Domain Rules

[Thaluikhain]

Could also have an array of baby Hell planes which are so comparatively easy to travel through due to a preponderance of portal gates that it has many of the properties of a single hell world, without having to play nice together geographically. Even if Cocytus and Dis are different maps, that doesn't have to mean you cannot travel from one to the other along the Styx or similar.

Actually, yeah, I like that. You could even say it used to be one normal/nice world, but was shattered due to the coming of Evil or whatever, and each part is now separate and evil but retains the sort of climate and geography it had before for some reason. Possibilities there.

I don't have a problem with different worlds, it's just when I watch Star Trek/Gate and this week's one off alien planet is the same forest as last week's one off alien planet and half of the rest of this season, with nothing whatsoever to differentiate them beyond the plot, it gets a bit tiresome. IMHO, better to have every place at least have some sort of gimmick, whether it's the BBC learning how they can make the sky/ocean pink for Doctor Who, or the 3 moons of magic for Krynn.

[Username17]

One of the advantages of table top RPGs is that the imagination doesn't have a limited shooting budget. Tatooine doesn't have to look like Jakku. The sand and sky can look like whatever you say they look like. But beyond that, the theater of he mind can go really out there. In Pandemonium, the whole world is an Escherian Hellscape with negotiable gravity such that all surfaces are "the floor." That might require some complex and expensive special effects to film for a movie or music video, but for a table top RPG you've already imagined it.

I'm not saying we need all the infinite numbers of infinitely sized Abyssal layers. We obviously and very definitely do not. And many of the outer planar regions that have been described are either dumb and forgettable enough to quietly sweep aside or just not big enough as a concept to do more than fill in a few hexes in a county-sized infernal domain somewhere. But there is also room for some pretty fucking wild shit with alternate gravity and planet shapes and such that genuinely does benefit from having distinct planets.

Or to put it another way: there's no particular benefit from Jakku being a different planet from Tatooine because they are extremely equivalent sandy deserts with scum and villains picking through scrap. Even Hoth, Endor, and Dagoba could just be biomes on Tatooine. After all, the desert. tundra, forest, and swamp are all factually filmed on Earth. But Bespin not having a ground is a pretty big fucking deal and the planet hopping actually adds something that merely going to different climate bands of a single planet could not.

And in a Table Top RPG, you have functionally limitless access to that sort of thing. Whatever stories you genuinely need additional planets to tell, you can tell those stories. And even after cleaning up clutter, that will still be the case.

-Username17

[Dean]

So Frank what do you think about trying to turn this into an alpha mode of the model you're thinking of. I know that sort of thing can take weeks so it's no small ask but I would love to be able to see this in even an incomplete skeleton. I've done a lot of work on domain stuff but with very different models and I would like to get a solid grasp on how you view this working.

As I said it's no small thing, but I'd be real interested in seeing this sketched out.

[Username17]

So Frank what do you think about trying to turn this into an alpha mode of the model you're thinking of. I know that sort of thing can take weeks so it's no small ask but I would love to be able to see this in even an incomplete skeleton. I've done a lot of work on domain stuff but with very different models and I would like to get a solid grasp on how you view this working.

As I said it's no small thing, but I'd be real interested in seeing this sketched out.

That's fair. So the question then comes to what are the minimum number of things it needs to hit the playtestable threshold while still being expandable. So an example of non-expandability would be like Holdings in Brithright or settlement parameters in AER - you can't really add a new type to either because the short list is deeply entrenched into how the rest of the system interacts.

On the flip side: Polities. For playtest purposes you want a couple different Lords of the Ringsy polities available, but if you have Halflings that contribute improved farmers in some kinds of hexes and some special military units like Eagle Riders, there's nothing stopping you from adding additional Polities of like Troglodytes or Amazons or whatever.

So there are things like Resources that are fixed once defined and the only way you can add more is by having them be unlocked at higher development levels. If we decide that the basic Resources are Manpower, Koku, Gold, and Karma, that's it for the lower tiers. We have already decided that we aren't tracking wood, stone, or steel. Although we could introduce Astral Pearls or Soul Gems or something for higher tier construction without that being a big deal. My personal preference is for two magic-currencies (Karma and Gems), but I can totes understand why people would want less or more. Heroes of Might and Magic became a much worse game when they went from Sulfur, Mercury, Gems, and Crystal to just Crystal, but I'm pretty sure the fact that Heroes VI was insanely unambitious garbage was quite orthogonal to the reduction in special resource types. My preferred domain tallies are:

• Manpower
• Koku
• Gold
• Karma
• Gems
• Culture

The fact that a provincial development has a specific type in addition to having a level creates an inherent axis of expandability. That is, we can define what a generic Level 3 Fortress does without defining all the specialist options. And you can write in what a Fire Ring or a Kelp Fort does that is different to the norm later on. Development in a Birthright (Law, Guild, Temple, Source) or AER (Military, Social, Economic) are both too limited. And I do think that your types of development aren't easily expanded upon even if your building list for each level definitely is. Things I think are important:

• Agriculture
• Urban Economy
• Fortress
• Temple
• Culture

Hexes come in terrain types of course, but adding new ones is not particularly difficult. Expanding on the parameters that hexes have can be pretty difficult. Fortunately, I don't think a hex type needs very much.

• Farm Max
• Hunter Max
• Fertility

That honestly seems cover it. Hunter max is a low number that doesn't change that much, and Farm Max goes all over the place from near zero for wasteland to 1000 for grasslands. I am divided as to whether to make Fertility numbers be per acre or per farm. Probably per farm is better, because theoretically farms in arid hills take up a lot of space with pastoralism and sheep rather than being nicely compact family farms like in the shire.

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Re: Planehopping, I'd like to advocate against single-alignment worlds being the norm, not because anyone's defending it but just because it's the D&D norm. Firstly, the 3x3 alignment grid is bad, but even with the more agreeable "heroes vs. villains" alignment, there's no reason Mt. Celestia and the assorted volcanoes of Gehenna can't be in the same mountain range. Elysium and Carceri can be on the same planet, separated by a body of water, and have lots of naval clashes and little ports and other enclaves within each other's territory. You could also have planes which are unified under one banner or which are split between lots of competing warlords all of whom are jerks, but it's also useful to have worlds that are contested by angels and demons not as part of a specific adventure premise where the fiends are invading Heaven or the angels invading Hell, but just there are planes out there cut across by the current front lines in the battle of good and evil, and those front lines shift, but it could be years, decades, or even centuries before they shift to the point of one side or the other being victorious across the entire plane.

[Omegonthesane]

You earlier alluded to the idea of Orcus Karma when justifying that there could simply be Always Evil units that can only be purchased with e.g. Orcus Karma. This would seem to undermine the idea of only two resources.

Unless Karma is either all lost when a polity changes religion (e.g. through conquest) or can be simply spent should there be any left over despite the change in the menu? Might provide some extra up front reward for specifically capturing and rededicating an Orcus temple if you get to spend some of its banked Karma on the Pelor catalogue.

'course it'd also make sense if there was a "sell / recycle" price for assets, particularly Karma assets where the justification for them being there is "it's magic, I ain't gotta explain shit the finer points of the flavour text exist to justify mechanics not the other way round". So you could imagine the Balor army simply being "sold" involuntarily and the karma going to the Pelorites that conquered their temple.

[Username17]

My thought on Karma is that it is regime specific. Your domain doesn't have Orcus Karma, you have Karma and you're a follower of Orcus.

The PCs will follow some PC appropriate pantheon, and when they conquer provinces with temples to Orcus they can sack them or rededicate them for Karma with their gods. Like Crusader Kings. And like Crusader Kings, you don't have the option of taking over a cathedral of wickedness and continuing to hold slaughter festivals in it for Karma. You don't even gain Karma for doing that.

While we're at it: Deserts. They don't make any food. Is that because they have a Farm limit of 0 or because they have a Fertility of 0? Any area with a Fertility of less than 10 is functionally unfarmable, because you can't make a living farming it.

-Username17

[Dean]

The one thing I'll say is that I think Gems wouldn't fit with a lot of the sub genre's D&D is used to emulate. Gems works in D&D's normal genre-less kitchen sink setup but if you're doing Dark Sun the "special" material type seems more likely to be steel than gems. If it's Rokugan it's jade. If it's LOTR it's....I dunno. Basically Gems seems at once too specific and too generic. There are a lot of the classic D&D setting's where I'd be confused as to why I'm putting such a primacy on gems.

Other than that I think it looks good. I think the gems thing could also be fixed by "gems" being the weird special thing so you just trade out gems for Jade/Energon/Steel or whatever is the very good special thing in your setting.

[Emerald]

While we're at it: Deserts. They don't make any food. Is that because they have a Farm limit of 0 or because they have a Fertility of 0? Any area with a Fertility of less than 10 is functionally unfarmable, because you can't make a living farming it.

I'd say Fertility 0 would be better. I can see incrementally raising Fertility over time from "there's no point in farming here" to "you need acres and acres of Tatooine moisture farms to break even" to "you have a few cactus farms that are collectively worht one Farm" to "you can farm normally" making more sense than going straight from "This is a desert, you can't farm" to "Surprise, here's a farm," and that model can also be extended to things like cultivating blasted demonic wastelands at higher levels.

The one thing I'll say is that I think Gems wouldn't fit with a lot of the sub genre's D&D is used to emulate. Gems works in D&D's normal genre-less kitchen sink setup but if you're doing Dark Sun the "special" material type seems more likely to be steel than gems. If it's Rokugan it's jade. If it's LOTR it's....I dunno. Basically Gems seems at once too specific and too generic. There are a lot of the classic D&D setting's where I'd be confused as to why I'm putting such a primacy on gems.

Athas has obsidian as the fancy gem du jour. For LotR, nothing comes to mind aside from the Silmarils and Arkenstone, but considering that the Rings of Power, the various magic swords, and such are generally depicted with gems in them, it doesn't seem too out of place.

Alternately, "Gems" can be something more generic like "Minerals" or "Reagents" and cover both literal gems as well as magical substances like Mithril, in which case it would work for a lot more settings.

[Omegonthesane]

The idea of regime specific karma that is lost when the regime is lost makes me think of how the Roman Empire supposedly dealt with foreign religions. But with the evil gods that D&D offers, and gods being verifiable real things that are real, it's a little harder to justify syncretic manipulation of religious doctrine for political expedient - and also would be super weird for a typical PC party to try to install a puppet Orcus worshipper instead of fully absorbing Orcusland.

As for deserts: Probably depends how desert-y the place is. Brain is saying Farm Limit 1, Fertility <10 would achieve the same design goal as Farm 0 or Fertility 0 under most circumstances if we assume Fertility 10 is subsistence level.

Had a brief vision of necromancers utilising sub-Fertility-10 farmland regardless due to skeletons not needing to eat their own crops, but that doesn't scale much and would only be worth the bother if you've either been driven violently to the badlands where mortal armies can't actually pursue you or else if there are magic cash crops that only grow in otherwise infertile locations. Which in turn can just be magic terrain that only appears in magic land instead of being default deserts.

[Grek]

While we're at it: Deserts. They don't make any food. Is that because they have a Farm limit of 0 or because they have a Fertility of 0? Any area with a Fertility of less than 10 is functionally unfarmable, because you can't make a living farming it.

Obviously Fertility. Consider the opposite case: Jungles.

Clearly, a jungle hex has very high Fertility. You can successfully support yourself through hunting in a jungle and if you built a plantation there you'd make quite a bit of money. The problem isn't that the land is barren, it's that there's way too many trees in the way to get properly agricultural - a low Farm Limit. If the local lord made a project of it, they could clear cut some of those trees and that would increase the Farm Limit.

With a desert hex, there's nothing stopping a family from fencing off some sand, tilling it and planting seeds. The problem is that fuck all is going to grow, even after they've done that. You also can't sustain yourself as a hunter-gatherer in a desert because, again, there's not enough prey animals there for you to hunt and not enough wild vegetation that you can eat. Those are both Fertility issues.

If a Master Gardener can build enchanted greenhouses that ignore the Fertility of a hex and function as a farm in a Fertility 20 hex regardless of location, those clearly want to go in the desert and not in the jungle, since with the jungle you'd still need to clear land for them and once you've cleared the land you might as well just build a normal plantation and save the gems.

[jadagul]

And conversely we can think about what happens if you, say, irrigate the desert (which is basically Emerald's point). Irrigation or other land improvements should (1) make the desert more like a grassland, and (2) raise the fertility of a given hex. It doesn't make sense for irrigation to increase the number of farms; it doesn't make sense for irrigation to be useless in a desert.

In contrast, irrigation totally can be useless in rocky wastelands where there's just nowhere to grow stuff. And technically those can also be deserts. So maybe my answer is that a rocky desert has a low farm cap and also low fertility, but someplace where it's just too dry to grow anything has a high farm cap and low fertility.

But I think this is maybe the right lens. What sorts of improvements should work on a given terrain, and how do you want them to function?

[zeruslord]

Hexes come in terrain types of course, but adding new ones is not particularly difficult. Expanding on the parameters that hexes have can be pretty difficult. Fortunately, I don't think a hex type needs very much.

• Farm Max
• Hunter Max
• Fertility

That honestly seems cover it. Hunter max is a low number that doesn't change that much, and Farm Max goes all over the place from near zero for wasteland to 1000 for grasslands. I am divided as to whether to make Fertility numbers be per acre or per farm. Probably per farm is better, because theoretically farms in arid hills take up a lot of space with pastoralism and sheep rather than being nicely compact family farms like in the shire.

-Username17

The base agricultural stats should be koku per acre (Fertility) and agricultural households needed per koku produced (Efficiency?), with Farm Max = (Efficiency/Fertility) * (acres/hex) and Output per farm = Farm Count * Efficiency - Household Consumption. Infrastructure improvements modify Fertility and Efficiency directly, and the outputs behave reasonably at the boundaries (when one household can plow enough land to grow enough grain to survive on, suddenly you can get a lot of households into that previously unviable 20,000 acre hex).

If you want to add complexity for the sake of realism, you could also consider distance to market as another input stat or as a limit on what kind of agriculture you can do in a hex. In a pre-modern setting, grain costs scale quite steeply with land distance because draft animals eat it, there's a hard maximum distance you can transport vegetables, milk, or butchered meat before it spoils, and moving herds to market on the hoof is cheaper per koku-mile than moving grain is. You might also consider separating pastoral fertility/efficiency from crop fertility/efficiency, since pastoralism produces fewer koku per acre but more koku per worker.

[Username17]

As far as "gems" go, the idea is that they'd be distinct mana. Is "Crystal" or "Vis" better? I agree that you don't want to have people saying "Why do I care about Sapphires?" but on the flip side I think a lot of people don't know what he word "Vis" means. Would it be better to just call it "Mana" and leave it agnostic as to whether you were storing it as fire gems or mana crystals or jade bars or astral pearls or whatever?

On the shitty hexes: the basic Grassland is easy. It has Fertility 20 and a Farm cap of 1000. The verdant hills are similarly easy. The Fertility is still 20 and the Farm cap is 500. And then we got the dense jungle with its fertility of 25 but paltry farm cap of 100. But what about the Arid Plains?

The issue is that what should be happening with the arid plains is the farmers should be fencing off larger areas. Making up for poorer yields per acre by just running goats and pigs on larger areas. The farms still make 20 Koku, they are just physically larger farms. Unlike the Hills or the Jungle there's no physical features preventing you from enclosing 1000 separate 20 acre farms, you just don't because the small family farms would produce bullshit for food.

Clearly what you want to happen is that if you bring irrigation and enclosures to the Arid Plains then it becomes more like the Grassland - the fertility doesn't change and the farm cap goes up. But if you bring irrigation to the Verdant Hills the farm cap stays the same but the fertility goes up. And then you have the windswept moors, that have an even lower farm cap because all you can do is let sheep graze on them. And when you do irrigation and enclosures the farm cap goes up - but only as high as the verdant hills were.

I think this implies that agricultural development is terrain type specific. That you don't have generic "improve farming" actions but specific improvements that increase farm caps or fertility or both that are tied to the terrain type they are applied to. And that very much means that there's space for specific polities to unlock weird hex improvements for specific terrain types. Fire Newts being able to make flame shunts in fire swamps and such.

-Username17

[Username17]

So the way I envision the expansion of agriculture is that you can provide a standard progression for each terrain type. The improvements can be stuff like Wells and Mills and Irrigation Canals and whatever, and for the most part those can be "Grassland Hex Agriculture Development Level 3." And this leaves things open for expansion where you can enact some gonzo fantasy projects or kick everyone off the land to make room for collective farms or whatever.

But this allows the progression of different types of terrain to look really different:

	Base	Level 1	Level 2	Level 3	Level 4	Level 5	Level 6
Grassland	1000/20	1000/25	1000/30	1000/35	1000/40	1000/45	1000/50
Verdant Hills	400/20	500/25	500/30	500/35	500/40	500/45	500/50
Arid Plains	400/20	600/20	800/20	1000/20	1000/30	1000/35	1000/40

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

I think this would make more sense if an Arid Plains 3 just BECAME a grassland.

If you've seen photos of heavily terraced hills in China, I think that at some level they're just as productive as grasslands although they technically remain hills - if the hill is 'stepped' into a series of flat lands it doesn't really have the limitations we associate with steeply sided hills.

[Username17]

I think this would make more sense if an Arid Plains 3 just BECAME a grassland.

Sid's Civ certainly went that way. I see two main issues. The first is that the costs of these upgrades are presumably going to be triangular or something. The second is that you're going to have polities for whom Grasslands are not the target you'd want to terraform things into.

There are heat loving races that get to do something nice when farming arid terrain. And they would genuinely like to differentiate between a Grassland and an Arid Plain with three levels of development on it.

-Username17

[TiaC]

That makes sense, but aren't these hex types also going to matter for other parts of the game?

So you could have a swamp hex, which is poor farmland, difficult to move armies through, and carries a risk of disease. Improving it by filling the swamp will affect all of these, and will eventually result in a hex identical to grassland. Irrigating that hex should then be simple.

[Dean]

As far as "gems" go, the idea is that they'd be distinct mana. Is "Crystal" or "Vis" better? I agree that you don't want to have people saying "Why do I care about Sapphires?" but on the flip side I think a lot of people don't know what he word "Vis" means. Would it be better to just call it "Mana" and leave it agnostic as to whether you were storing it as fire gems or mana crystals or jade bars or astral pearls or whatever?

Of those options I prefer Mana. What would Mana/Gems be used for? Is it just a HoMM style thing where building Unicorn Glades requires 50 gems? Or is this stored magic that you use to cast domain level spells like terraforming or whatever?

[Username17]

As far as "gems" go, the idea is that they'd be distinct mana. Is "Crystal" or "Vis" better? I agree that you don't want to have people saying "Why do I care about Sapphires?" but on the flip side I think a lot of people don't know what he word "Vis" means. Would it be better to just call it "Mana" and leave it agnostic as to whether you were storing it as fire gems or mana crystals or jade bars or astral pearls or whatever?

Of those options I prefer Mana. What would Mana/Gems be used for? Is it just a HoMM style thing where building Unicorn Glades requires 50 gems? Or is this stored magic that you use to cast domain level spells like terraforming or whatever?

You'd use it for downtime magic, summoning or enchanting stuff, hiring mercenaries that like to paid that way, and building developments like unicorn glades. So pretty much anything you could do with a Dominions magic gem, a Heroes of Might and Magic special resource, or a Master of Magic mana crystal.

They are a currency, so Wizards don't get to have it all the moment they have some downtime. But also they have utility other than "cast big spells" so warriors who happen to be like Admirals or something can still do things with them and aren't skunked out of a whole section of the 4X economy.

-Username17

[Mord]

The issue is that what should be happening with the arid plains is the farmers should be fencing off larger areas. Making up for poorer yields per acre by just running goats and pigs on larger areas. The farms still make 20 Koku, they are just physically larger farms. Unlike the Hills or the Jungle there's no physical features preventing you from enclosing 1000 separate 20 acre farms, you just don't because the small family farms would produce bullshit for food.

I thought the rule of thumb 20-acre size of a family farm was based on the amount of land that a five-person farm family can physically work with a basic ox plow. If you're taking about shifting from planting to herding, those aren't farmers anymore and probably won't be fencing anything off.

Pastoralist nomads have a totally different lifestyle from people of settled societies, and more to the point they use land differently. The question is whether it's worth modeling that differently. Me, I love thinking about Mongols and Huns and such, so if I were writing a "pre-gunpowder world history generator" game, I would definitely build in robust mechanics for differentiating settled versus nomadic civilizations.

[Username17]

The amount of acreage that can be farmed by an individual farmer varies wildly depending on the crops involved and the available technology. Horse plows go up to fifty times faster than ox plows, but require the invention of the horse collar in order to function (since a horse will strangle trying to push a standard yoke).

I extremely severely do not wish to get into the weeds on that kind of thing. Some farms will be physically larger than others. Some will be orchards growing fruit. Some will be fields growing grain. Some will have vegetable gardens, some will raise livestock. Some will be doing well, and some will be doing poorly. I don't actually care about the minutiae for the most part. It's important that you could zoom in and play Harvest Moon if you wanted to, but it's equally important that under no circumstances are you going to do that for one thousand separate family farms in a grasslands hex.

The 20 acre area is enough that a family can plausibly do half-assed Agricola style subsistence mixed agriculture and feed themselves and have surplus for market. Obviously you could rationalize and consolidate these things, but the macroeconomic assumption is that agriculture is muddling along and making a variety of foods of varying efficiency.

So there are places that have lower yields and require more physical space to make that kind of food. Some of that might be just doing more with low intensity plum trees and some of it might be families working harder to get the same amount out of larger areas with shittier soil. At the level of the hex, I don't actually care.

But a family could farm 40 acres. There are various reasons that they usually wouldn't if the land was capable of supporting families on less than that. But they physically could. 40 acres and a mule and all that.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

Sid's Civ certainly went that way. I see two main issues. The first is that the costs of these upgrades are presumably going to be triangular or something. The second is that you're going to have polities for whom Grasslands are not the target you'd want to terraform things into.

There are heat loving races that get to do something nice when farming arid terrain. And they would genuinely like to differentiate between a Grassland and an Arid Plain with three levels of development on it.

-Username17

You definitely want land forms to be transformable. If you claim a hex that was owned by the Swamp King and all the hexes are swamps, you do not want to have to answer the question of whether they're REALLY swamps, or if they're actually Grasslands-Irrigation 10.

A swamp is a swamp. Draining a swamp lets you turn it into a grassland.

The fact that you have to spend an improvement means that getting a hex of grassland is straight up better. But if you have some mojo that gives you draining swamps at a reduced price, you have a strategy in the domain game that doesn't work for everyone.

[MGuy]

How 'does' the Domain system interact with advances in technology or improvements for old techniques?

[Omegonthesane]

Sid's Civ certainly went that way. I see two main issues. The first is that the costs of these upgrades are presumably going to be triangular or something. The second is that you're going to have polities for whom Grasslands are not the target you'd want to terraform things into.

There are heat loving races that get to do something nice when farming arid terrain. And they would genuinely like to differentiate between a Grassland and an Arid Plain with three levels of development on it.

-Username17

You definitely want land forms to be transformable. If you claim a hex that was owned by the Swamp King and all the hexes are swamps, you do not want to have to answer the question of whether they're REALLY swamps, or if they're actually Grasslands-Irrigation 10.

A swamp is a swamp. Draining a swamp lets you turn it into a grassland.

The fact that you have to spend an improvement means that getting a hex of grassland is straight up better. But if you have some mojo that gives you draining swamps at a reduced price, you have a strategy in the domain game that doesn't work for everyone.

This doesn't contradict Frank's point. You can just say that once you meet certain prerequisite upgrades, instead of further upgrading a terrain you can transform it into a different type of terrain, without having to remove the option to upgrade it further as its existing type of terrain.

And while this could be implemented by e.g. saying that the 4th irrigation upgrade turns Grass into Swamp, this would create potential problems where an "upgrade" actually is a massive downgrade in cases like Frank's scenario of the magic desert dwellers with their specially terraformed magic desert. Even if the alternative is a bit weird to think about in edge cases, it's better than creating a perverse incentive at the mechanical layer.