[Discuss] Estates

[Robert Croson, Jr]

On 3 Aug 2007 at 10:05, fodder wrote:

> Brian Hendricks wrote:
> 
> > If the estates are owned by the lord, then why does the knight have to pay
> > to enlarge them from one size to the next?

You don't, really. Knights don't need to enlarge their estates at all. They can 
just stick with the original 5 point small estate. If the lord starts complaining, 
then the knight has one of two options: 1) Claim that your estate is already a 
medium/large estate. The lord can't tell. 2) Tell the lord that the cost of hiring 
troops to defend the realm is already taking all his gold. Perhaps the lord could 
see fit to send the required gold over and you will enlarge the estate 
immediately? I know many region lords that provide the gold to their knights to 
build larger estates.

> > If anything, then the lord should be able to take expanded estates and offer
> > them to someone for service to his/her region, instead of giving out a small
> > estate.

The purpose of estates being lost when the kngiht leaves is to invest a sense of 
ownership in the region: when the knight leaves the estate is lost, and all the 
money invested is gone. If the estate was just reclaimed by the lord and 
handed over to the next knight, then nothing could be lost. If nothing can be 
lost by the system, then nothing is gained by the system. All estates will get 
enlarged to the maximum size, and the net gain of the estate system will be 
zero. Investing in estates will be a minor bump in the road that will be 
accomplished in a few weeks, and then never need to be done ever again.

> right.. I just re-read estates wiki... seems estates has nothing to do 
> with your plot of land... but the number of people you hire to run the 
> place! in this context, "expanding estates" actually makes sense.. who 
> are you to poach another piece of land off your lord?
> 
> should estates be redesigned from scratch? instead of just a bunch of 
> officials .. change it to mean area/worthiness of the plot of land that 
> you are "renting".. and that total area of estates in a region is 
> limited (only so many plots of land to dish out).. so the lord can give 
> out say 10 small plots.. or 5 bigger plots, or any combos of different 
> sizes, etc...

There's no need to revamp the system to accomplish this. Just think of the 
expended gold as what is required to hire the people to run the larger estate. 
Your lord sees that you have the people to run the larger estate, so he entrusts 
more land to your care. This is just all RP stuff that has no bearing on game 
mechanics.

> tax shares would then have some linkage to the estates that you are 
> given.... you get the taxes from the plots, then a chunk of that tax 
> goes to the lord... as opposed to the lord getting all the money and 
> dish it out downwards (no idea if that's historically faithful at all). 
> you get bigger/better plots by being chummy with the lord, etc.

I think you're kind of missing the point of estates. There is a dual purpose here. 
Well, possibly even more than two purposes, but two important ones come to 
mind right away:

1) Give the knight some form of investment in the region. The knight has an 
estate in the region. If they change allegiance, they lose the estate. It doesn't 
just revert to the lord, so it can be handed back later. It's gone. A knight 
leaving a region incurs a loss (the loss of the estate), as does the lord (the loss 
of the support points generated by that estate). And, in a smaller sense, the 
entire realm loses a little due to the reduced tax collection and authority 
support.

IMO, one shortcoming of this system is that the estate does not provide 
*enough* of a direct benefit to the knight. There is only a very tenuous benefit 
to the knight of having a larger estate: The region control is slightly better, 
resulting in a slightly higher region income, and maybe an extra coin in his 
purse every other week. If the knight did not invest in enlarging the estate, 
then there really is no loss to him when he leaves the region. His new lord will 
give him the same basic estate anyway.

2) The second major point of estates is to make knights important to region 
lords. By tying the estates and estate points to knights, you make knights the 
real commodity, not estates. Region lords have to have estates to keep their 
regions functioning properly. How do they get estates? By hiring knights.

This gives the knights some power over the region lords, and balances the 
equation. They need some bargaining power to pry the gold they need out of 
the greedy region lord's hands.

If you were to convert estates over into something that the regions lords 
passed out to knights, rather than the knights provide to the lord, then you 
would be removing the largest part of why region lords need knights. This 
removes incentive for lords to hire more knights, and thus removes tax gold 
from the knights.

If a region lord had, for example, 20 estate points to hand out, then he could 
just give them all to one knight. That one knight sets his estate to whatever the 
lord asks, and then no more knights are needed.

You have now completely undermined the entire underpinnings of the estate 
system.