>players receive their own castle / lands and some degree of social prominence Is this a bad idea? Does it really kill the whole appeal of being adventurers to be given a whole castle and some responsibility?
>>98194570I think stuff like this is awesome, My character got to be ruler of an entire city once and as a foreverGM I've been waiting for the day I can give My players something similar
>>98194570It will radically change the tone & flow of the game if they were just murderhoboing around, so the GM and players should be ready for that. It's like your out-of-touch great aunt giving you a puppy for your birthday.
>>98194570What you need is a fully fleshed a rule system for domain level play The likes of which can only be found in ACKS
>>98194570Nah it can be awesome. It gives the players something to do w/ NPCs and treasure. Lets them express themselves and tell little side stories and develop their RP stuff. I always try to give my players a home base of some kind. Maybe it's the inn in the main city. Maybe their ship if we're sailing/spelljamming. In a previous game it was a dairy that they saved from some ankheg and just sorta got into and rennovated and got to know the NPCs at for shits and giggles.>Does it really kill the whole appeal of being adventurers to be given a whole castle and some responsibility?Only to the extent that you and the players want it to. Give 'em a castellan and a seneschal, because A) those are fun titles and B) then they only have to take responsibility for it to the extent that you guys are having fun w/ it.
>>98194570Domain playing using ACKS is peak Gygaxian OSR D&D
>>98194780Lol I love that OSR bros are trying to reintroduce these but honestly? Strongholds and followers were dropped because no one ever played with them. It's not fun. If you want a castle for your players, RP it. Don't try to use rules to govern and incoporate it. It's sloggy and dull.
>>98194570No it has been a thing since the 70's newfriend.
>>98194797So how many times have you tried it?
>>98194570>players receive their own castle / lands and some degree of social prominence Gay and retarded>players take their own castle / lands and some degree of social prominenceCool and rad
>>98194570If they're not theater kids but came here to smash doors and skulls then make sure it's in a time of great turmoil where every bandit leader calls himself a proper warlord. /v/ and /tg/ RPG are all about rising to power so don't hardland them if they never asked for it.
>>98194570Makes sense if you think about it, especially if it's some barely profitable frontier province. Think about it from the perspective of the king (or infamous local lord): that land wasn't earning you any money anyway, is constantly under attack and maybe the murderhobos will keep out other murderhobos.See also: Normandy.
>>98194570It's only a bad idea if your party is simply too uninvested to give a shit. "blah blah blah my character doesn't care about titles" okay cool, so negotiate? Accept it and turn to the clearly corrupt merchant advisor with a wink and a nod and boom, suddenly no title, and very much moneyIf your players aren't creative enough to step into something this simple, its not really your problem as a DM. If they aren't mouth breathing slackjawed animals, they will think it's rad as fuck, they will show up to every social calling in their posh velvet lined cloaks and insist the heralds announce them by their full hereditary title every time some inbred assfuck nobleman tries to ego them even if they don't want to play house with an imaginary castle setIf they do want it, but feel like it will make their character stop adventuring, all you'd have to do is remind them that MANY feudal adventurers who gained lands still spent 80% of their time riding off to crack skulls and drink the local vintages dry. Achieving your goals just means you get to set higher goals and if they TRULY cannot be fucked to keep playing the character, then the boredom was deeper than just this single scenario and they needed to roll a fresh character anyway
>>98194570my players basically got howls moving castle and it's worked out great
>>98195014Haha, many. I am very old. It was the default rules, anon.
>>98194570>is this a bad idea?Can be, if your players aren't interested in managing a castle and territory its going to turn into chores for them. How good at keeping up with their character sheet are they? Do they remember most of the rules or do you have to play the game for them? The appeal is going to be to players who already like wargames and/or political history and that sort of area. Helps if they're readers. If they're more into the action side of the game or hack & slashing their way through problems its probably not going to land. Some players who like puzzle solving sort of games can find it interesting at first and if you can keep up with theoretical challenges. There are a few different systems for handling domain play, some more abstract some more granular, what sort of game are you playing in the first place? A lot of the meme ideas around this are built on misunderstanding across various editions and generations, further exacerbated by youtube.
>>98195188>If they aren't mouth breathing slackjawed animals, they will think it's rad as fuckyou don't get to define what other people find fun anon.
>>98194570You need to give them a loyal and trustworthy majordomo or else they're going to feel like if they ever leave they're going to have all their shit taken away.
>>98196048They're not defining what other people find fun, they're calling people who don't enjoy what they enjoy retarded, at which point they'll enjoy whatever other tings retards do. Try and keep up.
>>98194570I member my one and only campaign of dnd5e was that dragonheist game.I don't know how it actually goes but the gm kept trying to force us to care about a shitty tavern we were forced to accept as reward of a quest from volo (we were promised gold).No one gave a single shit about the tavern and the gm just ghosted everyone after 4 sessions. Which was a good thing I hated the skill system.
>>98194570It has to be the right group, and whatever you give them should be an absolute pit/money sink. Plus you as a GM need to be able to generate interesting adventures around it that don't boil down to trying to take their sweetroll constantly. Works best with groups who know each other and like one another.
>>98194570>recieveIf they don’t take it by force or build it they won’t appreciate it.Burning you have a player who can’t make sessions regularly because they’re busy/schedule you might consider running a side game for him a couple hours a week where he’s managing a home base that will actually affect the campaign. It’s be grounded because players wouldn’t actually be able to communicate directly through him except through messages in-game so he’s making decision based only on what he knows and has to make assumptions on where/what the others will be doing in-game.
>>98194570you either die a morderhobo or live long enough to see yourself become the local lord
>>98194780so it is a bad idea, then.
>>98195188christ you're dull
>>98196109Ironic.
>>98194570I think giving the players a base of operations is essential to establish the setting. In the best campaign I ever played the GM gave the adventurers a big empty manor and had some homebrewed rules about designing the rooms (like adding a library, a laboratory, etc) and it was great for "dropping off" NPCs and also parking the PCs for players who were going to not play. I've never played OSR style domain management stuff, however.
I'm in this situation right now, as a DM. I want to try out the Pathfinder domain rules and as a result I'm doing an "intro adventure" levels 1 to 5 where the PCs are trapped in a bad situation and have to fight their way out, and in doing so, they perform a very visible heroic act with many who will be proud of them. Word will spread, the characters will gain prestige and admiration, and the king will see that as a threat to his rulership, and thus he will "reward" them for their service with ownership of an old crumbling castle in the far north, with a small village, which they can start to manage from there, while also fighting off the totally-not-Mongol horse nomad raiders and their pet dinosaurs, shamans, hobgoblin/orc allies, and other war beasts. There will be an interesting BBEG "greater power" to defeat, just like a normal campaign, but getting their village and castle into shape will be helpful for defending it against siege.Only problem is, Pathfinder is only viable related to the real world til like level 9. After that, there is no point to having a castle or followers or land or anything because you can just magick anything you want into existence and conjure your own fucking demiplane to live on instead. So basically I will have to slow down advancement a lot to get what I want out of the campaign.
>>98194570Holy shit you loser, this stuff was part of the basic assumptions of D&D until retards like you stopped playing the actual game
>>98196824It faded away pretty quickly, anon. It was always ignored by the majority of tables. The myths that OSR-bros tell themselves about "real" D&D are pretty silly.
>>98196850"modern" players hate bookkeeping, and running an estate is all about bookkeeping
>>98196866It wasn't, really. It was about morale checks. Old D&D didn't have rules to handle much more than morale and wages. There weren't complex rules around provisioning and economies, or anything.
>>98194570I know this is an ACKS shill. I dont play OSR and I am sure it is a garbage game regardless, but i will answer the question. Domain level gameplay is stupid and ruins all the fun unless thats the very purpose of the game. Adventurers becoming kings should be the player retiring the character. Kings have no reason to be running around doing adventure, they have an army and hire adventurers to do so.It always felt silly, like someone forgot the game they are trying to play.
>>98196910Did Conan's adventures totally stop when he became king by his own hand? And he's the archetype of the adventurer to responsible leader story.
>>98196932Your PC becoming a king and getting a castle has nothing to do with "now let's switch to domain level play and follower rules and mass combat." Those ideas are not connected to one another unless you want them to be.
>>98196932As the other anon said, becoming king has nothing to do with domain level rules. Those are a hinderence to the rest of the game and never go well. Your king can still go to face a dragon to save his people or open a path for trade between his nation and another.
>>98194570I fucking love Neverwinter Nights 2. It should've gotten a sequel instead of that Pillars of Eternity garbage.
>>98197294>>98197042Not according to Gygax and Macris. You don't know shit about D&D.
>>98194570The problem is the responsibility, just make them a count or baron or whatever and let them hire hirelings for the actual work.
>>98197373That's false. D&D never had those rules. It had morale and "I dunno roll some followers" and "here's wages." It did not have mass combat or domain level management rules. Those weren't introduced into D&D until Battlesystem, well after Gygax left, which quickly flopped.You don't know what you're talking about.
>>98197303my brother in kalach-cha, one day it will get the respect it deserves
>>98197391Alexander Macris says otherwise and he's the foremost OSR scholar and expert on Gygaxian D&D. Why should I listen to you over him? That's right, I shouldn't.
There is literally nothing wrong in giving your party a homebase and a little land. Nobody even said they have to be a king. They can just be wealthy nobles or whatever. Just have a seneschal or some other nerd run things while they're off adventuring so they don't have to worry about it.
>>98194570No, it's great. Stuff like that gets the players more invested, assuming they were invested in any way in the first place.
>>98196048Yes, you can. Just like how every fat person and/or drug addict is a moral failure because they have no impulse control, just like how despite being 13 percent blacks commit 50% of all crimes, just like how Trump supporters are retarded and master of mental gymnastics to justify being grifted, just how all anyone who believes in yahweh/god/mohammad is a fucking retard - you can make the assumption that someone who doesn't enjoy a gift of land in a fantasy RPG is a fucking retarded faggot who should immediately kill themselves.
>>98197429Except Trump supporters are the most likely roleplayers to enjoy domain level play and Alexander Macris himself loves Trump
>>98197405Don't listen to either of us. Read a book you dipshit. Go open the rules and read them.
Who are the oldest archetypes of fantasy adventurers? Knights. What did knights have? Estates, land, castles, fortresses. Lancelot had a whole ass castle and that nigga was always questing.
>>98197589Well no. Our oldest epic story about an adventurer is about a king. And Lancelot didn't have a castle in the older stories--he was specifically an orphaned prince not in power. And his stories are only about 800 years old at the oldest.
>>98197429Impressively wrong, great job lol
>>98197589Gilgamesh had no castle but a city. I don't think walls or whatever are described, tough he is the one building them for Uruk in later steles IIRC.
>>98197405oh good, purity-spiral schitzo has arrived
Wasn't it a thing in the old games where Martials got like castles and dojos and shit but it was a gold sink and you were better off acquiring magical items?
>>98197447Weird how the Acks writer likes his product and that style of play.Could be easy to post a primary source instead of a tertiary one
>>98197657>Gilgamesh had no castle but a city. I don't think walls or whatever are described, tough he is the one building them for Uruk in later steles IIRC.Bro just read it. It's really not that long. There's absolutely no way you actually read the story and don't think walls were described. They're like the very first fucking thing.
>>98197702Basically yes, which is why no one in the TSR era ever actually used those rules. It wasn't necessarily a "gold sink" so much as just boring and pointless. There were enough rules that a DM could annoy you with them, but no rules that actually enabled you to do anything.
>>98197808I did, I admit I didn't remember them.
>>98197657Gilgamesh is basically all about walls, anon. Enkidu dies because they went to get wood for walls.
>>98196910>I know this is an ACKS shill.There is something deeply, deeply wrong with these dumb fucks.
>>98197832Well, the walls are one of the single most important symbols in it. They are a metaphor for the entire conflict. Just like in virtually every bronze age story, where they symbolize the boundary between the city (order) and the wild (chaos) and the entire point is that the good guys are good because order is good and things from outside are scary and bad until you give them hookers and beer (no seriously: that's part of the story).
>>98194570not only is it not a bad idea, it's actually a pretty good idea to give the players a home base.any player with non-zero investment into the game is going to eat that shit up, and any player with zero or sub-zero investment into the game is not worth having at your table in the first place.the best part is you don't even need to be that involved in tracking its status or turn it into full-on "domain scale play" (tabletop Crusader Kings), just give the players a home base and things they can do to improve and/or maintain it.
I don't want land. Having that kind of responsibility keeps me from what I want to do, which is going on adventures and killing monsters
>>98197373I dont care about gygax or macris, hell i dont even know who macris is. Irrelevant to the fact domain-level rules in a game about fantasy adventurers slaying monsters are bad for the game.
>>98198032You're talking to the ACKShill, the dumbest troll on this board.Ignore him, he's absolute cancer.
>>98198032Macris is a weird queer who ran a really dumb company that promoted a gay troll.He's gotten himself and his game banned from several sites for trying to shill his game and threatening anyone who said negative things about him.That game is an autistic mess that copied a 60 page game but bloated it to more than a thousand pages, and filled it with AI slop but tried to pass it off as human art.Think of the dumbest possible heartbreaker-style designer, inflate his ego and make him have zero morals or integrity, and you should have a pretty good understanding of the guy.
>>98198118You will never be a woman
>>98194570two words: Crossroad KINO
>>98194570My current DM gave all of our characters some land. I don't think any of us have ever even seen our estates. They were rewards for helping against an apocalyptic army of undead. But, we haven't really had any time to breath, as it's been all we can do to slow their advance. We all kind of view it like a retirement plan for our adventurers. It gives us a little more skin in the game, something a bit more personal to be fighting for.
>>98198840This is the way to do it. Let them see it, but don't make it a major part of the campaign besides a few small boons here and there.
High test players love it, low test players squirm at the mention of it
Gygaxian D&D requires domain level play. All research into OSR points to this fact. Alexander Macris has a great blogpost about this.
>>98194570>>98194570>Is this a bad idea?Completely, 100% depends on the setting, system and current campaign you're running.
>>98194570I'm currently playing a campaign like this and it's the most fucking boring shit ever. DM had prepared so much and was so enthusiastic about it that I'll stick to the end anyway (thankfully, it's soon).
>>98194570Domain play been around since forever it fell when people only did small campaigns (1-10) over keeping on in their game world and giving reason for your characters to keep going or being allow to retire and start a new one without killing them off.ACKS does it, SAKE does it, Pendragon does it, C&C does it. Just because WOTC D&D didn't do it doesn't mean no one does it.Yes not everyone does it. However, most people don't even do combat or magic right and just let them cast for free and not track anything outside of spell slots. (How many people bother tracking their spell components, arrows, throwing knifes, etc)
>>98194570Back in the BECMI-era D&D that would be a great idea. These days I imagine most players would sell the place and go back to going into holes to kill sub-human minstrosities and spend their gains on frivolities.
>>98199616What makes it boring?Lack of violent action?Too much book keeping?
>>98199574thanks for letting me know to avoid it!
>>98194570Can I ask a stupid question?What do you actually DO with the castle / lands and social prominence or whatever? Like, how does it actually help our characters?I mean, it's not like I can take a hundred soldiers into a dungeon, and they're all cannon-fodder against something that could give the party an even fight.Also, the castle's a money-sink and it's not like we get any benefit out of it. So why would we even bother?
>>98194570Depends on the game and what engages your players.
I'm planning to make this the whole point of my next game, which will also be the first TTRPG for two playersThe players will start off as hired hands working for some more skilled adventurers who are trying to kill a dragon that has taken up residence in a dungeon. Over the course of the first session, the dragon will kill all the more experienced NPCs, but will get badly injured in the process, and it'll be up to the players to actually finish it off. Once they do, the king who hired the group will recognize the players as "dragonslayers" and deed them a castle and a town. The players now have a reputation they want to keep but cannot uphold.Once the players reach the castle and town, they'll find out no one has been lord of it in decades, and they'll have to clear out the monsters that have taken up residence in the castle and the wilderness surrounding the town. Focus will be more on that than on town management or playing Castle Tycoon 1066 or whatever.
>>98194570Depends on the level of responsibility and the scale of play. Are you playing individual heroes where you actually have to manage shit in your realm for no gain besides status for roleplay? Yeah it kind of sucks. If you can handwave management or put a steward in charge of management it's okay, or if the game is less about being individual heroes it's okay because the domain comes with more power. Now instead of four vagrants with decent weapons and armor you have realms, you can raise small armies for war. Suddenly you can have ten knights and a couple dozen lesser retainers to help you fight.
>>98194570As soon as 4e came out I came to the conclusion that any one playing a warlord would gain a fief. Now at least one person plays a Warlord every campaign. (Yes we are still playing 4e).
>>98194570The best thing to do in an evil campaign is to give them a town/people.They suddenly become VERY protective of their charges because its their property not just random NPCs anymore
>>98200611I think you are supposed and expected to get more involved in the setting. Engage in intrigue, politics and warfare. Sponsor new murderhobos for minor hassles, develop your domain and only occastionally ride forth to take on truly worthy foes.
>>98194570I remember once you got Crossroad Keep that new adventuring band of retards would show up and jump the gun on every task you told them but eventually they became heroes too.
>>98200611>the castle's a money-sink Why would it be? It's literally just stacks of rocks, no plumbing, no electricity, no fragile materials, nothing to break down. Unless someone actively tries to destroy it, the castles is gonna outlive you
>>98201704>>98200611Not just that, if you're even a minor lord / noble you charge rents for anyone on your land, charge merchants for using the road, tolls, it will make you money if anything
>>98201711That doesn't require a castle
>>98194570It depends. A lot of players want to go on adventures, that means traveling to distant places, not worry about some homestead they're being forced into responsibility for.
>>98202489Sure collecting the money might not require a castle, but storing it kinda does.
>>98200611It is not a stupid question, but it shows a lack of imagination. Having a castle is great! It's yours, and you can do whatever you want with it. >>98201619 Has excellent points. But more importantly, it is *yours*. Store your loot, have a safe place to rest, build a base, build a dungeon of your own, host helpful npcs like blacksmiths, arcanists, scroll manufacturing, clerics and sages! Collect taxes or tribute, raise an army, defend or conquer, start a seige, break a seige, seek out larger and worthier threats! If you want to manage the details, you can. If you don't, then let NPCs like a seneschal do it for you. Castles, and player bases in general, give players narrative control. By investing in them, you expand your options tremendously.
