People have started discussing procreation mechanics in the other thread [ > ], but those are intertwined with the empire mechanics, and we can't really discuss one without discussing the other at the same time, hence this thread.
Let me try to explain to you the challenges we face with these systems. The main problem is that the TaleSpire holdings cannot belong to the entire party. If that were so, you'd never lose them. Someone or other would always have a kid somewhere, so even if the party got wiped, the kid would inherit the holdings and the campaign would go on. Obviously this is unacceptable.
So we need a system whereby the holdings belong to just one person, the lord of the area. That, however, would understandably bum the other players out. So we'll make it more complex and more realistic than that, with different players owning different parts of the estate. You'd always need a lord for the entirety of the holdings, but the players can certainly own houses or estates in the area, and maybe even keeps etc. if you end up building multiple of them. I am not very familiar with feudal culture—they didn't teach much of it to us in Greece while I was growing up, they mostly focused on classical times for obvious reasons—so I look forward to studying it and finding ways to adapt it to Ultimate Edition in ways that promote a cool, deep game. If anyone knows stuff and has ideas, let's hear them.
So if one of the players dies with no heirs, his part of the territory passes on to his NPC relatives, and then you have one more NPC in your midst. You'll have many NPCs anyway, because someone will have to tend the fields, man the stables, guard the area, etc., so one more will not be a big deal.
As for how to deal with NPCs, I have ideas. I want the NPCs to come with the buildings, like in Age of Empires. If you build a house in AoE, you automatically get villagers to live in it, and then you can put them in jobs, which could be military, but it could be anything. That's how we'll handle it here too. That's the reward for building whole towns. Otherwise they'd just be ghost buildings. And of course the bigger the building the more NPCs you get, and the castle buildings will give you the most. All of those can be placed with TaleSpire via a choice of countless miniatures, so your holdings will come alive with hundreds of NPCs, unlike Life is Feudal where you can only have a few.
And that's where the They Are Billions phase will begin. I don't know how this will go, but we'll have to figure out a way to challenge you in the Empire phase. What if you leave for a year to go adventuring? Will your holdings and people still be there when you get back? We need to devise a system whereby you are motivated to build up and fortify and man your domains with tons of people, but we mustn't make the requirements so onerous that you're incentivized to never leave to go adventuring and stay in your home forever. And then on top of that we need to devise motivations for attacking other players' domains. This is especially difficult since those could be on other planets. Why the fuck would a lord go to another friggin' planet to attack someone when he has his neighbors to worry about and expand into? This needs to be figured out.
As a starting point, I am thinking of inventing a new line of non-weapon proficiencies dedicated to nobility and managing domains, so that players who want to control domains will have to spec into it. However, these proficiencies will be deducted from other stuff like climbing, singing, swimming, blacksmithing or whatever, so I am not sure it makes sense for a noble lord to be essentially uneducated just because he is a noble. I would think quite the opposite would be the case. So maybe we need a new system separate from proficiencies. But it has to be a system that cannot be realistically specced into by EVERY player. Thus, the lives of one or two of your party will be more important than those of everyone else, because they'll be the lords.
In short, we need to devise a RULE-BASED nobility system. In regular D&D, this is handled entirely via role-playing, and that's fine for a system that has so little strategy in it. Once we expand the strategy dimension to equal the adventuring one, however, we need proper rules for nobility and followers and so on, and these will have to incorporate the existing follower rules somehow.
It's complicated stuff, but if we want to exploit the full capabilities of TaleSpire, we have to do it, and do it well.
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