Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Balesir" data-source="post: 5832907" data-attributes="member: 27160">I agree here. The Hârn system and setting pursues pretty "Excel-intensive" approaches to running things like domains, ships and such like, and I love it to bits in that context, but it simply doesn't fit well with what D&D has ever been good at.For D&D I can see two potentially fruitful avenues. The first is to have a sort of parallel game setup; players participate in a "Game of Thrones" scenario writ large on the one hand, and in a classic "go on adventures and plunder dungeon-like sites" game on the other. One game of domain power, one game of personal power.The problem with this first option is the "rob Peter to pay Paul" issue - or, perhaps more accurately, the "rob Peter to kill Paul and take his stuff" issue. In other words, if there are fungible resources that are relevant to both games, what stops players gimping themselves in one area to get a "win button" in the other. I think this is a very tricky issue - it came up in Birthright way before magic items became a "party build resource", and expecting magic items to become non-tradable is to run against human nature and the raw facts of economics.The second option relates in an odd way to "extended rests" or whatever mechanism is used for "daily power" replenishment (and, judging by Monty's fondness for 'vancian' spellcasting, there will assuredly be some). So, if you'll bear with me a minute, an aside on game "tempo"...For various reasons, I think the hitherto assumed tie between game-world time and game-system time is problematic. The assumption that all a party's resources replenish each game "day" (or night) makes assuptions about the number of encounters per day and so forth either impractical or extremely limited. Encounters, milestones, short rests and extended rests have the capacity to give the game-system a tempo - a beat or pulse that amounts to a "systemic time measurement" that can be wholly divorced from the game-world time flow.I see this having several advantages:1) Game styles that progress over game days or weeks can be handled in as balanced and smooth a manner as "dungeon bashing" if resource replenishment is related to the encounter/milestone/full rest/level up tempo of the game-system rather than the imagined diurnal cycle of the game world.2) Given the escalation of power inherent in the concept of "character level", there can be a "time value of resources" effect, allowing the techniques and theories of management and economics to be applied to give functional "investment" or "capital" features in the D&D reward system. Don't worry - these won't be as complex as this makes the whole thing sound, although the design of them might use moderately complex techniques to balance them out!This last leads to domain elements that give out things like consumable items, followers a la MME or money income measured per milestone, per extended rest (or whatever replaces this in D&DN) or per level. The escalation of power and value with level will ensure that the value of any such element is limited (i.e. low level benefits will be useless at high level, meaning the "capital resource" either gets liquidated or upgraded) and measurable. Balanced items that represent ongoing benefits (in the same way that regular magic items do) but that meld in the flavour of "domains" and "investments" will thus be possible that fit with the "regular" adventuring play of D&D.So, two possible implementations of "domains"; could they be mixed? I think that might be even more tricky than keeping the "Game of Thrones" separate from the "Adventuring Progression" with just the first implementation option, but maybe a solution can be found?</blockquote>

Verification