Abstraction in My Liege,

I think the aspect of My Liege, that could potentially put off the most people is its lack of accounting granularity. It does not track Court wealth in gold pieces, but rather in Crowns - the average amount of annual tax drawn from a six-mile hex. It isn't much interested in extracting more value from each hex - mostly because it doesn't seem like the medieval nobility was overly interested in this either (with exceptions, of course).

I don't think it's even necessary to "convert" between Crowns and gp either, in no small part because the majority of medieval taxes were never collected in specie currency, but rather in goods and services. To me, it's easier and more realistic to assume that, once PCs have this much power, they no longer need to worry about personal expenses. No more haggling at market stalls for 50 feet of rope. Furthermore, I don't want PCs to be able to level up through collecting taxes. They must still go out and adventure to do that.

Crowns are a good example of the philosophy of abstraction that I took when working on My Liege,. That is, I wouldn't be afraid to abstract things in order to serve the purpose of getting right to the political machinations. However, I was comfortable with abstracting units, but less comfortable abstracting concepts. The value of 1 Crown is not precisely defined, but it represents a combination of goods, services, and money that is real in the fiction of the setting.

For a while, I was calling the other currency that Courts track "Favour." While it represents a feeling that would be real to the characters, it was a little too wishy-washy for my taste. Then, during one late-night design session, I had the epiphany to add an 's.' Favours feel far more concrete and comprehensible than the nebulous feeling of favour. Everyone has owed or been owed a favor before. It's already a currency in real life, even if we don't track it as strictly as we would in a game.

Abstraction also allows ease of adaptation of the My Liege, system to different settings and genres. To make it work for your game, you would only have to change a few entries in the Petitions table, the terrain features, and the different types of companies available for warbands.

I could easily imagine adapting My Liege, to space-feudalism, for example, by reskinning the monsters in the Petition table as alien invasions, changing terrain types to planet types with exotic luxuries (Spice, anyone?), and reimagining warbands as "fleets" with different ship types mustered from, say, exploration outpost worlds, industrial worlds, etc. The rest of the rules would scale easily due to the abstraction of units.