Domain Rules

[Username17]

So we've been discussing ACKS a bit, which naturally brought up Birthright and An Echo Resounding and the old Companion rules and all that jazz. But rather than get that thread increasingly off topic, I thought it would be good to talk about where I'm at for 10KF Domain rules moving forward.

So first off: Domain Turns of about one month. Terminology changes somewhat from game to game, but pretty much everyone agrees that this is about the length of time for domain. I also agree. Moving on.

Where I differ is the idea that Domains should take just one or two "domain actions" each Domain Turn, because that inevitably ends up with a crap tonne of things that are defined as "free actions" or "not an action" or whatever because obviously domains need to be able to conduct diplomacy and move troops and continue work on their castle and shit at the same time. Because well, obviously. Which brings us to the Council.

The Council

The default assumption is that every Domain is actually run by the Council. There may or may not be a titular ruler, but the people tasked with actually giving out orders are the people who actually matter. This allows it to be played as an RPG, because of course the player characters are presumably going to be four to six characters who are co-equal ensemble protagonists.

Each member of the council can take their own Domain actions, and the only restriction is that all Domain actions have costs, and you have to actually pay for all the ones you want to take. The actual members of the council vary from Domain to Domain. That is, there are a bunch of hats that you could wear, and everyone in the council gets to pick exactly one. Each one gives you slightly different super powers, with the idea that characters of any particular class would have more than one council position that would seem like a decent fit such that if you have two Paladins one can be the General and the other can be the Champion and they aren't directly pissing in each other's cereal. Similarly, one Rogue could be the Chancellor and another Rogue could be the Spymaster.

• Admiral; Adviser; Aerie Keeper; Alchemist; Ambassador; Archon; Astrologer; Beastmaster; Calender Keeper; Chamberlain; Champion; Chancellor; Chaplain; Consul; Dean; Diviner; Dungeon Keeper; Engineer; Executioner; Forgemaster; General; Guildmaster; Harbormaster; Herald; Historian; Huntmaster; Inquisitor; Jester; Judge; Magician; Marshal; Master Gardener; Minister of Agriculture; Minister of Works; Necromancer; Physician; Poet; Priest; Puppeteer; Ritualist; Scribe; Sheriff; Spymaster; Stablemaster; Steward; Treasurer

Ideally, other regional domains also have their own councils, and depending on what kind of domain they are, they might have different kinds of councilors in them. Thus, you should be able to figure out what happens to a rival domain if you assassinate or suborn one of the members of their council. Taking out the Marshal of the nearby Orc tribe should have potentially predictable effects as would taking the Master Gardener out of the picture for the nearby Elvish forest city. Further, NPC Domains don't even need to have councils that make sense - you could have a Bishopric where the entire council was made out of various semi-overlapping Cleric positions (Priest, Chaplain, Inquisitor, Diviner, and Archon, for example).

Structurally, having about fifty council positions should take up around 3 pages. The council positions don't need to be that long, because they only have a small collection of additive abilities. Any council member could shill out to start building a fortress, but the Court Engineer is better at it.

At the highest level, the various divine and fiendish realms can be their own Domains with their own councils. Orcus is simply the "Court Necromancer" of the Demon Princes.

-Username17

[Username17]

On the need for upgradeable holdings.

Looking through An Echo Resounding or the Birthright Domain rules it was likely inspired by it's easy to see just how rapidly the counting of holdings and assets and shit can become overwhelming. Between construction and conquest you are probably going to add an average of more than one asset per session, and it's very quickly going to become impractical to remember what they all are or do.

The prospects then of tracking every "resource extractor" on the map is a complete non-starter. You need the ability to improve things without adding things to track - and that means incremental improvements.

Birthright was kind of almost there with its "Law Holding" which had a level, but that had a number of issues. The first issue is that you can't have a Domain "run out of slots" before it gets a castle because that's dumb as hell. Secondly, you don't want to have separate Law Holdings operating in parallel because then we're back at the level of never being able to keep track of anything. So every province can have the same stats, and ones that don't have a Fortress in them just have a Fortification level of zero.

And yes, that means we shouldn't have two separate forts in the same domain, which is a fully acceptable concession to playability of empire building.

-Username17

-Username17

[Chamomile]

Is there a reason why we can't have two separate forts that collectively meet the requirement to count as a level two holding just be counted as a level two holding, the same as if you'd spent the same resources on one big fort? As I recall from the last time we talked about this, the only thing that mechanically mattered to the level of your castle was how much gold you dumped into it, and whether you just dropped a million gp on a level whatever castle or you used the Stronghold Builder's Guide to plot out your castle on graph paper was down to personal preference. Is that still the paradigm for this thread or has something changed?

[deaddmwalking]

And yes, that means we shouldn't have two separate forts in the same domain, which is a fully acceptable concession to playability of empire building.

I don't think that will work. If there are times when you have to zoom in or out, it might matter that Orcus's personal holding (with his council of retainers) has a fort even if when we look at Hell as a single domain it gets lost in the shuffle.

If domain territories change, knowing whether you've acquired a fort or not may matter. At the very least, you want to avoid a situation like in 40k when you're assigning wounds whether it's unclear whether the attacker of the defender gets to determine what happened.

If your army captures 90% of my territory, do I get to decide that 100% of my resources are in the 10% I have left?

[Thaluikhain]

Each one gives you slightly different super powers, with the idea that characters of any particular class would have more than one council position that would seem like a decent fit such that if you have two Paladins one can be the General and the other can be the Champion and they aren't directly pissing in each other's cereal. Similarly, one Rogue could be the Chancellor and another Rogue could be the Spymaster.

Should that work the other way around as well? If you really want a Spymaster but you don't have a spare Rogue, would more than one class be a good fit (maybe in different ways, but that might be getting complicated), or would you need to take a square peg class and mash them into the round hole and hope for the best?

[jt]

What is your intended range of supported scales?

Different ways of modeling the world make sense at different scales. There's a scale where you care that your domain has a castle with a moat, or that a pair of ogres fights under one of your banners. There's a scale where you that's tedious bullshit and you only want to know how many human-equivalents worth of footmen/cavalry/artillery you have in that province and what they need to eat. These sound like different systems. It's important that you can zoom in and out between them, but you already switch systems when you zoom in from mass combat to the usual RPG squad combat rules.

The failure mode of domain systems is going to be different than the failure mode of tactical combat systems. That's part of what it means to use a different system. The usual D&D-like tactical combat rules don't break with thousands of folks per side, they just become too unwieldy to actually use. That won't be the scaling problem in a mass combat system where you can always add an extra zero onto the size of your squads. Instead you'll have problems like: the system asks for any special troops in this squad, which is meaningless because the squad is ten thousand troops, and there's always something special at that scale. Or the system asks you to run individual battles, but almost any specific battle doesn't matter because your domain is the size of the Holy Roman Empire.

I assume that your low end is modeling the lands around a castle the party captured. Maybe even going as low as a mine the party captured? (Which has been the outcome of my first adventure in several campaigns.) There's at least one system change required between there and interplanar battles where the party takes over Hell. Where you place that changeover makes a big difference in what kind of system you can make and what kinds of details it can include.

[souran]

While a game where everybody runs the kingdom or part of the kingdom sounds fun, is this still supposed to be appended to a traditional quest based rpg like in OSR type game or a personal heart breaker?

If so, I guess I am still just not sold on this conceptually. Most people play their TTRPGs in about 4 hour session blocks. Now, obviously there are people who organize their whole lives so that they can play 12 hours solid on a saturday or who play 8 hours from 6 p.m. to till 2 in the morning on a friday or somthing but 4 hours is a typical session.

Dealing with this domain stuff as you have it described could easily eat an hour, and then another hour dealing with the follow up. As a subsystem to another game this seems like it will hog table time and become the focus.

Why not just have a game where everybody runs domains instead of having a domain subsystem?

Honestly, the "best" implementation of armies and domains is sadly exalted where they end up functioning as very weird magic items. However, by doing so they didn't eat a lot of table time.

This is not to say that this isn't good or worth discussing I am just not sold on domains as a minigame for a 1 to 1 rpg.

[jt]

I think the idea is that you alternate between party-scope adventures and domain-scope military campaigns, usually in separate sessions, but sometimes you get to mix them. The domain management rules allow player-driven hooks for those two scenarios. You'd do the actual domain management at the end of a session, during your wrapup session, or between sessions, depending on how your group organizes.

Concrete example, the party is a bunch of individually powerful adventurers that are jointly running a rising kingdom, and these are their adventures:
[*]The Fighter, who is at least nominally the King, sees good, unused farmland to the east, and sends scouts to find out that it's inhabited by orcs. The party spends a session in army mode, driving the orcs out across a few battles.
[*]The Wizard needs to secure weird ingredients from beyond the southern wastes for his next tier of domain-level spells. The party spends a session going on a globe-trotting adventure to a far away land where lizard people in pyramids hoard the moonstones he needs.
[*]Somehow the lich up north got wind of that and mustered an army while the kingdom's leadership was off adventuring. When the party returns, they have to rally their forces and push him back. They spend a session on the culminating battle of this campaign, but first find an opportunity to ambush his best death knight as an adventuring party.
[*]The Ranger, who is the ambassador to the elves, had to request a favor from them while repelling the lich, and now the elves want the party to return a stolen elven artifact from a dwarven stronghold. They head there in adventure mode, but midway through foment a myconid uprising and lead them in a battle that gets them past some of the toughest defenses.

[Username17]

Each one gives you slightly different super powers, with the idea that characters of any particular class would have more than one council position that would seem like a decent fit such that if you have two Paladins one can be the General and the other can be the Champion and they aren't directly pissing in each other's cereal. Similarly, one Rogue could be the Chancellor and another Rogue could be the Spymaster.

Should that work the other way around as well? If you really want a Spymaster but you don't have a spare Rogue, would more than one class be a good fit (maybe in different ways, but that might be getting complicated), or would you need to take a square peg class and mash them into the round hole and hope for the best?

Absolutely. While you would have some positions that have extremely specific requirements (such as Court Necromancer), I should think the requirements of Spymaster should be generous enough that if you want to have a Druid whose spies are ravens and pixies that you can do that.

Is there a reason why we can't have two separate forts that collectively meet the requirement to count as a level two holding just be counted as a level two holding, the same as if you'd spent the same resources on one big fort?

No. Indeed certain fortification levels would be assumed to come with watch towers stationed around the province and such. The key is that I think the advantages for having multiple fortification levels in the province does not outweigh the administration cost.

Similarly, the total urban population of a province can have the same effect whether it's nominally all in one city or split into two cities or whatever.

I'm looking at domains roughly the size of an English county. Which is to say noticeably bigger than an ACKS domain, and about the same size as a Birthright Province.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

At the highest level, the various divine and fiendish realms can be their own Domains with their own councils. Orcus is simply the "Court Necromancer" of the Demon Princes.

-Username17

I'm looking at domains roughly the size of an English county. Which is to say noticeably bigger than an ACKS domain, and about the same size as a Birthright Province.

-Username17

I don't think I follow how these two statements can be reconciled. Are you implying that the 9 Hells is a single domain with Orcus on the governing board and is playing the same game as the Sheriff of Bedfordshire?

[Username17]

I don't think I follow how these two statements can be reconciled. Are you implying that the 9 Hells is a single domain with Orcus on the governing board and is playing the same game as the Sheriff of Bedfordshire?

I'm saying that if you want to sound like a knower in international affairs, you refer to countries by the names of their capitol province. The Nine Hells has an administrative district which is one hella built-out province and the ruling council of Demon Princes are the council of that. Subordinate provinces have their own councils, but then the councilors of the zombie infested wastes are also all separately minions of Orcus.

So Orcus can be 'Prince of the Gray Wastes' and also 'Court Necromancer of Antenora.' And then the Gray Wastes are a subordinate realm to Antenora and also too the councilors of the Gray Wastes are all Orcus' minions directly.

You are Duke of a Province when all the councilors at least nominally answer to you, whether you're actually on the council or not. So you can be the Duke of a Province and the Councilor of another province where the second province is the capitol of the Kingdom.

-Username17

[jt]

Would you say that the domain modeling system supports a domain up to the size of an English county, and anything bigger is a collection of counties held together by diplomacy/feudalism/teaparties? And if somebody wanted to do something bigger than, say, unifying England, it'd be time to write a system for the next scale up above that?

If so, I think that all sounds workable. I'd like to see a little larger scope - say enough abstraction for the party to directly control what Crusader Kings calls a duchy, or about one tenth of a France - but I haven't actually run the numbers on just how much stuff that contains and whether you'd have to start abstracting out things that could be the players' first holding.

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A couple of thoughts that don't warrant their own post:

Google Sheets exists, and you can set up a read-only sheet for people to copy from. If somebody is going to have to go track arable farmland and available levies, it'd make a lot of sense to make a great template sheet that you can link people to. I guess it's the character sheet analog for domains.

Fantasy writers have no sense of scale. You can't conquer Westeros in the proposed system, because while it's clearly a Fantasy Britain, it's apparently the size of South America. If you have a standard example campaign setting, it'd be useful to not only correct this trend, but to reverse it a little. If your Fantasy British Isles are smaller than the real thing, with the total area of just England or even Ireland, then you've significantly reduced the administrative overhead in conquering it. And it can still feel like you took over an entire Britain worth of stuff if your world is just a little more islandy than Europe and you're cutting analogs to rural counties that nobody cares about. You can't cut back an entire order of magnitude this way, but you can still get away with reducing things to a half or third the size of their real-world counterparts.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I couldn't help but notice that you missed the essential role of "Courtesan Wrangler".

[Username17]

Would you say that the domain modeling system supports a domain up to the size of an English county, and anything bigger is a collection of counties held together by diplomacy/feudalism/teaparties? And if somebody wanted to do something bigger than, say, unifying England, it'd be time to write a system for the next scale up above that?

Basically yes. I don't really see the fantasy needing to have much more domain conquest than like France, which is about five hundred miles on a side. In Forgotten Realms that covers the Sword Coast from Waterdeep to Baldur's Gate and inland to the Graypeak Mountains, including:

• Ardeep Forest
  Misty Forest
  Trollbark Forest
  Forest of Wyrms
  Loudwater Forest
  The High Forest
  Lizard Marsh
  Marsh of Chelimber
  The High Moor
  Highstar Lake
  Serpents Tail Stream
  Unicorn Run
  The Star Mounts
  Dessarie Hills
  Troll Hills
  The Troll Claws
  Llorkh Hills
  Greypeak Mountains
  Hill of Lost Souls

That seems like a big enough region for normal conquest games. And I think that the game wouldn't croak and die if you covered an area twice that on a side, which would extend along the coast to Luskan and extend inland to The Silver Marches and The Empire of Shadow. A thousand miles square is a huge area in most fantasy worlds.

If so, I think that all sounds workable. I'd like to see a little larger scope - say enough abstraction for the party to directly control what Crusader Kings calls a duchy, or about one tenth of a France - but I haven't actually run the numbers on just how much stuff that contains and whether you'd have to start abstracting out things that could be the players' first holding.

My thoughts on the Duchy is that the PCs would be the council of the capitol province and the councils of the subordinate provinces would be henchmen of individual PCs. So your Duchy could be Cornwall, Devonshire, Somerset, Dorset, and Wiltshire without anything leaving semi-direct PC control.

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Fantasy writers have no sense of scale. You can't conquer Westeros in the proposed system, because while it's clearly a Fantasy Britain, it's apparently the size of South America. If you have a standard example campaign setting, it'd be useful to not only correct this trend, but to reverse it a little. If your Fantasy British Isles are smaller than the real thing, with the total area of just England or even Ireland, then you've significantly reduced the administrative overhead in conquering it. And it can still feel like you took over an entire Britain worth of stuff if your world is just a little more islandy than Europe and you're cutting analogs to rural counties that nobody cares about. You can't cut back an entire order of magnitude this way, but you can still get away with reducing things to a half or third the size of their real-world counterparts.

No sense of scale works both directions. Greyhawk's Oerth is deliberately bigger than Earth. Krynn on the other hand, is super tiny - being less than 8000 miles around.The entire continent of Ansalon has about as much land as France.

I can definitely see the advantage of having vassalage rules that scale to controlling multiple kingdoms within an empire. But I don't want to be tracking individual development levels of provinces in them once we start operating on that scale.

-Username17

[Username17]

I couldn't help but notice that you missed the essential role of "Courtesan Wrangler".

Certainly I could see room for expansion council positions in regional or thematic expansions. Who wouldn't want to be Chief Eunuch?

-Username17

[Dean]

The domain work I’ve done splits the process into 4 phases. The transition is one that begins with a focus on buildings and ends with a focus on societal constructs. The 4 phases are settlement, city building, society, and empire building.
Settlement: Where you help tame land and build physical buildings
City Building: Where you create a functioning city with specialized labor and goods
Society: Where you create a society, the ideas and self concept and rules and important parts of your domain besides the material elements.
Empire: Where you attempt to force other cities and societies to become yours, both in ownership and concept.

In more detail they work like so
Settlement Phase: This is the phase where you’ve just taken a perfectly good fort from some manticores and you want to turn the land habitable. It can also be used for settling entirely new lands. In this phase you worry about getting land plowed and planted, you build grain silo’s and mills so you have food through the winter. You care about how many people you can get cutting wood because you want palisade walls. This phase should be very hands on where you’re deciding where to allocate resources and work to make sure that your population will have enough food to get through winters and be secure enough that living there isn’t a danger. In this phase when a new building is being built it’s plausible that your character is actually helping the building themselves. This phase ends when your settlement becomes stable.

City Building Phase: At this point your settlement is harvesting natural resources from the land around you successfully. Your settlement is gathering food and wood and perhaps things like stone and iron. In this phase you should still be concerned with building things but they should be more advanced projects. Pottery, wineries, fisheries, etc. You’re constructing the beginnings of a city now and when you order a Smithy to be built you no longer imagine that you’re there yourself watching the stones be set down. The city building phase should end with the creation of some high profile establishments like Barracks, Armories, a Castle, and a Trading Post. Those buildings should serve as end posts where you are moving from a settlement into a true domain. You will have troops, fortifications, and no longer keep track of your specific wood or grain supplies and start keeping track of your “Economy” in a generalized sense. Actually buildings like Trading Posts can actually convert your specific resources to money while Castle’s can begin to generate taxes. In this way you can have a fluid transition from when you wanted to keep track of how much grain and wood you had to a more general view of your domains resources.

Society Phase: In this phase you build societal structures more than physical ones. The projects you put into place here should generate a sort of cultural identity. Some things still require physical structures like academies, hospitals, grand temples, amphitheaters, garrisons and guarded watchtowers along the roads. Others are concepts or memes like a hero myth for your civilization, a state religion, mandatory military service, trade relationships, unique elite military units. This is where you should get to decide what your society really looks like, not just it’s buildings. Whether you want to build an idyllic elven commune where everyone is magically educated, a mercantile and wealthy trade city, or a terrifying Spartan slave state only able to exist because no one can stand against their military. The ability to choose what kind of society you want to create should be the really exciting part of the domain game, not just numbers telling you how much gold and troops it generically produces. The memorable difference between two kingdoms is that one is The Gryphon Kingdom where anyone who can tame a gryphon may vote on the council of lords and all are free, and the other is Ur where inside a great pyramid the Lich King Amegnon wields supreme power and holds the population in slavery with his armies of undead.

Empire Phase: The only thing that matters in the empire phase is conquest, so everything must have some relevance to your ability to conquer others. Military might is directly applicable because empires run on powerful militaries but wealth funds forces and culturally advanced cities should dramatically cut down the time between when you conquer an enemy city and when you can start getting taxes and troops from them without a sword at their throats, because people near Athens kind of already thought of themselves as Athenian due to years of cultural export so a change of ruler is less likely to see revolt.

An important note about Population: If you have a domain you’re going to want to see it grow and you don’t want to wait 40 years of game time to see that happen. That presents a problem because it strains credibility to make every hamlet blow up like a gold rush town the moment a player starts digging wells in it. What I recommend for that is to frame only a small portion of population growth as representing childbirth and immigration until you’re well into the Society Phase. Instead you say that in the ancient world there’s people everywhere, it just requires building something that provides enough value that the shepherd on the hills starts to think of himself as a member of your domain. The Shepherd IS a Corinthian when he thinks of himself as such and will pay taxes to Corinth without someone threatening him to and will not simply move if a draft comes. He does not need to literally build a home outside your castle, you gained him as a member of your population when he started walking a few miles to the temple you built to worship and trading his fleece with your merchants.
In this way you can let someone start with a little hamlet of a couple hundred people and let them build it up to a domain of many thousands without cognitive dissonance. Certainly some people will erect homes within your city walls and some children will be born there too but the vast majority of population gain should be framed as occuring when you convince people that already exist in the vast countryside around you that you are in fact their King.

[ETortoise]

The main thing I found interesting in An Echo Resounding was that the PCs could effectively adopt a village and start playing the domain game more or less whenever they wanted. Similarly, when I ran ACKS the PCs were keen to start their domains well before they’d reached “name level.” (Especially since we’d been playing weekly for two years and the average party level was 6.)

One of the interesting things about old-school D&D is that the equipment chapter and the wilderness encounters imply a middle-game where the PCs have 20-100 armsmen following them around and might own a longship, farm or townhouse.

In short, is their room in domain rules for the pissant domains of village heroes and minor mercenaries, or is that handled better with the basic rules?

(Dean, this seems to fit within your settlement phase.)

[Username17]

The smaller things are, the less the macro-economic assumptions are necessary and the less the macro-economic assumptions make sense. As long as the amount of actual food produced in the economy is enough to feed everyone, you don't actually care whether vegetables or cattle are being produced in any particular hex from a macro picture. But if you are playing Harvest Moon with one actual farm or whatever, that shit is incredibly important.

With small settlements and tiny areas of control, it's ambiguous whether it's beneficial to talk about things in terms of development levels and macro regional surplus and shit. There's a small scale where it's clearly not, and there's a large scale where it clearly is, and then there's stuff in the middle where it's arguable.

The thing about AER is that there's no benefit to having the village spend "domain actions" to roll social and wealth tests to randomize the production time of a saw mill. If you're doing things at the level of the village. You can just part out the cost of a saw mill and see how many people it takes to work one. Saw mills can just have a construction time and you could know when they were going to come online. Abstracting the development only makes sense when it becomes a pain in the ass to track all the things that are being developed. Abstracting the costs and outputs only makes sense when the amount of things being traded internally becomes larger than you can flippantly describe to the MC.

-Username17

[Username17]

I've thought about Dean's four phases, and I don't think I'm on board.

The Domain management game is appended to a role playing game. It is necessary because you need abstraction to handle larger numbers of people and transactions than you model individually within the game. But also too, it's obviously not necessary to abstract things that you can in fact model within the normal RPG.

If the player characters are building a barn, they can just build a barn. Make craft checks, haul wood around, figure out how many hit points the walls have, and so on. Whether you're bashing rocks together or printing circuit boards, if you're doing it yourself you don't need abstraction or a separate system at all.

On the flip side, if you're dealing with enough people or land that orders are being relayed through intermediaries, then you need a layer of abstraction. It doesn't matter if you're leading nomads scrabbling in the dirt to stack rocks together for a new beginning or slotting in as the new governor of an advanced metropolis - you need the abstraction because there are too many dice to roll otherwise.

The question is what you do when provinces become small enough relative to what's going on that you end up wanting to abstract their contents. Individual provinces are small enough that you can aggregate their hex contents.

-Username17

[ETortoise]

If the player characters are building a barn, they can just build a barn. Make craft checks, haul wood around, figure out how many hit points the walls have, and so on. Whether you're bashing rocks together or printing circuit boards, if you're doing it yourself you don't need abstraction or a separate system at all.

This presupposes that the game has rules for all that stuff, including what barns do. Although if the manpower/time building system for raising citadels is measured in dudes/GP instead of +2 production, it probably can be scaled down to barn-raising. I understand AER is being ditched as a dead end, but it has two features that I like when compared to ACKS.

• You can start your domain from a single village at low level instead of needing to clear a hex and hope you get a good land value after spending 100 sessions earning enough XP that your claim will be respected and people will move to your barony.
  
  Domains have a bunch of tasks that come up each month and the party can always choose to solve one by going on an adventure. It sets up a fun series of constrained choices for the players. What challenges should they throw their domain resources at, and which one should they handle personally? Then you get a basic structure for your games. Session 1 is domain events, rolls, and part 1 of the adventure. Session 2 is part 2 of the adventure and domain turn resolution.

If the multi-part domain adventure is explicit, you could even have random domain events. The MC wings the first part of the adventure, then uses the downtime to tie everything together before the group meets again. Then you can have Court Seer job that allows the player to pre-roll domain events so that the party can prepare or deal with them early.

[Dean]

If the player characters are building a barn, they can just build a barn. Make craft checks, haul wood around, figure out how many hit points the walls have, and so on. Whether you're bashing rocks together or printing circuit boards, if you're doing it yourself you don't need abstraction or a separate system at all.

This presupposes that the game has rules for all that stuff, including what barns do.

Tortoise has it exactly. Just "building a barn" is a reference to rules that don't exist. Once you write the rules that food production halts in the winter but granaries and storehouses let you store X amount of food but cost 80 wood then your players can build their barns and have it matter. They'll know how many days they need to chop wood or get others to chop wood to get the resources and how long it takes to build.

There's no reason your character needs to count as more than +1 Worker in the very low reaches of the domain game. I, like etortoise, saw a real desire in my players not just to become kings but also to become leaders of very small settlements that they could help in direct ways and one more set of hands can do that. Also even in that low level domain experience when a character wants to get wells or breadmills or whatever built over a month that is more rolls than you want to individually track, even if it's only the PC's and a few dozen hands doing it.

All of the domain rules I've sketched out I set on monthly turns and run in the background behind the adventuring. With some limit on how long you can be away from your domain before they default to scripting. This way you can decide you're building your granaries this month and then you just adventure, where the DM starts the session describing you setting beams into foundations with your townsfolk before you get the message from the Baron.

One a different topic entirely: I like the idea of special people as requirements for certain buildings and developments. So a Master Architect would be required for grand temples or palaces, a Beastmaster is required if you want the Exotic War Animals option and so on. Obviously you don't need to fill most jobs but for very unique one's I think it would add flavor to say that if you want war drakes you can't just throw money at it, you need to find someone who can tame you war drakes. This could be done behind the scenes rolling every month to see if your cryers and dovecotes brought someone in but it allows the option to meet the falconer ranger on your adventures and bring that person back to become your Grand Falconer so you can have the giant eagle riders you wanted.

[Username17]

I see a fundamental difference, in fact the fundamental difference as one of scale rather than development level. A D&D edition should have a robust Harvest Moon minigame, but that is ultimate a completely separate question as to whether regional society is advanced enough to have a mature economy with specialization.

So imagine that the players are interacting with a single farm that has forty acres or whatever. If that's some Little House on the Borderlands scenario where the only food they eat is what they grow then that should be handled by the Harvest Moon minigame. And if it's connected to a wider civilization through a permanent marketplace and the entire farm is an indigo plantation that exchanges non-edible agricultural goods for currency which in turn gets traded for goods and services, that's still the Harvest Moon minigame.

On the other hand, if you are leading a thousand refugees to resettle the lands scorched by the now-defeated Lich King you can't do that with the Harvest Moon minigame because two hundred farms is too many farms to track that way. And if you become the leader of a market town that has two hundred farms attached, that's still too many people to play out individual buildings for.

The real take-home from your thoughts on development levels is that D&D needs real Harvest Moon rules. Sometimes players don't end up as counts but just run a farm or an inn. Sometimes there's an intermediary step in their Dwarf Fortress where they only have five minions or whatever. That won't always start at nothing - players might inherit, purchase, or conquer already existent businesses or whatever.

There exists a part of many adventurer stories where the character becomes the leader of a smuggler gang or buys a shop or in some other way has a small firm and that facet of a character's life and progression deserves better rules than the ad hoc running a business rules from the 3rd edition DMG2. But those rules will still necessarily be microeconomic in nature. Extracting money from society is good rather than neutral because your balance sheet is your own and does not include the people on the other end of the transactions.

-Username17

[Dean]

My question then is at what point does your farm/business minigame turn into the minigame where you run a town? If running 10 people is Harvest Moon but 1000 people is the domain minigame when does one transition into the other and how? My statement is that there is a space where you have 80 to 200 people and the rules for running groups of that size are what I was calling the "Settlement Phase". Where you plausibly care about making a granary cause that's a project that 80 people might really care about.

Domain rules that only work if you rule a minimum population of 1000 are less complete than rules that work with smaller populations than that because that's a desired playspace. If that's accepted then whatever rules are made to let someone be mayor of their hamlet are basically what I'm calling the "settlement" rules. It's just the name I've assigned for when the work you can get done and things you can accomplish as a leader are small enough that they include things like normal buildings.

I totally agree that you need to zoom out as your rules progress, and significantly. It is satisfying at the start to assign a dozen workers to plowing fields and another dozen to cut logs so you can build a mill but obviously when you run Athens you absolutely can't be delegating individual workers to working on individuals farms and mills. My current idea to make this transition feel natural is to tie the advancing stages to particular developments. So when your town gets trading posts you stop tracking your ore and wood and zoom out to tracking your economy, letting you put up stone walls even if you didn't have stone because you're just paying in less granular economy points now. Perhaps you get bureaucrats to zoom out of labor control, building crews to zoom you out from putting up individual granaries to working on grander public works projects that are more relevant to the larger domain scale.

I think that there should definitely be a minigame before you rule a thousand people, and then if you make that I think it should be easy to upgrade it smoothly into the bigger world of domain rule. However one thinks that should be done I think it's an uncontentious position that it should be an option.

[Username17]

The transition from micro-economy to macro-economy is one of scope and scale, not one of development level. This makes the term "settlement phase" extremely misleading at best.

We switch from micro economics to macro economics when "we include both sides of economic transactions. The farmer gives some of their surplus corn to the blacksmith, the blacksmith makes some nails and tools for the farmer. Ad long as only the farmer or the blacksmith is "us", then it makes sense to concern ourselves with microeconomic concepts like profit. If both the blacksmith and the farmer are "us" then we don't care who got the better deal in that exchange, we only care about macro-economic concepts such as gross products.

It is possible to be in a micro-economic state and be very advanced or very large. I could imagine characters setting up or running a wealthy and powerful corporation in Finality with hundreds of employees. It is also possible to be in a macro-economic states and be in a very early state of development. You could kill a dragon or something and become the leaders of a tribe of literally stone age Troglodytes or Grimlocks who don't even have pants technology.

The Harvest Moon game is quintessentially microeconomic, and it needs to scale pretty far up. The domain management game is definitionally macro-economic, and it should ideally scale even farther up.

-Username17

[maglag]

I see a fundamental difference, in fact the fundamental difference as one of scale rather than development level. A D&D edition should have a robust Harvest Moon minigame, but that is ultimate a completely separate question as to whether regional society is advanced enough to have a mature economy with specialization.

But doesn't normal D&D work on a completely different time scale?

If a domain turn takes one in-game month, that's enough for the typical party to level up multiple times between each turns. Whatever you started growing in one turn can easily become obsolete by the time the party comes to collect the harvest.

Not to mention your average mage can just craft/ritual a lot of stuff in one month.

In dominions a mage can craft one item or ritual per month, and that's it, no adventuring, no research, no getting out of their room in case enemies attack the province, spend 30 days 24/7 working in that one item/ritual with no pause for anything else except if an assassin crashes inside their room.

But in D&D a month's worth of mage rituals/crafting will be 30 magic items and possibly hundreds of rituals with some spare time and spells to go take care of other local problems.