KOTR Postmortem and Next-Gen Rules Discussion

[Privateerkev]

One idea for rent vs. own could be that all ranks are treated exactly the same, but a person who has a rental land would not get a Private or Royal Army out of it. The rentee could still accumulate an army in the garrison or a nearby fort, of course. That would be easy to keep track of and easy to implement, while still providing a major penalty for use of rental over ownership.

I like that too. Seems like another good compromise.

Tristan brought up the question of what happens to land when the noble dies. Does the renter lose the land to whoever the noble leaves it to in the will? Or, does the renter automatically aqcuire the land upon the death of his lord?

*edit*

I can't see a case where a rental land would be denying someone a Royal Army. A Grand Duke or FL wouldn't be renting from someone. A Prince might but I think the Prince should keep his royal army if he is a renter. He is the Prince after all... ^_^

[TinCow]

For inheritance purposes, the rental land would still technically belong to the Lord, so he should be able to dispose of it as he wishes in his Will. That's part of the 'stability' he would get out of it.

Regarding the Prince, perhaps he simply shouldn't be allowed to rent at all. No self-respecting heir to the throne would tolerate such a situation. Give him 1 turn after he becomes the Heir to re-arrange his affairs, then make all rental lands he possesses return to their original Lord and bar him from all future rentals.

[Privateerkev]

For inheritance purposes, the rental land would still technically belong to the Lord, so he should be able to dispose of it as he wishes in his Will. That's part of the 'stability' he would get out of it.

Regarding the Prince, perhaps he simply shouldn't be allowed to rent at all. No self-respecting heir to the throne would tolerate such a situation. Give him 1 turn after he becomes the Heir to re-arrange his affairs, then make all rental lands he possesses return to their original Lord and bar him from all future rentals.

Both sound good to me.

Do oaths of fealty still work the same? Say a Baronet has 3 land. He gives one to the Baron and lends one to a Baronet. Does the Baronet still swear to the Baron? Or would the Viscount have to give both to the Baron so the Baron can rent one to the Baronet?

[TinCow]

In order for this rule change to really be able to achieve the stability people want, we would have to allow for oaths to be sworn like they currently are. Restricting it to something like direct swearing only to the person who is renting you the land would vastly reduce the utility of such an arrangement. So, I say keep oaths and rentals completely separate. You can rent to anyone you want and you can swear to anyone you want, and whether the two have any relation to each other is up to the players. I'll write up some draft language later, but I also think we need to bar 'subletting' simply because it would start to make things very confusing. You can rent land to whomever you want, but that person cannot then rent it out to a third person.

I will probably implement this rule by bringing back the 'Bonded' and 'Freehold' distinction that never worked well in KOTR. In order to make it work effectively, I'll change the language of each land-owning rank to allow them to rent out property. I will then add a new rank called Bonded Noble whose requirement is renting a land and which will be held simultaneously with another rank, like the Heir and Chancellor. The Bonded Noble rank will work by overwriting a few of the powers/penalties of the nobleman's other rank. Technically everyone who wasn't Bonded would be Freehold, but since Freehold would be the natural state, I see no reason to include it as a separate rank. Thus we will have 'normal' ranks and 'Bonded' ranks. A Viscount who owns his land will still have the formal title of Viscount, but a Viscount who rents his land will have the formal title of Bonded Viscount.

The main question is... would this kind of arrangement be enough to staisfy the players who want more stability than the current system? This is definitely not as strong as some of the proposals FH and others have been putting forward, so I'd like to hear their take on it.