Hey guys recently I started a new campagne with a new group and it is going good, but later on it is necessary for them to rebuild a village for plot. And here is my problem I cannot come up with a good system for it. I know from the rulebooks what hireling are costing but how long do they need to work for a specific building and what do the resources cost. Please help me find sth I can work with or that'll help me. 

Thx guys and girls

You don't really ned a system. Just wing it.

I've seen youtube videos of small teams of people (2 or 3) building primitive buildings (wattle & daub, mud brick, etc) in a day or three. So I figure that if you have a team of adventurers and a pile of villagers, count on a couple of weeks of all-daylight-hours hard work.

Yeah, I'm with Greenstone on that. I've seen very elaborate systems of how much gold, how much time and how many workers but in my opinion unless your whole campaign is based on construction and management it's not needed. If the goal is that the party has to rebuild the village to move the story forward then just decide how much that should tax them. Is it going to take pretty much all their gold? Are they going to have to make shady deals with people who control certain resources in the area? Is someone going to get their kneecaps broken? Or is it well within their means and they make friends with the local baker? I would think it's more about how you want rebuilding to work into the story and then put the needed strains or rewards.

The only suggestion I would add beyond what has been said, is to potentially set 2 or 3 “levels” or “thresholds” for what the finished product might look like (and consequences in the form of what it is capable of).

As an easy example let’s use low/medium/high to define three levels of time + gold that the party will have to invest in the village.  You can figure out specifics of how much equals each level based on your game and your needs.  

• if they give it a “low” investment of time and money, the village might suffer from plague, be susceptible to raids, become abandoned, or simply not be particularly noteworthy later on.
• if they give it a “medium” level of investment, maybe they get the support of a local merchants guild or some noble, who helps them finish the village and sets it up as a prosperous commercial route for trade.  The village begins to prosper and they see it develop over time if they ever go back to it.
• ‘if they give it a “high” level of investment, the local ruler takes note and makes a significant investment in building the village alongside them and connecting it to the larger kingdom, for strategic military value or whatever.  In reward for their efforts, the party is awarded a keep/tower/castle/etc. built in/near the village, and receive titles of lower nobility in the kingdom.  They now have a base of operations and status in the area, and perhaps some level of responsibility for helping the monarch look after it.

TL,DR:  don’t get too bogged down with math and rules.  Set a “good”, “better”, “best” view and let them choose how much this village is going to be worth to them.

2nd edition had a Birthright campaign that accounted for building an maintaining a nation, stronghold or desmene, as did the BECMI Rules Compendium. Which I just refreshed my memory a bit, sets the cost of building a stronghold at around 150,000GP starting out with one day of work for each 500GP spent, which means in this context it would take just under a year of game time to build a fortified stronghold and cost a small mint.

MCDM has the Strongholds and Followers book out that may be of interest if building and maintaining things suits your campaign and players. I understand it is inspired by the Birthright Campaign setting for AD&D 2e.

So you could run with the amount of gold it would take to rebuild the village and apply a work day for X amount of GP repaired, or X amount of GP donated shortens repair time by one day per 500GP, or a mixture of both. Also of note, if the adventurerers have any kind of regional renown or influence, they might be able to bring that to bear and provide more assistance by calling in favors to get more resources for the reconstruction effort. 

Maybe run a skill challenge to determine how much help the PCs actually are in the rebuilding effort. Put the ownership on the players to describe how they use their skills to best affect repairs. But overall, I would agree that getting too bogged down in the granular details of this might not give you the effect you need, or one that is actually fun.

Thank y'all for the Tipps I will use them.😊

I did a campaign based around this kind of thing. I abstracted away a lot of the micromanaging and gave the players the following choices:

• What resources were available for the village depended on where they adventured. Clearing the spiders out of the woods gets lumber. Making a deal with the telepathic spider queen gets less lumber, but also silk and a defensive ally. Clearing out the nearby plains secures land for crops and livestock. The mines yield stone and steel, etc.
• After each adventure (corresponding to one region), the party could establish teams to harvest some of the available resources and build with them. Number of teams available depended on the size of the village.
• Size of the village was based on population (increased by growing food or building housing) and production (which was pretty much everything else besides food/housing).
• The third "stat" of the village was defense. If they grew to be large and productive too quickly without investing in defenses, they would be an easy target. There were "defend the village" encounters that directly incorporated the defenses they had built.
• Production output could be used to purchase developments for the village like schools or barracks. These were organized in four main "social policy" categories - Might, Ingenuity, Harmony, and Prosperity (based off Fighter/Wizard/Cleric/Rogue), and the things the party chose determined the "feel" of the village and its emergent politics.
• Buildings from production and recruited NPCs could also contribute to the "static income" of population/production/defense stats.

This was pretty fun and we all liked it, but by the time they had cleared the 6th "resource region" (roughly around level 9-10 I think?) it had ballooned quite a bit and started feeling like a chore to assign all the teams and allocate all the production. So I did a time skip and now the village mostly takes care of itself and the party has a different role. But it's pretty neat that the village has developed based on their choices.

One other issue with this kind of design is that it requires a lot of downtime. Rome wasn't built in a day, as they say. It worked pretty well to alternate between adventure and building/downtime phases, but it does end up with a story that spans a lot more time than many campaigns and it things like elf lifespans vs human lifespans can become relevant.

I know this thread is pretty much resolved but something that seems really odd to me about some of the existing mechanics, or from older editions, is the amount of time building takes. It seems like for some reason all those rules forget that we're in a land of magic. Like it assumes there's going to be 100 serfs hired to build a castle and it will take a year. (Or whatever nonsense) What about being able to move earth, levitate and telekenisis? I mean telekenisis can move 1000 lbs. Or what about fabricate? Seems to me that adding a small group of casters to a team of builders would get things done right quick! 

Quote from BluestPapa >>

Hey guys recently I started a new campagne with a new group and it is going good, but later on it is necessary for them to rebuild a village for plot. And here is my problem I cannot come up with a good system for it. I know from the rulebooks what hireling are costing but how long do they need to work for a specific building and what do the resources cost. Please help me find sth I can work with or that'll help me. 

 

Thx guys and girls

As a DM do you want to put resources and time into building out a village management system.  Do you really want to roleplay "I'm farmer Ezekiah sirs, and my sheep have been getting eaten by the local werewolf clan, can you help kill them so you can get my 2gp tax this year?"  and build adventurers around running a village?  Its Dungeons and Dragons not Thorpes and Towers?  If you want to spend your time building out a system, just let the players know you'll need time to come up with the system and make sure the players actually want to play T&T and not D&D, because that is where you are going towards. 

At best, I'd create 12 possible buildings and roll a D12, but tell the players that it will cost 2500 gp for the first roll and then double it and so on.  Let them get something like a shepherd with sheep or carpenter for instance.  Also add in maybe 20 citizens with each shop.  Give them like 5gp/year for each citizen and do a roll on it, maybe its more maybe there's famine and the players lose money or let citizens die.  It costs a lot of money to attract people to come out to the middle of nowhere.  The money shops make in D&D compared to actual income you get from adventuring is nowhere comparable.  Maybe give them some minor quests to keep the shops and people there as well.  Let them know that building that village won't make them powerful, it'll be a money pit.  Maybe in the next campaign you start it 200 years later and the Thorpe grows to a town with walls for instance.

Quote from BTI_Brian >>

I know this thread is pretty much resolved but something that seems really odd to me about some of the existing mechanics, or from older editions, is the amount of time building takes. It seems like for some reason all those rules forget that we're in a land of magic. Like it assumes there's going to be 100 serfs hired to build a castle and it will take a year. (Or whatever nonsense) What about being able to move earth, levitate and telekenisis? I mean telekenisis can move 1000 lbs. Or what about fabricate? Seems to me that adding a small group of casters to a team of builders would get things done right quick! 

While you're not wrong, take a look at spellcasting service costs.

Magic isn't wielded by the majority of the masses. You *could* hire a team of spellcasters to get this done in a month or a week, but what would that cost you? If you were to consider a one time casting of Cure Wounds is suggested to cost 50GP for the first level version, what does the 4th level spell Fabricate cost in your world? Fabricate still requires that the raw materials be on hand and available to be transmuted, and it might require the caster to also be a master craftsman/mason to "create items that ordinarily require a high degree of craftsmanship". 

If it takes a year and 150K GP to build a castle by hand, with muscle and experience, or for Mighty Fortress 26,000 GP worth of diamonds (500GP per diamond), 52 weeks and the ability to cast 8th level spells (which might take a commoner a lifetime), which would be the quickest? Neither, they both take a year.

I could see a magic user expending magical resources to build their own fortress in this manner, or to assist a powerful ally or maybe a liege lord. If the party-in-question were in the position to leverage said assistance, I would allow it. It would be a huge favor to be called in, to be sure.

Yeah, I get that. It's a good point Kaavel. I haven't ever run through it all to do a price or time comparison. But I did look at some costs for a magic method I think would speed things up. I don't think the cost is an issue. I think I could do it for less that normal means. It's player level, or the cost of hiring a caster, or multiple casters, but I still think magical methods could potentially cost less.. So say you cast a teleportation circle at the job site. (each casting consumes 50gp of components). The next day, or if you have another person who can cast a 5th lvl spell, You go to wherever you're getting your main building materials from. Stone, wood, brick, whatever. You cast a teleportation circle there, Then levitate 500lbs. of material and walk it through the circle with you. Right now it's only cost 100gp in components. If you had several people who could cast levitate you could move a lot of material through the circle in 10 minutes. At the cost of 50 gp per teleport.

Would it cost 50gp to move those same materials by normal means. Such as cart, wagon, etc? Honestly I don't know. I don't really want to look up cart weight stats and hireling rates atm, but the magic method would be much, much faster. I'm not disagreeing with you that finding the casters would have a cost if the party couldn't do it, and that may be prohibitive or end up costing the same, or more, than traditional methods. Or there could not be casters for hire in the area at all.

Anyways, it's fun to think about. I still think magic methods haven't been considered in most construction rules. Maybe I'll take it on as a side project and see if I can figure out a workable system, lol