded by a few necessary industries (metalworkers, etc.) and enough fields to support the community), and I'm defining it as a densely populated geographical location where the primary occupation of the majority of its denizens is not agriculture in some form or another - that is, townspeople make their living through activities other than farming/food production.  Usually, this alternative occupation was a craft or trade of some kind where the individual bartered their particular skillset for coin (and then for food) - joiners built furniture, coopers barrels, masons foundations, etc.  Obviously, furniture, barrels, and foundations were made long before these dedicated craftspeople came along - most folks had enough know-how to cobble together what they needed.  What these artisans offered was an easier and (theoretically) higher-quality product allowing these noncrafters more time to devote to their primary trade.  We see the ramifications of this today when most of us have trouble repairing the utilities that enable our way of living (fixing a microwave oven, toilet, etc.) without calling an 'expert'.  The trades of plumber, electrician, and so on are the descendants of this artisan tradition.  Cooking is the most recent trade to be appropriated by craftspeople - many people still know how to cook, but that number is decreasing.

Returning to the Middle Ages, these artisans formed organizations to fix prices, control the market, and disadvantage competing groups (a fusion of union and CEO).  Due to this, guilds gained rather considerable economic power very quickly, enough to influence the rising judicial system to pass laws favorable to the guilds (such as laws requiring a guild license in order to practice the guild trade).  Guilds created monopolies on most trade goods and eventually gained enough power to upset the feudal system and take over political, economic, and social control of European society (extending from the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment and into today).

The foundations of this guild takeover were laid during the Middle Ages with the rise of urban centers.  So, guilds deserve a rather important place in any historically-influenced fantasy setting referring to this time period.  Any cities existing outside the normative feudal framework were probably founded by wealthy guilds seeking a place to ply their trades without paying the hefty taxes levied by their noble overlords.  Within an urban center, guilds have as much or more influence as the local noble.

As the number of guilds grows in your setting and guilds splinter into more specialized organizations, friction will develop between groups as they compete for resources and markets - a brewer knows enough to make a passable wine, potentially undercutting the Vintner's Guild set price, which would destabilize the Vintner's Guild and garner power for the Brewer's Guild.  If the Vintner's Guild discovered what was happening, they might expand into the brewing of ales and beers or (more likely) hire some bruisers to smash up the guilty brewer's brewery.  The Brewer's Guild would retaliate, and all of a sudden we've a city-wide conflict between two wealthy, powerful groups each looking to hire men and women with a penchant for violence.  Starting to see why guilds are a useful component for your world?

The purpose of this post, however, was to look at how we might use combine guilds with Alexis' economic system.  As I understand it, Alexis' encyclopedic approach gives him references for goods, both raw and manufactured.  Since I don't have such a phenomenal resource for my made-up world, I need to improvise.  I have 2 choices: make it up - create a list of all the goods I wish to be available and then arbitrarily decide how many references each location has - or use these guilds - decide, based upon resource availability and synergy which guilds are in ascendance in each of my major population centers using my 0-3 scale for raw resource production, and use that as my reference or each affiliated trade good.

In case you hadn't guessed it, I'm going to go for the second approach.  This means that I need a list of guilds wherein each guild is broad enough to encompass the wide range of goods necessary for me to run my game yet specific enough that by choosing my guilds carefully I can start to give each city a unique flavor (having a metalsmithing guild, woodcrafting guild, stoneworking guild, and randomcrap guild would not be discerning enough, but having a tinsmith, coppersmith, zincsmith, bronzesmith, coppersmith, ironsmith, steelsmith, goldsmith, silversmith, pewtersmith, etc. is too specific).  I have my list and am in the process of implementing it.  We'll see how it works.

Core Mechanics

Most modern games have a central mechanism that governs how players usually interact with the world - D&D 3.x had the d20 roll, GURPS has the 3d6 roll, FATE has its d10s, and so on.  Now, OD&D and AD&D featured different interaction mechanics for different scenarios - martial combat and saving throws used the d20 roll-under, as did ability checks, but the all-important reaction roll was determined by 2d6+Cha mod.  I'm sure there are other mechanics I am forgetting, since I am not as familiar with OD&D and AD&D.

All of these mechanics (except FATE) function similarly: [di(c)e roll] + [modifier] ~ [difficulty value] (where ~ is a relation corresponding to either greater-than-or-equal-to or less-than-or-equal-to, and the modifier can either be a positive number or a negative number, usually dependent upon the identity of ~).  I don't think this is controversial.  Typically, the DV will increase with the scale of the feat required, and the modifier will correlate with the character's ability for that task (as the character gets better at something, their magnifier will increase).  Usually, the dice used will stay fixed, although FATE and dice pool systems are the obvious exception to this; such systems tend to change the number of dice rolled according to character skill and demand a number of 'successes' depending upon the difficulty of the task attempted (and the value required to count as a 'success' can also vary based upon this task difficulty).  For example, in FATE, a character with 4 Brawl rolls 4d10 when attempting to apply brute force in combat, and count as a success any die resulting in 8, 9, or 10, a failure any die of value 1, 2, or 3, and neutral any die in between (failures cancel out successes).  Depending upon the defenses of the target, the number of successes required will fluctuate.

Lastly, I wanted to discuss the system presented here.  As I understand it, it is the current foundation of C's current skill system over on www.hacknslash.BlogSpot.com, and it was highly influential in the creation of the Prodigy discipline system.  The gist of it is that there are different tiers of experience and that as one progresses these tiers, one rolls a larger and larger die.  This is a truly elegant skill system.  To me, though, it does have one unfortunate flaw.

In the real world, three things tend to happen as a person becomes more skilled.  The first is that the person is able to accomplish more impressive feats - a skilled cook can prepare a much more remarkable meal than a novice from the same ingredients.  Second is that the person's failures tend to be less catastrophic - a novice's meal might actually poison you while a skilled cook's failure might just taste bad.  These first two things are accounted for in most of these systems - rolling a larger die or adding a larger number does increase the character's likelihood to succeed, and failed attempts will likely fail by less, so that works.

The third thing, though, I think is perhaps most important: skilled characters can more reliably produce the same results.  One of the major problems of rolling single dice is that each value is equally likely - rolling a larger die increases the mean result, but critical failures are just as likely as critical successes, which are just as likely as any other possible value.  For 3.x, I use 2d10 instead of 1d20 for this very reason.  It is the combination of higher quality and more reliable work that makes skilled people more valuable.

If you watch reality TV shows like Project Runway, Make Me a Supermodel, Top Chef, etc. you'll see the judges weighing which is more important - the capacity to do great work or the ability to consistently create a good-quality product.  Usually, the reliable people beat out the hit-or-miss geniuses.  It is this last quality that is lacking from most resolution mechanics (GURPS, of course, is based on the 3d6 bell-curve but it has other issues [since most actions are opposed by other individuals and success is reliably attained, most turns are spent hoping the opponent screws up instead of wishing for the character to do well]).

Prodigy seeks to increase both consistency and the level of achievable results by summing an increasing number of dice together as the character improves.  There are 6 tiers of skill: Novice, Apprentice, Journeyman, Specialist, Master, and Grandmaster.  Someone with Novice knowledge of the skill is essentially untrained at it, whereas Grandmasters can perform superhuman feats (a la minor superheroes, demigods of myth, etc.).  Tasks are rated along these criteria as well, so there are Apprentice difficulty tasks, Specialist difficulty tasks, and so on.  The following table shows the dice rolled for each tier and the difficulty value for each category.

Discipline Level	Notches	Dice Rolled	Difficulty Value
Novice	0	1d6	3
Apprentice	1	1d4+1d6	6
Journeyman	3	2d4+1d6	9
Specialist	6	2d4+2d6	12
Master	10	3d4+2d6	15
Grandmaster	15	3d4+3d6	19

Discipline Level	Notches	Dice Rolled	Difficulty Value
Novice		1d6	3
Apprentice		1d4+1d6	6
Journeyman		2d4+1d6	9
Specialist		2d4+2d6	12
Master		3d4+2d6	15
Grandmaster		3d4+3d6	19

Now, the mean value of each roll is also the mode  (except for novices, which is appropriate).  Notches refer to how much training is required to reach the next level of skill.  I'll keep those numbers to myself for now, since explaining that would take a great deal more time and space.

Hopefully these thoughts stimulate your own brains and/or whet your appetite for Prodigy.

Determining Reference Definitions

So, defining what a reference is is, for me, the current hurdle I'm attempting to overcome to create a functioning economic system (details found here and  here).  To recap, references are the relative importance of the various trade goods - goods with more references are more valuable than those with fewer.  Essentially, each reference is equivalent in value to each other reference, so having 9 references of bees and only 2 of gold means that bees are 4.5 times more important than gold.  Each reference is associated with a quantity of the good it represents, which allows us to see the relative production values of that good.

Now, since Alexis' world is Earth c. 1650, he is able to approximate the global production values of each of his goods from the global production values of goods today, then divide those totals by the total number of references for each good to get an exact (ish) quantity of goods for each reference.  It is an excellent system, but one that absolutely does not work for the world of Prodigy, which has but 800,000 square miles of land mass currently inhabited by humans (slightly less than the size of the Louisiana Purchase, or about the size of Mozambique).  Due to the region's small size, compared to the planet as a whole, and the fact that the region does not correspond to any geographic area on Earth, I have to go a different route.

In Alexis' post linked above, he suggests setting the reference value of gold to 2,000 oz per reference.  So, since I am unwilling to arbitrarily define these references, let's use that value to define our whole system.  Each reference is equal in value to each other reference, so by using the current economy, we can get at least some prices on the table.  Yes, the availability of resources in today's society is drastically different from medieval availability.  Yes, many of these goods are commodities which fluctuate widely in price over time (gold, especially).  So, there are several sizable problems with this methodology, but I've spent a while trying to come up with a better one and have yet to find it.

So, let's find the cash value of 2,000oz of gold, and then the price per large unit (mostly tons and bushels, since I'm ignoring the livestock for now) for each of my raw goods.  By dividing the cash value of a reference of gold  by the price per large unit, I'll get the number of large units equal in value to 1 reference of gold.  Aha!  We have reference values!

Now for the next problem: price correction.  I have approximate values of raw goods, and I also have a price list of various goods from the medieval era (here), so by using the latter to get a correction to the former, I ought to be able to come up with a rebalanced set of prices.  We'll see how it goes.