Strongholds and Domains: A Revised Approach

Maybe one day. It's hard to work on a 2nd edition when I haven't even finished the 1st edition, in a sense...

By the way, on your blog you said you'd never gotten the sneak preview of Lairs & Encounters. But in my update of June 7 I made it available to ALL backers. Have you not seen it still? 

Thanks for the in-depth assessment and analysis! 

This encourages vassalization for the PCs, which is good - interaction with the game world. Some light math tells me the percentage of one's income that would come from one's vassals doubles in most cases, given 4 vassals of about half your personal domain size or so.

It's balanced out by the fact that you do not get income from one's sub-vassals. Assume you're a count with 800 families with 4 vassals of 400 families, each of whom has 4 vassals of 200 families.

Old System: 4 barons of 200 families at 12gp revenue each contribute (200 x 12 x .2 x 4) 1,920gp to their marquis. 4 marquis of 400 families at 12gp revenue each contribute [(400 x 12 x .2) + (1920 x .2] x 4] = (960 + 3840) x 4 = 5,376gp to their count.  

New System: 4 barons of 200 families contribute (200 x 3) x4 = 1,200gp to their marquis. 4 marquis of 400 families contribute (400 x 3 x 4) 4,800gp to their count.  

 

My impression is that at this point the various revenue and expense categories have become more cosmetic than functionally different. For example, there doesn't seem to be any morale difference between having a tax of 2 gp/family and liturgies of 1, relative to a tax of 3 and liturgies of 2 (or for that matter, 102 and 101!) Tithes are now slightly distinguished by having a -2 penalty for being 1 gp/family short, but that just means that there's now never any incentive to not pay tithes (especially considerating that, beyond the morale effect, it's an invitation for the judge to invent horrible additional custom effects to punish such impiety!)

If the goal is simplicity, then it might be even simpler to just fold liturgies into taxes entirely and reduce record-keeping by one box (i.e., set base taxes to 1 and omit liturgies from the record). That's effectively the net result of the new system here, unless I'm missing something.

Admittedly, there's some RP benefit in letter some realms self-identify as high tax and high luxury while others are low tax and low luxury. But it still seems oversimplified to say that only the difference between taxes and discretionary spending is what matters to public opinion. Historically, what were reasons why a kingdom or empire would prefer the high tax and high spending model over the low tax and low spending model? I assume there were some even in antiquity -- certainly those competing options provoke some sharp disagreements in modern politics!

Understood, and taken in good faith.

I agree that it is a trivial rule to drop, but it perplexes me that it is still there. If you want to approximate steady state, it is easier to just not add noise by default, no?

There are nine distinct morale values, all of which modify slightly different facets of the domain, and then there’s a table of 12 modifiers to the roll. Me, I’d be pretty happy with domains having two morale states (“tolerates ruler” and “open revolt”), with a d20 roll triggering a revolt on a 1+ (or 5+ or 9+ if the ruler has done something egregious lately) and revolts persisting until either egregious ruler behavior has been addressed / peasant demands are met, or they are put down by force. That’s about the level of complexity I’m in the market for.

At the end of the day, my players only want to deal with one layer of henchmen. As a consequence, PC domains are practically limited to one layer deep (if they weren’t already by other factors). Likewise, I have a limited amount of prep-time and interest for NPC realms, which is best served by paying attention to the count/duke layers of the chain (who make reasonable patrons or villains; not too high that the players are irrelevant, not so low that the players can kill them trivially). I don’t care if there are marquis or whatever below them or not, and my players sure aren’t willing to manage a multi-layered domain structure, so any actual rules for low-tier (or very-high tier) vassal rulers are wasted space as far as I’m concernd. It’s not that I can’t ignore them - it’s just one more thing I have to houserule around, particularly given shrinking maximum personal domain size. Houserules are expensive; in a complex system, the number of unexpected possible interactions between parts grows superlinearly with the number of parts.

Lacking a printer, our options are pretty much spreadsheets, wiki pages, or text files. Or proper databases, I guess. Updating hex populations over time, and then generating income for each month given varying population and morale, is a very natural spreadsheet operation, and doing it manually per-hex (possibly 1.5mi hex) sounds like an awful lot of unnecessary work.

There’s a bit of a difference between the expense of designing a class, which is undertaken but once, and the recurring expense of a complex domain system, which requires work every month of game time (which might be twice a session or more). If anything, that post’s conclusion on fighting value 1 is a simplification and generalization of the current rules. I have very little trouble with math in principle; it is repetitive math, compulsory math, and math that comes up during play, which are best eliminated. Automation is a band-aid, a crutch. If my players were hot-to-trot and wanted to design Traveller starships with Fire, Fusion, and Steel and run domains with population detailed down to 1.5-mile hexes, I’d be grateful for having complex options. But they don’t, which is why I’m doing all the math once and building standardized domains, so just like with standardized Traveller deckplans, there’s an option on a table that works closely enough and has all the actionable stats in one place. So what if the population is off by 5%? The players don’t have an accurate census in-world, and any discrepancy in income can be handwaved as either particularly aggressive or lax tax collection. I’m not willing to worry about it. As far as my players are concerned, a domain is a thing that gives you gold and XP every month, and helps offset the cost of the mercenary army you wanted. Broadly, the point of the game for us is killing things and taking their stuff (because these give you XP). Everything of interest is one of: threat, weapon, loot, simultaneously weapon and loot, or Not Sure Yet. The value in a domain is measured in how much better it makes you at killing things, and how much stuff it gives you, and we measure its cost in paperwork against its value in those terms.

Simulation is good in that a good simulation avoids breaking suspension of disbelief, but if simulation were my end, I would be programming, not sitting around a table with dice and friends. Having a properly-balanced game is good in that overcoming true challenges is deeply rewarding, but if that sort of satisfaction were my end, I would be playing RTSs. Narrativism is good, in that a well-executed story can tap symbols and trigger emotional response, strengthening the game-ritual, but if telling stories were my aim, I’d be writing novels rather than playing. Simulation is the groundwork on which the other two can build towards emotionally satisfying conclusions without being interrupted by confusion and WTF. But, like most infrastructure, it seems best to me if it is simple, robust, and hidden.

i really didint mind the use of spreadsheets, hell i will keep using them anyway, but there are some changes that i really like, speacialy the no morale bonus for large army, max taxing and maxing army was the only logical thing to do in the old system.

I haven't read the domain rules in ACKS for a while (and never used them since we haven't gotten high enough level), but from memory, these appear easier to understand and I think they are an improvement.

I can see where Jedavis is coming from. I'm personally somewhere between:

"Yeah, these are great, new, and improved!"

and...

"I wish they were simpler to use at the table."

I don't mind all the details I see here, but my players will not be at all interested in them. I'm interested to see if these rules can be distilled into a few easy steps that they would be interested in using personally (as opposed to me doing it all). More input later.

No, I have, I guess as of that date? Feels more recent than that, but time’s been compressed lately. I recall posting typos and feedback here.

How would a proficiency like Leadership (or overloading Leadership more) work out, perhaps, for increasing one's maximum controlled territory?

Take a page from the caster profs and do "as if +2 level"?

If L15 was 14 hexes, and L16 16 hexes?

One still has to have a proper stronghold size, and do the work of clearing/claiming the hex, defending the hex, etc. - there's a lot of variables in establishing the real value of the extra part-or-whole hex.

 

Re: At the end of the day, my players only want to deal with one layer of henchmen. As a consequence, PC domains are practically limited to one layer deep (if they weren't already by other factors). 

But that's exactly what these rules achieve? Now if you want to know how big the Count is, you just ask how many marquis he has, and then you're done! You don't need to know anything about the marquis's vassals. 

 

Re: There are nine distinct morale values, all of which modify slightly different facets of the domain, and then there's a table of 12 modifiers to the roll... Me, I'd be pretty happy with domains having two morale states... That's about the level of complexity I'm in the market for.

Fair enough. Personally, I think many levels of morale is great. In the game I ran, our Paladin was ecstatic every time he pushed his domain's morale up another notch.

maybe the domain morale levels would benefit from a summary table to go with the text descriptions, and little dashes to indicate when certain effects haven't kicked in yet?

They would - good idea!

Thanks for the detailed response!

[quote="jedavis"] Understood, and taken in good faith. I agree that it is a trivial rule to drop, but it perplexes me that it is still there. If you want to approximate steady state, it is easier to just not add noise by default, no? [/quote]

It's there because when I ran the game, it felt like there needed to be some fluctuation in population for the player's domains that might model random events. At the same time I wanted a mechanic I could drop for NPC domains without impact. Hence the +/-d10 approach. (More on this later).

I suspect I run NPC domains how you run PC domains - how much gp does the NPC have to spend on his army to fight the PCs. 

[quote="jedavis"] There are nine distinct morale values, all of which modify slightly different facets of the domain, and then there's a table of 12 modifiers to the roll. Me, I'd be pretty happy with domains having two morale states ("tolerates ruler" and "open revolt"), with a d20 roll triggering a revolt on a 1+ (or 5+ or 9+ if the ruler has done something egregious lately) and revolts persisting until either egregious ruler behavior has been addressed / peasant demands are met, or they are put down by force. That's about the level of complexity I'm in the market for. [/quote]

Got it. More on this later.

[quote="jedavis"]  At the end of the day, my players only want to deal with one layer of henchmen. As a consequence, PC domains are practically limited to one layer deep (if they weren't already by other factors). Likewise, I have a limited amount of prep-time and interest for NPC realms, which is best served by paying attention to the count/duke layers of the chain (who make reasonable patrons or villains; not too high that the players are irrelevant, not so low that the players can kill them trivially). I don't care if there are marquis or whatever below them or not, and my players sure aren't willing to manage a multi-layered domain structure, so any actual rules for low-tier (or very-high tier) vassal rulers are wasted space as far as I'm concernd. [/quote]

Got it. My own experiences as a Judge have been very different. Each time I've run ACKS my players have assembled domains, then conquered other domains and ultimately ended up running realms at anywhere from prince to king tier. The campaign villains have been at king to emperor level.

[quote="jedavis"]  It's not that I can't ignore them - it's just one more thing I have to houserule around, particularly given shrinking maximum personal domain size. Houserules are expensive; in a complex system, the number of unexpected possible interactions between parts grows superlinearly with the number of parts. ...  I'm not willing to worry about it. [/quote]

I do understand this approach. It's why I always try to offer standard or averaged outcomes for every area of the game - here's a standard caravan, here's a standard kingdom, here's an average treasure type value. At the same time, I've always felt that as a designer it's better to offer more detail, then to offer too little detail, thinking that it's easier to ignore what isn't needed than to create what isn't there. Or, put another way, unexpected results are more likely to occur when adding new rules than from simplifying and averaging existing rules.

[quote="jedavis"]  As far as my players are concerned, a domain is a thing that gives you gold and XP every month, and helps offset the cost of the mercenary army you wanted. Broadly, the point of the game for us is killing things and taking their stuff (because these give you XP). Everything of interest is one of: threat, weapon, loot, simultaneously weapon and loot, or Not Sure Yet. The value in a domain is measured in how much better it makes you at killing things, and how much stuff it gives you, and we measure its cost in paperwork against its value in those terms. [/quote]

Ok. So I would say the point of ACKS for me as designer was to allow players to achieve and exercise power. Killing things and taking their stuff is a means of achieving and exercising power, and a fun one. But as a player and GM, I've always felt frustrated that in most RPGs, the dungeons and the characters get tougher hand-in-hand - the player is always fighting "level appropriate" challenges and as such is on a treadmill. So I wanted to offer an opportunity to achieve and exercise power in qualitatively different ways over time. 

Hence, rules for managing a domain, creating magic items, defeating enemies on the battlefield. It's certainly true that the domain game is over-designed if actual play stays focused on traditional adventuring throughout. One could simply say "for each hex you control you get XX gp per month to spend on troops" and that's that. 

To what end do your players use their mercenary armies? Do you do mass combat in your games? If so, what system do you use? 

Thanks for the feedback, again.

 

OK, good! Yes I think you did.

I've been thinking about this. I think there's opportunity for more detailed mechanics on how to control territory - new proficiencies, new specialists, etc. But for now I'll leave as is...

 

It definitely sounds like something better left to a self-contained "module" of extra rules for people looking for increased complexity in domain play.  possibly something to go along with stuff for the people who, for example, want to care about where the roads in their domain are, or how many aqueducts and temples their city has.

The sooner ACKS can fulfill my Civ 5 cravings, the happier I'll be

right there with you (/¯–‿・)/¯

[quote="susan_brindle"]

Re: At the end of the day, my players only want to deal with one layer of henchmen. As a consequence, PC domains are practically limited to one layer deep (if they weren't already by other factors). 

But that's exactly what these rules achieve? Now if you want to know how big the Count is, you just ask how many marquis he has, and then you're done! You don't need to know anything about the marquis's vassals. 

[/quote]

Fair enough, I guess?  I should sleep more.  Still seems simpler to just cut them away entirely.

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Re: There are nine distinct morale values, all of which modify slightly different facets of the domain, and then there's a table of 12 modifiers to the roll... Me, I'd be pretty happy with domains having two morale states... That's about the level of complexity I'm in the market for.

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Fair enough. Personally, I think many levels of morale is great. In the game I ran, our Paladin was ecstatic every time he pushed his domain's morale up another notch.

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I seem to recall that my players mathed out a setup that converged to +4, but I forget the details (probably relied on a high-cha ruler).  I guess it was sort of satisfying to see it operate as intended, but hardly exciting except inasmuch as their income went up.

Frankly I’d be unsurprised if you ran NPC domains at a higher detail / higher level of interest than we run PC domains :stuck_out_tongue:

I believe the highest level PC we’ve seen in my games was 9th (with most of the party around 7th), and the largest PC domain was 3-4 6mi borderlands hexes, in a campaign starting at 4kXP and running about 40 4-6 hour sessions (~2 years in-game). Conquering (or at least pillaging) other domains is something they’re interested in, but the practical matter of amassing enough troops to actually do it, and then maneuvering the political situation to get away with it, have so far prevented it. Toppling kings seems a very distant prospect.

I suspect the history of the hobby will show that creating more rules is a much more common event than removing rules, for the typical DM. Given that, it would be very useful to have explicit documentation of things like “don’t modify this, because if you do thief domains spiral out of control”. Making assumptions explicit (as the Secrets chapter does) is great, but noting game-consequences of tweaking values would be even better.

I absolutely agree that dungeoncrawling gets old, and that challenges should change qualitatively with level. “I use my sword to kill this orc (and his family) and take his pie” and “I use my army to kill this count (and his army) and take his domain” are qualitatively different (enough for us, I guess), if analogous, and they share a comparable risk profile. Domain mismanagement, item creation, running thieves’ guilds, and trading put PCs into emotionally-charged situations much less readily than combat; keeping or losing your life and holdings very rarely comes down to any given ruffian’s hijink roll or a mercantile value roll or a magic research throw. To manage a domain into the ground and open revolt would typically require aggressively poor play. There’s not enough risk involved for these activities to be exciting (notable exceptions: hijinks performed personally by PCs, magic research using experimentation rules with possibility of catastrophic failure). I suppose jedavis’ corollary to “do not point the dice any anything you are not willing to destroy” is “do not bother pointing the dice at anything that they have no possibility of destroying.” On reflection I don’t think domain management and magic research are fundamentally unworthy or uninteresting; it’s an implementation detail. However, high danger is not necessarily compatible with realism. Domains didn’t rebel every 20 months in expectation, historically… but managing domains would be much more exciting if the Sword of Damocles hung a little nearer.

So far, mercenaries (“armies” might be overselling things) have been used for hunting monsters (massed crossbowmen and occasionally light ballistae vs dragons, chimeras, giant scorpions, skittering maws…), knocking over humanoid lairs / keeping massed humanoids off the PCs while they kill chieftains during hex-clearing, mass combat via DaW:B in defense of domains against beastmen at platoon-scale, and road construction. There was some discussion of taking the domain next door last campaign, but their forces were judged insufficient.