D&D General Let's talk about Domains, War, Leadership and Sundry

[Reynard]

Because the issue has come up in a couple other threads, I wanted to discuss the "other" D&D play -- that of carving kingdoms out of the wilderness, raising armies, building tower and temples and guildhalls, becoming a ruler or leader, and so on.

This stuff has been around since the inception of the game and is built into the influential fiction of King Conan and Elric. Eventually growing beyond simply hunting treasure was an assumed part of play, and still should be IMO. In fact, after thinking on it a little bit, the fact that most published WotC adventures end in the low range of the higher levels (12 to 14) they set up the characters perfectly to "retire" from adventuring/world saving and settle down with a few hundred followers in a stronghold of their own design (or which they stole from the big bad of that previously mentioned adventure).

As a GenXer who came in by way of BECMI, I am most fond of the Domain and Warfare rules of the Companion Set -- simple yet comprehensive. I bought Strongholds and Followers and it is a good book but not as detailed as I would like (hopefully Kingdoms and Warfare fix that), and I have been eyeing Legendary Games "Ultimate" series for a while.

How do you feel about this "leadership" mode of play? What systems do you use to enact it? Is 5E a system that can support it, or needs it?

 

[Alzrius]

I have a lot of thoughts on this particular subject, but really I think that James Maliszewski says it best in his On the Loss of D&D's Endgame article.

 

[Yora]

One interesting thing that seems to have been shared more frequently in recent years is that back in the 70s and 80s, retiring characters to lords generally meant retiring them from play for most groups. And at least in the inner circle of TSR, players would often have characters of different levels to be grouped into parties, base on what they felt like playing that day, what would be a good addition to the rest of the team, and which characters were tied up with long term downtime projects.
Those characters who settled down in a domain would occasionally make appearances as more or less player-controlled NPCs, but the whole idea of players actually governing and maintaining domains was apparently not something considered a serious part of the game. Later additional rules were introduced to manage domains and lead armies, but those remained a fringe phenomenon at best. Players would read them and dream about doing all the stuff they described one day, but there are few reports of that ever really happening.

A big challenge that I see is that D&D today is very much conceptualized as being about a single fixed party with 4 to 6 PCs of the same level. If they really put down roots and run a domain, which one is going to be the Lord? What do the others do? Or does everyone get their own domain? Then how are they going to play together?

Though yesterday, I had a very interesting conversation about the possibility of conceptualizing "Adventurers" as people who aren't tomb robbers or a traveling charity, and instead people who are building both funds and reputation to be able to establish a domain of their own after the end of the campaign. Using the idea as a foundation to explain why adventurers exist in that world and how society thinks of them, but without the prospect of actually playing that part of their later lives.

 

[Reynard]

One interesting thing that seems to have been shared more frequently in recent years is that back in the 70s and 80s, retiring characters to lords generally meant retiring them from play for most groups. And at least in the inner circle of TSR, players would often have characters of different levels to be grouped into parties, base on what they felt like playing that day, what would be a good addition to the rest of the team, and which characters were tied up with long term downtime projects.
Those characters who settled down in a domain would occasionally make appearances as more or less player-controlled NPCs, but the whole idea of players actually governing and maintaining domains was apparently not something considered a serious part of the game. Later additional rules were introduced to manage domains and lead armies, but those remained a fringe phenomenon at best. Players would read them and dream about doing all the stuff they described one day, but there are few reports of that ever really happening.

A big challenge that I see is that D&D today is very much conceptualized as being about a single fixed party with 4 to 6 PCs of the same level. If they really put down roots and run a domain, which one is going to be the Lord? What do the others do? Or does everyone get their own domain? Then how are they going to play together?

Though yesterday, I had a very interesting conversation about the possibility of conceptualizing "Adventurers" as people who aren't tomb robbers or a traveling charity, and instead people who are building both funds and reputation to be able to establish a domain of their own after the end of the campaign. Using the idea as a foundation to explain why adventurers exist in that world and how society thinks of them, but without the prospect of actually playing that part of their later lives.

We played out the domain and warfare parts to varying degrees, depending on the group of players and the campaign. But I am not from the first generation of gamers.

I think that having building a keep and becoming a lord as an ultimate goal, though, IS a good character motivation -- especially in a sandbox where PCs need a reason to be compelled to go looking for trouble and the hopefully associated treasure. Fame and fortune are both necessary to worming your way into high society, after all.

 

[DEFCON 1]

To me the real issue with that style of play is that the game just isn't built with it being a foundational piece. Like it or not... D&D's primary "board game" is small party monster combat. That is what the rules are designed for... that it what more than 3/4th of a character sheet are numerically geared to... that is what feels like "should" happen at least once every session (which is why when someone says "Our table had three sessions without combat!" it's treated like an outlier or something special.)

All the other game aspects that have been added to D&D over the years... like for instance Skills and skill checks; Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, and Traits; exploration mechanics; naval combat; etc... are all kind of basic and do not have nearly the same "board game" complexity and depth as either D&D's small party combat,or other RPGs whose foundation and design were built ON those aspects being the base "board game".

So even if we get additional rules created for kingdom building (either from WotC or MCDM or whomever)... they are still board game rules that are not a focus of D&D itself. They are an add-on. But the problem is, and always had been, that that add-on... the game of running a province or nation... is a fundamentally different game than what D&D is. So it'll never be seen as truly a part of things-- ruling a nation is not small party hand-to-hand combat. So if someone truly wants to play a "board game" about building nations and conquering rival nations... there will be countless other better games out there to play that will probably be much more fun than anything that gets stapled to D&D. But the only downside is that you don't get to add your PC's story to them.

There is a small market for these add-ons, Some people will definitely make and play these add-ons to the base D&D game experience, and will have a fantastic time doing it. But unfortunately too many others will just end up seeing these add-ons as a pale shadow of what they otherwise could be playing if they didn't have this need to tack their D&D character's story to it.

 

[Reynard]

To me the real issue with that style of play is that the game just isn't built with it being a foundational piece. Like it or not... D&D's primary "board game" is small party monster combat. That is what the rules are designed for... that it what more than 3/4th of a character sheet are numerically geared to... that is what feels like "should" happen at least once every session (which is why when someone says "Our table had three sessions without combat!" it's treated like an outlier or something special.)

All the other game aspects that have been added to D&D over the years... like for instance Skills and skill checks; Bonds, Ideals, Flaws, and Traits; exploration mechanics; naval combat; etc... are all kind of basic and do not have nearly the same "board game" complexity and depth as either D&D's small party combat,or other RPGs whose foundation and design were built ON those aspects being the base "board game".

So even if we get additional rules created for kingdom building (either from WotC or MCDM or whomever)... they are still board game rules that are not a focus of D&D itself. They are an add-on. But the problem is, and always had been, that that add-on... the game of running a province or nation... is a fundamentally different game than what D&D is. So it'll never be seen as truly a part of things-- ruling a nation is not small party hand-to-hand combat. So if someone truly wants to play a "board game" about building nations and conquering rival nations... there will be countless other better games out there to play that will probably be much more fun than anything that gets stapled to D&D. But the only downside is that you don't get to add your PC's story to them.

There is a small market for these add-ons, Some people will definitely make and play these add-ons to the base D&D game experience, and will have a fantastic time doing it. But unfortunately too many others will just end up seeing these add-ons as a pale shadow of what they otherwise could be playing if they didn't have this need to tack their D&D character's story to it.

This point of view strikes me as strange considering how D&D came out of wargames in the first place and incorporated the idea of "graduating" to a leadership position in its earliest incarnations. I think it is more accurate to say that over the course of the editions, particularly in the WotC era, the focus of the mechanics as moved ever more onto the "combat board game" as you put it. Early D&D had far less mechanical focus on combat as a percentage of pages in the book or whatever metric you want to use. D&D was about exploration and treasure hunting and character advancement and eventually building a keep and gaining followers.

That said I am not really interested in arguing about the basic premise of the thread. I want to talk about how to do it and how to make it fun, not whether it should exist at all.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Because the issue has come up in a couple other threads, I wanted to discuss the "other" D&D play -- that of carving kingdoms out of the wilderness, raising armies, building tower and temples and guildhalls, becoming a ruler or leader, and so on.

This stuff has been around since the inception of the game and is built into the influential fiction of King Conan and Elric. Eventually growing beyond simply hunting treasure was an assumed part of play, and still should be IMO. In fact, after thinking on it a little bit, the fact that most published WotC adventures end in the low range of the higher levels (12 to 14) they set up the characters perfectly to "retire" from adventuring/world saving and settle down with a few hundred followers in a stronghold of their own design (or which they stole from the big bad of that previously mentioned adventure).

As a GenXer who came in by way of BECMI, I am most fond of the Domain and Warfare rules of the Companion Set -- simple yet comprehensive. I bought Strongholds and Followers and it is a good book but not as detailed as I would like (hopefully Kingdoms and Warfare fix that), and I have been eyeing Legendary Games "Ultimate" series for a while.

How do you feel about this "leadership" mode of play? What systems do you use to enact it? Is 5E a system that can support it, or needs it?

The biggest issues I have with this style is play is two-fold:

1. Some players just aren't interested in it. This isn't relevant to this thread, since presumably you get player input before you start such a campaign.
2. Some PCs just aren't interested in it. This is especially important if your character has low Intelligence and Charisma (there were unintelligent nobles, of course, who tended to avoid politics and leave their domains to stewards). I think if you're doing a social game, you need a higher point buy.

I read an old 1e adventure series called "Bloodstone Lands" where your PCs end up being very high level (they have high-level pregenerated PCs, in fact) and we saw their respective fates. The paladin became a king, the monk led a monastery, and so forth.

 

[Hussar]

I think that the following issues, which @Defcon1 was referring to, need to be addressed in order to make domain management fun for the table:

1. How do you turn what is essentially a solitaire game into a group game?

2. How do you avoid the book keeping. While I'm all for details, spending an hour on what is essentially spreadsheets is not my idea of a fun session.

3. How do you craft rules such that they apply to all classes? After all, the domain a Human Great Old One Warlock would (probably) look pretty different from the domain of a Halfling Oath of Vengeance Paladin. The rules have to be very flexible.

 

[Reynard]

2. Some PCs just aren't interested in it. This is especially important if your character has low Intelligence and Charisma (there were unintelligent nobles, of course, who tended to avoid politics and leave their domains to stewards). I think if you're doing a social game, you need a higher point buy.

That would only be true if you hinged all their leadership and interactions on die rolls. I am not sure that is the best way to go in a game that is going to be inherently political. You can use the characters stats as something to inform how you adjudicate things, but what the characters actually do is going to be much more important.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I agree with most of the above points - if games do get to high levels some sort of domain management tends to show up in my experience, but it's always a side-plot to the main game.

Part of the issue is it's really difficult to 'balance' - some players will be more interested than other, and some pc's will be more interested (and capable of) as well. The paladin who wants to be king could easily get a ton of spotlight time to focus on all of his followers - but the barbarian who just likes smashing stuff and still has a personal grudge against the BBEG probably couldn't care less. So you need to balance table time to make sure the paladins player isn't hogging the game.

Which means that unless everyone wants to get in on it, it's best to have a simple, easy-to-adjudicate, not-power-affecting setup run during downtime, with a little rp and maybe some side quests coming off it. If everyone wants in... you probably want to find a really good co-op kingdom builder boardgame (or hack a non-co-op one to fit) and have sessions devoted to that, with impacts going back and forth.