I recently wrote about my current setup for a campaign wilderness map and the associated hexcrawling that goes along with it. The greater context is the promise of ever changing gameplay. This is true for characters with saving throws replacing armor class as your most important defense, this is true for spells that change how the game is run, and I want it to be true for the campaign itself where dungeon looting yields to wilderness exploration, and eventually to kingdom building.
Kingdom building is what the domain game is all about. Wilderness exploration is about travelling from here to there and the creatures you encounter. It’s about learning who your allies and enemies are, new towns with new leaders and their own economic goals, monster lairs, humanoid tribes, instigating war, brokering peace. Eventually, the players are going to lay claim on a lair or a town. Now what?
Adventure Conqueror King System
interesting comparison of An Echo Resounding and Adventure Conqueror King
Unfortunately it’s turning out to be too much work for me. When I look at the monthly campaign summaries—something I write every four sessions—I notice that there is some free form stuff in the *Sages and Spies* inspired by recent events, my players’ interests and adventure hooks, and there is some stuff generated by the rules of *An Echo Resounding*. For every lair I need to find out whether it spawns units. If it does, these units need to attack a nearby location. I need to resolve these fights and if the units win, they plunder the location they attacked. For every non-player domain I need to figure out what sort of move they make during their domain turn. This involves looking at the numbers and rolling a d20, but often it has been so long that I feel I need to double check those numbers or I find little mistakes. In the end, a lot of time gets spend for very little gain. Or, to look at it from another perspective, I spend some time looking at numbers and rolling dice to produce text that is boring compared to the free form stuff I write up for the *Sages and Spies* section.
+--------------------------------+----------+ | Building | Price | +--------------------------------+----------+ | a *small statue* for a well or | 50gp | | a garden | | | a *small, public altar* made | 250gp | | of stone with spirit gate und | | | a small well (5ft.×5ft.) | | | a *small shop* made of wood | 300gp | | with a place to sleep in the | | | back room (15ft.×15ft.) | | | a *simple wooden building with | 700gp | | one floor* such as a tavern, | | | a gallery or a gambling den | | | (50ft.×50ft.) | | | a *wooden building with | 1500gp | | two floors* in a village | | | (50ft.×50ft.) | | | a *stone building with | 3000gp | | two floors* in a village | | | (50ft.×50ft.) | | | a *manor house with two | 10,000gp | | floors*, marble columns | | | and statues in a city | | | (50ft.×50ft.) | | | a provincial *castle* with six | 75,000gp | | floors (60ft.×60ft.) and an | | | inner courtyard (30ft.×60ft.) | | | surrounded by a wall | | +--------------------------------+----------+
This leads to a strange effect: Build a large wooden Freya temple for 1500 gold and you’ve got a temple and 1500 experience points (gold spent = xp gained). Spend a few domain turns building a temple, however, and you will have a temple, it will give you Wealth -1 and Social +4, and a powerful 9th level cleric will come and settle here (using *An Echo Resounding*).
Having two very different ways of building a temple complicates things. It seems to me that paying for the temple using their own gold is a more visceral experience for players. They built it. This is what it cost. It’s easy to embellish it. It’s easy to list it on the campaign wiki. It doesn’t require anything on my part except determining a suitable price when they ask for a quote.
I also think they don’t *mind* getting a 9th level cleric, but there are still questions: why haven’t we met them before? Why aren’t they coming on adventures? In fact, why isn’t this a player character?
My game allows players to run multiple characters. In a particular session, players can bring up to three characters. The character with the highest level is the main character, the others act as secondary characters. Experience point gained for killing monsters is split on a per head basis. Treasure—and therefore experience points for gold—is split by shares. Every main character gets a full share, every secondary character gets half a share.
Sometimes, players will grow tired of characters. Sometimes, characters will break bones or loose limbs. These characters are perfect fits for these roles. Majordomos of castles, priests in temples, heads of guilds, captains of ships, regents of towns.
This is how I hope to achieve a greater identification with the setting. Over time, more and more important folks will be former player characters. It’s also ideal for a new campaign. At first, no high level priests exist. As soon as the first player character cleric reaches 9th level, however, *raise dead* is an option for *all* the player characters in the region—even if they’re playing in a different group! And *raise dead* will remain an option even if the player running the character abandons them or if the player leaves my table. The character has been established, backstory included.
The party could build an armory, buy equipment for four hundred heavy infantry (swords, chain and shield is 60 gold per person based on prices in Moldvay’s *Basic D&D* or 24000 gold total + 3000 gold for the armory itself based on my list of buildings above). Then, if the town is big enough to supply enough able bodied fighters, four units of heavy infantry militia will automatically be available whenever the town is attacked.
Hiring mercenaries will require less money. Human heavy foot *guards* in peace time will cost three gold per month (1200 gold per month for four units), twice as much in war time (2400 gold per month for four units).
I don’t think I need to use the War Machine rules introduced in the Rules Cyclopedia. I can keep using the unit combat rules in An Echo Resounding, the B/X Companion by Jonathan Becker, or the M20 Mass Combat Rules by Greywulf. I’m not sure what my favorite mass combat rules are, for the moment. I’m tending towards keeping the rules from *An Echo Resounding* because rolling for attack and damage is easy to remember. There is no *scale* factor and there is no *Unit Attack Matrix*. That makes it easier to understand.
started rethinking domain-level play
So, that’s where I’m at right now. What about abilities, or aspects?
Based on a recommendation on Google+ I took a look at Houses of the Blooded. There, you have domains consisting of provinces and each province consisting of ten regions. Each region produces something, and based on that you can have armies, goods, trade, and so on. I think it interesting, but I don’t think I’d want my D&D to be about it. Too much detail, it’s not really part of player characters, we wouldn’t want to spend time on it at the table, and so on.
I was also looking at the King Arthur’s Pendragon and The Great Pendragon Campaign. My campaign fell apart because of many reasons, but the lousy winter season where you’re supposed to look after your family, your manor house, your lands, build fortifications and all that—this part of the game just was *not exciting enough at the table.* And that is a problem. As Chris says in one of his blog posts, there’s always the danger of these systems turning “boardgamey” or “beancounterly.” Or that all the decisions have no consequence after all.
I’m still chewing on this.
#RPG #Old School #Sandbox #Domain #Mass Combat
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On Google+, Andy wondered about moving some of the ’beancountery’ aspects of domain play from the table to the downtime between session, to email, to G+ or to the referee playing ’solitaire’. This is a good question. How much indeed? What I can say is that there is very little interaction between me and my players *between* sessions. Everything needs to happen at the table. Between sessions, people focus on work, family life, other hobbies, etc. In our *Pendragon* campaign, that meant running the winter phase at the table. This lead to some frustration. The winter phase was not seen as part of the game. It was something that happened before or after the game. It took away from the game itself. In our *An Echoes Resounding* campaign, that meant me rolling all the dice and writing up all the results between sessions and players making two domain turns every four sessions, and most of them wanting to do the right thing but having no idea of the options open to them and a winter phase effect if we talked about it for too long. In the end I feel it means a lot of work for me for very little gain at the table and for the players. I can only speak for myself, of course. As far as I am concerned, I don’t enjoy playing a solitaire domain game. That’s why I need a different solution.
– Alex Schroeder 2015-05-04 07:47 UTC