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A Sword Without a Hilt: A Song of Ice and Fire/D&D 3.5 Crossover

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Trek said:
It just feels pointless. What's even the point of taking over the world if our system is so bad that it takes 2 years to make small messenger posts with teleport and magic building tools?
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Ultimately you are losing sense of scale, the costs are high because we are taking over undeveloped medieval hell or mismanaged lands owned by corrupt trade magnates.

We haven't made a significant amount of money since our raids on the Efreeti not because we are overspending on infrastructure, but because we have not specifically set out to gather wealth. Each time we have done so we have done it out of all proportion of time invested or practical obstacles to even spending that wealth in a timely manner.

I don't want to get rid of of the timescales to effect change of the magnitude we are enacting because then it trivializes empire building. Which is anything but.

Large provinces would complete projects faster if we had PCs helping or if we had smaller provinces dump their administrative actions on speeding them up. These aren't meant to be fast, they're meant to be world-building devices.

Salt in the open, it's faster for me to get a sense of complaints around here considering hardly anyone else bothers to organize the strategic actions around here or propose changes (and that's more work for me to learn already since then I have to reorganize the sheets).
 
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Trek said:
What I was trying to show was that the stuff that seems be taking 2 years should be done in 2 months max. I even outlined how easy it is with our current resources. Not related to places that are already devloed like Braavos or Volantis
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You can't build institutions on this scale within two months. If anything, two years is blazing fast.

Try setting up a new nation scale service in a modern industrial nation with an abundance of materials, easy communication and well educated workers. Now try the same in the boondocks by banging rocks together and staffing it with illiterate, inbred hillbillies.
 
Trek said:
Ok let me make a case to you guys about the ridiculous point costs. I will put it in a spoiler to prevent salt.
The current system does not work with high popultation. Like at all.
Look at how ridiculous these costs are. We have armies that can topple the entire continent, mass produced high power creatures and magic that completely bypasses most low level problems. Why then does it take 20 months (both IRL and in game ) to make a freaking messenger service in Orange Shore?









Look above, the average time to completion for most is 8 irl months. Some reach to years and some are even more insane reaching to multiple years.

I am 21, by the time messenger service our most basic building finishes in Orange shore I will be 23. If this does not show you how ridiculous this is then nothing will.

If the point cost scales for the rest of the infrastructure then I will be 40 years old by the time Orange shore finishes all our regular buildings and thats before any addons.

Now the system will bleed random amounts of money from us 1 out of 6 times. With 6k IM that the place bled us we would just buy ravens to replace the entire messenger system, it would be done in 1 month.

So if we will never build anything beyond a freaking messenger services in the disputed lands then why the hell did we take over the place anyways?

Westeros has a massive population so we might as well give up on ever building anything there, and if we cant even do that then why the hell bother to take over the place?

With the amount of gold we lost just this turn we could make so many construct ravens that half the places could be done in 1 month, 1 hour of building with titan tools and the lyte, 5 troopers to guard the ravens and a truth speech instruction manual on how to input mail into box such that the automated ravens we can mass-produce will deliver them. In just 1 month each and every messenger system will be done. Instead it takes 2 years to make a basic building for a problem that we already solved.

It just feels pointless. What's even the point of taking over the world if our system is so bad that it takes 2 years to make small messenger posts with teleport and magic building tools?
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I study (and sometimes practice, if I can get a second internship or short-term contract that fits in with my degree now that my last job has finished) urban planning IRL. "Short-term" is five years when you're talking about infrastructure, and that's in a world where we have infrastructure and equipment already set up. In Planetos, in the middle of nowhere? Sure we're not building megaprojects, but there's an incredible amount of setup when it comes to creating institutions, manpower, services, and the accompanying installation. Several years isn't shocking at all.
Once we're finished with Messenger services we'll set up schools, lawmen, social services, tax reform, etc. It's a long slog, but we'll just keep putting dice there in the background as we get other stuff done with our main PCs.
There's no point in creating great change in our capital if it can't trickle out elsewhere, or if we can't enact similar reforms elsewhere due to lack of infrastructure to carry our will.

It's the Yi-Ti Emperor problem. Lots of personal power, big army, but no real way to project that power or make people follow his orders. He needs more loyal lords with local power bases, more bureaucracy doing what he says and making sure his writ carries far, and more infrastructure to extend the reach of his existing loyal institutions.
We're currently facing the same issues. We can make local elites bow in name only, but to make it matter we have to make them part of the economic, social and political system by integrating them into our state. This is done through infrastructure projects, which takes ages because they involve setting up roads and buildings across an entire continent, making people do what we want and making them learn the requisite skills, etc.
 
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@DragonParadox, since Nettles can share spells with Sheepstealer, it would make sense that she could do the same with Ruin Delver's Fortune, right?
 
Trek said:
Its not just a matter of focus deficiency.
Even if you assume that it takes 1 building per 1000 people with titan tools and the lyte we can bang out the infrastructure within days. Distance and remoteness are both irrelevant we have teleport. We have magic you cant equate it to modern infrastructure.
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The Titan's Tools and Lyres are generally being used on more important tasks, such as bridging islands, building roads, rebuilding an entire district in Braavos, etc.

And yes, we have access to Teleport, as do several of the Companions, but we also have better things to do with our time rather than play delivery man. It's better for the materials and personnel to actually have to travel to their destinations. We want roads to be built to them, communities established to support them, etc., not disconnected islands of civilization with wilderness in between.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
I study (and sometimes practice) urban planning IRL. "Short-term" is five years when you're talking about infrastructure, and that's in a world where we have infrastructure and equipment already set up. In Planetos, in the middle of nowhere? Sure we're not building megaprojects, but there's an incredible amount of setup when it comes to creating institutions, manpower, services, and the accompanying installation. Several years isn't shocking at all.
Once we're finished with Messenger services we'll set up schools, lawmen, social services, tax reform, etc. It's a long slog, but we'll just keep putting dice there in the background as we get other stuff done with our main PCs.
There's no point in creating great change in our capital if it can't trickle out elsewhere, or if we can't enact similar reforms elsewhere due to lack of infrastructure to carry our will.

It's the Yi-Ti Emperor problem. Lots of personal power, big army, but no real way to project that power or make people follow his orders. He needs more loyal lords with local power bases, more bureaucracy doing what he says and making sure his writ carries far, and more infrastructure to extend the reach of his existing loyal institutions.
We're currently facing the same issues. We can make local elites bow in name only, but to make it matter we have to make them part of the economic, social and political system by integrating them into our state. This is done through infrastructure projects, which takes ages.
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Its not modern infrasture though, it does not require complex supply chains. A messenger outpost is just 1 building with a handful of people and ravens, thats it. Its not even a school or municipal building. Its a messenger outpost.

Even if I am underestimating how long it would take to build a 100 small messenger outposts with our magic items and how we would need to allocate them. Then why arent we buying these tools in mass to speed up our empire development? We sure as hell have the money for it, wouldnt it be worth it to buy a large number of titan tools and finish these projects in months instead of years? For just not even 0.5% of our total money?
 
Trek said:
Its not modern infrasture though, it does not require complex supply chains. A messenger outpost is just 1 building with a handful of people and ravens, thats it. Its not even a school or municipal building. Its a messenger outpost.

Even if I am underestimating how long it would take to build a 100 small messenger outposts with our magic items and how we would need to allocate them. Then why arent we buying these tools in mass to speed up our empire development? We sure as hell have the money for it, wouldnt it be worth it to buy a large number of titan tools and finish these projects in months instead of years? For just not even 0.5% of our total money?
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We've had an explicit canon interlude by DP about the struggle to set up the necessary supply chains for a messenger outpost. It's regular new horses, food, trained and disciplined staff and materials to a bunch of random spots in the middle of nowhere, that really have to all be perfectly supplied at all times for the system to work.

I do agree that more Titan's Tools could help. We should buy more next time we go off-Plane. They won't make actions automatic, but they grant a significant bonus to heavy construction actions!
 
Trek said:
Its not modern infrasture though, it does not require complex supply chains. A messenger outpost is just 1 building with a handful of people and ravens, thats it. Its not even a school or municipal building. Its a messenger outpost.

Even if I am underestimating how long it would take to build a 100 small messenger outposts with our magic items and how we would need to allocate them. Then why arent we buying these tools in mass to speed up our empire development? We sure as hell have the money for it, wouldnt it be worth it to buy a large number of titan tools and finish these projects in months instead of years? For just not even 0.5% of our total money?
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It's not just a single outpost, dude. It's an entire functioning messenger service, and everything needed to support it, for a large region. Not just a small town, but for a huge piece of formerly uncivilized land.

And we are buying the Titan's Tools and Lyres. They are extremely expensive and time consuming to craft, however, and only produced in relatively small numbers. The last batch we bought cleaned out all that were available at the time in the Opaline Vault, the only place that produces them normally. The Lyres are not limited by cost or number, but by the number of skilled, trustworthy Bards we can find to operate them rather than spend their time performing in taverns and other more comfortable locales.
 
TalonofAnathrax said:
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We've had an explicit canon interlude by DP about the struggle to set up the necessary supply chains for a messenger outpost. It's regular new horses, food and materials to a bunch of random spots in the iddle of nowhere, that really have to all be perfectly supplied at all times for the system to work.

I do agree that more Titan's Tools could help. We should buy more next time we go off-Plane. They won't make actions automatic, but they grant a significant bonus to heavy construction actions!
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Why are we using horses for that anyways? Wouldn't it be much cheaper and less complex to just use ravens?
 
Trek said:
Its not modern infrasture though, it does not require complex supply chains. A messenger outpost is just 1 building with a handful of people and ravens, thats it. Its not even a school or municipal building. Its a messenger outpost.

Even if I am underestimating how long it would take to build a 100 small messenger outposts with our magic items and how we would need to allocate them. Then why arent we buying these tools in mass to speed up our empire development? We sure as hell have the money for it, wouldnt it be worth it to buy a large number of titan tools and finish these projects in months instead of years? For just not even 0.5% of our total money?
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The thing is you are not just building the places for the messengers to shelter in, you are also building up the institution, training the horses to take relay riders, ensuring that the people in the Imperial Post are loyal to the empire at least more than they are to random local magister X, giving them some training in how to defend themselves etc
 
Trek said:
Why are we using horses for that anyways? Wouldn't it be much cheaper and less complex to just use ravens?
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Because people who can ride horses are a lot more common than people who can reliably train ravens and outside of magic most of the latter are maesters, not really trusted by Viserys and Co.

TalonofAnathrax said:
Horses can carry a lot more and are easier to replace. They're also far, far cheaper.
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Also this
 
Goldfish said:
@DragonParadox, since Nettles can share spells with Sheepstealer, it would make sense that she could do the same with Ruin Delver's Fortune, right?
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DragonParadox said:
Yes, as long as Nettles is on her dragon like the class metrnions the dragon is like a familiar.
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So, @TalonofAnathrax, what about replacing Shrink Item or Shadow Phase for Nettles with Ruin Delver's Fortune? Lots of good effects there that she can share with Sheepstealer as needed.

Greater Blink makes Shadow Phase less useful and the Shrink Item Chamber reduces the usefulness of knowing the spell personally. Losing one or the other doesn't seem too bad.
 
Trek said:
Its not modern infrasture though, it does not require complex supply chains. A messenger outpost is just 1 building with a handful of people and ravens, thats it. Its not even a school or municipal building. Its a messenger outpost.

Even if I am underestimating how long it would take to build a 100 small messenger outposts with our magic items and how we would need to allocate them. Then why arent we buying these tools in mass to speed up our empire development? We sure as hell have the money for it, wouldnt it be worth it to buy a large number of titan tools and finish these projects in months instead of years? For just not even 0.5% of our total money?
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Alright. Let me crush your hopes and dreams.

Where do you build these 100 posts?
Are 100 even enough to provide good coverage?
Where do you get the necessary literate workers?
How do you handle packages too large for ravens?
How many ravens do you need to serve a city of 20,000 people?
How do you handle secure communication with official government agencies?
How do you stop bandits from ambushing couriers?
What about corruption and theft among the workers?
How will you handle the shifting needs caused by other developments in the province?
How do you deal with the expected population shifts caused by modernizing the economy?
Where do you get enough furniture to outfit all these offices?
Maybe you need regional hub stations?
If so, where and how?
Who manages all of it?
How do you deal with service interruptions?

Etc.
Etc.
 
Azel said:
Alright. Let me crush your hopes and dreams.
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Alright, I am convinced that we are doomed to never develop most of our outer lands to any significant degree in the scope of the quest. The time scales are way too big, might as well focus on stuff that matters than these far off places.
 
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Trek said:
Alright, I am convinced that we are doomed to never develop most of our outer lands to any significant degree in the scope of the quest.
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Just because it might not ever be finished by the time the quest concludes doesn't mean we shouldn't do the job properly.

That same reasoning would make anything we do in Sothoryos pointless, along with a ton of other actions which have little to no impact on the eventual confrontation with the Others.

EDIT: The journey matters just as much as the destination.
 
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Goldfish said:
Just because it might not ever be finished by the time the quest concludes doesn't mean we shouldn't do the job properly.

That same reasoning would make anything we do in Sothoryos pointless, along with a ton of other actions which have little to no impact on the eventual confrontation with the Others.
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At least those actions have meaning and impact. So I can understand spending effort on it even if we will never see any return. But seeing that more than half of our empire, lands that we own and control are doomed to medieval standerds even as our capitals flourish feels like a wasted effort.

Let me put it this way, by the time we will finish building an imperial god the orange shore will still be constructing messenger services.
 
Trek said:
At least those actions have meaning and impact. So I can understand spending effort on it even if we will never see any return. But seeing that more than half of our empire, lands that we own and control are doomed to medieval standers even as our capitals flourish feels like a wasted effort.

Let me put it this way, by the time we will finish building an imperial god the orange sohore will still be constructing messenger services.
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I don't really see the issue. So what if we don't? It's a worthwhile part of building our empire.
 
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