Why did domain level play fall out of style?
>>97837556Nobody bought the AD&D domain level modules, and the attempt to reintroduce it in 2E flopped commercially.
Management is a niche compared to just adventuring and doing cool things. I like strategy and management games but even I am not sure I would enjoy such a playstyle right after work.
If you can point me to people who want to play Accountants&Advocates or Bureaucrats&Bean Counters, then you'll have the people who are interested in "domain level play" in the cockeyed fashion we've often seen it. People will happily play lords or even kings if it means making broad policy decisions or making judgments in times of crisis, but the day-to-day business is considerably less exciting in a TTRPG format as opposed to a video game, with the drudgery being passed on to either the GM or the players. There's a right way to domain play, and a problem is that many games with domain rules took a far too simulationist approach and that's how you rob the fun out of having a domain.
>>97837748Thing is, if you look at real life "adventurers" you will see that these avenues go hand in hand; these men were often merchants or feudal claimants, or eleventh sons looking to carve out a fiefdom.Real life "Adventurers" showed up in ships, with entourages and envoys, and maybe a small army, and are as likely to sack a few port-towns as they are to entreat with the local authorities.Vikings, Conquistadores, Mercenaries, Migratory tribal warlords.
>>97837901And real life adventures died mostly from diarrhea. Diarrhea was a huge problem in the ancient world, and still is a huge problem today in many parts, though most people try to spare the poor folk who died by it by saying they died due to "poor water" or "fever" or any number of things other than "they shat themselves to death."You've got to know what pieces of real life you actually want to include in games, and what parts are best left out.
>>97837941I don't think sacking an island of primitives to turn them into coconut picking serfs for your coconut matting and tinned coconut water empire is equitable to dying of the runs, but there should totally be a table of parasites and diseases to roll on for drinking from dutty water.
>>97837901That's just playing fantasy rogue trader, you don't bean count but give orders and look dashing while doing the cool shit.
>>97837556Because all the bookkeeping rules that come with domain play are utterly meaningless in a game. The threats to your domain will always be what seems appropriate to the GM.So you spend 20 cumulative hours building up your fief, then you get to play the lame little wargame that abstracts your dozens, hundreds or thousands of soldiers into 5-12 little tokens and, wooow, so worth it.
>>97837556The rules weren't good. Not only were they boring, but often they just made no sense.
>>97837556Because you might as well play a board game about that. Plus DnD rules for domain play are notoriously shite and all retroclones reflect that even further.
>>97837556It never was in style to my knowledge. Birthright was one of the worst-selling settings in the history of the game.
>>97837901>muh real life!>followed by an utterly ridiculous claimSpoken like a true never-game
>>97837556Bad rules + bad theme + bad gameplay + lackluster concept to begin with.This really isn't rocket science. If not for OSR faggots, nobody would even care about this shit for over 40 years
>>97838333made for a badass PC game though
>>97838388Yeah, appealing to Steve, Bob and Joey. And a decade later, also Dave. Very good and successful game
>>97838388It was alright.
>>97837556DnD usually struggles with things not related to dungeon crawling. Being the master of a domain doesn't really jive with that. It's the same reason that hirelings are so rare.
>>97837556It was boring and to much accounting for most folks
>>97837561Birthright?
>>97838346You don't know who Pizarro is, you don't know about the birth of the Rus, or the expansion of the Cossacks into central Asia. And you have no appreciation of the scramble for africa, or the entire colonial era.Shit, WIlliam The Conqueror was an archetypal "Adventurer" as were crusaders who established states like Outremer and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and various Islamic leaders who used mostly familial tribal armies and their personal wealth to finance their conquests.So kindly shut up, retard.
>>97838217Duh, so you abstract away the shitwork by offloading it to menial npc's, until a player takes an interest in how a particular aspect of the operation is run.
>>97837875We're playing that, and we NEED a 14+ excel spreadsheet per player...But once you do, it is actually quite fun.
>>97837556>oldschoolers wanted to keep looting tombs instead of doing realm simulations>newschoolers wanted to keep doing narrative arcs instead of doing realm simulationsShrimple
>>97838329Personally, I like a game with significant downtime. I find a settlement management with crisis you can try to solve (and must for it not to devolve) at an adventure level to be fun.And not every player has to do it either. Some might open shop in said settlement and craft / trade items, spy on visitors, run a thieves' guild, work on lower level politics or even help organize the military.
>>97837556I don't think it ever really was in style. B/x sold a lot more copies than the original boxed set did, and those stopped before any kind of domain management started. I'd guess that most people who played b/x or red box probably never got much past that.
>>97839323Hitting name level back then was genuinely an accomplishment, but I think most players opted for the "traveling" character options rather than the base-building. Or at least, let one player become the landed noble while everyone else mooched off of him.
>>97837556>Implying it was even in style.It wasn't.
>>97839381Yup. As much as grogs like to pretend it was some integral part of the game that got killed for no reason, in reality it got taken out because so few people gave a damn about it that it wasn't worth wasting space in the books on.
>>97837556It required that you'd already be into wargaming hobby. (and that you owned lots of minis)
>>97837556Because it's a flawed game idea. The people that want to play a single adventurer don't want the "reward" to be that they stop doing it, and the people that want to manage shit don't want to have to slog through playing a pleb being stabbed by goblins.The increase in scope sounds cool, but a change in the basic game is going to put off almost everyone that liked the game as it was.
>>97839093Birthright flopped commercially, yes.
