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<blockquote data-quote="Yora" data-source="post: 8315811" data-attributes="member: 6670763">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&amp;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 &quot;Adventurers&quot; 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.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Yora, post: 8315811, member: 6670763"] 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 [I]after the end of the campaign[/I]. 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. [/QUOTE]

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