Community building rules?
 

Hiya,
Long time gamer here who never got to GMing TMP in the 80's and is now finally able to give it a shot.

Have any of you implemented any kinds of rulesets for community building? Mutant Year Zerr, Other Dust and Broken Earth etc. have some sort of rules for that but not sure how they would really work.

Since such a huge part of TMP is rebuilding civilization I was thinking of some sort of "technology tree" and resoure management system that would make it concrete yet gamey enough to be interesting for players.

I mean my players are not really interested in knowing exactly how much of what kind of fertilizer is needed/acre for some specific crop but they would be interested in getting the community to "Farming level 1, produces X amount of food", now we can start building greenhouses! and so forth.

How have you handled the community rebuilding efforts gamewise in TMP?

Also a bit related...since the characters soon find out that they are about 150 years late how do you encourage them not to simply abandon the mission and go murder hobo with all the gears and ammo they have? :p

Technology recovery work as not really been formalized in either 3rd or 4th edition. The 4th edition does has an extensive section on building a city of a given tech level, but a few of us have tried to do that using those rules and find them cumbersome at best, incomplete and broken at worst.

If you want to try and use the ideas and tables in that section to make a recovery tree of some kind, I am sure there would be more than a few here interested in seeing the result.

I've been kinda tempted to rip out the rules from another system and beat them into submission though not sure how well that would really work. Right now I just kinda outline what basic tech level a town might have and what problems it needs addressed.