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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rounser" data-source="post: 2933832" data-attributes="member: 1106">But as an earlier poster implied, the only loyalty that can truly be trusted is family, because of the mutual genetic investment they represent to one another.  Sharing power out to non-family more or less guarantees it's loss some generation or other.That calls for adventuring families, to ensure that all the brothers and sisters are of sufficient level that they're sufficiently useful to one another as a unit, and do their jobs well enough as bishop, guildsman and knight.This combination of "snip the tall poppies" and "keep it in the family" seems to superficially resemble the real world....the specifics of how this is implemented and to who and what are the D&Disms....that and the fact that a political opponent can scry/teleport/disintegrate you in your sleep, turn your castles to mud, or route your armies singlehandedly, making keeping the tall poppies snipped a really urgent priority for any realistic D&D ruler, IMO.Random ideas related to this include magical crowns, coronets and tiaras that are more than just symbolic (without them the royal family is open to the more obvious magical espionage), and perhaps tournaments to help sort out who is a potential threat to the crown (although in "RAW cause & effect reality", this would be insufficient, especially when powerful nobles smelled a rat given that tourney winners kept disappearing, and more rigorous methods of finding high level characters would be required).Such measures might seem to violate the RAW's demographics (given that a large metropolis can assume an 18th level cleric and a 16th level wizard, I gather from another thread), but the answer to this problem is obvious; they're members of the royal family.</blockquote>

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