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Originally Posted by Adm.Lee
I've finally caught up, and I am enjoying the read, thanks for these!
What are you using for the village's farming and food rules?
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An overly-complicated spreadsheet.
The 4e rules for food production aren't deeply simulationist, but it seems to me that hunting and foraging are short-term solutions. The real sustainable way to keep a team (or community) alive is the cropland base facility (p. 134). Because "cropland" feels awkward when I type it a lot, I'll use "field" to refer to the basic unit of agricultural production (without trying to figure out what "one cropland" or "one field" means in actual land area).
When I set up the village, I decided it had about one field per permanent resident, three dairy cows, and about a dozen pigs. Hand-waving this worked for a while, but when I mentioned harvest season was coming, my players got a lot more interested in food supply (I told you I had an atypical group). A bit of math that I didn't record, along with some arbitrary decisions, gave me the village's current food supply. I then did some cursory research into the Polish planting and harvest cycle for major crops. This let me allocate the fields by crop, and from that, I could determine the amount of effort needed for planting and harvesting.
Mu ultimate goal here was to make food a background concern but not the dominant issue facing the team.
I maintain a separate spreadsheet for tracking downtime activity (and some other daily events and logistics). Unless a PC is on light duty or otherwise unavailable, I assume they have three shifts of activity each day. My players give me varying levels of input and I roll for anything requiring it (a high level of player/ref trust and a strong social contract help at my table are helpful here). Here's an example from earlier in the campaign:
You'll note that some of the downtime tasks have fractional completion notes. For tasks that the book says require "one week," I require 20 shifts of work; for tasks measured in days, I convert each day's effort to 3 shifts.
This brings us around to the harvest spreadsheet (told you it was overly-complicated!). When I set this up, I ran some numbers on how many of the villagers were able-bodied enough to contribute full effort to working the fields. Based on this, and assuming that most of the village is involved in daily farming, I figured out how thin they'd be spread each month. Further assuming that each villager has INT d8 + Survival d8, this gives me what the NPCs are actually rolling for each month's harvest, including assistance bonuses. If a PC puts in the 20 shifts of harvesting a field, I roll their INT + Survival rather than those of the NPCs. Here's what July's results looked like:
... and looking at this, I see I completely failed to include the animal fodder in the harvest math. Enh. I may or may not re-work that - it's not as critical as animal food.
Also, as I worked on this, it became evident that 4e has no rules for food preservation. Under rules as written, any food produced without industrial means will spoil in a week. I'm assuming that by 2000, surviving communities have figured out such arcane technologies as canning, curing, smoking, salting, and pickling, so the villagers are doing a great deal of food preservation off-screen to ensure everyone makes it through the next three seasons...
- C.