[OSSR]Birthright Boxed Set

[Wiseman]

Has there ever been a system that can switch between large-scale domain/army management and the adventures of an individual party of characters well? I fell like something like there would be a demand even nowadays for something like that. At least, I would be interested in such a system.

[Blicero]

I mean, King John of Bohemia took the field at Crecy despite being fucking blind - he strapped himself between two other dudes and road out into battle like a boss, because he thought the majesty of royalty would protect him or some shit. That didn't work and he was captured by the Black Prince, who spared his life and held him for ransom. That wouldn't happen in Cerilia. Your ass is a power-up if you get captured in battle.

The wikipedia article you link to does not agree with your account of Crecy.

Yes, yes, whatever.

The site you link to also does not agree with your account of Crecy.

[Ancient History]

Oh, sorry, I thought you meant the "strapped between two blokes" bit - no, John of Bohemia wasn't captured by the Black Prince, I was confusing him with some other asshole.

[OgreBattle]

Has there ever been a system that can switch between large-scale domain/army management and the adventures of an individual party of characters well? I fell like something like there would be a demand even nowadays for something like that. At least, I would be interested in such a system.

ACKS is often brought up for being a game that actually has a ready to use domain system.

Everyone has their own idea of what domain management should feel like though, for myself I like how Metal Gear Peacewalker and MGSV have a base management minigame that gets you additional income for researching new gear for you to use in the core "I am the hero" game.

There's also "crew management" in games where you run a pirate ship of sorts. Skies of Arcadia did that nicely, and I thought Rogue Trader was going to do that but I'm not sure if it really does. Does any Star Wars RPG handle running a star destroyer?

[Mechalich]

There's also "crew management" in games where you run a pirate ship of sorts. Skies of Arcadia did that nicely, and I thought Rogue Trader was going to do that but I'm not sure if it really does. Does any Star Wars RPG handle running a star destroyer?

Star Wars SAGA has rules for running a freebooting trader/smuggler vessel in the Scum & Villainy book though I never bothered to look at them in detail so I can't tell you if they suck or not (given the overall problems with the economics of Star Wars I suspect the suckage is strong). Something like a Star Destroyer is a state asset that violates local economic assumptions though - you can't maintain it without a constant influx of resources from elsewhere in the same way as a modern aircraft carrier (heck, the resources required to run a Star Destroyer are an outlay greater than what can be supported by the average Star Wars planet).

Has there ever been a system that can switch between large-scale domain/army management and the adventures of an individual party of characters well? I fell like something like there would be a demand even nowadays for something like that. At least, I would be interested in such a system.

Dynasty Warriors Empires perhaps, and also in a slightly different way the various Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. The most recent version of DW Empires actually has a reasonably dynamic set of things you can do for adventures and a bunch of kingdom management things that mostly matter in terms of meaningfully impacting the mass combat scenarios.

Obviously those games only have you controlling one officer at once, but they have means of collaboration and various bonds between officers so it's not much of a stretch to have it be considered a 'party' and Liu Bei, Guan Yu, and Zhang Fei is pretty much the ideal of what you want a party of adventurers who also deal with kingdom management to be.

[Prak]

So basically the route to Real Ultimate Power in Birthright is to fuck your twin sister and take turns murdering the offspring with an elf weapon until you have super godlike ultra bloodline. Right?

If you are fucking your twin sister you don't need to use an elf weapon because the babby will have a bloodline equal to yours so you can just take turns with infanticide for +2 blood potence a pop. You'd need some life extension or to be Dwarves because you'd have to have your twin sister give birth about fifty times to crank both your blood potence up to the point where you get divine powers that aren't even listed in the box set.

The elf weapon lets you do it way faster - just two babies each if you're sister-fucking and four babies if you're just knocking up random commoners.

-Username17

Actually, if we want to talk about horrible sex crimes incentivised by dumb rpg rules, you're better off saying your character has a harem of (however many you can get Mister Cavern to agree to) sisters, who they've chained up in the dungeons. Letting your sister(s) take turns killing your incest babies means less points for you. Then you only kill the male incest babies, because the female incest babies can be raised to child-rearing age and installed in your horrible, horrible sex crime fueled power factory.

Dear, sweet Satan and Mara, Birthright might be worse than Werewolf in the crimes it incentivises.

I don't know why this particular piece of terminology fail bothers me more than Krynnian Paladins swinging hauberks at people, but it does.

Is it perhaps because paladins swinging hauberks at people is a hilarious mental image?

[Maxus]

I don't know why this particular piece of terminology fail bothers me more than Krynnian Paladins swinging hauberks at people, but it does.

Is it perhaps because paladins swinging hauberks at people is a hilarious mental image?

As someone who's been hit with a large, wet mophead, I can testify it combines the less attractive qualities of being clubbed and being whipped. I can only imagine being hit with a hauberk would be even worse.

[hyzmarca]

And yes, I care if people are born with "heroic potential" as in Birthright or just work hard to get to 20. If my character's goal is climbing atop the social hierarchy, the underlying assumption is that there's a social hierarchy to climb. If it's inherently stable with better-than-yous on top and my character lost the genetic lottery, he's eternally consigned to sucking DMPC cock. If he won, he's presumably accidentally fallen through the cracks and must regain his "rightful" place among the assholes. Both stories, from a power fantasy perspective, are strictly inferior to one where he and his friends from level 1 get to create a new social order with those assholes at the bottom. The best outcome with better-than-yous is you as the CFO of Mylan getting to share in the sweet price-gouging. The best meritocratic outcome is free epipens and Heather Bresch pouring you coffee.

I recently played a Crusader King's game where I started out of the Khan of Jewish Kzaria and went full North Korea mode, because Paradox nerfed North Korea mode. I ended up conquering the entire map and converting almost all of it to Judiasm, except for a few Catholic holdouts in Britain and one county of Sunnis somewhere.

Being a nobleman in a feudal society does not preclude being the underdog and changing the world.

[Nath]

Also, Darth Vader was originally supposed to be some elite agent of the Emperor, tasked with retrieving the Death Star plans. Grand Moff Tarkin clearly was higher in the food chain. The character already got immensely popular when they wrote him in Empire Strike Back promoted to be in charge of the Executor-led fleet to hunt the Rebel Alliance HQ.

[JonSetanta]

That new MTG set out now, the sequel to Conspiracy, has some rule called "Monarch" that allows the person holding the title to draw an extra card each turn until they get hit in combat (then the attacker becomes Monarch).

I'd rather play MTG like that and pretend it's Birthright than actually play Birthright.

[Ancient History]

OSSR Birthright Box Set
Part Two Part Two


No. It's the second part of the second part.

FrankT:

My fault this was late. I was being put up in a chicken farm while doing emergency medicine. It was a thing, apparently. When last we left our insipid adventurers, we had been talking about how the random events are neither numerous nor detailed enough to bother with in the first place. You roll 2d10 and on a 7 Mr. Cavern is asked to make something up with the prompt “diplomatic matter” and on a 16 Mr. Cavern is asked to make something up with the prompt “intrigue.” But that's so vague and unhelpful that honestly you might as well just tell Mr. Cavern to make something up every season to keep the plot moving. If you're going to have a table at all, it should give some actual results that impact the game in some way and be way more specific than “Natural Event.” I mean, fucking hell.

The idea here is that these events are extremely vague and your responses to them equally so. You either personally respond or delegate a minion to respond or ignore it entirely. You have a limited number of Regent Actions per season and you have a limited number of minions, so it's expected that some events you're just going to have to ride out. In practice, events happen only once per turn so sending one minion on a Final Fantasy Tactics style dispatch mission is no cost at all. The challenge is then to convince Mr. Cavern that the minion you are sending is “skilled.” Which is some straight magical teaparty because we are talking about 2nd edition AD&D henchmen whose character sheets don't actually tell you what characters are good at. And we're talking about events that don't define what skills you'd need to be good at handling them or even what they are.

The actual mechanics for handling or ignoring an event are just “Roll a D6,” with a table giving 5 levels of result based on whether you sent someone skilled or unskilled (which of course is deep in the weeds of “giving Bjs to the DM”), or no one at all (which you would never do). There's some weirdness in the table, like as far as I can tell it's actually bad for you to tell your minions what to do? I don't get that at all. But the bottom line is that the system “send a minion to handle each problem in your empire, check to see if they have one or more appropriate skills, roll a d6, check chart to see if the fire has been put out” is a fine system to start with. I could completely imagine a game based on like 3 Kingdoms Period China where you had floods and brigands in little hot spots all over your empire each season and you had minions who were awesome and minions who were boobs and you sent them to different places and then rolled a single die for each. That could be a pretty cool game. But Birthright gives you like 4 henchmen and only one event to deal with at a time and it's still appended to AD&D2 which means that you're never going to get a straight answer as to whether one of your minions is a competent bureaucrat or bandit hunter.


Vague and simple resolutions are fine if you're doing a lot of them so the overall strategic questions are interesting.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that while you could do something productive with this event resolution system, there are a bunch of reasons why it doesn't work in the game they are trying to write. Most of which have to do with the fact that all the places it touches AD&D® are places that get herpetic sores in a few days and you should really get your doctor to look at that.

You thought we were going to put a gross picture in here for nightmare fuel. Didn't you?!

AncientH:

One of the things I really dislike about Birthright's domain rules is that it takes AD&D class pidgeonholing into brand new realms of suck.



Specifically, the assumption is that if your class is Thief group, you're running a guild; if you're a Cleric, you're running a temple; if you're a Wizard, sources, etc. It reinforces this by giving you a tax incentive favorable rate on collecting Regency points from your various holdings depending on your actual class. So this is the rare time when being a Fighter/Mage/Thief means you're doing better than most everyone else, at least so far as bringing in the RP ever Domain turn.

Also, the official exchange rate is one Gold Bar == 2,000 gold pieces. I don't know who's doing the math on that one, but that works out to each "bar" being 40 pounds, depending on which source for the weight of a gold piece you use. That's sort of an arbitrary figure, but stopping to think about it just makes you remember how utterly bullshit the D&D economy is, with staple goods being cheap and plentiful but quest rewards and level-appropriate expenses absurdly high.

Also, I'm seriously not sure how they think trade routes work. The idea is that you the regent forge a trade route between two provinces, and that the tax value of that trade route is the average of the levels of the two provinces [ (A + B)/2 ]. So...what if the trade route is longer than just two provinces? I mean, the Silk Road isn't actually something you can aspire to in Birthright, but assuming you have Human province (0), wouldn't you just make trade routes to every fucking province nearby and mooch off their wealth? Trade human-made pigskin condoms to the Elves in exchange for treesilk or some shit?

Also, the tax rate for a seaport is [ (Province level / 2) + 1 ] ...that's regardless as to whether you have a sea or ships or anyone to trade with. I guess Salt Lake City could have a seaport and generate 2,000 GP a month just from...uh...well, charter fishing is out. Tourism, I guess? I don't know. I might be making too much of a deal about edge cases.

FrankT:

Birthright has the beginning of an action economy. You get one Domain Action each month and there's a Realm Initiative roll to determine who gets to choose whether to declare first or last. Each month has four war moves if you are at war. And that's nowhere near enough to cover all the shit you want to do like send minions to do shit or whatever, so they end up leaving “free actions.” That ends up letting you hire soldiers, dispatch minions, move troops around and shit without any specific limit, which makes the entire action economy something of a joke. The really important one is the fact that you are limited to one Realm Action, but you can apparently just send minions to handle shit until the shit gets done. Or maybe they all fuck it up, because that's all MTP in the hands of Mr. Cavern.


How well can you get your minions on task? I don't even know!

There are some glimmers of good ideas here and there, like I kinda like the thing where sometimes there's a festival that will make the province happier with you if you show up and less happy with you if you don't. That's a cool sort of ruler dilemma. But it requires an action economy that's a bit deeper than this. People are gonna want to know why a character that can fucking teleport as a Bloodline power has to spend his whole fucking month making an appearance at some provincial fair. I mean, how long does it take to eat a fucking corn dog and make a speech?


Eat the fucking corn dog and move on!

It sorta demands that you get some kind of action points to spend alongside your (sigh) Regency Points and Gold Bars. But that's not here.

AncientH:

Looking at the Master List of actions, the costs of actions (in RP and GB) are often so nominal that even if you have a seriously shitty province/realm/holdings, whatever, you're going to run out of actions way before you run out of alternate resources. I mean fuck, even if you have a weak bloodline and a Level 1 Province with only a couple Level 1 holdings, you're going to generate a couple 1 GB and RP per turn...and unless you're building a fucking castle (10 GB/turn) or fortify a holding (5 GB/turn) you're probably spending most of that on coke and whores.

A big part of this is that obviously, they don't want the kingdom management minigame (metagame? framing device?) to overwhelm the actual fucking roleplaying game. When you're an adventurer, Mister Cavern generally doesn't leave you with more gold than what's in your purse to manage at any given time; Birthright doesn't want you to get too hung up in the fiddly details, delegating the less important things and abstracting shit like "where is my treasury actually at, anyway?"

FrankT:

Integrating adventures with the kingdom management system is definitely a non-trivial problem. Ars Magica has a bit of a problem where one player will be primarily interested in seeing their six month project to completion while another player will be primarily interested in a dragon hunt that takes a lot of table time but not much of the year. Ars Magica lets the player who is doing the potion mixing play Sir Robin's Minstrels to the guy who'se doing the dragon hunt, but there's still a big imbalance possible in how much screen time players get with their favorite characters.

Birthright doesn't really seem to have that going on. It doesn't seem to address the problem at all. What happens in Birthright is that when everyone is taking turns doing their one month domain actions, one of the players shouts “Dungeon Crawl Road Trip!” and then they spend the next three hours having a regular D&D adventure with their henchmen while all the rest of the players shoot daggers at them with their eyes because they are fucking turn locked because they decided to do some diplomacy phase shit that was resolved in two minutes.


Birthright never got tied into Spelljammer to my knowledge, which is probably for the best.

This problem alone basically makes the game unusable for its apparent intended goal – that of playing a group of player characters who are all kings and also adventurers. The game pretty much can't be played in real time around a table with several players playing rulers of different fiefs. That straight up does not work. The game can only really be considered as a thing that you might do with a single player and a single DM. Since the game was put together by two people, I'm not sure they ever noticed that it did not work at all when expanded to a typical D&D play group worth of people.

There's an interesting bidding thing where you can contest another leader's and then bid how many points you want to spend to stop it, and they can counter bid more points to push the action through and so on. And you know what? That will never fucking happen, because that requires multiple players who are playing against each other, and there is no fucking way that is going to be a thing as long as one of the players can paralyze the entire game for hours by insisting on having a solo adventure.


Remember how this shit didn't work in a cooperative storytelling context at all?

It's actually deeply weird to me that TSR managed to get so far up its own asshole that they greenlit a thirty book series without asking “is this idea remotely playable for a typical 4 to 7 person D&D group?” Like, that would seriously be my first question. Maybe my second after “Is this idea going to be sufficiently racially insensitive as to offend a potentially large group of fans?” which is a disqualifying question that Birthright also was unable to answer correctly.

AncientH:

To be fair, they do suggest at one point that not everybody needs to have their domain turn at the same time - I'm not sure how the fuck that works, but presumably they'd sort out the results of Bob's turn last week, run this week's adventure, and then get Frank's actions in for next week or some shit like that.

Also, I just compared the GB costs in the action table with the actual costs written in the fully fleshed-out actions, and they don't always match. Like, the table says fortifying a holding is 5 GB/turn, the actual action description says that it costs 4 GB per level, but work proceeds at 1d6 GB per turn, but if they want to spend 5 GB/level, it can proceed at 2d6 GB/turn. I can follow the math, I just don't know why I bother.

Also, we finally get an explanation of what ley lines are! These connect stronger magical Sources to weaker ones. Because if you remember, the max level of a Source is inversely proportional to the level of the Province. So wizard-lords that want a combination of Real Power and Indoor Plumbing need to compromise by building a ley line from the magical source in the wilderness to their apartment/tower in the city.

I have no idea what the effects of multiple ley-lines do. Presumably, one Level 7 source is enough to light up the whole Dark Gods-damned realm, as far as mana goes. I also have no idea what happens if somebody conquers one end of a ley line - does that mean they get to tap your source? I would guess so. That would seem to be a strategic drawback, if anybody actually gave a limp-dick fuck about it. I guess we'll look at this again when we get to Realm Spells.

FrankT:

Holdings and shit seem to be created in a month. This is not long enough for... well... many of them. They start at level 0 and you have to spend an action for each level improvement. So it takes like 10 months of not being the master of your domain to set up and max out a new castle. That's too much ruler time and not enough actual time. We really need some sort of Dominions style gig where we took lieutenants out of circulation for
five months and got a minimalist fort at the end. The thing where we put claiming uncolored portions of the map as new provinces as single month actions is something that should have made the designers say “Hey! Our action economy is kinda bullshit and needs to be reworked.”

That said, there's an acceptable list of domain actions to take. You have a diverse enough set of cards to have real choices of what to play each turn. The action economy isn't advanced enough, but it's a decent place to start.

AncientH:

The most bullshit of the actions is "Hold Action." Normally, your action order is determined by who has Domain Initiative, but with Hold Action, you get to hold your action until the end of the turn, so that you can respond to somebody else's actions. I guess this is so that Queens and Princesses and shit that act first in the turn, blowing their actions on diplomacy don't get blindsided when the Thief Guildleader decides to raid their treasure to fund the new wing on Fortress Badass.


Also, I am mildly glad they haven't tried to integrated any stronghold-building optional rules into this quite yet. I mean yes, you can build a castle, but you don't have to break out the graph paper for it.

FrankT:

What is War good for?


Other than the obvious.

So making war games is hard. It's really very hard. Most war games are shit of course, but the underlying issue is that even for the ones that work in their field it's not at all obvious which ones can even be adapted to work for a different scenarios. The DBA folks get into real problems when someone wants to stat up a dragon or give one side rifles or something. The tactical questions involving flanking spear columns just don't fucking matter when armies are loose squads supporting tanks and machine gun nests.

Birthright has you buy military units that are like groups of infantry or cavalry or whatever. These have little war cards attached to them which... I can't really describe how bad these things look, so I'm gonna have to spoiler this shit:

It's really this bad. That is not a joke. The graphic design on the war cards looks so bad that it appears to be the actual pen drawings of the people spitballing this in the first place.

So the war cards have an acceptable number of stats on them. Move, Defense, Morale, Melee, Missile, and Charge is not an unreasonable number of stats to track. The thing where the war cards get rotated when they take damage to have worse stats is like a primitive form of HeroClix. Mage Knight was probably inspired by Birthright, though obviously it's a much more mature system than Birthright is. Which is odd, because rotating the cards to show them being damaged is a major pain in the ass and shouldn't be done. You'd seriously be better off putting coins on damaged units or whatever. We're talking about pieces of cardstock – or possibly just regular paper that is photocopied from cardstock – we really can't make sure that the piles are going to stay pointing in the right direction. Especially when we are also expected to move them around to different places on the field over the course of the battle.

You move the war cards around a field that has 15 slots on it, plus a reserve area for each faction. Could be simplified, but I think it's acceptable. There's an unnecessary complication where hostile units can be in the same zone but not engaged, which is ideally so that you can put guards next to your archers and engage incoming attackers while the archers continue to use ranged attacks but in practice makes things more complicated for no real reason. You can end up with several engagements in a zone, plus unengaged units from both sides leaving you with like eight meaningfully different piles in a single zone. That's... not good. There are a couple of ways that could be less bullshit.

AncientH:

I mentioned before that one of the things that Birthright encourages is delegating authority. It kind-of only does lip service to this, however. It's not like setting a city in Civ to produce gold, or telling the governor to autobuild. One of the ways it shoots itself in its own foot is the lieutenant system. A lieutenant is a properly-motivated and capable henchperson that you can delegate to do shit on your behalf.



This frees up you to effectively have more actions per turn, because you delegate an action to your henchman!

Problem 1: You only have a limited number of Henchmen, determined by your Charisma (and, to a degree, bloodline level). This is really, only a nitpick because...

Problem 2: You can only assign one lieutenant to take one action on your behalf per turn.

Seriously, what the fuck. This reeks of the nerf-stick. Some players really do just want to hire a general, hand them a mercenary army, point at the horizon and say "conquer that, I'll tell you when to stop." That should totally be a thing. Leaving intelligent minions to run tax collection and manage the sacrifices to the Dark Powers should be a thing, and not mutually exclusive. I have no idea why they thought introducing and then fucking over this idea was a good idea.

FrankT:

One of the draws of doing war games in a fantasy environment is that you can have fantastic military units. Dragons. Skeleton Warriors. Golems. Whatever.


Siege Rhinos!

The special units list of Birthright is a disappointment. There are:

• Dwarf Guards
• Dwarf Crossbows
• Elf Archers
• Elf Cavalry
• Goblin Archers
• Goblin Infantry
• Goblin Cavalry
• Gnoll Marauders
• Gnoll Infantry

That's the whole list. Aside from some Elf fapping about how Elf Cavalry is the swiftest and most dangerous that I could do without, I would say all these units deserve mention. But it's woefully insufficient. Where are my fucking war bears? Dwarves in D&D have fucking cave bears as war beasts, where the war cards for those?

If you're gonna insist on having war cards for all the options and insist on issuing a separate card for mercenary infantry and regular infantry and pikes and shit, you need more than this. Like, a lot more. Considering how gonzo AD&D is, I'm really surprised that anyone thought they could get away with something so paltry.

AncientH:

I don't have much to add here. This is basically a half-assed Dominions 4-style thing, except that instead of going into skirmish-level combat like you would do in a Warhammer Fantasy campaign, Mister Cavern has "DM fiat" to decide how to run the battle, or even if they're going to run the battle at all instead of just arbitrarily deciding who wins and assigning losses accordingly. As such, the player really doesn't need to bring anything to the table in the way of tactical or strategic thinking, although mouth wash and a knee pad might go a long way.


...lower

FrankT:

Morale.



So morale is a very important issue for battle games of all kinds. And that includes fantasy skirmish battles like the ones found in D&D. And so it is that morale rules have been floated many times for different editions and subsystems. Now it's importantly true that the high point of morale rules from all the editions was actually 2nd Edition AD&D. Monsters had morale numbers and you rolled 2d10 against that. And I think it was roll-under somehow because lol 2nd Edition, but the point is that 2nd edition AD&D actually had an entirely serviceable system for determining when the hobgoblins started booking it, which didn't generally feel stupid or like Mr. Cavern was deliberately screwing with you. And that's more and better than any previous or subsequent edition can say for its sorry ass.

Which brings us to the fact that Birthright makes its own weird morale system. Each of the war cards has a symbol on it, and the morale values of units are listed as symbols, and you are supposed to shuffle all the war cards you are not using at the moment and draw one to see if the symbol matches one of the ones on your troops. Which means that every troop with a shield on it you are fielding makes shield morale units incrementally less brave. It's all fucking stupid. And there's no reason for it. As I just said, this book came out for an edition that already had a morale system that is probably as good as the game is ever gonna get. Roll 2d10 like a boss and take this bullshit card flipping mechanism and shove it up your ass.

If they'd just used the perfectly fine morale rules they already had, they could have had a much more extensible game. If someone wanted to field a unit composed of the bizarre Native American Stereotypes from Ravenloft, then you could just do that. Because those assholes already had morale ratings.

AncientH:

I can't rant as hard about Frank at this shit; I'm seriously researching an article about Mexican prostitutes and can't focus on arbitrary battle minigames-within-the-minigame that are only held if Mister Cavern feels like it adds to the fucking atmosphere or something. You'd seriously be better off dumping the War Cards and playing out battles using a Warhammer Fantasy session. Or maybe a game of Netrunner, if you want to pretend this is all a simulation anyway. So I'm going to write my whore article, and we'll pick this up later for Part III: The Birthright Campaign.

[tussock]

Minor point: the morale rules for 2nd edition you had to pick a morale number for your monsters as the DM, from a table of suggestions in the DMG, and then not even roll it if the players were trying to game the system or whatever: the specifics always fail with 2e.

Mentzer had the number in the monster description, on 2d6 roll over, with Zombies and such at 12 (special number, never fails despite mods) and Kobolds at 6 and almost everything else between. Fear spells still used saving throws instead, because PCs didn't have morale, so yeah, there's always bits of stuff here and there.

[Longes]

What is War good for?

[Mechalich]

Integrating adventures with the kingdom management system is definitely a non-trivial problem. Ars Magica has a bit of a problem where one player will be primarily interested in seeing their six month project to completion while another player will be primarily interested in a dragon hunt that takes a lot of table time but not much of the year. Ars Magica lets the player who is doing the potion mixing play Sir Robin's Minstrels to the guy who'se doing the dragon hunt, but there's still a big imbalance possible in how much screen time players get with their favorite characters.

Birthright doesn't really seem to have that going on. It doesn't seem to address the problem at all. What happens in Birthright is that when everyone is taking turns doing their one month domain actions, one of the players shouts “Dungeon Crawl Road Trip!” and then they spend the next three hours having a regular D&D adventure with their henchmen while all the rest of the players shoot daggers at them with their eyes because they are fucking turn locked because they decided to do some diplomacy phase shit that was resolved in two minutes.

I'm assuming that this was never resolved because the people at TSR liked each other enough to not do this to each other at the gaming table and thereby it never entered their heads that this would happen to other people's gaming groups. At lot of problems in tabletop vanish when you have a group of people who know each other well and actually get along without being dicks to each other sitting around a physical table.

Obviously this is bad, because very few groups will have this frictionless ideal. At this point all games should probably be tested using online systems with people who explicitly don't know each other. Still, TSR should have absolutely recognized that rules that depend on 'don't be a dick' to function are not viable in the world we live in.


Unrelated: arguments about the nature of Force-sensitivity in Star Wars are all very well, but we should probably take them to another thread

[Longes]

Well it's actually an argument about divine right to rule.

[Username17]

Still, TSR should have absolutely recognized that rules that depend on 'don't be a dick' to function are not viable in the world we live in.

This is basically totally wrong. It isn't that people have the ability to split the party but they wouldn't do that if they weren't assholes. It's that going on adventures is your Domain action and Domain Actions Are Taken In Fucking Initiative Order! The simple act of not splitting the party requires a gentleman's agreement to bypass the rules entirely and stop playing the Domain game for a while. The actual rules for transitioning between the Domain minigame and the adventure minigame split the party even if every player wants to adventure that month.

-Username17

[Mechalich]

Still, TSR should have absolutely recognized that rules that depend on 'don't be a dick' to function are not viable in the world we live in.

This is basically totally wrong. It isn't that people have the ability to split the party but they wouldn't do that if they weren't assholes. It's that going on adventures is your Domain action and Domain Actions Are Taken In Fucking Initiative Order! The simple act of not splitting the party requires a gentleman's agreement to bypass the rules entirely and stop playing the Domain game for a while. The actual rules for transitioning between the Domain minigame and the adventure minigame split the party even if every player wants to adventure that month.

-Username17

Huh, it really wasn't clear that is was that impossibly stupid. Is it even possible to adventure as a group and still manage domains then? Or are the two games effectively completely divided?

[Username17]

Huh, it really wasn't clear that is was that impossibly stupid. Is it even possible to adventure as a group and still manage domains then? Or are the two games effectively completely divided?

There are multiple very strong impediments to playing this game multiplayer. There's the thing we talked about earlier where the arbitrary limit on how many people can own holdings in a single province is three. There's the thing where you get a divide by party error if you try to access D&D adventures from within the Domain turns. There's the thing where the starting player character power levels are wildly imbalanced. There's the thing where it wants you to start in the pre-built areas and it's not at all obvious how you would give an allied province that was in any way near the others to six players and have that be remotely balanced. And so on.

The idea that the players would want to adventure together doing D&D stuff and then conquer the map together doing domain stuff doesn't seem to have crossed the authors' mind. Like, at all.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

Well it's actually an argument about divine right to rule.

[Kaelik]

Well it's actually an argument about divine right to rule.

Well if you track crazy bullshit far enough, Goku is the actual son of the actual first ever saiyan in the universe or something? Because his dad time traveled back in time and founded the saiyan line?

Divine Right is a weird thing in Dragonball.

[Ancient History]

Hate you. Hate you both.

[Wiseman]

Is that thing even canon? I thought it wasn't.

[tussock]

I'm assuming that this was never resolved because the people at TSR liked each other enough to not do this to each other at the gaming table and thereby it never entered their heads that this would happen to other people's gaming groups.

You're over-estimating late-era TSR. There was no playing of games on company time allowed. They had no official playtesters, no internal feedback mechanisms of note beyond basic legibility editing. As for outsiders, discussion of D&D on the internet was prone to copyright violation notices being sent to your ISP, though you could post stuff to Dragon and they'd tell you why you were wrong (especially if you weren't).

The rules in big projects of the time often don't interact well because the people who wrote the different parts weren't given any time to make that happen, basically. Authors of the era have noted they had to sneak stuff out of the office to play it a bit with family to have any idea if it was working or not, and if you couldn't organise enough weekends with the other authors for that then things just never really glued together before it got published.

Some of the book suffer more for this than others.

[Shrapnel]

Is that thing even canon? I thought it wasn't.

What? The Bardock time travel thing? It's about as canon as most of the specials are.

[Kaelik]

Is that thing even canon? I thought it wasn't.

I couldn't possibly comment on what counts as canon for DBZ. It has been a long time since I cared enough about DBZ to even know what happened, much less have an opinion on canon.