1222-1227 OOC

Yeah, the spoiler tags don't quite work the way you'd think.

[spoiler]I have to change the font colour to black (#000000) when I use spoilers.[/spoiler]

What's the covenant's aging mod? +0?

+1, I believe.

For magi it should be +2. We're spending the money to keep everyone in the lavish lifestyle of a Summer covenant. See the table on Covenants, page 63.

Yeah, I assumed that -- I was asking about the covenant itself. Healthy Feature, etc.

Nothing in particular. But that Summer lifestyle does extend a +1 to non-magi as well.

Rules question for y'all, about Perdo Animal guidelines.

"Kill (destroy) an animal" guideline is level 30. "Destroy one property of an animal" is level 40. So, when dealing with Animal, the guideline to destroy a property of something is 10 levels higher than the guideline to destroy that something.

"Destroy something made of animal products" is level 4.

Is it reasonable to say that "Destroy one property of something made of animal products" would be level 10?

In a vacuum, that seems reasonable. Have you compared to similar guidelines for, say, Terram or Aquam?

For Aquam, the difference between "destroy a liquid" and "destroy one property of a liquid" is 5, or rather 1 magnitude: 15 vs 10. For Terram, the difference is 2 magnitudes: 5 vs 3. So I think 2 magnitudes for Animal is reasonable, but it's up to the troupe.

Where's the "Like" button?

So, I'm skimming the "What Happens Next" thread looking to see if Fiona knows or is involved in anything, eating a left-over pbj and not paying a whole lot of attention...certainly not as much as I should. And then I see "snake" and "bone", and Fiona perks right up. [color=blue]"Wait...did someone say 'snake'?" she said lustily.

I'm sick, in oh so many ways.

No worries ... there can be plenty of opportunities in the course of the story. And hey, when it's just among us players, you can ignore the dice if you really want the scene to go a certain way.

:laughing: Don't worry, 80% of it quickly becomes second nature. And the other 20%, we're always pointing out factors things we missed to one another anyway. 8)

Yep. Someone did.

Okay, people. I tried to come up with some calculations for Stultus' play-house idea, and the final number I am getting is completely ridiculous. Someone check my math and my assumptions, please?

I'm assuming a theatre that can hold about 3000 people is about the size of a large manor house. (The Globe could hold 3000 and was only 50 feet in radius, it seems reasonable to me.) Construction costs for a manor house are 10 pounds, x2 for Large, x2 for Superior construction: 40 pounds. Let's make it 50 to allow for unscheduled cost overruns.

Operating expenses:
3 L/year for repairs (Covenants guideline)
7 L/year (rough guess) for supplies: torches or rushlights, etc.
20 L/year for people to clean the place and for criers to run around advertising plays, things like that. (20 unskilled laborers)
50 L/year to support the factor in the style appropriate to his role as "patron of the arts" (rough guess based on the numbers in C&G).

The theatre is not planned to have its own acting troupe -- the whole point is to give acting troupes and troubadours from all over a plausible reason to come visit.

Let's say we can put on 3 performances a week -- a deliberately pessimistic assumption, I'm looking at worst-case scenarios here. Let's make another deliberately pessimistic assumption that on average the theatre would be only about half full. So. 3000 "seats" total (only 1500 present at a performance), of which 70% are not seats but standing room, 20% are cheap seats and 10% are private boxes.

The Globe charged a penny for standing room: granted, that was 300 years later, but it was also competing with more than a dozen other theatres. Blackfriars Theatre (one of the competitors) charged 4 pennies, which limited attendance to members of the gentry. So I'm thinking a penny for standing room, 2 for cheap seats, and 4 for a private box seems appropriate. That would make the total take 2250 pennies a performance, or 6750 a week.

We could charge "concession vendors" (ale-sellers, fruit girls, etc) a fee to come in and hawk their stuff, or we could handle concessions ourselves, but in either case I have NO CLUE what the money from that would look like, so I'm leaving it out of my calculations entirely.

The average acting troupe would perform in an inn yard. You could pack, what, 200 people or so into an inn yard, of whom only half would toss a penny into the hat when it was passed around? If we give the acting troupe 10% of the take, they'd be overjoyed. This could be increased up to 20% if they brought valuable intelligence -- so let's go ahead and call it 20%. Another 10% goes to the Church as a tithe. Another 10% would go to bribes, guards if needed, etc. So the total profit would be 4050 a week, or... around 840 pounds a year (less 80 for the yearly operating expenses). And that's with worst-case assumptions.

That can't be right.

I might compare the construction to more like a church than a manor house (especially because houses can have many more internal load-bearing structures), hence rather more expensive. But that's of less importance than the annual estimate (if accurate). There's also the period of ramping up to full profitability, which I'll also ignore for now; there might also be all sorts of unlisted costs that substantially degrade the profits.

My main reaction is: those calculations seem reasonable if we are under the assumption that people will actually go to the theatre at all - that is, if the idea of theatre-going "goes viral" in Paris. (Or is already in the culture ... but is there any reason to think it is?) 4500 audience members a week - that's a substantial fraction of Paris's population. Is it realistic* to think that the majority of the population - all classes, down to errand-boys - will attend multiple plays per year? Especially if some of them are snotty and Church-sanctioned? In other words: the presented vision is for an extremely successful theatre venture; do we think that is what will happen?

  • yeah yeah, I know this is a fictional world we're playing in :mrgreen:

Another way to gauge: 760 pounds a year "pessimistically" is almost a Legendary source of income; it's certainly much greater than a Greater source of income (three times as great, in fact). The closest analogous examples I can see in Covenants are: (Greater) the Bierhaus brewery and inn in Bamberg; (Legendary) the great hospital of St. John in Jerusalem; (Greater) a Greek navy of several dozen ships, with expert crews included; (Greater) a sponsorship from the King of France; (Legendary) the Pope's income. And, of course, (Legendary) the sheep and wool and parchment of Mons Electi. Where would a perenially successful theatre fit into that list...?

Note also that cunningrat's calculations have about 140 pounds per year going to acting troupes (double that, actually, but because they're spies too). Covenants also lists: (Lesser) A wandering troupe of a dozen minstrels, moderately famed. In other words, the theatre's proposed payments to its actors are commensurate with full-time employment for 3 or 4 acting troupes. That sounds like at least the right order of magnitude.

At the end of the day, it's going to be about what kind of stories we want to tell. If this interests the troupe, then we should make it happen. And riches (especially riches from a mundane institution) will come along with lots and lots of unexpected stories, not least about "interference with mundanes". My reaction is that cunningrat's situation is actually a very optimistic one, because it depends on the theatre taking off. But if we want it to take off, then the money calculations seem to be reasonable.

(One could also model this in more detail with the labor points rules in Covenants, and progress from a Trivial source of income up the scale, over years and decades ... perhaps more realistic ... but is that what we want to play?)

I think the flaw may be 3 performances a week. There will be ramp up time for each performance. After Stultus writes King Lear ( King Guernatus in his version), the actors must be able to practice. Sets must be built. Costumes made. Lets guess that all of that takes 3 months with the running time of the play to be about 2-4 weeks. Cut out the times when they must perform Passion Plays ( although those might be profitable if the Church wants people to go).

So the time it makes a money is say 6 weeks out of 52. It is sucking money for 52 weeks out of 52.

Where it could save money is for the Magi to make devices that save money. Like a lantern that appears to be a candle but is not

Jebrick, I think you're suffering under a misapprehension. I ain't writing plays for these people. :slight_smile: Each troupe has their own repertoire of rehearsed plays, that they take from town to town. (Okay, they're playlets by modern standards, but still). They have their own costumes. They even have their own sets -- the wealthier troupes haul them around in what're called pageant wagons. So there would be little to no 'ramp-up time' required.

Gerg, you make some very good points. You've got some misapprehensions too, but they're immaterial, because you've hit on the one thing that I missed completely. Namely, that this is a game that centers around stories. :slight_smile:

So. We've agreed (?) that even though my numbers might be wildly off, the playhouse can produce income at least equivalent to a single Typical income source, or even a Greater one. What we're after right now, therefore, are two Minor boons (Informants and Secondary Income Source) and therefore we'd like some stories that center around us acquiring those boons. If the troupe agrees that that's what we want -- and if we can figure out a way for Stultus to stay home, or take a secondary role -- I'd even be willing to run them.

How does that sound?

I think this is the right way to think about it - stories to gain the two boons. I think this would be cool!
I also think that the ideal would be for Stultus to be one of the main characters involved in these stories - since clearly they're what cunningrat wants to play. Which is awesome, except that to me it means that someone besides cunningrat should run the stories.

Actually, that's not quite true.
I know a bit about the subject matter, and Stultus knows a lot. Honestly, I only came up with the idea because I was reading Sabatini's Scaramouche at the time. I was struck by some of the similarities between Andre-Louis Moreau and Stultus[sup][1][/sup] and the rest kind of came naturally, because it's the direction Stultus' thoughts would go. Actually playing out the stories is something I could take or leave.

[sup][1][/sup] The first line of the book describes Stultus perfectly. "He was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad: and that was all of his patrimony."

This is actually a really good question, to me. What can magic do to alleviate the results of a botched spell? Would a sufficiently strong PeVi spell do the trick? (and if so, how strong is sufficiently strong?) Or is the point of a botch to be something that can't be negated until it leaves of its own accord?

And (for this new guy), if so, what is a sufficient amount of time?