Just an odd question: In old-school DnD, you eventually get lands and escalate to domain play. That much I get, but I'm wondering - What did domain play actually do, so to speak? How does it benefit the usual 'loop' of going into dungeons, killing things, and coming out with loot? Unless I'm missing something, it seems like a money-sink to me:>Your men-at-arms are weaker than you personally>You can't take them into the dungeon>You need to keep dumping money into your estate / domain to improve itAll that, and it doesn't actually do anything for your character personally, unless I miss my read.
You stop going INTO dungeons, instead you run a country.
>>98814872FPBP
>>98814621Redirect the question to Open OSR, more anons will be able to answer.
>>98814872>your reward for playing well is to stop playing and start an entirely different game
>>98815016>your reward for playing well is to stop playing and start an entirely different gameWell, yes, your reward is having a greater impact on the setting than 'Grug cleaned out the dungeon of Cockmongler the Overlyfond and now the local shepherds lads have had to go back to jacking off like regular folks'.You get to scope out to 'King Grug cleaned out the nearby Slutsvania, the Succubus-Brothel Citystate and now everyone except him has had to go back to jacking off like regular folks'
>>98815016Yes.That's a good reason to play the game you want, and not use bait-and-switch worldbuilding simulators posing as games.
>>98815062Cockmongler the Overlyfond was doing society a favour by stopping the shepherds going all welsh with their charges.
>>98815016D&Dogshit is so bad even it wants you to stop playing D&Dogshit.
>>98815081A civilization cannot sustain itself on mongled cocks alone. You really think the milkmaids were going out there alone every day to pick flowers like they said they were?
>>98815086Said the retard who never played anything.
I think the decline in domain play started with 2nd ed.As far as I know, there was not much of that from then on.
>>98814621Oddly enough, rulership requires more adventuring, questing, and dungeon delving:>You can't just plop a fortress down wherever. This requires either permission from some sort of ruler, or a petition. Or it requires you to clear out a suitable place in unclaimed lands. (In any case, a leader doesn't give peaceful lands to someone. He gives borderlands, recently ruined lands, or contested regions.)>Several sessions must be dedicated to exploring and finding the right spot for a keep>Go through that region either roleplaying with any locals (if there are any) and letting them know you're their new lord. Some won't take too kindly to this!>If your DM is doing their job, there will likely be dungeons somewhere in this territory that requires investigation.>You're playing an oldschool game, you're not just using 1 character, you're likely sending some of your underlings or low level characters from your stable to go check it out>Building the keep itself isn't done overnight, or even in a few months. A castle takes years to build. And while it's being built, it likely attracts nearby hostile forces>All of this takes money. LOTS of money. However much you think it takes, it takes more! Where do you get more money? Dungeons.>Every week or month that goes by, your DM should be keeping track of exact time and world events. He should be rolling on a set of tables to see if anything is happening as time progresses>Now that your keep is built and you have a small settlement, the complaints come in. Because you're an inexperienced lord you must go settle these disputes yourself. "Something's eating all the livestock on Shepherd's Road!" or "Some kids were playing over by the river, and one of them found an old cave! A bunch of gray men came out and kidnapped him!" If you take care of these things, your settlement appreciates it. If you ignore them or fail, it starts to decline>Assign a steward to take care of your lands while you're out adventuring.Continued
>>98815400Continued>Finding the right Steward might be a quest on it's own. You could travel to distant lands seeking just the right person you can trust with the job. By doing so, it assures that your DM isn't going to pull some "backstabby" bullshit because you took the time to properly vet them>Resources that make a region lucrative are not easily gained. A doesn't just create perfectly formed chunks of silver, like in a video game. You need to build a surrounding fortification, a refinery and workshop for smelting, and it needs to be protected. Then you need to build a safe road back and forth between it. This goes for any resources your lands generate. And all of this is VERY expensive>Because all of this is so difficult to build and maintain and finally turn into a profit, it makes it a huge target to your neighbors. Now the "Political" game starts>Your DM will be keeping track of political factions on all sides of your land. Which ones want your shit, which ones want to form alliances, and which ones want to kill you and take your women as slaves.>All of these neighbors also have dungeons and places to explore. There's a lot of intrigue and council meetings, sure. But there's also a lot of dungeon delving. "The people of Mulderlund have been disgraced and honor can only be restored when the Sapphire Chalice is returned to their Queen! Whoever claims it would certainly form an alliance!">You'll notice that the gravity, weight, and power level of each adventure scales higher and higher. Again, you'll send your lower levels mooks to handle ordinary things and missions. But the slaying of dragons, investigation of flying castles, and war with the ogre-prince? Those will require your main dude to go out and take care of>If you're doing it right, full-scale wargaming with formations of units will be deployed, but even here there are delves to be hand. "We've sieged the Castle of Red Shadow... But first we must claim the dungeon beneath!"Continued
>>98815460continuedSo, you have a successful domain. You have a keep, and some settlements, and you've managed to defend it against your nasty neighbors. What next?>Establishing trade routes. Sending scouting parties to foreign lands for the sake of profit and lucrative gains. Reputation alone is rarely enough to get the cooperation of a merchant's guild. They will likely require some sort of quest done before a route can be made (or else it would have already been done!) Once you do this, they become targets to banditry. Gotta clear out them bandit lords>Humanity's favorite passtime is war. Maybe you want to start sending spies and war parties out to your neighbors to see what they've got. Or maybe you just want their land! This all requires more dungeon delving. "Well, we took half the city of Ashkur, but the other half has been fortified, has a keep on it, and a bunch of enemy forces are barricaded down in the sewers..."After all of this, lets say that you've had a very successful campaign and everything's went good up until this point. Several in-game decades have passed. Certainly, by this point you've encountered some sort of otherworldly strangeness>Explore the planes. Each planar adventure starts this whole loop of adventure and discovery over again>Explore Space! It may be on a spelljammer or a rocket ship, or whatever, but there are more dungeons out there to be had!>Conquer the Underdark! All of this can be done underground too>Complete a Megadungeon. Dungeons are supposed to be infinite. Put your DM in a place where you've conquered so much that he can't come up with anything else>Ascend to godhood! Start doing research in your setting to see how you can become immortal or a demigod. Build huge, arcane and divine structures that let you face the gods themselvesHaving a fortress IMPROVES your ability to progress. It doesn't take away from it.
>>98815016I make a point of making my characters stop paying rent in the black zone and eating kibble, yes
>>98815016>why can't yon king dive direct into the foul hole in yonder hillThis is what having a stable of characters is for, ie. the expected way to run domain play.
>>98814621what’s the best game for domain play today? assuming I want to start as a lowly adventurer and grow over time
Fairly related to the topic, but I've always wanted to run a generational game. My big trouble is always finding a way to comfortably balance the amount of time spent with each generation and longer lived races (and thus theoretically characters).>>98821208I can't imagine there's a "bad" game for it, since domain play is generally an "add-on" to a core system like DnD/PF or what have you.
>>98814621Domain play was tied to the wargame side of things. Players were already building fantasy armies to fight each other with and D&D basically explained where the Heroes, Super Heroes, Lords, Sorcerers and Wizards in their armies came from.>>98822164>I can't imagine there's a "bad" game for it, since domain play is generally an "add-on" to a core system like DnD/PF or what have you.Which is ironic since D&D started out as the add on to a wargame.
>>98814621OP I didn't read the title or text of your post but I wanted to reply to let you know I saved this image
>>98815400>>98815460>>98815526This sounds really fun Anon. The closest I've ever gotten was one time I rewarded My PCs with an old, run-down farmhouse on the outskirts of the city after they had killed a monster. Unfortunately it never went much farther than that and in the years since everybody I've played with has barely gotten past the first couple levels. I dream of My PCs someday having castles and kingdoms of their own, but I think a lot of the fun would be removed if it wasn't truly earned.
>>98814621>What did domain play actually do, so to speak?Nothing. Literally nothing at all. It was just "here's something you can do" with no actual reason to do it.There was a supplement/setting named Birthright for AD&D that focused on domain level play and that might have made it a real thing. I never played it so can't comment on it.
>>98815016Everyone gets promoted exactly one rung further than they should.In this case you go from murderhobo to king of murder
>>98822164>>98822212>no reccs
>>98814621I read that title wrong, thought it said "domina play"
>>98815086Most Buzzwords Spewed Award
>>98815016>your reward for playing well is to stop playing and start an entirely different gameThe “entirely different game” is a lie. In real D&D, you either play pretend and improvise (I.e. storyshitting) or you retire the character and let it be part of the game world for future parties, those are the options. The “domain play” meme was born out of a lot of tortured logic with regards to what should count as “storyshitting”; basically, they memetically reached the conclusion that old D&D was a well-defined skill-based game with no storyshitting, but then somebody actually read old D&D and had to cope with the whole pretending-to-be-a-fantasy-government thing.
>>98815016>your reward for playing well is to stop playing and start an entirely different game>>98814872>You stop going INTO dungeons, instead you run a country.I never reached domain play at the supposed levels (8-10+), I always start doing it when the players are interested, and the king possitions are earned through play. I am always working on some rules for domain play (DND hasnt any) while having normal play sumultaneously. Sadly not a full document right now.
>>98820889Having multiple characters is “not strictly forbidden”, there are no real rules for it, just a sidebar suggesting that you might allow some of your players to do it if they are the better sort of player. But people really like that one because it causes other elements (like downtime activities and level caps) to work out better.I think the best way to use the old domain class features is to say “everyone is loyal and they can run things without you so just keep going on adventures”. There are parts of the rules which imply this but other parts which imply that the keep should be a pain in the ass. And that’s just for fighters; the thief’s “domain” is a hideout wanna-be-thieves-guild on the outskirts of a town that already has a thieve’s guild (so you get a gang war as a class feature). And the Druid’s domain is that he has to run the Druid’s circle. These are retirement narratives.
>>98815175Fair point well made.>>98821208At the risk of summoning the fishfag the domain play in ACKS is actually pretty well built into the rule system.If you want to try something less OSR Mongoose published a book for DnD 3.5 called the Book of Strongholds and Dynasties which I remember being very impressed with twenty years ago.If you want to escape dnd clones and fantasy Traveller has some dynasty and 'kingdom building' rules though you have to combine shit from three separate editions to make it a playable system.
>>98825167People hate ACKs because of all the astroturfing that right-wing culture warriors have done to promote ACKs. Most of the fishfags don’t mind it but I think there’s one who hates it.If we were in /osrg/ right now, most of the old-D&D-related posts in this thread would be deleted, with repeat offenders getting banned for being fishfag. Anyone who contradicts the memes is fishfag.
>>98814872This has more or less always been my problem with domain play, you end up less like Beowulf and more like a real king. Even after gaining kingship a PC should in essence be a Beowulf style warrior king, still going around killing monsters and villains, just having enough support to justify skipping 20 sessions of buildup before fighting the villain.
>>98821208>>98825167>>98825199Seconding the ACKS recommendation. Domain play makes up whole chapters of the rulebooks and there are clearly defined rules for every process.
>>98825291Fishfag prime once said that the best example of D&D domain play he had seen was in Baulder’s Gate 2, because it just gives you choices to make now and then and otherwise stays out of the way, you own an estate but you’re still an adventurer. I think that’s a good point.But I also respect the hell out of ACKs and I hope to try it some day as a player. The game that ACKs wants to be is definitely implied by old D&D, the smooth transition from “thug” to “treasure hunter” to “owner of a small treasure-hunting company” and so on, where lordship just springs naturally out of the logistic side of the game. Ideally, lordship should make adventuring easier, it should solve some of the logistic problems that low-level characters are forced to actively think about (“we’ve got people for that now”). But the fictional precedence says that Conan hates being king and that he had more fun adventuring.
>>98825167>At the risk of summoning the fishfag the domain play in ACKS is actually pretty well built into the rule system.It's built into it, but not anything that could be called "well built".The entire system is a pretty sloppy mess because it's 1500+ pages of rules for the sake of having rules, and it's hard to find a worse example of any particular rule on account of all of them being bloated and poorly constructed. There's never an attempt to consolidate or simplify rules when they could instead be bloated further, so you wind up with a system that has incredibly lengthy procedures with dozens of dice rolls that require constantly looking up different tables while assembling and referencing spreadsheets all just to try to do what other games perform with a few rolls, a chart, and a DM actually using their brain.
