This is also the moment they can arrange marriages for themselves, their relatives or allies.
Finding a Suitor
Once per year, the Nakodo (the person arranging the marriage, might be the PC themselves) makes a test of Courtier/Awareness TN 15 to find a suitable marriage prospect for their “client”. Achieving this difficulty means that:
The future suitor will be a second or third child of a family of slightly lower status than the character’s;
Will be a respectful partner but with no real feelings towards them;
Will have the capabilities of a samurai of their age, without special talents or deficiencies (rolling 7k3 at anything related to their school, and 5k2 for anything else);
If the character is from a Courtier or Artisan school, their future spouse is a Bushi. If the character is from other schools, their future spouse is a Courtier or Artisan.
As this suitor doesn’t bring anything special to the table personally, the benefits of accepting this basic result is just the alliance prospects with their family, the dowry they’ll bring to the character’s family and the possibility of having children soon, to continue the character’s legacy.
But having such a simple marriage is obviously not the ideal. As per the table below, it is possible to adjust the characteristics of the suitor by calling Raises on the initial test. On the other hand, it's possible to reduce the base difficulty by accepting an inferior result in one of the three “parts” composing a marriage prospect (see below).
Depending on how respected by the regional court the Nakodo is, the base difficulty of the test can be changed by -5 (for a friendly court) or +5 (for a hostile court), or more. In general, characters who are Bushi will marry Courtiers/Artisans and vice versa, but exceptions can be made. But for the suitor to be a Shugenja, it’s necessary to call 5 Raises on this test. Families with Shugenja lineages are loath to lose such important individuals.
Furthermore, each Raise in the test can be used to gain 2 points in a specific Advantage that the player wishes to have, either in their marriage or on the spouse itself. Purposefully choosing Disadvantages guarantees 1 Free Raise per 2 points in Disadvantages.
Examples of appropriate Advantages and Disadvantages include Bitter Bethrotal, Karmic Tie, Wealthy, or even things like Sacred Weapons or Paragon of Honor possessed by their partner. The character can also invest their own XP on this, maybe as an opportunity to access Advantages they couldn’t normally justify before.
Anatomy of a Marriage
As can be seen in the table below, you can abstract the future spouse of the character into three aspects: the Relationship they’ll have with the character, the Capabilities of the spouse and the Influence they’ll have with their old family.
RELATIONSHIP: The base result means the future spouse of the character respects them enough that they’ll avoid actions that would bring shame or dishonor to the family, but this won’t be a particularly loving relationship. If you have extraconjugal affairs, the NPC will take that as a permission to do so as well.
If someone tries to target your spouse with a social action to turn them against you, seduce them or anything like that, treat the TN and Successes needed to affect them as the base level for their Competency (as shown in the Court Challenges and NPCs article). Even then, your spouse will never agree to do something drastic against you unless the reward is truly astounding or the enemy has powerful blackmail material.
At the second level of relationship, you and your spouse are compatible and develop true feelings for each other. To target your partner with social actions demands two Raises on top of the difficulty as determined by their Competency. At the third level, your spouse is truly in love and dedicated to you. Attempts to make them betray you in any way are impossible, they’ll rather die than let you and your family be harmed.
On the other hand, having a negative level in the Relationship aspect will not affect the difficulty of convincing your spouse to turn on you, but it will open the possibility of them doing actually harmful actions.
COMPETENCY: This aspect shows how skilled your future spouse will be. A base result means they are as skilled as is expected from a samurai their age, rolling 7k3 for tests related to their School Tag (Bushi, Courtier, Artisan, etc) and 5k2 for anything else. They have Social Power 4 if their school is either Courtier or Artisan, or 3 otherwise.
At the second level of competency, they can be more talented in their specialty (7k4 / 5k3 rolls) or more broadly skilled (8k3 / 8k3 rolls), with no glaring weaknesses in training. Their Social Power is 1 point greater than the base tier.
At the final level of competency, your spouse is a true genius in their field (10k4 / 6k3 rolls) or is highly trained in a large array of abilities (10k3 / 10k3 rolls), with Social Power 2 points higher than the base competency.
At negative competency, your spouse is extremely poorly educated, or refuses to put effort into anything they do. They’ll have 6k2 / 3k2 rolls and a Social Power 1 point lower than base competency.
INFLUENCE: This aspect represents both the influence your future spouse will have with their own family, and how influential their family will be, bringing an advantageous alliance to your own household. At the base level of influence, your spouse will come from a family slightly smaller than your own and will have their ears for reasonable requests. You can always count on them being at least Sympathetic (again, see Court Challenges and NPCs) to your requests and having a few samurai to help during times of hardship. If you’re using the Assessed Value rules for lands and military capabilities from my previous article, your spouse’s family will probably be at a similar level than yours, just slightly lower.
At the second level of influence, your spouse represents a major bridge between your two clans, making them always at least Friendly to you, or their family being a bit more powerful than yours, making their resources quite substantial in wealth and troops. Marrying a member of such a family is certain to bring power and prestige to your clan, but also means the possibility of being overshadowed by them.
The third level of influence allows you access to both of the previous benefits. Marrying the precious child of a powerful family can be both a blessing and a curse, since failing your spouse means courting retribution from their family. On the other hand, many paths are open to their allies…
At negative influence, either the spouse’s family saw this marriage as a way to get rid of a problematic child, making them very unreliable to you, or the family itself is on the verge of destruction or disgrace, and you’re probably their last lifeline available. This means it's probable they’ll be counting on you for help, instead of them helping you.
Dowry and Living Standards for the Partner
As the Player Character is most likely the heir of their House and their spouse is the one joining their family, you’ll receive a dowry equal to your own Status x10 in Koku, but this multiplier can be increased or decreased by x2 for each Raise called in the initial test to arrange the marriage.
EXAMPLE: If a character from a Status 2.0 family calls one Raise to increase the Dowry they’ll receive, they’ll get 24 Koku from the marriage (Status 2.0 * 12 = 24). Without a Raise, the dowry would be 20 Koku instead (Status 2.0 * 10 = 20).
Instead of increasing the dowry, you might decide to reduce it to half to gain a Free Raise in the test to arrange the marriage. If the Nakodo fails the test, they can reduce the dowry by 1 Koku per point of failure to consider it a success instead.
After the marriage, you must sustain the Living Standards of your spouse. See the article regarding Living Standards and Samurai Economy for the price paid for it. You must keep your family at least at the same Living Standards as your own, otherwise their Relationship to you degrades by one level per year, and their family becomes enraged at your disregard for their child’s wellbeing, also degrading your Influence with them by one level per year.
Legacy
If your character is in a straight relationship, you can roll for the possibility of having children. Of course, adoption is always a possibility for all kinds of couples and only demands the choice to do so. For natural pregnancies, these rules assume that both your character and their spouse aren’t infertile, so each year that passes you can roll a single d10: on a 7 or higher, the woman of the couple becomes pregnant and has a child during that year.
_w_-_(MeisterDrucke-1119571).jpg)
On a 10, roll again for the possibility of having twins: on a second 10, that is confirmed. You can keep rolling to see the possibility of having triplets, quadruplets, etc. The possibilities are WAY higher than real life with this method, but PCs are unique anyways and the results can be funny as hell. Another roll of d10 can determine the sex of the babies and, in the case of twins, if both results are identical, then so are the twins.
As the pregnancy comes to term, the mother makes an Earth roll with TN 15 (or 20, for twins, 25 for triplets, etc). A simple failure means that the baby is born, but there are complications. This can be represented by giving the child or the mother a random disadvantage or by making the mother barren from then on, for example. A failure by more than 5 means that either the child or the mother dies in childbirth. A failure by more than 10, means both die. If the mother is the PC, change a death result to a random disadvantage. If the mother is an NPC, roll as if their Earth was 2.
For each year, the child makes a roll to see if they’ll survive childhood. The player makes an Earth roll (with Earth 1) for the child versus TN 5, with +1k0 bonus for each year of age the child has (including the first). On a success, they survive the year. On a failure, they spend most of that year sick, dying if they fail the test again the next year.
Both childbirth and child survival rolls can receive bonuses from several sources, the most common being from having a higher Living Standard (+1k0 per level above Comfortable). Having medics on retainer can also add their Medicine skill to the rolls. Having a Shugenja present will add their School Rank to the rolls as well.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário