Politics, Economics, Religion, should you care?

[MGuy]

So I've been doing some reading on the upcoming Civ and somehow I drifted to thinking about the game of Kingmaker I ran (but didn't finish) about a year ago and some of the discussions on these boards. Civilization as I thought about it seems like it would be a good thing to base a kingdom management game upon but I wonder if it would even be possible to take into account some of the things Civ games have factored in for Kingdom management. I remember in Kingmaker (and I assume the Ultimate Campaign rules as well) things like what kind of government you had gave you certain bonuses and penalties and in Civ games Economic Policy (and what choices you had there) along with Religion and Government also gave you certain benefits.

Whether or not the specifics were good or bad I'll let other people argue about. My real question is, considering Kingdom Management is probably not what I'd center 'my' Heartbreaker around, but it 'is' something that people seem to agree that they want available in the game, would skipping these details wholesale make a break the minigame?

[PhoneLobster]

Any and all parts of the My Barbie Palace and My Barbie Empire minigames that do not have direct and relevant impact on your main TTRPG beating people up and taking their stuff experience can and should be dropped.

If a building at your palace or action involving your kingdom doesn't directly increase your personal powas or drop NPCs on a combat map or something it basically shouldn't be a thing we seriously care about or expend more than half a fuck of attention on (and certainly no spreadsheets worth of attention, no, not even a fraction of a spreadsheet for fucks sake).

And it probably shouldn't even be considered a minigame. It's just some minor accounting you do to support/as part of the main game. And I stress MINOR.

I'd also like to remind people, I've been working on rules covering this stuff, and running them in games for a fair number of years now and gone through rather a number of iterations. And every damn time. Simpler is better.

Taking a less reductive approach leads to THIS SORT OF WORTHLESS CLUSTERFUCK.

Your mission is to let players say "My cool barbarian lives in his barbarian palace with his super barbarian sword vault that gives him an awesome super barbarian sword, his barbarian concubines that enhance his barbarian powers, his barbarian palace guard which help fight when ninjas invade while he is in the barbarian bathroom, and his barbarian throne room which grants him some INCREDIBLY SIMPLE income from his barbarian kingdom to pay for all his barbarian shit".

That is your entire mission. Your mission does not include anything that would ever require a spreadsheet to track. Ideally your kingdom maintenance notes should NOT exceed 1 character sheet worth of complexity. Ideally they should safely fall well under that.

[rasmuswagner]

I hate kingdom minigames that don't respect the rules of the main game.

Kingmaker, for example. In addition to being poorly designed, because it's written by English Majors with high-pressure smoke hoses up their asses, the Adventure Path also had stuff like "an army of hundreds of trolls, with no significant caster support or ranged attacks, are marching overlands towards your kingdom. Oh noes, you must construct additional pylons. Also, you're past level 10 and can just murder the fools".

[MGuy]

Alright, so right now the answer is 'no'. Alrighty.

As for the Adventure Path I actually had the Troll thing happen earlier than it was scheduled to. Like WAY earlier. The players randomed up a few trolls as an encounter, couldn't beat them, and ran away. It was literally the only encounter they didn't steamroll. So they were VERY concerned about the Troll thing and that pretty much became their sole focus. Building up what they could, as fast as they could so they could end Troll threat. Worked out well, ended the campaign shortly after that. Went well, there were high fives all around.

[Grek]

Kingdom Management pretty much has to be the point of your game or not there at all. Making a castle and an army and a crown make since as something you'd want for your character requires so many setting and rules assumptions to align that it has to be baked in from the first design steps.

[Blicero]

This is the obligatory bit where I talk about how ACKS is a D&D-like with kingdom-management rules. They are pretty granular; e.g., they let you track the monthly population growth of your various domains.

There exist people who want to play a management with that level of detail, but it is unclear how prevalent they are in the general population. This post outlines some of the issues the author ran into while running an ACKS domain-level game. https://wanderinggamist.blogspot.com/20 ... ntent.html (I have not played or run high-level ACKS, so I cannot add my own experience here.)

There is also some game called An Echo, Resounding that apparently approaches domain-management from a more top-down perspective. So probably more like Civilization than ACKS is. I do not know how well the top-down approach interfaces with the bottom-up character-scale rules of D&D though.

[CapnTthePirateG]

You do want the ability to say something like "my necromancer king rules the land with an iron fist" or "my country allows freedom of speech" and have that actually reflected.

That does not mean you should be micromanaging tariffs and shit.

[PhoneLobster]

The problem with ACKS, the cluster fuck I linked to already, and all too many aspirational strategy level minigames is one of poor or unfocused goals and bad design methodology.

The designers don't have a list of clear workable and interesting game play goals that will actually enhance game play, and they certainly don't have a design methodology that would let them achieve, well, ANY, goals with any sort of workable practical efficiency.

Their goal is usually something asinine like "wow I really liked (insert complex SINGLE PLAYER strategy computer game here) and I believe without any basis or analysis that I can and should insert exactly that on top of my TTRPG!" instead of being about any specific desirable TTRPG game play outcomes.

Then their methodology (all too often IMMEDIATELY) gets bogged down in excessively detailed minutia players (rightly) hate and never actually gets to the big flashy outcomes players might actually enjoy, much less the big flashy outcomes actually relevant to the actual TTRPG the players actually signed up to play. If it ever even becomes a remotely complete rules set at all since that bogging down in minutia often causes the design process itself to grind to a slumping halt.

What is the kingdom management phase FOR? What is it supposed to do? If I am tracking, say, migration pull factors as just one piece of minutia among countless others on a spreadsheet exactly how fucking much of a contribution IS all that work towards actually achieving ANY desirable outcome? Was a desirable outcome even in active consideration at all when someone decided the rules needed to track detailed mechanically formalized migrational pull factors?

No major phase of game play, no major reworking, addition to or foundation of your RPG rules set gets away with NOT HAVING GOOD GOALS. And nothing will save your rules set if your design process is a misguided rambling mess of obsessive minutia distractions.

[Blicero]

The problem with ACKS, the cluster fuck I linked to already, and all too many aspirational strategy level minigames is one of poor or unfocused goals and bad design methodology.

The designers don't have a list of clear workable and interesting game play goals that will actually enhance game play, and they certainly don't have a design methodology that would let them achieve, well, ANY, goals with any sort of workable practical efficiency.

Their goal is usually something asinine like "wow I really liked (insert complex SINGLE PLAYER strategy computer game here) and I believe without any basis or analysis that I can and should insert exactly that on top of my TTRPG!" instead of being about any specific desirable TTRPG game play outcomes.

Then their methodology (all too often IMMEDIATELY) gets bogged down in excessively detailed minutia players (rightly) hate and never actually gets to the big flashy outcomes players might actually enjoy, much less the big flashy outcomes actually relevant to the actual TTRPG the players actually signed up to play. If it ever even becomes a remotely complete rules set at all since that bogging down in minutia often causes the design process itself to grind to a slumping halt.

What is the kingdom management phase FOR? What is it supposed to do? If I am tracking, say, migration pull factors as just one piece of minutia among countless others on a spreadsheet exactly how fucking much of a contribution IS all that work towards actually achieving ANY desirable outcome? Was a desirable outcome even in active consideration at all when someone decided the rules needed to track detailed mechanically formalized migrational pull factors?

No major phase of game play, no major reworking, addition to or foundation of your RPG rules set gets away with NOT HAVING GOOD GOALS. And nothing will save your rules set if your design process is a misguided rambling mess of obsessive minutia distractions.

Yeah, a reasonable criticism of ACKS as-written is that none of the various strategic-level factors in the domain game will contribute all that substantively to most the content games relative, particularly to their bookkeeping cost. That is the issue when there are probably fewer than a hundred people who are part of the population of "people who have spent extensive time playing domain-level ACKS games". I think the implicit assumption of ACKS is that Mister Cavern will write a script in excel or python or R or something that handles all the day-to-day calculations of running a domain. "Simulationist" or "emergent" play elements are definitely something that I have a weakness for, but it is unclear to me that that approach is necessarily superior to a more play-focused style. Unless your D&D group is composed solely of AGEod team members or something.

[Username17]

ACKS domain management does not tie in to the other games well enough or frequently enough. However, PL's complaint that it isn't just a minor excuse to get a bonus to sword swinging is completely missing the point all over the place. If owning a kingdom is just a hat you wear that gives you a bonus to swording people, then it's not worth anything. The game already gives you hats that give you a bonus to your swording, owning a kingdom has to be more epic than that.

Armies, conquests, building castles, dealing with crop failures, these are all things that for good and ill the barbarian king should have opened to them by becoming a barbarian king. Being the owner of a kingdom requires that there be kingdom level actions to take in the game. And kingdom level goals to have.

3e D&D fails to have a good kingdom management game basically because it fails to have a good mass battles minigame. It's possible to scale up or down the detail of castles and armies all the way from simple aggregate gold costs and standard castle types down to individual rooms and the quality of locks on a door. Which is good. An RPG needs to be able to scale from the general to the personal at a moment's notice, and 3e can do that - except that when it comes to your armies of tiny men actually doing anything it can't. There's no satisfactory mechanism for conducting a siege or storming a hill that isn't just putting your personal minis on the board and slogging through a personal level combat with however many hundreds of dudes in it.

The ACKS problem is more one of scaling. The level of detail on a province only has one setting, and there's no obvious way to zoom in or zoom out. The result is something that you pretty much need a computer to track when things get big and also feels clunky while things are small. Now it also doesn't tie in to the armies marching around portion of the game very well, but the main issue is the difficulty to scale such that the management requirements are rarely in the Goldilocks zone.

I think This is a pretty reasonable critique of ACKS. Much more so than PL's bizarre claim that a kingdom should just be a bonus that goes into the crown slot. ACKS really doesn't spend enough time presenting the players with the kinds of events that make it feel like it matters that you're in command of a county. But that just circles back to the question of scalability. What it is that matters for your game is going to be different from what matters for my game. Maybe you want to do Dwarf Fortress and expand your mine and fight Goblin sieges. Maybe you want to do Crusader Kings and have your children marry into Elvish royalty. Maybe you want to do King's Bounty and march an army of monsters around conquering castles. Maybe you want to do Starflight 2 and sail around setting up trade routes. These are all legit things that a campaign could focus on, and the rules have to be able to provide a high percentage of meat to minutiae for all of those tables. And that means that the game itself has to be able to focus in or focus out on different aspects. If I'm doing King's Bounty style, I want the trade routes to pretty much take care of themselves once I have the big field battle with the ogre bandits, and if I'm doing Merchants of the Coral Sea I want to be able to fuck around with the trade routes pretty much non-stop.

The 3e system for fortresses, where there is a "Medium Castle" that has a cost that you can plonk down, and also where you can zoom in to walls, rooms, and stronghold spaces if you want, is pretty much perfect. But the whole kingdom game has to be like that, because different aspects of it will interest different groups and have important consequences for different campaigns.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Beyond the lack of mass combat, 3e kingdom management fails because with levels 1-20 available, the very idea of kingdoms ceases to matter at all. personal power trumps collective power to such extreme levels that kingdoms don't have any reason to form beyond some sort of arbitrary desire by wizard-kings to rule over the masses simply because they can. There's no incentive to manage a kingdom at all, for pretty much all the same reasons that Green Lantern and Superman don't do kingdom management.

To make kingdom management viable you have to bring the power level down a lot. Kingdom management is a useful thing in E6/E8, at which point an army is still a useful thing to have and territoriality is still something that actually matters because it hasn't been entirely invalidated by high speed flight and teleportation.

So you need to decide what the world actually looks like first - meaning how far you're restricting level and what powers/items/weirdness you're restricting and which monsters exist and how powerful they are, and then you can extrapolate a mass combat system for that world. Right now 3e, or even 2e, doesn't do that. There are mass combat scenarios in D&D novels and they pretty much universally suck terribly because no one has any idea how to properly handle the forces involved (also the authors generally can't even manage to count their orders of battle consistently) and throwing Elminster at an orc horde is just as ridiculous as throwing Superman at an armored cavalry regiment.

[FatR]

It is not even the problem of power level. The core concept of "adventure story" means that the action of heroic few have a disproportionally huge impact. Not only one hero getting a magic sword that gives him a physical buff and cuts through anything can turn a total rout on almost continental scale into a landslide victory; one entirely non-magical jester with a rapier, some gold in his purse, and enough wits can be far more important in keeping his King sitting on the throne than all of the rest of King's men combined (and no, I haven't made those examples up).

If you want to actually keep remotely true to vast majority the stories that might inspire people to play a game of heroic adventure, kingdom administration is still not at all important even if power level is low enough for armies of little men to matter. If it is not even important in Song of Ice and Fire, where financial difficulties surface for the grand total of one time over five long books, and problems of civil unrest about twice, then you can fucking bet it is not going to be important anywhere near the stories people might actually play on tabletop. At least not important enough to have a minigame for it, instead of postulating that "political/economic/religious differences with the faction X led by the villains Y and Z would be our source of adventures for the time being". The main relevant functions of a domain administration minigame, if you actually want to run something resembling an adventure story, instead of playing a full-time tabletop strategy, are determining how much money you can earn from your domain (if money still matter) and how much troops you can raise - probably to serve as either a distraction for your real attack on a BBEG, or as window dressing for a duel with him, mind you - from your domain. And these should be determined by simple stats, not complex functions.

I'm largely with PhoneLobster on this matter. Particularly as his observation about the wish to insert one's favorite strategy games on tabletop seems to be spot on.

[PhoneLobster]

Armies, conquests, building castles, dealing with crop failures, these are all things that for good and ill the barbarian king should have opened to them by becoming a barbarian king. Being the owner of a kingdom requires that there be kingdom level actions to take in the game. And kingdom level goals to have.

Even aside from your MASSIVE strawmanning of my position through your post... all those things still need to totally tie back to your core game experience.

Armies and conquests and castles are all very well, and entirely supported by my own preferred goals... (and hopefully by my mechanics) they need only tie in with the TTRPG experience. I don't particularly care about the exact details of your mass combat system, but it has to tie into your main PCs combat mechanics in a way sufficiently compatible that they get to fucking interact with it as a meaningful TTRPG combat encounter in some way.

As for bizarre tangent of attacking the very idea that your nifty castle or palace should give you nifty items and real character power bonuses, well fuck you for arguing from the position that Players should somehow care about your shit castles full of shit that DOESN'T give them meaningful things they actually fucking care about.

Because that is the alternative. Your palace harem gives you real character power, your sword vault gives you a real and useful sword, and if they don't then those things are worthless wastes of player time and character resources and you should feel bad that you made them into shitty trap options instead of rewarding players for taking the sorts of fun sounding options they damn well SHOULD be taking.

[Username17]

There's no incentive to manage a kingdom at all, for pretty much all the same reasons that Green Lantern and Superman don't do kingdom management.

D&D characters are well short of Green Lantern or Superman. Or rather, they are about the level of Green Lantern or Superman at about their weakest points. So you get to be the Max Fleischer Superman who strains when throwing cars around or the Green Lantern who gets sucker punched by Batman because he has to concentrate on keeping his forcefield up or he doesn't have one.

A horde of Orcs is actually conceptually a pretty difficult thing for Elminster to deal with. His attacks are powerful and blow up everyone in a 20 foot radius column of flame - but such things are only moderate artillery strikes to large armies. They certainly hurt, but it's not going to break anything by itself. Meanwhile, Elminster has to get the fuck out because the number of ax blows he can take from bog-standard orcs is quite finite. He has some really good tricks, and he can teleport away and prepare a plan that will probably do him some good. But it's completely non-trivial how one would go about doing in a big army when you can count the number of spell slots at each level on the fingers of one hand. There are ways for Elminster to win, but none of the standard Elminster spell preparation layouts are going to do the job.

Truth be told, whether from a conceptual standpoint or a game mechanical standpoint, a D&D party is going to need an army (or something equivalent) to fight an army. 3e D&D simply does not have mass combat minigames that work for shit, so what actually ends up happening is the player characters assassinate the Ogre King and then the army disperses. They don't take on the army head to head because they lack the personal power to do so and the rules do not deliver a viable alternative. But that's not because there's anything about the world or the characters that would preclude leading a column of knights to take on the enemy army or would make a prolonged siege impractical or unwarranted - it's just that that section of the rules doesn't fucking work and people are forced to shift the narrative to parts of the rules that do.

If you want to actually keep remotely true to vast majority the stories that might inspire people to play a game of heroic adventure, kingdom administration is still not at all important even if power level is low enough for armies of little men to matter.

Most adventure stories are short - the equivalent of one-offs. D&D Campaigns are the equivalent of only the longest stories and series. So pointing out that no one builds a water wheel, erects a cathedral, or trains an army in the vast majority of stories is basically pretty much completely fucking irrelevant. The question is whether worry about siege logistics in Lord of the Rings or train up legions of followers in Wheel of Time. Which they do. So that's the end of that argument.

-Username17

[Kaelik]

A big time strategy minigame is not necessary for any D&D style TTRPG game, is likely going to be a problem for many gamers, which is probably why you don't want to build one that is either mandatory, or gives bonuses in excess of what PCs can otherwise get. (Unless you are just making the game for your group only,)

If you are going to have one, the "essential" characteristics are:

1) Your character, that RPG character you have and are playing, has noticeable and effective actions that influence your kingdom management that don't stem from your personal ability to manage spreadsheets or play a strategy game that has nothing to do with your character and everything to do with your ability to talk about how what orders your PC gives to townspeople or whatever.
2) There should be some kind of limiter, that makes the strategy part more about your character than about your ability to give orders. Maybe the actions from 1 are so powerful that they are important, maybe you have an influence pool that you spend for things, so you can't just write up your own Poli-Sci manual of how your kingdom runs, I don't know, this part is hard.
3) It shouldn't be boring as fuck, or overly strategy game. Which sort of directly conflicts with the actual goals of people making these games, who usually want to play strategy games instead of TTRPG.

[FatR]

A horde of Orcs is actually conceptually a pretty difficult thing for Elminster to deal with.

Srsly? By the most conservative imaginable interpretation of what Elminster can do, the disparity in power level between him and standard orcs is vastly greater than disparities that turned battles into effortless routs IRL. In his least powerful state from early editions and without specifically loading on mook-killing spells he can murder dozens to hundreds of orcs every few days, without really allowing them to fight back in any meaningful fashion. You need world wars-scale mass armies to even think of asborbing such punishment for more than a few days. Any "PCs vs Army of non-casting grunts" challenge only does not effectively end when you take out the strongest enemy combatants if the army suddenly appears out of nowhere and you have a very short timer until the failure conditions.

Most adventure stories are short - the equivalent of one-offs.

If you consider actual content, without filler fights against random encounters, most campaigns may fall short of a novel whose author is not intent to milk the same story for five more books, or a few-episode OVA. Campaigns lasting for years, going for levels 1-20 and also actually ending instead of disintegrating due to everyone's fatigue are rare exceptions.

So pointing out that no one builds a water wheel, erects a cathedral, or trains an army in the vast majority of stories is basically pretty much completely fucking irrelevant.

If you believe that what happens in the vast majority of stories is completely fucking irrelevant then whatever you can conceptualize is going to be fucking irrelevant. All those computer games whose experience you mentioned as examples of shit you want in TTRPGs? Everyone can play them on their PCs already.

The question is whether worry about siege logistics in Lord of the Rings

Characters in LotR did not worry about siege logistics. At all. They don't even really worry about siege tactics. Even in the context of the war itself (never mind that it was only a distraction for good guys' main plan) parts where PCs do any sort of anything remotely approaching commanding are very much narratively insignificant compared to parts about their personal valor or their ability to raise more and unexpected allies.

or train up legions of followers in Wheel of Time. Which they do.

Except no, they don't. Admittedly WoT bored shit out of me about book 7 or 8, but up to that point PCs' management of followers entirely boiled down to taking over countries by force and then not thinking of actual management even as an afterthought, convincing key personalities in one faction or another to join their cause, and entrusting an Obvious Evil Traitor with doing all the actual training for their army of battlemages off-screen. None of that remotely requires a kingdom management minigame more complicated that a simple tally of common troops and magic-users PCs gain with their conquests and alliances.

So that's the end of that argument.

There was no argument to start with.

[hyzmarca]

his barbarian concubines that enhance his barbarian powers,

Have you ever gotten a bonus to your barbarian powers from having sex with someone?

It seems to me that banging your concubines is a goal in and of itself, not a means to an end. After all, people do it all the time, and I've only ever heard of people getting penalties from it, never bonuses.

There's no incentive to manage a kingdom at all, for pretty much all the same reasons that Green Lantern and Superman don't do kingdom management.

But, Superman doing kingdom management is the entire plot of Injustice: Gods Among Us.

The actual reason that Superman doesn't do kingdom management is that, in modern Superhero paradigms, having a kingdom makes you a villain.

[Username17]

It seems to me that banging your concubines is a goal in and of itself, not a means to an end. After all, people do it all the time, and I've only ever heard of people getting penalties from it, never bonuses.

That's pretty much it. The goal of a kingdom management minigame is to use your kingdom management abilities and choices to achieve kingdom goals. Making a bigger kingdom isn't a step towards something else, it's the accomplishment of a goal. Like defeating the ogre king or saving the princess, expanding the kingdom is simply a notch on your bed post signifying success.

What it comes down to is that there needs to be something in your game for high level Fighters to do if you insist on having high level fighters. And the first - and often last - answer that people tend to come up with is "march soldiers around and put up castles." And if that's your answer - or even part of your answer - then marching soldiers around and building castles has to matter. You have to have challenges which are answered by "I got an army of tiny men" and challenges that are answered by "I have a fortress on Dire Weasel Pass" and the characters for whom that is supposed to be their high level contribution to the team need to have abilities that interact with their armies of tiny men and their fortress construction projects. And subsystems have to exist for those abilities to have meaning.

Fortresses don't threaten and protect 5' squares, they threaten and protect 6 mile hexes on the overland map. Armies of 200+ soldiers do not take attacks of opportunity they patrol forests and storm hills. This large area control has to be a thing the game tracks or you're never going to have things for higher level Fighters to do.

3rd edition D&D fails Warriors because its proposal for what Warriors should be doing past 9th level or so is simply not supported in the system. Even if high level Warriors could hold their own against level appropriate demons and giant lizards, they'd still be failed by the system because the system promises that they are supposed to have armies and fortresses and those aren't really supported.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

You have to have challenges which are answered by "I got an army of tiny men" and challenges that are answered by "I have a fortress on Dire Weasel Pass"

The problem is, "I planar bind a Gelugon' also answers any challenge that an army of tiny men or a fortress could supply, and destroys both of them.

Giving high-level martial classes a tool that high-level wizards have already rendered useless and/or are one dominate spell away from completely co-opting anyway doesn't help.

Army management matters only if you cut off the limitless extraplanar resources supplied by standard D&D. So in Dark Sun, the wizard kings care about managing their armies.

You can't have a strategic resource management system in which some players have infinite resources and others don't. It's like having a starcraft match were one player has to do everything normally and another just manifests in zerg up to the unit cap constantly (like that mission in Wings of Liberty where you play as the Protoss in the end times).

3e D&D provides no real reason why conventional armies or conventional kingdoms should exist at all, and you have to solve that problem first before you can start talking about what those things actually do. There are ways to do that. Dark Sun is one way. E6 or something like it is another way. There are undoubtedly more, but you have to use one of them.

[Username17]

The problem is, "I planar bind a Gelugon' also answers any challenge that an army of tiny men or a fortress could supply, and destroys both of them.

Why? To the extent that's true or false in your favorite edition (and there are actually lots of ways to make it not true in 3rd edition depending on how you outfit your tiny men), it's basically just an accident of rules edge cases. In AD&D, Gelugons are flat immune to anything less than quite powerful magical weaponry so having it tear through any army of any size was just a matter of time - unless you believed the grappling rules in which case a press of bodies could take down and incapacitate a Gelugon with only a handful of losses. In 5th edition, a Gelugon just takes half damage from weapons that are neither magic nor silver and it can take about as much punishment as thirty randos.

Having a fiend or genie at your beck and call isn't necessarily that big of a deal, and is certainly not conceptually something that invalidates having an army of tiny men or a fortress. Ideally, you'd probably want the Ice Devil to kill a few dudes and get run off - sufficiently painful that the general would want to send adventurers to kill it to death but not dominating enough for the demonologist to completely invalidate the tiny men leadership of the other character archetypes. I think we can all agree that the performance of the Gelugon in 5th edition is just sort of sad, but it's still proof that there's nothing mandatory about the rules coming down on one side or the other of the sweet spot.

Interestingly, ACKS actually does an OK job at this. Wizards can make golems and ducksnakes and shit, and those things can be considerably better than a soldier. But the numbers involved mean that armies of randos with spears are still valuable.

-Username17

[hyzmarca]

You have to have challenges which are answered by "I got an army of tiny men" and challenges that are answered by "I have a fortress on Dire Weasel Pass"

The problem is, "I planar bind a Gelugon' also answers any challenge that an army of tiny men or a fortress could supply, and destroys both of them.

A sufficient mass of level 1 archers can reliably put down a Gelugon in a single round, and they only need a level 3 Cleric to finish it off. Even without one, they can effectively prevent it from regenerating by continually damaging it and keeping its HP in the negatives. The simple solution to this problem, if you can't get a good aligned weapon, is to simply toss the Gelugon in a pit of strong acid, where it will suffer forever. Or perhaps set them on fire and light your cities with eternally burning ice devil torches.

Why? To the extent that's true or false in your favorite edition (and there are actually lots of ways to make it not true in 3rd edition depending on how you outfit your tiny men), it's basically just an accident of rules edge cases. In AD&D, Gelugons are flat immune to anything less than quite powerful magical weaponry so having it tear through any army of any size was just a matter of time -

That's not entirely true. A gelugon only has 10DR. A longbow causes d8 damage and have a 3x crit multiplier. Average of 5 HP damage on a crit. The average Gelugon has a 147 HP, so 30 crits should do him in. That's 30*20*20 = 12,000 men can kill a Gelugon in a single round, on average. Of course, he regenerates, but that isn't actually very useful against this much massed damage.

Of course, this number becomes much lower if you wrap your arrows in oil-soaked cloths and set them on fire, because fire is energy damage and energy damage always bypasses DR, but there are no rules for doing that. If you went Pathfinder and gave all your tiny men flask throwers, they could do full damage to the Gelguon from beyond its maximum attack range.

[Schleiermacher]

What sort of Gelugons are you talking about here, Hyzmarca? Because in 3E, Gelugons have DR 10/good, AC 32 and fire immunity, meaning that this mass of level 1 archers has to be very large indeed and setting them on fire is just going to make them feel at home.

Edit: Ninjaed by your edit. I see that you have done your homework. But you've still forgotten about the fire immunity. Also, 12 000 archers can't actually all focus on a single target at once -and the more rounds the gelugon gets to live, the greater the chance that it can rout your archers by teleporting around and throwing out Cones of Cold, Walls of Fire and Persistent Images -or wading into melee with its fear aura. Still, that is at least a fight, even though a victory for Team Tiny Men will get horribly phyrric.

[hyzmarca]

What sort of Gelugons are you talking about here, Hyzmarca? Because in 3E, Gelugons have DR 10/good, AC 32 and fire immunity, meaning that this mass of level 1 archers has to be very large indeed and setting them on fire is just going to make them feel at home.

Well yes, I said 12,000 men. It's a very big mass of archers. But it's still possible for enough tiny men to accomplish this.

I forgot about the fire immunity. And they have acid resistance, so that's a no-go. Substitute, Holy Water instead. That still works to full effect.

[PhoneLobster]

It seems to me that banging your concubines is a goal in and of itself, not a means to an end. After all, people do it all the time, and I've only ever heard of people getting penalties from it, never bonuses.

See now once upon a time the gaming den was in agreement on this.

Luxuries that are just "goals in themselves" are TRAP OPTIONS. Your PC is objectively better off saving all their money and time for more powerful equipment and living like an asthetic monk hobbo. EVERY cent, every moment, spent on concubines, magic nose dust and ornamental gardens or indeed ANYTHING luxurious is a cent or moment of play resource OBJECTIVELY WASTED.

But actually we WANT the demon king NPC and the barbarian PC to spend money on building rooms for and filling them with their awesome concubines, and we want to at least say things like "The enemy demon king has a vast harem of sexy demon concubines" and "My barbarian king has a sweet harem of sexy former princesses in peril".

If you are stupid enough to fall for the "its a goal in itself" line you are throwing in game resources and player time down the trap option toilet and that WAS once considered fucking unacceptable on this forum.

If your rule set has NO fucking answer to "Wait, why did the demon king sink all that money into demon concubine harems? if he had sunk it into MOAR PYLONS for his peasant spearmen like my hobbo barbarian did then he would have had moar abstracted war powa!?" then your game has fucking failed as a fantasy RPG.

[Schleiermacher]

Look, PL, game balance is important but in the end, if your character doesn't have any in-fiction goals (that, being fictional, are objectively speaking entirely meaningless to pursue) you're just playing Progress Quest.