As all of us who actually play long games know, numbered editions of D&D and AD&D before it start losing integrity in the mid-high levels. BECMI and even more so some certain derived systems like ACKS offer unique experiences at certain level stretches, notably the stretch from "Name Level" up to dimension hopping hero-diety in which Characters establish their holdings and attract a population of followers that can interact politically with other city/state/nations. What are the chances we'll see this being offered in the new Rules Revision?
>>93406584Low because it's not actually that great. When I rolled up a thief my goal was to become the Greatest Thief of All Time and do legendary stuff like steal from the treasure vault of the Grand Sultan of the Efreeti, not become a guild master and get bogged down by paperwork and dispute mediation between low-level thieves who still think that 3d6 gold is a fortune.
>>93406584Lol fuck no. Unless it was already published in Tasha's, it's not going to be in 5.5e, because the system is just locking in the various optional and variant rules from Tasha's as base rules and charging you 200+ burgerbux for it.
They have rules for making PC strongholds, so a step closer than 5e but not as intricate as something like ACKS.At the very least it will give the 5e playerbase a nice little introduction to the idea of domain play, then some of the more sensible sorts could go on to try better things.Like quitting ttrpgs and playing wargames like a grownup.
>>93406584They are adding Bastions, doubt it'll be very involved other than some benefits.https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/dnd/ua/bastions-and-cantrips
>>93406661>>93406693It would be nice if it were integrated enough into the Core that it wouldn't seem like an alien concept if there were a later Master Player's or Name Level Guide that expanded it in depth.
nobody plays RPGs to play house
>>93406661>They have rules for making PC strongholdsThose were actually in 5e as well, just in the DMG.
>>93407868There are literally entire successful RPGs that are all about playing house - not that Domain Play is at all like that.
>>93407868lies, I tried really hard to do that in my last campaign.DM blocked it like the massive fag he always was, should have dropped it instead of hoping for a decent finale.
>>93408507D&D is the only successful RPG, so this is false.
>>93408534No you didn't.
Are we taking about Birthright levels of domain play?
>>93406584Very unlikely as it requires a whole lot more bookkeeping than the average 5E player is willing to do.
>>93406607If your refuse the strengths you have been given then you rightfully deserve to get fucked by the wizard outperforming you.
>>93408879yes, I absolutely did.The village hub had an abandoned temple, my religious wizard went all on using all his free time to repair it, my interactions with NPCs and even my spell selection at level up was influenced by it.
>>93414302You don't have shit to prove to these mongs
>>93406584Chances are decent, since it's in the UA.
>>93416398Expect it to be phoned in and poorly implemented, like every other UA they've ever published.
>>93416419>Expect it to be phoned in and poorly implementedthat's the entirety of 5e
>>93416496Exactly, and 5.5e has shown quite exhaustively that their idea of "revising" and "updating" the rules includes a handful of minor tweaks, copy-pasting nearly all the content from Tasha's, and giving the Paladin a horse.
>>93417449Weeeee
>>93417449>giving the Paladin a horsethey already had the horse
>>93417497Yeah, but now it's really important to their kit.
>>93418144I don't think so.
>>93410392>If your refuse the strengths you have been givenYou tell me how 1st level thieves and thugs are gonna help me steal a jewel from Grand Sultan Marrake al-Sidan al-Hariq ben Lazan, ruler of the Efreeti Grand Sultanate. And keep in mind that when I wrote "chaotic good" on my character sheet, I meant it, so "cannon fodder" isn't a viable option.
>>93421641The organized crime syndicate they operate funnels resources to you.
>>93421650Simpleton answer
>>93421650Actually hang on, I just double-checked my 2e PHB. At 10th level I attract only 14 (4d6) fellow thieves, with the table weighted heavily in favor of them being just 4th level Thieves, and my pool of followers never grows from that point.14 4th level human thieves aren't going to be able to collectively steal enough loot to equal the take of even a single actual adventure that I go on. 4th level so when they go out and pick pockets or mug someone or something they're gonna be rolling for like, what, Treasure Type M at most, right? So each one gets 5 (2d4) gp per attempt. Say three successful attempts per thief per night. Over a month that's 6,300 gp. But they're not going to give me all of it, they're going to be keeping most of it for themselves. Thieves' guilds usually only take a tithe, so I'm only getting 630 gp per month from these guys.That's not going to be enough to achieve anything. And this is assuming ideal circumstances, i.e., none of them are caught, they don't turn on each other, we don't have to spend any of this money on the gang war that the PHB expressly states can break out...
>>93421736alternatively they're your lookouts, your runners, your greasemen, any particular role in a heist you need they can handle
>>93421787As only 4th level characters their numbers are so bad compared to mine that any job they can perform with competence is significantly beneath my own expertise, while any job I can perform with competence is beyond their abilities barring extremely lucky rolls. They're definitely going to be dead men walking if I try to have them help me steal from Grand Sultan Marrake al-Sidan al-Hariq ben Lazan, as I have previously stated is my intention to do.
>>93421815Side note, stealing from the vault of the Grand Sultan of the Efreeti is in fact a long-running goal of mine, as in, for *decades* now I've wanted to run a character who manages to go to the City of Brass and steal treasure from the Charcoal Palace. Never yet pulled it off, but maybe one day...
>>9342181514 4th level thieves will absolutely ventilate any single target who isn't immune to their weapons. You have no concept of the mechanics of scale.
>>93421857>14 4th level thieves will absolutely ventilate any single target who isn't immune to their weaponsOh I'm not denying that they can put out a lot of damage if they can manage it. But as Humans their Move Silently/Hide in Shadows start at 10%/5% respectively and couldn't have been higher than 40%/35% by 1st level unless they had exceptionally good Dexterity scores. By 4th level at most they're sitting at 60%/60%, maybe a little higher. Or in other words, four in ten checks for either fail in even normal circumstances, nevermind when trying to infiltrate and burgle the Charcoal Palace, which I have to imagine is going to be stocked full of attentive guards. And to get even *that* good assumes that they have completely neglected all other thief skills (find/remove traps, pick pockets, open locks, detect noise, climb walls, read languages). These supposed "thieves" only have a 10% chance to open a lock, and a 15% chance to pick a pocket. I might as well let the cleric do it for all that they'd succeed.Granted 10th level is much too low for me to be attempting this too, but the point is that these 14 chucklefucks are both all I will ever get (PHB says I get them at 10th level and gives no rules for getting more as I gain additional levels or replacing them if they die). Unless I spend a lot of time and resources leveling them up like Pokemon to the point where they each get 14 chucklefucks of their own, but that would be an immense investment of time and resources, during which time I myself would be facing lower-level challenges and thus not getting the rewards that a thief of my level SHOULD be getting. Plus at that point we're talking about 211 thieves (me, my 14 chucklefucks, and 196 of their own chucklefucks) in one area. The place will look like Detroit on a bad day or Moscow on a good one.
>>93421932Then surely you can see how controlling a functional crime syndicate can aid the progression from 10th level to a level you will be attempting your heist. "Companion" levels.
>>93421932The point is, it's a much more sensible use of my time to just send the chucklefucks off to basically get me enough money to cover living expenses while I continue to actively adventure and gain XP until I reach a point that I can rob the Charcoal Palace on my own. Except now I can't even do THAT as well as I used to because I have to spend time and resources on paperwork and dispute mediation between low-level thieves who still think that 3d6 gold is a fortune. I was legitimately better off at 9th level when I was still a free thief able to adventure on my own or with a party of like-abilitied adventurers who likewise were not yet being bogged down by paperwork and monotony. I reached 10th level and my reward isn't to become a better adventurer, it's to pick up something that's going to hinder my adventures unless I deliberately scale myself back.Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that realm-level play can be great fun for some people. But if your goal is to create a character who achieves great and legendary things like mythical heroes of old, then realm-level play hinders you, it doesn't help.
>>93421953No, I can't. Because time spent controlling the crime syndicate is time not spent gaining XP and thus abilities and appropriately powerful treasure.
>>93421980>>93421996It's supposed to be a phase that a campaign goes through as it progresses to becoming epic. Your aspiration is just going to end up feeling like going through the same 5 room dungeons you went through at 1st level only with bigger numbers.
>>93422029The phase being called, what, "the doldrums"? Because 3e onwards was absolutely right to cut that phase out and just have your character become gradually more epic, with more abilities, items, and options open to them even as they face monsters, traps, and challenges that are likewise more complex.
>>93422069No it wasn't. That's how you end up visiting cities where the chump city guards are 16th level fighters and that makes no kind of rational sense.
>>93422242In the City of Brass the chump city guards don't need to be 16th level fighters. They're efreeti. They're 10 HD with an AC of 2 and a THAC0 of 11, and Champion morale. Not to mention a bunch of innate spells like gaseous form, invisibility, wall of fire, polymorph self, and a natural fly speed. The City of Brass is expressly described in the efreeti's entry of the 2e Monstrous Manual as having "an efreet population that far outnumbers the great cities of the Prime Material Plane".
>>93422342And exactly how many levels do you think you should progress through with the City of Brass as your center of operations?
>>93422420The City of Brass isn't a center of operations. It's a dungeon that has some relatively pleasant parts ot it just like most dungeons. The efreeti and their servants and slaves (magmin, azers, genasi, jann, red dragons, fire giants, elementals, etc.) are the wandering monsters. The Charcoal Palace is the center. Marrake al-Sidan is the boss, and his treasure vault is the prize.Now you tell me how 14 4th level chucklefucks are supposed to help me here.
>>93422459Again, they help you make the progression between 10th and 20th level.
>>93422518How? We already established that anything that is reasonably challenging for me to attempt is absolutely deadly for them. My adventuring career will necessarily slow down if I bring them along on the kinds of adventures my 10th level person should be going on.At 9th level I was facing things like dragons, frost giants and, heck, maybe even an efreeti or two. Now that I hit 10th level I have to scale back to goblins and kobolds again, or else risk losing any or all of my 14 chucklefucks, forever.
>>93422601How much in-world time does it take you to progress from 1st to 20th level?
>>93422661Varies from DM to DM. There is no hard and fast rule in 2e. The PHB says that the DM "may" require a few weeks of training to represent gaining a new level, but the DM is just as likely to not require any training at all and you level up as soon as you have the experience.So in other words, accounting for travel time between adventure sites, it could be as little as a matter of weeks (for DMs who allow immediate level-ups and have the adventure taking place in a single megadungeon, and so the only thing that needs to be taken into account is resting/recovering for hp and spells) to as long as many years (for long campaigns taking place across a huge area and with DMs requiring weeks of training to gain levels).
>>93421834Funnily enough, I ran that exact thing happening like twenty sessions ago in my current campaign.
>>93422029Excuse me, what the fuck is druid doing?
>>93406584WotC thinks the primary D&D audience only wants fantasy superheroes, and if you pretend otherwise you're not paying attention.
>>93422809Murdering his way up the hierarchy of druids instead of earning adventure XP.
>>93422795MOTHERFUCKER WHY WASN'T I THERE.
>>93422820Batman is a superhero too
>>93422723Gamebreakingly ludicrous without presumption of "chosen one" special snowflakism >>93422809Once a 1e Druid has finished doing >>93422828, he then gives up all XPs and takes up a new class from zero - but it is effectively a hyper-druid with bonus planeswalking abilities. AD&D is a trip.>>93422820Ikr
>>93423179>Gamebreakingly ludicrous without presumption of "chosen one" special snowflakismYou asked, I answered. RAW, there are no hard rules, so any argument based on a presumption of time passing is flawed from the start.
>>93423507No, you've accurately described the implication of RAW 5e - which is that adventurers progress from level 1 to level 20 in about 5 weeks worthy of recommended Adventuring Days. Counterpoint - that's dumb.
>>93423535How dumb or not dumb it is is irrelevant since I’ve been consistently talking about 2e and the overall thread is about realm-level play which at least at the moment isn’t a thing in 5e. This particular line of conversa to on has specifically been about my first post/the first post in the thread where I pointed out that realm-level play isn’t particularly enticing because it actually inhibits adventure rather than helps it, and so far no one has been able to really demonstrate otherwise.
>>93423535 >>93425676Oh, wait, I think I see the disconnect. In >>93422723 you thought I was referring to 5e, didn’t you? I wasn’t. I was talking about 2e. The 2e AD&D PHB and DMG don’t give hard and fast rules for how fast characters can/should level and whether or not training is involved, only a suggestion. So theoretically an AD&D campaign going from 1st level to 20th level could take a matter of just a few weeks to a couple months of in-game time, with the only pauses being for resting to recover spells/hit points and, in the case of wizards, to scribe scrolls into the spellbook, which depending on the dungeon they might not even need to leave the dungeon to do.Rather notably the 2e adventure Night Below: an Underdark Campaign is presumed to take place over only a few weeks to a couple months at most but takes the characters from 1st to 14th level, so this is even a playstyle officially supported by TSR.
>>93425676>>93425825There's no way in hell you can level up that fast in 2e
Why would a system about fantasy capeshit have rules for a defunct game mode basically no one who is still playing the game ever does?
>>93425825Try beating Night Below. It's damn near impossible to defeat every encounter
>>93426095Find me the rule that says you can’t. Especially assuming a party that doesn’t have mages or bards (and thus no one who needs to spend time scrolls), there’s really no reason you can’t level up as fast as you can defeat monsters, heal up, and then go and defeat more. And by really no reason I mean “I was literally just reading the book earlier today and it says that spending weeks of training in order to gain a level is a suggestion, not a rule.”
>>93406584Nil. Almost nobody actually used them. Even in Gary's original group, domain ay wasn't a focus. They went on deadlier dungeoncrawls like the Tomb or Horrors or D-series.They omitted the exploration rules, so there will be no Domain rules - or they'll be implemented in a very Forge-y storygame-y manner
>>93426114Yeah. It's not like 2013-4 when the OSR was doing cool stuff. That scene is fucking dead, so there's no real reason for WotC to court them like they did in early 5e and the NEXT Playtest
>>93426278You don’t need to defeat every encounter to still gain levels extremely rapidly, which is the point I was making. That goal post was fine where it was, thanks.
>>93426281The laws of time and space?>>93426351You could defeat every single encounter in all of Night Below and still not progress to level 18 in 2e.
>>93423013Probably because I don’t know you and thus wasn’t going to invite you into my living room. Though, if you live within two hours of Montreal, you should be even more disappointed. Because then it was actually possible.
>>93427247Given that Night Below is only supposed to take you to level 14, that’s less than meaningless. As for the laws of time and space, the actual stated Rules As Written in the PHB allow for the instant gaining of XP and the instantly leveling up, if the DM wants. There is *no* hard rule that going from level 9 to 10 or whatever should take weeks or months or years. Sure, you *can* run it that way, and you can run 3e and 4e and 5e that way too. But there’s no actual rule mandating it, so any argument based in it is flawed from the start.Don’t worry, you’re not the first grog I’ve met who doesn’t know the system half as well as he thought he did. It’s a common affliction.>>93427284Nah, I live in Massachusetts.
>>93427916Rule Zero says you can do whatever the fuck you want - but you probably shouldn't if you want integrity in your game. Thanks for making it abundantly clear why you don't give a fuck about gameplay through mid-high levels though.
>>93427983Don’t think that I haven’t noticed that this whole thing is just a tangent that you’ve launched to distract from the fact that I pointed out the problem with domain play - it inhibits rather than helps higher-level adventures because the same things that are challenging to a 10th level character are a dire threat to 4th level characters, so say nothing of what happens as you painstakingly crawl from 10th to 11th level and so on. Where before you were fighting young dragons, giants, and even the occasional efreeti, now you’re back to focusing on bandits and kobolds and maybe the odd ogre because that’s all that your cadre of 4d6 chucklefucks can survive against, especially seeing as there are no mechanics for replacing them.Until you address this fundamental problem, you have no argument.
>>93428487The fundamental problem is that it becomes silly for 10th+ level characters to keep doing the same thing they've ever done only with bigger numbers. Your solution seems to be "just hand wave those levels" and there are a number of OGL d20 systems like SotDL that solve it by just removing those levels entirely but I think most people would like to have some meaningful options.
>>93428541> The fundamental problem is that it becomes silly for 10th+ level characters to keep doing the same thing they've ever done only with bigger numbers.Evidently not, given the direction of gaming over the past 50 years suggesting that this is exactly what the majority of playgroups want. Even if we ignore the entire WotC lineup of D&D games, how many 1e and 2e games do you think *actually* did anything with domain play? It can’t have been that many seeing as TSR kept publishing high-level adventures that didn’t do much to consider it.
>>93428739The lack of mid-high level adventures throughout the entire history of the game is perhaps the best demonstration that there is a need for compelling gameplay at those levels.
>>93428756Is there really that much of a lack? - Against the Giants was for characters 6-12 - Descent Into the Depths of the Earth is 9-14 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits was 10-14 - Expedition to the Barrier Peaks was 8-12 - Tomb of Horrors was 10-14 - Night Below was 1-14 - Swords of the Undercity was 8-12 - Swords of Deceit was 10-15 - Conan Unchained! was 10-14 - Conan Against the Darkness was 10-14 - Almost every one of the CoM series assumed at least 15 as the starting level, excepting only The Tree of Life (elves only, 8+) - The entire DA (Blackmoor) adventures assumed 10-14 - Dragons of Truth was 10-13 - Dragons of Triumph was 10-14 - Mists of Krynn was 0-15 - Bloodstone Pass was 13-17 - The lowest starting level for the H series was 13 I think I'm done here, but there's still tons more I could list out that either were set entirely in the 10-15 or higher range; or which start at low level but advance to high level during the course of play. And almost none of them take "domain play" into account other than making occasional note of the fact that the PCs might have followers who can do this or that task or serve as a source of replacement characters in the event of PC death.
>>93426351Np
>>93428963Protip: When you use adventure lookup to attempt to make a point you should put in the effort to remove the entries that are very much about Domain style play, which is the entire CoM series, Blackmoor and, I think, most of those Conan modules on your list. GDQ is supposed to conclude the A-T-GDQ campaign and Night Below is its own campaign.The H series is basically the only canonical mid-high level campaign and its widely lambasted for exactly the sort of implausible "mundane epic" tone I'm talking about.
>>93429936Blackmoor’s adventures aren’t domain play. DA1 Adventures in Blackmoor is a dungeon delve that sends the PCs back in time to when their domains wouldn’t even exist; DA2 is Temple of the Frog which is just a classic dungeon crawl; DA3 is another time travel episode where player domains are invalidated; and DA4 is basically just a riff on Return of the King where the party goes to a place to destroy an evil artifact, no domains required.
>>93429936Oh, but anyway, you didn’t talk about what the adventures were actually about or how they played out, you just talked about a “lack”. I named a dozen and could easily have named a dozen more. TSR blatantly gave PCs a chance to play with their NPCs chucklefucks following them around, and just as blatantly it can’t have been all that popular because TSR moved away from them and focused more on lower-level adventures, or high-level adventures where NPCs were nothing more than people following the PCs around in dungeon crawls serving as cannon fodder.
