Playtest question: Improving your estate instead of moving to better lodgings

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Rafu

  • 71
One of the PCs has bought an estate with her first treasure roll, and all seem eager to improve their living conditions, so this is bound to become relevant soon enough.

This is from page 12:
Quote
Investing in Your Estate
Investing in your estate means employing people to work to improve it. Roll three dice and choose two among them:
1. You employ builders.
2. You employ a guard.
3. You employ laborers.
4. You employ a priest[ess].
5. You employ a servant.
6. You employ a specialist.
When you employ builders, choose 2, but don’t employ builders until you’ve already had laborers dig and lay your foundations. (...)

So it's a minimum of 3 steps before you can move in: buy land, dig foundations, employ builders -- though you'll probably want to employ builders multiple times before you move in, while you might get lucky and get to hire both laborers and builders on the same roll, or get an estate with old usable foundations as its charm.

This is from page 13, first column:
Quote
Moving to Your Estate
You can move to your estate as soon as you consider it habitable. Once you’ve done so, it no longer makes sense for you to spend your treasure to move to better lodgings. Now, when you examine your treasure and roll a 4, count it as a 3 to improve your estate.

And this is from page 13, second column:
Quote
4. Moving to Better Lodgings
When you move to better lodgings, (...)
If you own an estate, you can choose instead to employ builders, to invest in the improvement of your estate house.

There's actually three different rulings I can make out of it:

A.
For the PC who owns an estate, rolls of 4 when examining treasure count as 3s (and the third quote above is just some fancy wording).

B.
For the PC who owns an estate, a roll of 4 when examining treasure counts as a special case of improving their estate, where they skip the subsequent roll of three dice but they instead get the effects of rolling a 1 on it: to employ builders. This is different from rolling a 3 when examining treasure, in that they only get to employ builders, instead of employing people in 2 different functions, but they're warranted to get builders (thus, the second quote above is imprecise).
To honor the spirit of the law above its word, I'd rule that, for the PC who hasn't had viable foundations dug already, they get to employ laborers to dig the foundations instead of builders.

C.
For the PC who hasn't yet moved into their estate house, same as B above. For the PC who has already moved into it, same as A. Thus, there is no mistake, contradiction or imprecision in the wording of the rules - it's just that the rules are quite intricate.

Which one is it?

I would also like to know this - it's a bit confusing.

And what's this?

"They pillage your specialized crops, ruining them.*" -> the "*" means you get 1 examined treasure from their harvest.

Does that mean that they harvest all you've got, and then you have to replant? "Ruining them" sounds awfully intentional, somehow.

Specialized and non-specialized crops aren't explained anywhere, so it's a bit... "up to interpretation", and I'm not 100% sure I'm getting it right.

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lumpley

  • 1293
C is correct. (And good catch: I'd allow laborers too.)

On pillaging specialized crops: because they aren't skilled to correctly harvest your orchids or whatever, they harvest them incorrectly. The result is that you do have a harvest of orchids or whatever now, worth 1 unexamined treasure, but there will be no future harvests. They've ruined them, and if they did it out of blundering ignorance, nevertheless they've done it as thoroughly as if out of malice!

You can replant if you choose, or pursue whatever other course you think opportune.

-Vincent

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Rafu

  • 71
Thank you!