If a game has a random chance for your character to professionally farm dirt, isn’t it fair to expect that game to have comprehensive rules for dirt-farming? Wouldn’t you want carefully curated charts indicated dirt yield by season, with random chances for dirt blight, or for plagues of dirt-devouring locusts? What about the rules for how to sell your dirt at market? It seems perfectly reasonable to expect a game with farmer characters to have a table indicating whether your dirt purchaser is a charlatan, a rube, or a common yokel! This week, we discuss the weird expectations of “realistic-style” heartbreakers, and then also a bunch of other total nonsense.
System Mastery 
Earlier this year, my Grandma passed away and we had the radio off during the funeral procession and all that. We got back in my dad’s car after the funeral was over and turned on the radio. It was still on the classic hiphop station my dad likes to listen to and out through the speakers the first thing we heard, after dealing with death and depression all morning, was “All I wanna do is zoom-a-zoom-zoom with a boom-boom”. And so we drove away from the funeral jamming out to the music, our day having been made significantly brighter.
That’s my Rumpshaker story. Never be ashamed to own that single.
Wreckx-N-Effect truly brings us all together as a people.
I unironically enjoy Titan AE.
Same here, it’s totally great, but it’s undeniable that the soundtrack has some vile 90s Brit hop on it.
Jeff, come on man “knights had to be winched onto their horses”, really? You know you can do cartwheels in that stuff right? You’re normally so on point, what with your opinions of TMNT and Neverending Story and suchlike….
Hey hey hey. One F. And I most certainly cannot do cartwheels in that stuff, unless it grants the wearer the ability to perform cartwheels they lacked prior to putting it on!
Nah ha. Pendantry. The best kind of ped-.
No love for Ronny Cammareri. :(
I put him on the list! He got billing above Ben Gates! And Speckles!
Listening to this I can’t help but think D&D 3.5 is the polar opposite of the type of game you just described: the game assumes that player characters are larger than life heroes, but even then it gives you the opportunity to buy Profession (farmer) and actually gives mechanical support to the use of that skill (okay, it’s not much mechanical support, given that it’s just “Roll a Profession check each week to see how much money you earn on the side,” but it’s a lot more mechanical support for that activity than most games give it.
Also, I really want to play your hypothetical Harvest Moon/Monster Rancher mashup.
The consensus I think is that every game set in fantasy times has a farming skill, and it’s invariably just done as “Roll the skill dice to see if you farm. Farming includes crops n’ stuff” where what we want is “At this breakpoint you generate sufficient early crop yield to produce a second late harvest, consult late-harvest vegetable table B. Don’t forget that a Gourdmaster prestige path receives a second harvest automatically from the Gourd Table (D2).”
Yeah, basically giving the same kind of depth in rules to the task of farming as most RPGs give to, say, combat.
It gets interesting when you start thinking about party composition: obviously, since this game is about farmers, everyone’s a farmer, but in the same way as in D&D everyone’s an adventurer but all the different classes bring different resources to the adventuring party, you’d have basically different types of farmers each specialized towards a specific task that needs to be done.
And of course, if you’re doing this in a fantastic setting it opens up completely new venues as to what kind of shit can happen on your farm. Droughts and pests are one thing, but what the hell are you going to do when a dragon swoops down and decides to grab one of your price bovines for a quick snack?
That thing about having to get put on your horse by a crane was actually not true:
“5. Knights had to be hoisted into their saddles with cranes.—Wrong.
This notion appears to have originated during the late nineteenth century as a joke. It entered popular fiction during the following decades, and the image was finally immortalized in 1944 when Sir Laurence Olivier used it in his movie Henry V—despite the protestations of his historical advisors, who included the eminent authority Sir James Mann, Master of the Armouries at HM Tower of London.”
That quote is from here: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/aams/hd_aams.htm#cranes_b
And there is more info here: http://madeofwynn.net/2012/10/08/medieval-anachronisms-part-3-cranes-hoisting-armored-knights/
Great Podcast – enjoyed it thoroughly. The idea of fantasy farming where you breed mythical animals and grow magical crops is pretty cool, and as always you are a delight to listen to.
We are already a democratic republic. That means we don’t vote on things directly but instead have representatives. A direct democracy is what we should be but not what we are.