What value timber can be logged during a given time period? It would, of course, use the ACKS labor tree. I've houseruled building lumber as a trade good, with each unit of lumber costing a base of 125 gp and weighing 50 stone (I may have underestimated the weight, but whatevs.), and now a player is asking if he could throw some idle mercs at logging. I know how much the mercs can produce per day as labor, but I'm uncertain as to how that should convert over to the units of lumber.
i think the assumption, via abstraction, is that they would produce an amount of lumber worth the sum of their daily labor amount. so if enough of them are put to lumbering and they have a daily work value of 50gp, that's how much wood they produce.
[quote="Jard"]
i think the assumption, via abstraction, is that they would produce an amount of lumber worth the sum of their daily labor amount. so if enough of them are put to lumbering and they have a daily work value of 50gp, that's how much wood they produce.
[/quote]
I was more wondering if anyone had put the same level of thought into this as the ACKS mining .pdf you can download from here.
Loads of lumber are already included in the ACKS merchandise tables on page 145 of the core rules; A load of common wood weighs 80 stone and is worth 50 gp, and a load of rare wood weighs 16 stone and is worth 500 gp.
[quote="thirdkingdom"] I was more wondering if anyone had put the same level of thought into this as the ACKS mining .pdf you can download from here. [/quote]
Ooh, that'd be nice to have - especially if it included the chance of getting different types (and values) of wood the same way the mining rules allow for different types of metal. Ooh, and it'd be nice if said rules were flexible enough to allow both sustainable forestry and deliberate clearing of land, as well as the various possibilities in-between - with, of course, the attendant changes to land revenue that clearing land implies.
Alas, the closest thing I'm aware of is this thread on how much time and expense is involved in clearing forest hexes.
I guess the biggest difficulty in designing such a system would be working out how to reconcile this with ACKS's existing land revenue rules.
Yeah, I know about lumber already existing. My assumption was that common lumber is for firewood, fencing, tool handles etc. and that rare lumber is for furniture, carved chests, paneling in throne rooms, etc. I wanted something specifically for construction purposes: long, clear lengths for joists and rafters, sawn boards for ceilings and floors, etc.
To clarify, my base assumption has been that a given forest is comprised of some ratio – maybe 30:10:1 – of Common, Building and Rare lumber. I’m a cabinet maker, by trade, so perhaps I’m delvish a little too deeply into this.
Assuming you’re willing to accept the same abstraction as I used in the mining rules (specifically, that all lumber fits into an existing trade good in some fashion, and that ‘a load of common lumber’ may be a slightly different thing for different woods, but is uniform in weight and value), you could make this with very similar tables.
You’d want to start by listing each kind of wood, and deciding which trade good it fit into (pine is a common wood, mahogany is a rare wood, for example). Then sort them based on what you think their value as a forest should be, and assign each one what is essentially a “conversion rate”; how much GP value of labor you have to invest to get one load of their lumber type. You can then weight and adjust their appearance rate based on their value to create the right average value for a forest.
If you want, you can then make a table like ‘harvestable forests by terrain type’, or you can base it on the land value of the hex. If you really want to get into it, you could genericize it as ‘useful resources in the hex’ by terrain type and land value, and then either make a table or assign by fiat which of those resource nodes are forests, mines, or whatever else you want them to be.
[quote="Aryxymaraki"] Assuming you're willing to accept the same abstraction as I used in the mining rules (specifically, that all lumber fits into an existing trade good in some fashion, and that 'a load of common lumber' may be a slightly different thing for different woods, but is uniform in weight and value), you could make this with very similar tables. You'd want to start by listing each kind of wood, and deciding which trade good it fit into (pine is a common wood, mahogany is a rare wood, for example). Then sort them based on what you think their value as a forest should be, and assign each one what is essentially a "conversion rate"; how much GP value of labor you have to invest to get one load of their lumber type. You can then weight and adjust their appearance rate based on their value to create the right average value for a forest. If you want, you can then make a table like 'harvestable forests by terrain type', or you can base it on the land value of the hex. If you really want to get into it, you could genericize it as 'useful resources in the hex' by terrain type and land value, and then either make a table or assign by fiat which of those resource nodes are forests, mines, or whatever else you want them to be. [/quote]
What I've been doing is as follows: in addition to lairs per hex, I'm randomly generating some number of features per hex. One of the categories of features is "Resources", which can be anything from a mine, a patch of comfrey or other herbs, timber, etc. I'm giving my players two options: one, they can harvest the resource all at once*. This yields an automatic (again, see footnote below) monetary gain. They've got ten stone worth of comfrey they can sell or use, or a dozen loads of firewood, or whatever. I'm also giving them the option of harnessing the resource in a more sustainable manner, which will increase the Land Value of the hex by some fraction (depending on the size, usually between .1 and .75). That way they have a choice of either utilizing the resource all at once, or playing the long game and looking for a constant, but slow, increase in profit.
*for some value of at once. Obviously, it might take some time for a mine to be tapped, or a forest to be felled, or whatever.