YOU are in charge of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 3e...

[souran]

Because of the importance of battles in the fiction that backs D&D it seems like rules for mass combat should be a core part of D&D. Similarly, Kingdom management rules seem like they should be important too.

The problem with both is that most players would trade any meaningful mass combat or kingdom management ability for +1 swording at the first opportunity.

D&D really doesn't handle the tone shift between "adventurer living hand to mouth" and aristocrat whose actions directly influence a multitude of lives at all well.

While its anecdotal, my experience is that less than 1 in 5 players has any desire for the game "evolve" into a game where some/most people run city-states or nation-states. Maybe twice that are interested in real rules for mass combat.

Most players really would like their dungeons and dragons game to actually be about going into a dungeons and fighting dragons. Level 20 should have higher stakes sure, but the core concept is still receive quest, get mcguffin, kill boss monster.

Now obviously High level play is completely fucked up and unable to support something as basic as a "normal" D&D adventure because two or more 9th level casters can probably defeat any challenge you can think of by casting just 8th and 9th level spells. It is extremely hard to think of challenging scenarios in D&Ds dominant milieu that would work for high level characters. I think that the only real solution would be to make high level play more like lower level play and bring the game around to where level 20 heroes fight demons and gods instead of shaping new worlds.

While that will certainly make some angry, for most I think it would be a relief. Almost nobody understands the wish economy/plane hopping end game of current high level D&D. Many are so scared of it they never bother to play at that end of the pool.

[Username17]

The problem with both is that most players would trade any meaningful mass combat or kingdom management ability for +1 swording at the first opportunity.

You've mistaken effect for cause. People will trade their armies and their kingdoms for +1 swording because those games don't work in D&D. People will trade bonuses in minigames that don't work for bonuses in minigames that do. In a hypothetical game where the kingdom management game was functional, people would sometimes invest in granaries rather than a magic helmet.

For example, let's take Pirates Gold! where there are several minigames that are broadly functional. Some people take the Fencing skill, and other people take the Wit and Charm skill, and both are reasonable life choices. I mean yes, you need to stab enemy captains in the chest, but you also want to be invited to dance with a beautiful governor's daughter, so what are you gonna do?

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Well, also, if the minigames are properly designed the synergy will flow both ways.

The kingdom management game ought to allow you to earn favors from noble houses or the king, and those people can offer you rewards that are in turn useful for adventuring. In the same way, adventuring is a means to acquire funds that help expand your lands (or your plane-hopping wizard fortress or whatever).

[PhoneLobster]

Well, also, if the minigames are properly designed the synergy will flow both ways.

Well yeah, clearly, any and all mini games need to be thoroughly integrated with the main game or they can fuck off in general, and more specifically even a functional minigame will have the "trade it in for a +1 Sword" issue if the functional minigame fails to be of any value to the main game.

But at the level of integration with useful values flowing both ways from adventurer adventures <-> kings of kingdomia I'm not sure minigame is the correct term any more. Maybe integrated minigame instead of separate minigame? But fuck it whatever that's just a bullshit jargon fight.

Anyway. More specifically the main thing any kingdom management or mass combat mechanics need to remember is that they are there to enhance and interact with the adventurer adventuring game play, not to be some mostly unrelated thing you randomly sometimes sink large amounts of accounting into for extended periods instead of it.

That leads to some interesting design priorities I don't think are widely accepted. I mean there isn't all that much in the way of Den threads on this but it ends up rapidly devolving into detailed accounting of kobold work hours for carpet export manufacturing and advanced and detailed population migration modelling. Things which never really should have been in consideration, much less given priority, for designing an additional integrated minigame for a D&D clone.

[OgreBattle]

If anything mass combat seems to matter more to low than high level players. Aragorn-is-level-5 leads an army of thousands to fight the forces of Sauron because he can't do it alone. Nappa and Vegeta destroy planetary armies in their downtime and only need to roll initiative vs the handful of guys at their power level.

Kingdom management seems best handled as a new track you can level up on that doesn't detract from your ability to sword anyone.

[PhoneLobster]

If anything mass combat seems to matter more to low than high level players. Aragorn-is-level-5 leads an army of thousands to fight the forces of Sauron because he can't do it alone. Nappa and Vegeta destroy planetary armies in their downtime and only need to roll initiative vs the handful of guys at their power level.

Kingdom management seems best handled as a new track you can level up on that doesn't detract from your ability to sword anyone.

Don't get me wrong, in my view the main thing "mass combat" needs to be is a good foundation in basic mechanics that makes it easier to do your regular combat in situations with large numbers of enemies and maybe large numbers of allies around. Players want their adventurers to use their only personal abilities using the same mechanics they normally use instead of heavily abstracted "mass combat only" mechanics in encounters that feel like they are "battle" scaled.

And the main thing "kingdom management" needs to do is give you Excalibur and related awesome powers and a bunch of reasons to go have awesome adventures with them.

The focus for both systems always has to be at every turn "What does this bring back to the core game play?".

edit: Oh and while I'm not adverse to "Kingdom management" as a term and as a distinct goal. For me when I covered that ground I leaned more towards "Base/Organization management" with a bit more flexibility as to whether or not a group of characters might decide to run a Kingdom or a Cult or a Mercenary Band or a number of other things, whatever, maybe even just a guarded private palace to sink their higher level resources into for personal profit without any specific clear organizational theme or affiliation.

I think there's a lot of room to tell players "at X point you pretty much MUST build lairs and loot caves of some sort" and less but certainly not no room to design a game where you tell players "at X point you have to build an actual god damn Kingdom, final destination, no variation".

[Username17]

Anyway. More specifically the main thing any kingdom management or mass combat mechanics need to remember is that they are there to enhance and interact with the adventurer adventuring game play, not to be some mostly unrelated thing you randomly sometimes sink large amounts of accounting into for extended periods instead of it.

This is just an assumption of failure. If you accept this premise, then anything you make will be a waste of time because you've already assumed that your additional content is a waste of time and detracts from the game by its inclusion.

If your premise is that the goal of the game is to fight monsters in a damp basement, then everything you do above ground is just hoops you have to jump through to climb back into the hole. But that's a little bit insane. More than a little bit insane. The characters view rampaging around in caves as a means to an end - and that end is becoming rich and successful or thwarting the Lich King or whatever.

Once you expand your idea of the game to better match the characters' motivations, then other activities with a potential for goal advancement are just as valid as tracking the next minotaur through the next maze. Hauling cargo from one port to another or leading your army to victory in battle are not distractions from the game - they literally are the game. Just as much as swinging a sword at a dragon is the game.

-Username17

[Ice9]

Something that comes up when talking about kingdom management in D&D specifically - what comes afterwards?

Often, there's a sort of progression proposed or implied:
1-X: Personally sword things
X-Y: Run a kingdom
Y-20: Deific/planar stuff

And I can see why, because it sort of fits the existing power curve, and it means you can keep the abilities that would wreck the kingdom minigame but are appropriate for cosmic bullshit.

However, what exactly that last step implies is usually handwaved, or punted for later. And I'm not sure there really is a great answer. Considering that going from adventurer->kingdom status usually involves a bit more abstraction and separation between your character and the direct action, let's consider how the gameplay at that 'tier' would actually look like:
* Even more indirect. The PCs become demigods and spend their time getting more followers / sending those followers on quests of divine important / making mysterious proclamations to manipulate events. Fits the progression, but there aren't many examples of this, and I'm not sure how many people would want to play it.
* Back to personally swording things, but it's metaphorical or some shit. Like you enter the spirit plane and face-stab "the concept of greed", for example. A lot easier to write, but on closer inspection it's just low-level play reskinned; particularly jarring after the kingdom part did shift the gameplay.
* The same as the kingdom phase, but on another plane. You move to another plane and start building bigger, crazier stuff; instead of a farmer militia, you have an army of angels, say. Seems fine, but I don't really know what makes it a new tier in that case.

TL;DR - People take about "Adventurer -> King -> ???", but nobody seems to know what "???" would be.

[angelfromanotherpin]

I always liked the basic D&D thing where your endgame is doing the arbitrary things needed to become a god yourself. Now, I recall that the actual paths in BD&D weren't great, but you could have paths be things like 'build an improbably vast monument with materials untouched by magic' which would obviously tie in to the kingdom management game; and/or things like 'go to Hell and kill Tiamat,' which ties into the personal badass adventurer game, and players can do whichever kind of thing strikes their fancy.

[erik]

First the kingdom, next, the world!

You conquer other kingdoms, put down threats to the realms. Manage other lesser heroes to handle the little things. Every now and then your underling heroes bite off more than it can chew and you need to step in.

There's a lot to do after taking over a single kingdom.

Having something to protect, especially something big like a kingdom, gives you loads of adventures to do because you have something vulnerable to care about.

[Username17]

People take about "Adventurer -> King -> ???", but nobody seems to know what "???" would be.

There honestly doesn't have to be anything past king. There are certainly enemies to be faced past the Lich King, but there's no reason that they have have to be faced by players wearing a different hat. When you face the God of Death Defiled, you still basically have a giant army you bust out the mass combat game for and showdowns with the Grave Titans that you bust out the skirmish rules for. I don't see how that has to be mechanically different from when you faced down the Lich King's smaller but still substantial army of death and his less powerful but still impressive Wraith Barons.

There certainly can be another minigame where you start spreading a philosophy and get to start pushing cultural imperialism across the world and eventually become a god emperor by stealing all the prayers that would have gone to Orcus before your propaganda machine made that unpalatable or whatever. But there doesn't need to be.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

TL;DR - People take about "Adventurer -> King -> ???", but nobody seems to know what "???" would be.

God

The ??? is God.

Basic D&D had Basic, Expert, Master, and Immortal.

Basic was, well, basic. It was the bare minimum you needed for adventures. Expert is where the logistics and dragons started kicking in and that became more complex in Master. And then, you hit Immortal, and became an actual motherfucking deity.

Now, the rules for Immortals were fucking terrible, but the basic idea is sound.

[PhoneLobster]

This is just an assumption of failure.

No, it's the fucking basics of good game design. You keep your primary goals in mind at all times and design a unified whole that delivers the actual experience players sign up for.

You don't write three different games (D&D, Warhammer Fantasy, and Dominions) then just present them as standalone "minigames" and say "well each one is a rich experience in it's own right so OF COURSE people trying to sign up for D&D want to play those other two games for (probably more than) 2/3rds of the time they assigned to playing D&D". That's the Avoraciopoctules school of game design where he just stops you playing D&D from time to time and literally makes you play Age Of Wonders for a while. That's pretty fucking stupid.

But then again, maybe you are pulling some misdirection and attempting a refutation that isn't actually remotely relevant to the basic principle of keeping your minigames relevant to your core game play experience, because the things you ACTUALLY say...

Hauling cargo from one port to another or leading your army to victory in battle are not distractions from the game - they literally are the game. Just as much as swinging a sword at a dragon is the game.

Aren't actually an issue, sort of. With a proper integrated "minigame" instead of separate minigame leading your army to victory is just another core game combat encounter, moving cargo is just the place that your next core game encounters will happen at and will net you profits that will wrap back into benefits for your core game experience.

You don't get to pretend those are unique to a separated minigame design methodology. You don't even get to pretend they are better within a separated design methodology (hell it's pretty obvious they are worse the more segregated you get).

In the end it boils down to a choice between two sales pitches.

Choice 1)
Hey, Play D&D, but also for very large stretches of time chuck your entire character sheet aside and play Warhammer Fantasy battles and/or Dominions instead.

Choice 2)
Hey, Play D&D, but also sometimes the combats your D&D character engages in will be big fancy battles in the D&D game, and you eventually get treasures so amazing in D&D terms for your D&D character to use that your characters keep them in castles and junk where D&D game play will occur and maybe become kings if you feel like it which will generate more D&D adventures.

There is a minority group of Avoraciopoctules clones out there who WILL play choice 1, and eagerly. But it's TTRPG land, there is a minority of suckers for everything. Simple fact is that most players never want to take giant wads of their D&D time and replace it with Warhammer Fantasy or Dominions time, and when they do... they just do so directly by playing different games instead of your tacked on deliberately irrelevant "separate but somehow compelling minigame".

But players DO love the idea of their D&D combat encounters including big kick ass battles where they maybe fight alongside allies or not, but where, key thing here, their D&D characters (not a separate minigame "warhammer battle hero" profile) get to directly kick some battle ass. They do not want to play an abstracted and separate "mass combat" minigame, they want to play "[insert movie here] hero kicks ass personally in a battle" as a variant core game combat encounter.

D&D Players generally don't want to sit down and play anything remotely like an actual strategy/economic kingdom simulator. They want an excuse to say "my D&D character is so awesome they got to be King and wield Excalispear, the legendary spear of awesome Kings". At a stretch they want to play a D&D campaign that includes "[insert movie here] hero kicks ass personally in a battle" as a variant core game combat encounters as part of the D&D adventures that their awesome D&D Kings go on in a "save and improve the Kingdom" campaign.

A set of rules designed around accepting that fundamental truth is a set of rules that recognizes that the "Kindgom Management Game" isn't a separate game focused around economics and actual strategy, it's JUST, and BETTER if it is JUST, something that generates more encounters and advancement for the core game.

edit: But all that aside, kudos to you and others for having some actual ambition on the "maybe include mass combat/kingdom management as a goal?" thing. Everything about your planned implementation and design methodology aside, it's an admirable goal compared to reforming existing feat mechanics.

[FatR]

On kingdom rules. Nobody wants to play kingdom management in DnD. When people say that they do, they either lie to themselves or engage in empty dreaming about attaching their favorite tabletop strategy (probably dealing with fixed inputs, unlike DnD, and generally vastly simpler) or even computer strategy (not explaining how they’ll do without a CPU) to DnD. Nobody even wants to read about kingdom management. Take ASoIaF for an example of a popular fantasy series that comes the closest to being about running a kingdom. It is all about NPC interactions – dynastic combinations, alliances and who fucked whom (figuratively or literally). Except one incident in five books, all involved parties pull all necessary money for their endeavors out of the author’s ass, and supplying armies also becomes a problem exactly once, in the middle of almost supernaturally harsh weather. In the vast majority of fantasy books, and movies, and whatever, virtually no narrative space or importance devoted to management and administration. When matters of rulership become relevant at all, it is usually because an army is needed for the main characters’ quest, and from Lord of the Rings to Wheel of Time they obtain that army by going to the ruler(s) of one country or another and becoming buddies with them, after which an army is conjured by waving the ruler’s hand. Nobody wants to read about the problems of financing, arming and feeding those armies (even most people reading about real history don’t), much less play through those problems. Moreover, a kingdom management game sufficiently rooted in reality to be attractive for logistics geeks, assuming those play TTRPGs in sufficient numbers, would disincentive ever doing anything interesting with your kingdom (meaning: taking it to war), and in DnD, where rulers can defeat threats by themselves, the winning move for all kingdoms more interesting than a nomadic chiefdom would be not to play.

Also, almost nobody wants mass combat rules radically divorced from the normal skirmish routine. Judging by reactions to various attempts to introduce such, from Exalted to Pathfinder, the people commenting positively are overwhelmingly control freak GMs who like the fact that mass combat rules generally make keeping PCs down much easier. What people want is a way to cleave through lots and lots of orcs or other minions that individually provide next to no challenge, without the game being slowed to a crawl.

What, on the other hand, DnD really needs, is a henchmen management system that does not boil down to running them just like PCs. Picking up NPC companions, and allies, and servants is something that happens routinely in both stories and in DnD games where party is not completely devoted to being sociopathic murderhobos. While mooks under PCs’ command can use the same system as others masses of mooks, some way of speedily resolving combat between the party’s named henchmen and whatever part of the enemy force they take on, not boiling down to “if PCs win, henchmen win too”, or just as speedily deciding what sort of benefit they provide in a bossfight, would be quite appropriate. As would be a social system for managing their loyalty.

If fact, if you want any sort of kingdom management game that stays remotely true to the likely sources of inspiration for DnD, fits the setting full of civilization-crushing monsters and reality benders, and does not disintegrate at the point when PCs obtain the ability to throw city buster attacks or hop planes, it should be an extension of the henchmen loyalty management game, except instead of squires you now manage barons and vassal kings, which control domains – including not only geographical territories, but various sources of influence, so you totally can bring, say, a leader of a dragonflight, a headmaster of a wizard school, or a fantasy pope onboard and receive as much or more benefits as you can from owner of a big piece of land – and bring units of mooks (quality of mooks being determined by hardcoreness of domains) for your battles.

[momothefiddler]

PL: I reject your implicit assertion that D&D, at its core, is about tactical fights on grids with minis. It's just that that's the only part of the experience that D&D has ever given viable rules for, so we've all just learned to MTP the rest. But yes, I'd very much like a system that supported talking to the prince or building a castle or hatching a basilisk. And if you make a game that tacks all of those on as extensions to tactical fights on grids with minis (e.g. the castle gives me bonuses to swording because it holds lots of swords) then your game is less useful to me than D&D, because it adds extra rules that still don't support what I want to do except in tactical fights with minis.

FatR: I mean... I like the idea of logistics and dragons and I'd sure like to have a magic system that I could use in anything but a small squad fight without the MC and the world having an aneurysm. That said, I agree that much as I like CK2 and much as I'm willing to spend an hour with it paused looking for the right kid to betrothe my daughter to, I don't actually want that in my D&D.

[PhoneLobster]

PL: I reject your implicit assertion that D&D, at its core, is about tactical fights on grids with minis.

I never asserted that. Hell, you proceed after rejecting that to assert that it basically has been, which is more than I did.

D&D is notoriously hard to describe but it is 1) Clearly about more than just tactical gaming and 2) Clearly very much about deeply personal and invested role playing of individual characters.

People already "talk to the Prince" and all the other things up to including becoming King and adventuring for the betterment of their nation, not because they always secretly wanted to upgrade from "tactical" and play an elaborate Kingdom building Strategy Game instead. They do it because it sounds like a cool thing for a cool adventurer to do on their cool adventures. And ideally something they might do that doesn't end or grossly interrupt the role playing of their character's continued personal adventures. They do these things, and want to do these things, with the direct hope that they will make their continued personal D&D adventures BETTER in some way.

And that's what your rules should do make it a cool thing for an adventurer to do. It should NEVER require literally swapping out the rules and nature of the game to an actual strategy game. It should ALWAYS continue to be relevant to the cool adventures of the cool adventurers.

But yes, I'd very much like a system that supported talking to the prince or building a castle or hatching a basilisk.

And yet you attack my position that those should be all directly relevant to combat and adventuring. Which is pretty odd especially for a castle a place built for combats to happen at in ways favorable to the owner and basilisks which just begs the question as to "WTF?" if your plan for that basilisk isn't combat related.

Seriously. You want to build castles in D&D... and make them irrelevant to the game play of D&D? You want your characters to raise a cool monster pet in D&D... and not have it be relevant to the D&D game play? You want your D&D players to interrupt their adventures to take time to talk to a prince... in a way not relevant to their D&D adventures?

Have you thought this out?

adds extra rules that still don't support what I want to do except in tactical fights with minis.

And what extra things DO you want it to do? Because, all to often, that isn't something people in favor of "totally separate but somehow compelling minigames" answer. And when they do, for a separate strategy "minigame". Well. All to often it's "But I like turtles single player computer strategy games dominions so lets just blindly glue its carcass onto D&D".

Which fair enough you specifically managed to rule out, but you are also specifically ruling out a D&D adventuring rules extension being predominantly relevant to extending and facilitating D&D adventuring, so what DO you want?

[Chamomile]

The source material for D&D glosses over tactical scale combat just as much as it does kingdom management. You can estimate a character's level from how they behave in a fight, much the same way you could estimate a kingdom's wealth and unit specializations (or whatever) from their performance in a field combat, but you can't tell what combats Boromir uses a power attack in any more than you can tell where Rohan's supply centers are to keep all those cavalry units fed.

[Username17]

The source material for D&D glosses over tactical scale combat just as much as it does kingdom management. You can estimate a character's level from how they behave in a fight, much the same way you could estimate a kingdom's wealth and unit specializations (or whatever) from their performance in a field combat, but you can't tell what combats Boromir uses a power attack in any more than you can tell where Rohan's supply centers are to keep all those cavalry units fed.

This. Novels focus in on whatever details they damn well feel like, and almost never bother to give you an actual blow by blow of combat or even a grid usable description of force disposition.

D&D has tactical combat because its tactical combat minigame works pretty well. But that's not because the tactical combat descriptions in source material books are anywhere near detailed enough to give all the inputs a D&D skirmish requires. If the rules for building a fortress and raising an army worked, then we'd use them - even though the books we use as source material rarely speculate on what tax rates are or where stone is being quarried from.

-Username17

[momothefiddler]

PL: "tactical fights on grids with minis" was admittedly snarky but the rapidity with which you immediately devolved into tying everything to combat is... telling. Is "the D&D game play" anything but combat to you? Do these "D&D adventures", which honestly doesn't sound any narrower than "things that PCs do in a D&D game" have noncombat aspects?

No, I don't want to interrupt my adventure to talk to a prince in a way that helps my damn adventure, I want my adventure to involve talking to a prince. God. And maybe castles are meant to be defensible, but it seems honestly really obvious to me that I don't actually want one to have a fight near or in or, if my DM has a realllly big table and gridmap, across the walls of. I want one because that's the status symbol house that fits the aesthetic and I want it to have a giant library that's magically lit and heated, and I want it to have fucking manticore stables, and I want there to be cellars with portals into time-accelerated planes so my alcohol (I was gonna say spirits but, yknow) can age properly without me having to be patient and I want it to goddamn fly and you know why I want those things?

Because they're awesome.

And sure, if I get in a fight, maybe I'll ride one of my manticores. Maybe I can read a book in my library about the weaknesses of the ancient evil that's awakened. I don't fucking know. I don't care. Maybe I won't do those things, but yeah, it'd be nice to have those options, because they fit into other actions I choose. But you know why I'd do them?

Because riding a manticore to fight an ancient evil is also awesome.

And if I decide it's not, well, I don't have to. I still have manticore stables and maybe my messengers ride them I don't know I'm making this up off the top of my head right now.

My whole point here is that getting in fights and winning fights and getting in more fights is not my end goal in a ttrpg. Doing cool shit and feeling awesome (and, to a lesser extent, playing with character traits and actions and emotions I'm uncomfortable examining in real life) are my end goals.

The only reason I primarily do that through fighting in D&D IS BECAUSE D&D DOESN'T GIVE ME WORKING RULES FOR OTHER SHIT.

So when you say a game should have all its "minigames" (read: all my cool shit that's not fighting) tie into its "core game play" (read: fighting), I think that, to be charitable, you don't have the slightest clue what I enjoy and I wouldn't like a game you designed.

[PhoneLobster]

I think I can refute your entire post with one quote and one word...

And sure, if I get in a fight, maybe I'll ride one of my manticores. Maybe I can read a book in my library about the weaknesses of the ancient evil that's awakened. I don't fucking know. I don't care.

BULLSHIT.

[FatR]

The source material for D&D glosses over tactical scale combat just as much as it does kingdom management. You can estimate a character's level from how they behave in a fight, much the same way you could estimate a kingdom's wealth and unit specializations (or whatever) from their performance in a field combat, but you can't tell what combats Boromir uses a power attack in any more than you can tell where Rohan's supply centers are to keep all those cavalry units fed.

How about "no"?

Let's use ASoIaF as an example again, because it is popular and because the author does not care about depicting any sort of combat very much. Off the top of my head I can name a couple of dozens of duels, skirmishes or battles from a viewpoint of a combatant in the midst of them. There are exactly two cases when a character plans for a battle and the battle is not off-page (Blackwater, the first assault on Castle Black), but in both cases once fighting begins the viewpoint character switches to doing personal combat, instead of acting in any sort of commanding capacity except leading by example. However you cut it, personal combat and small-scale skirmishes are vastly more represented in written fantasy than leading troops to battle. Even in ASoIaF, where characters top at, like, level 2-3, you can find plenty of examples of people doing cool shit in personal combat and skirmishes that someone might want to emulate, and you can find numerous observably different archetypes of fighting men (or magicians). But you would be hard-pressend to find examples of people doing cool shit in the role of battlefield commanders, and you sure as fuck won't be able to find archetypes to differentiate one good general from another there.

Needless to say, if we look at series that actually has a hard-on for combat, like, say, The Witcher (books), the picture will be even clearer, with exactly one proper on-page battle in 7+ books, and that depicted almost entirely from the viewpoint of grunts, against many dozens of duels, fights and skirmishes.

[momothefiddler]

You... you literally do not believe that I want a cool exotic library in and of itself?

I don't even know what to say to that.

Uh, I'll try this:
I'm in a game right now where the loot contains "Tales of Snorri the Elder by Lukas Selvig" and it's not in the sell pile because of course I want to keep that and put it in my library once I build my castle. Duh. I literally do not expect at any point in the game to learn the contents of this book, because I'm quite certain that that title was a bit of flavor tossed out at random and I'm fine with that but I want this book on my shelves and I'm passing up money that could have gone to swording to do it, and I have no expectation that this book will ever help me sword things. And I'm literally one hundred percent cool with that because swording things isn't my end goal???

Also in the loot pile is "Metallurgical Properties of Mithril and its Common Alloys: +2 bonus on crafting with Mithril", and it's cool that that will give me a bonus to making cool shit, another thing I like doing. It's cool that that ties into other stuff, and that way the book helps the crafting which helps the swording and all the fun things fit together. But if it didn't? That'd be cool too! See: Lukas Selvig.

How the hell do you even play games? I'm honestly confused at this point. Like I could believe that you focus on combat or something, but that you would so thoroughly refuse to believe that anyone would ever not is just a little... baffling.

[Username17]

I'm not usually fond of "rollplaying vs roleplaying" arguments, but PhoneLobster is so doubled down on the "progress quest plus fighting" position that I can't even see how to engage with the conversation on any other level.

The fact is that the purpose of the game isn't to win at fighting minigames, nor is it to get bigger numbers on your character sheet. The purpose is to tell cooperative stories in a fantasy setting. All the numbers and fighting and shit are in service to that. As are rules for manticore wrangling or cultivating farmland or taxing peasants and raising armies and whatever else the fuck you want to do.

And because it's a cooperative story, sometimes you'll have character options that you don't use and that is OK.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

Stuff about books

Look dude, I hate Frank's vision of kingdom management and mass combat more than anyone except Phone Lobster (since he hates everything that has ever existed that he didn't personally make with the burning force of a thousand supernovas).

But we are decades past the point at which any human being (as opposed to Tay like robot) should be arguing for or against anything in a cooperative storytelling game based on it's representation in single author fiction.

You might as well argue that movies should have more internal monologues that explain past events because books do. It's an entirely different media that is supposed to tell different stories in a different way.

[PhoneLobster]

You... you literally do not believe that I want a cool exotic library in and of itself?

I don't believe your claim that you don't care if your fucking manticore or your fucking baslisk or your fucking castle or your entire fucking magic library just doesn't ever fucking DO anything.

I also don't believe the alternative back down claim that you don't care if it doesn't do anything in D&D as long as it does something in the Crusader Kings game you have conceded is a bad idea.

But basically, bullshit and fuck you, the manticore that you CAN ride into combat, IS OBJECTIVELY BETTER than the one that you can't.

And in order to ride it into combat you need the rules support for that specific thing to be there, and it helps if the rules give you ways and means of getting that ridable manticore, but you don't need or want to tack on a single player computer strategy game minus the computer to have that.

You are arguing against "cool things that actually do stuff" on the basis of "meh, cool things, screw doing stuff no one wants that am I rite?".