Rules update 2014

Overview

Over winter of 2013/2014 we have carried out a review of the rules from the first year of Empire. As a result of that review we are implementing some changes to the published rules. We are in the process of updated the wiki to reflect the changes, but will summarize and explain all changes here so that players can identify the changes easily.

Merging Mage Armour and Mage Staff

Mage armour and mage staff have been combined into a single skill - Battle Mage. This skill costs 2pts and allows the character to wear mage armour and to use a staff.

The goal of the Empire rules is to encourage people to make iconic choices - our goal is to encourage wizards to look like the classic image of a magician on a battlefield - arrayed in mystical armour and wielding a staff. It's absolutely fine for magicians to use shields on the battlefield - but we didn't want the rules to significantly advantage that choice (or others like it) over a staff and magical armour. The original rules did not support this very well, because using wearing mage armour and using a staff was exceptionally expensive but still left you very vulnerable to arrows.

Merging the two skills makes them much cheaper for anyone who wanted both, which produces an immediate benefit in terms of the original design intent. In addition, some players will already own a magical staff while others have a cool set of magical looking armour. Both of these items are very expensive phys-reps to purchase or make. Players who have the armour but not the staff, or vice versa, can make use of the other kit if they are able to borrow it for an event, allowing them to try it out the other part of the ability without having to spend character points.

Implementation

Every character who has one of the two existing skills - but not the other - now has the new battle mage skill. Any character who previously had both will now have the single replacement skill and automatically receives their two experience points back.

Bands Streamlined

We have eliminated the option to create groups which are not a banner, coven or sect. Analysis showed only 1.5% of characters were in a group that was not also either their banner, coven, or sect. Unfortunately the existing rules were exceptionally complex - it was very unclear whether characters were in a band just as a group member, in a band as a bonded member of the group, both or neither. Just trying to show the players who was actually in a band was sufficiently complicated that it was clear that many participants - including ourselves - could not follow it.

The new rules for bands present slightly fewer options but are vastly simpler to operate. You create bands, there are three types, banners, coven or sects. You can be in one of each. You are either in the band... because you are bonded to that band - or you are not. We are looking at some further simplifications to the way "band magic items" like magic standards work to further streamline the rules for bonding.

Implementation

We have updated the character generation system so that new characters can pick a banner, a coven and a sect to begin play as part of if they wish. We have updated the group information screen for the group contact to show who is in a banner, coven or sect.

Groups that were just groups - that is they were not bands, covens, or sects are no longer shown on screen. Any group contact who wishes to update a group to set it to be a banner, coven, or sect; for any reason, can do so by email to Profound Decisions.

Ceremony use by Sects

We have changed the rules for sects cooperating to use liao more efficiently. The previous rules were too generous, such that a single dose of liao could be used to cover dozens of characters. The result of this was that ceremonies were very inefficient to produce without using a sect, and that there was a significant oversupply of liao. Because liao was not in demand, it's value was artificially low and there was less enjoyable game for players looking to acquire or sell it.

We have changed the rules so that a sect that is cooperating can only affect a single target with their ceremony for each dose of liao used. However every member of the sect who shares the virtue of the lead priest (the character consuming the liao) can participate without consuming liao. This means that sects cannot produce more auras than a lone priest with the same amount of liao, but they can produce much more powerful effects than a lone priest could do.

Clarifying the Sentinel Gate

There was considerable confusion around the Sentinel Gate at events in 2013, how it operated, how it worked, etc. We have reviewed the situation and created a page to clarify exactly how the gate works and what the rules are. We have tried to remain consistent with ref rulings given out in the first year, but have favoured producing the best possible version of the gate for the game going forwards.

The rules for operate portal and detect magic have been updated to reflect their new abilities in relation to the Gate.

Wains

The definition of an Imperial wain is a caravan load of material. The original plan was to make clear that we did not expect/require/want players to phys-rep these enormous quantities of material and hence we picked a weight that was enormous to reflect this - several tonnes. In practice this caused problems in the first year, and it was clear that there were situations where we would want to phys-rep a wain of White Granite, Mithril, or Weirwood and let the players respond and roleplay accordingly. In addition there was some suggestion that we might have over-estimated how much a traditional medieval wagon could carry...

We have not changed the character description of a wain, but we have refined the OOC explanation to state that a wain is around 500Kg. IC you can expect that to be a volume of around half a cubic metre. We still don't remotely expect players to phys-rep these commodities; the intention is that players trade the promissory notes provided by the civil service. However, if we choose to phys-rep a wain of material on a battlefield then we will try to get the weight as close to 500Kg as reasonably possible.

Additional Changes

We have a few more additional changes to make, this page will be updated with details once the changes are completed on the wiki.