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

[Reynard]

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?

Shared interest among the party. For example, in Strongholds and Followers multiple PCs can build their individual "keeps" together and make a "castle."

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.

Do that stuff off session. Everyone has email and Discord, etc...

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.

I think that is mostly flavor. "My keep is a crooked tower" versus "my keep is a grand cathedral." Your people still have to eat, though, so it is still going to be town plus farmland.

 

[Hussar]

Additionally, besides the player buy in issues, there are issues that some characters just don't lend themselves to running a domain of any sort. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for that specific character.

 

[Reynard]

Additionally, besides the player buy in issues, there are issues that some characters just don't lend themselves to running a domain of any sort. It just doesn't make a lot of sense for that specific character.

Presumably this would be resolved in Session 0, just like characters that don't lend themselves to dungeon delving or saving the world or whatever.

 

[Yora]

If it's the premise of a new campaign, that wouldn't be an issue.

However, then you'd want to have the strongholds appear pretty early on in the campaign, and not have the players flounder around for half a year until they can finally get to do the stuff the campaign is actually about.

I guess looking at Birthright would be the way to go to approach working on such a campaign.

 

[Undrave]

My current (on hold) game is mostly about that idea.

The party leader is a Dwarf noble from a destitute family and we're investigating abandoned dwarven fortress left behind after a war with humans and a mysterious plague caused them to be abandoned. I forgot how many but we're trying to find them all AND investigate that plague which might still be around in some way as a mysterious affliction has been granting bizarre powers to people who survive it recently (possibly a sort of reincarnation curse? Someone got sick and turned into a Dryad!). They had found one before I showed up and we explored a second that was cleared up of Duergar so we established it as our home base and had a bunch of refugees and followers (including a PC for a player who had moved away) move in and start establishing it.

We've mostly been juggling finding those fortress and getting in the good grace of the local noble and villagers. The human barony they are in is treated as a backwater area of little interest by their centra authority and they're kinda abusively authoritarian and beaurocratic in the Capital city's own barony...

We're also slowly gathering allies. We're leaving word everywhere that any dwarf in the kingdom is welcome, we got a knowledge hungry Beholder to live in our under dark access caves in exchange for access to the fortress' old library and my current PC is a Rock Gnome part of tribe that was displaced by a mysterious wave of undead and he's trying to secure a safe place for his people by making nice with these wacky dwarves.

But it hasn't been super mechanical. It's mostly background and social stuff, plus we haven't been back there for a while now due to our quest. We do take notes.

I don't even know if we'll continue...

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

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?

The way Birthright addressed this was Domains having different categories of holdings that generally mapped to the 2e class groups. With some exceptions, Warriors would have Law holdings, Rogues would have Guild holdings, Priest would have Temple holdings, and Wizards would have Source holdings.

 

[Alzrius]

The way Birthright addressed this was Domains having different categories of holdings that generally mapped to the 2e class groups. With some exceptions, Warriors would have Law holdings, Rogues would have Guild holdings, Priest would have Temple holdings, and Wizards would have Source holdings.

Those interested in reading more about this should check out Brandes Stoddard's review of Birthright, in the context of domain rulership, over on Tribality.

 

[DEFCON 1]

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.

Fair enough. The only thing I'd add is that my post does present a number of the potential roadblocks that I think would possibly need to be overcome in order to create a game system of land management for D&D that wasn't just one person's personal house rule system. Because presumably you aren't concerned about just getting a few ideas for you yourself to use in your own game, but instead are talking in more general terms for a more universal player base. If that's true... then knowing what the potential issues are will only help focus your design in ways to no longer have them be issues.

Good luck!

 

[thirdkingdom]

I recently wrote a book (Into the Wild) addressing this very issue for Old School Essentials (and other OSR-games), which focuses primarily on domain building (which is mostly the purview of fighters, but other classes can do it too, just not as well). I wrote another book (A Guide to Thieves' Guilds) a year or so ago that focuses on running Thieves' and Assassins' Guilds (again for OSE). I think a big way that domain-level play can be done successfully is through extensive use of retainers.

As the higher-level PCs get involved in doing name-level activity they spend more time researching spells, creating magic items, running domains, etc., and the players start controlling their retainers for more day to day activity. As downtime allows the higher-level PCs return to adventuring as needed. I'm a big proponent of creating retainer trees, which allows you to play at different tiers at once. For instance, you could have a 12th level main PC who, while they're not creating magical items or running a spy ring are exploring the outer planes, and they've got a few 6-8th level retainers who are busy exploring new lands, delving into higher-level dungeons, etc., and those mid-level retainers have a few low-level retainers who clear the easy dungeons, handle patrols of newly claimed territory, etc. It allows for the name-level stuff to be abstracted out while giving the players something to do in the meanwhile ("Okay, so Arwenna is busy creating a wand of fireballs, which will take about a month. During that time I'm going to get her loyal retainer, Gworg the Unwise, to lead an expedition to see if they can't convince the hill giants to the east to stop raiding out supply lines.").

 

[commandercrud]

I play 5e and just use the original BECMI War Machine rules as-is. I have Colville's book and ordered the other, but haven't used it. It seems lame by comparison. The BECMI rules can be used almost as-is.