Domain Rules

[MGuy]

I'm not sure about this physics puzzle thing but I really don't see the issue with what Frank is proposing. It seems absolutely reasonable that traditional flyers you care about would be operating within shootable range most of the time. Birds can fly high sure but there's no reason for me to think a pegasus encumbered by a dude in armor with a bow or huge lance would be flying very high. Humans are a big deal because of tools sure but also because endurance. Humans can apparently handle sustained strenuous activity far longer than many other animals. I don't see a person who is using an expensive mount like a pegasus or griffon in a way that would make it likely that they get tired and drop mid flight.

I could also see dragons following this kind of idea as well. The fact that they can even fly if miraculous but that shouldn't mean that it wouldn't be stenuous for them. And being intelligent creatures they would also understand that falling out of the sky is likely a lot more deadly for them than swiping at people with what amounts to tooth picks for them on the ground.

Maybe I'm missing something but while yes, birds can fly higher unencumbered most of those birds you won't care about in game. Any that become important, like if it wants to fight, will have to drop to a range you can engage it at. This is convenient for game balancing yes, but it doesn't break my verisimilitude to believe that most magic flying creatures are operating at low enough ranges that bows are a threat. Maybe not a major threat since it is just a bow, but a threat nonetheless. What is disagreeable about this set up?

[deaddmwalking]

In 3.x, there aren't rules about becoming fatigued as the result of flying - at least, not any more than there are rules for forced marching. If you assume that flying more than 8 hours is the equivalent of a forced march, ONLY THEN does flying become an issue.

Given enough time, and no rules to counter, there is nothing saying you CAN'T fly to heights where the air pressure is non-existent. D&D is also silent on rules about air pressure and altitude, and temperature and altitude. In an Iron Man movie, you have to worry about freezing up if you fly too high - but not in D&D.

In the absence of rules, there are going to be some people who complain that you're shitting on their agency by creating rules that don't exist and limit their ability to break the game.

Even though 3.x doesn't have these rules, any hypothetical domain management system probably should. But for the moment, it's not crazy to say 'assume that SOMEHOW archers on the ground are able to shoot at air-cavalry or air-archers at a disadvantage, but not an UNBEATABLE disadvantage. Maybe it's a combination of using shield walls (minimizing casualties at far range to the point of insignificance), maybe it's the flying opponents aren't THAT high, maybe it's the flyers getting tired and getting ganked the moment they land - whatever - the specific can be left out because this is supposed to be a simplification - if you want to play each archer on both sides round-by-round you wouldn't use the high-level zoom. When you go to individual characters, the results should end up consistent, but for the moment it's enough to say '3.x left a bunch of rules out and we'll plug them in when it matters'.

[Dean]

I think all this flight ceiling talk is kind of missing the forest for the trees. I'm not psychologically opposed to making flight more difficult after 300ft or so but if we're recognizing that we should also recognize that someone shooting arrows from 300ft in the air has huge advantages over an opponent on the ground. They could shoot farther and harder and gravity would reduce enemy bows effectiveness. Pegasi archers could be the horse archers to horse archers and I actually think that's cool.

Horse Archers in general are a tactic that wargamers think is l33t but historically they're just a weird trick you have to get used to. Horse Archers can harass infantry without being attacked in return and that's really cool but they are also incapable of taking territory and that's a huge downside. Archers didn't obviate infantry, horse archers didn't, ballistae didn't, siege engines didn't. You need infantry if you actually want to win any battles so I don't think that super duper horse archers are actually a huge problem.

That being said I think a few good rules would make flying troops more versimilitudinous and fun. Things like carrying capacities (how many arrows can you bring Eagle rider?), and flight times would be cool to know.

Also I think this entire conversation is very very much the definition of why mass battle conversations should be had once the domain game under it can even be looked at. This is why talking about the mass battle mechanics was always gonna get fucked. We're talking about pegasi high altitude flight rules now for fuck sakes. Mass combat is an infinite rabbit hole worthy of 10 of it's own threads, it's not gonna get solved as an afterthought to an already incredibly complex design problem.

[Foxwarrior]

Flying creatures can (obviously) go fast enough to gain a certain amount of altitude, but doing so is analogous to sprinting - they can only maintain that level of exertion for a certain amount of time before they exhaust their oxygen supply.

This is a good point for why going to twice your normally preferred altitude can be more than twice as difficult... but it only works as a hard cap on altitude gain if the creature is so bad at flying it loses more altitude when trying to cruise and take a break than it can gain in a sprint. Which is I guess a fair assertion when talking about absurd bulky fliers like pegasi and dragons, although I'll note that dragons usually really like to soar.

You need infantry if you actually want to win any battles so I don't think that super duper horse archers are actually a huge problem.

Basically horse archers weren't an unbeatable problem IRL because they had endurance flaws. If you can kite an enemy that can't fight back forever, I don't know whether "winning battles" is on the table but "eventually and painstakingly killing every single member of the infantry" is, and not having any living (or undead, construct, etc) enemies left wins you the war. Thus my suggestion that you should fight the dragon in its lair. Although if dragons can risk death or dismemberment by switching to fire breath runs that kill 100 people every five minutes instead of completely safely dropping a shower of rocks that kill 10 people every five hours, you would sometimes get the dragons within arrow range due to time constraints.

Also I think this entire conversation is very very much the definition of why mass battle conversations should be had once the domain game under it can even be looked at.

Pegasi might be a derail, but I think that the reason it's a derail is basically because this is just a fliers vs fighters problem all over again, except the mass battles framing explicitly rules out just having the wizard cast fly on everyone.

[Dean]

You need infantry if you actually want to win any battles so I don't think that super duper horse archers are actually a huge problem.

If you can kite an enemy that can't fight back forever, I don't know whether "winning battles" is on the table but "eventually and painstakingly killing every single member of the infantry" is, and not having any living (or undead, construct, etc) enemies left wins you the war.

But that simply isn't possible almost ever in the real world. On an infinite endless plain horse archers can do that but the real world has cities with walls and forests and rocks and mountains and terrain of all different types and horses can't deal with any one of those things. That's why I said horse archers are only really important to wargamers, cause when you think of battle as a spherical cow problem you can solve it with horse archers but historically horse archers are relatively irrelevant cause every fucker that can walk into some trees can become immune to them. The only place on earth they've ever mattered is the closest the earth comes to an endless plain.

If you want to make horse archers or even flying horse archers not dominate you just model more elements of reality. Terrain, encumbrance, fatigue, cover, etc. But I also suggest writing the parts that make them cool like how firing from above someone would totally rule and outrange and outpenetrate any similar ranged units.

[jt]

It's entirely normal for design discussions to go back and forth between the different concerns. You look at one aspect of the problem until you learn something about how you want it to work, then check on how what you learned applies elsewhere.

A domain system obviously needs to know something about the sort of mass battle system it supports, otherwise you're just smashing gross food production numbers against each other with a sticky note on it saying "TODO: Make this interesting."

If you were to design them entirely separately, it'd make more sense to start with mass battles. A domain system attempts to reach for a mass battle system every time two domains get in a fight. But you can have mass battles without a domain system, since you can go straight from a standard RPG scenario to a mass battle scenario in the course of one inspiring speech.

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Added in edit because I was ninja'd:
Yes, Dean is right that Mongol horse archers did not kite armies to death. They kited armies and it was fatiguing and hurt supply lines and when the armies actually got into a real battle they weren't at full strength.

But in the face of a fantasy world, I don't think modeling the limitations of horses (terrain, encumberance, fatigue...) is fruitful. That just gets you the same problem again with pegasus archers. And giant ant archers. And blink dog archers. We can come up with endurance terrain yadda yadda rules for all of these things, or we can realize that the convergent problem point is archers. The problem is specifically archers doing something that stacks (like HP damage), because we can't trust an abstract kitchen sink fantasy game to prevent endless archer attacks from happening. If archers cause slowness or morale penalties or whatever else that doesn't stack, the problem goes away.

If you want a mass battle system to play nice with an RPG system that was designed independently and hasn't come to this conclusion, you'll need to come up with a mass battle themed reason why archers don't deal HP damage. Which is why I like the shield formation solution that I and apparently K have suggested.

[maglag]

Why is it so weird to imagine that Dragons fight on or adjacent to the ground because they are more effective that way?

Because in Lord of the Rings the dragon will rather fire strafe you to death.

Because in Game of Thrones the dragons will rather fire strafe you to death.

The big classic dragons in media aren't pretending to be closet trolls with decorative wings, they're actually making use of their iconic flying ability.

If you're organizing dominions, somebody's gonna be want to be Daenerys Targaeryen, first of her name, breaker of chains, she who has an harem of eununchs, burner of cities, strafing the battlefield with fire and lauguing at any ground crawling ranged units below black magic ballistaes or high level enemy units with +5 frost javelins.

Yes, Dean is right that Mongol horse archers did not kite armies to death. They kited armies and it was fatiguing and hurt supply lines and when the armies actually got into a real battle they weren't at full strength.

Not exactly true.

See, in old times organizing and moving an army took its sweet time. Even if you had cavalry, you got slowed down in strategic movement because you had to wait for the slow infantry and supply wagons and whatnot. There was plenty of time between your scouts reporting an enemy army was coming and rallying your banners. But the "everybody gets a horse, probably more, also our supplies are also the horses" Mongol army was so fast in the strategic map that they may as well be teleporting. By the time you got word of warning the mongols were coming, they would usually already be at your doorstep before you could've organized your own army/defenses/anything.

[Omegonthesane]

Considering that ppl are seriously saying that D&D dragons should have the option to meticulously grind enemies to death by dropping rocks from far out of strafing range, it's odd to bring up the examples where Smaug and two of Daenerys' dragons were killed by arrows fired from nonmagical weapons. (And in the Game of Thrones case the arrows were also nonmagical, albeit specially made to pierce dragon scales. Less certain about that for Smaug.)

[RelentlessImp]

The Black Arrow fired from Bard's bow after the thrush pointed out Smaug's weak spot was very much not a magic item. It was an incredibly well-made arrow - forged by Thrór himself, last King Under the Mountain, an example of the greatest of dwarven craftworks from Erebor.

[Whipstitch]

Considering that ppl are seriously saying that D&D dragons should have the option to meticulously grind enemies to death by dropping rocks from far out of strafing range, it's odd to bring up the examples where Smaug and two of Daenerys' dragons were killed by arrows fired from nonmagical weapons. (And in the Game of Thrones case the arrows were also nonmagical, albeit specially made to pierce dragon scales. Less certain about that for Smaug.)

It's not odd for Maglag. Own goaling himself is his signature move.

[Omegonthesane]

The Black Arrow fired from Bard's bow after the thrush pointed out Smaug's weak spot was very much not a magic item. It was an incredibly well-made arrow - forged by Thrór himself, last King Under the Mountain, an example of the greatest of dwarven craftworks from Erebor.

I didn't know that for sure offhand and I cared enough to hedge my bets but not enough to just look it up.

[Username17]

Whether objects are magical or not in Lord of the Rings is fairly open to interpretation. There isn't some astral plane or mana weave or something that distinguishes magic from non-magic. Some stuff is simply of immensely superior quality, some creatures are massively superior to a normal human, and so on. Whether that's magic or not isn't a question the setting feels is interesting. Tolkien was religious, and if you wanted to reduce him to a blubbering pile of contradictions you could ask him about the difference between sorcery and miracle. In the context of the setting he wrote, the question of what was and was not magic rather than merely fantastic was left deliberately unaddressed.

Anyway, I find the "Normal Flying Creatures with Ranged Aare treated as Horse Archers" to be wholly satisfactory. For all the objections that flying archers should be a hole in the rules and in the simulation, I don't think that's true. Actual examples of media and real world biology simply don't support the idea that the game should fall apart as soon as you put an Archer on a Flying Horse.

Anyway, Dean is much more accurate as to the battlefield relevance of Horse Archers than the typical gamer shouting "Haxxors!" is. Horse Archers were historically useless until the stirrup was invented (2nd century BCE), but even after that there were plenty of battles and wars where the Horse Archers won and plenty where they lost. The standard "Mounted Archer" actually was a dragoon, where they rode horses to key points, dismounted, and fired from afoot. Turns out you're a lot more accurate doing that. Horse Archers came in and out of fashion and were good or bad depending on the other parameters of the battle.

As Dean alluded to, Horse Archers can only do their thing if they don't need to take or hold any fixed objectives. Not only are they susceptible to just plain losing against Archers or Heavy Cavalry (or even Infantry in sufficiently constricted terrain), but their very nature limits them to inflicting attrition on enemy armies or on pillaging enemy resources. No one ever surrenders a city to Light Cavalry.

It's a fine military unit. And versions that are mounted on Giant Bees are probably even better. But it's not an "I Win" button, nor should it be. It doesn't replace the Infantry Cohort, it supplements it.

-Username17

[maglag]

The Black Arrow fired from Bard's bow after the thrush pointed out Smaug's weak spot was very much not a magic item. It was an incredibly well-made arrow - forged by Thrór himself, last King Under the Mountain, an example of the greatest of dwarven craftworks from Erebor.

By Middle-Earth standards, "incredibly well-made" is magic.

The elves "incredibly well-made" boats never sink even if you fill them to the brim and send them down a waterfall.

The elves "incredibly well-made" rations are packing an impossible amount of calories.

The elves ""incredibly well-made" ropes harm evil creatures and can unbind themselves on command.

And Bard himself boasted that his "incredibly well-made" arrow never missed. All his other arrows as well as those of the other archers bounced off harmlessly the flying dragon, but the "incredibly well-made" 360 no-scope into Smaug's weak point for massive damage.

[Thaluikhain]

Didn't the elves say that they didn't understand what was meant by "magic" or something?

[Username17]

In any case: daily wages.

Our standard untrained laborer makes 1 silver piece per day, and they spend 10 silver pieces per month on feeding themselves at a minimal level. That's your basic 1 copper piece meal for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and a total of 10 "treats" throughout the month. Pretty damn basic, and you could expect anyone who made more money to spend more of food - to a point.

But what this means is that a Laborer who works 20 days in a month has only ten silver pieces for everything else. Festival games, new shoes, rent, taxes, everything. Meaning that the basic Laborer can't afford 1 gold piece per month in taxes, can't afford one gold piece per month for any one thing at all because they have only one gold piece per month to get everything else after they've eaten day to day.

But things escalate quickly. A Smith or other Artisan is taking in 12 gold pieces per month, meaning that they can easily afford rent on a decent place to live, eat decent meals on the regular, and pay taxes of some kind. Even a member of the guard is getting two silver pieces per day and their disposable income is much higher.

This means that buildings costing 2000 gp and more isn't unworkable. I mean, yes the subsistence Laborer is never going to get that on a silver piece a day, but a middle class worker that can save 6 gp a month can afford that in less than 3 years without starving in the interim. The amount of income that can be invested goes up very quickly as incomes do. Making a gold piece per day is very achievable for characters who have guild-certified talents, and saving up the 12000 gp for a fancy restaurant kitchen is only just barely out of range. Such a character wouldn't need an unreasonable loan or to have a terribly large number of business partners to afford that.

That investing in a fancy kitchen does simply literally cost hundreds of years worth of income for the people on the very bottom rung of society. Makes you understand why people are willing to go adventuring...

-Username17

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

Hey Frank, stop spamming the forum.

[Username17]

Hey Frank, stop spamming the forum.

I had totally forgotten about the kit chen spammer.

-Username17

[OgreBattle]

These domain rules satisfying enough to run a game that's entirely at domain scale?

So a session would be like a Warcraft/STarcraft stage, you first gather materials, then produce units and scout and beat the badguys

[Dean]

Not to sideline your question Ogre but I don't think it has to do that or even should. The game has always been about playing characters and that's the rewarding part about it. One person alone could happily play a game that changed scales and spent large amounts of time concerning itself with lumber production and then zooming in to fight a Chimera but 4 people can't really do that. I think a good domain game is one that can deliver the things people need in the background to be satisfied. A player doesn't need to sit down and tally their grain holdings and road tax to be happy with their domain game they just need to know they rule the Elfwood and know they can ride to the next mission with a squadron of giant eagle riders and know they have a domain wide effect where the brush and branches move for them but confound their enemies.

The list of things a player needs to be satisfied with the domain game is actually pretty large but they don't need many of them at any given moment and, crucially, almost all of them are things imagined from character scale. It's cool to know you have an army ten thousand strong but the cool part is imagining your character rearing on horseback in front of them sword held high.

Anyone could make a detailed, spreadsheet filled domain game that would run on your computer and deliver good accounting of one's domains holdings and forces. The requirement is that the domain game be playable at the table by 4 people simultaneously without ruining their nights (or all but 1 of their nights). As such in my opinion the best domain game is not the most detailed or full one but is the one that accomplishes the absolutely mandatory requirements people have of a domain game (and delivers on those) and then gets the fuck out of your way to let everyone play the game they came for.

[Chamomile]

Not to sideline your question Ogre but I don't think it has to do that or even should. The game has always been about playing characters and that's the rewarding part about it. One person alone could happily play a game that changed scales and spent large amounts of time concerning itself with lumber production and then zooming in to fight a Chimera but 4 people can't really do that.

I've either spent the last five or so years in a delusional fever dream or else I can confirm for you that this is not true. Now, it's definitely true that the average player does not want to actually rule a domain, they just want a fancy title like "Overlord of the Abyss" acknowledging that they kicked Orcus' ass and some fluff references to demons bowing and scraping. It is nevertheless true that there are people who want to build specific buildings, settle specific hexes, and get specific game mechanical feedback from that, Civ-style. I've never really been satisfied with any system for doing that on tabletop, but both I and several players I've interacted with keep designing and signing up for games that attempt to do this kind of thing because we want to see it finally work.

[Emerald]

I've either spent the last five or so years in a delusional fever dream or else I can confirm for you that this is not true. Now, it's definitely true that the average player does not want to actually rule a domain, they just want a fancy title like "Overlord of the Abyss" acknowledging that they kicked Orcus' ass and some fluff references to demons bowing and scraping. It is nevertheless true that there are people who want to build specific buildings, settle specific hexes, and get specific game mechanical feedback from that, Civ-style.

Seconded. I recently finished running a 4-year campaign with domain management as a central component (with lots of houserules for structure mechanics, recruiting NPCs, downtime training, etc.) and the whole group was really into it, to the point of one guy straight-up making custom spreadsheets to track everything so he could carry out simulations comparing the perks of recruiting different monsters and such.

In fact, I'd pitched several campaign ideas beforehand and the group specifically picked that idea over a different, more Game-of-Thrones-y one where all the domain stuff would have been in the background and they would have been basically adventurers with noble titles, because if they were going to be dealing with events at a national scale they wanted to know that their actions and decisions had a hard impact rather than me arbitrarily throwing in NPCs and plot points based on whatever they'd been doing lately.

[Username17]

One of the main issues with RPGs in general is that the focus of any particular story or scene is decided collectively. And thus, information that is abstract and ignored at one time may need to be concrete and in-frame at another. Much of this comes down to physics problems, where you don't normally need to worry about how fast a flower pot falls or how many hit points a door has, but under various scenarios those could be important and the rules need to be there for you to unpack the abstract into the specific if for any reason it becomes important to do so.

With the Domain rules, the change in focus is mostly not physics but economics. You probably are not going to focus in on a particular guide or a hex or a particular village or a particular farm, but you might, and the rules should allow you to do that. I think then that it's pretty important to have aggregation and disaggregation that is quick to do at the table.

-Username17

[Username17]

On zooming in.

A koku is worth one gold piece per month when eaten. But the value chain can be broken down significantly. It is after all worth 1 gold per month after it has been made into bread, soup, and beer. A cut of that gold piece goes to the miller, the brewer, the teamster, and the cook. And of course, some cut of the gold piece actually goes to the farmer who actually grows the wheat and vegetables.

Because food doesn't come out of the ground as a soup and a sandwich and also doesn't come out of the ground in town there are a number of intermediate steps of merchants and specialists that take a cut somewhere along the line. This is where things get extremely approximate, since of course the amount of power that various economic actors have had in different historical periods and places has been all over the map and the amount of the final value they've been able to extract has similarly been all over the map. Margins for merchants and millers have at times been as high as 50%, which probably explains why those characters get such bad press in some folk tales.

There are also a lot of steps that come between sowing barley and drinking beer. Planting, weeding, harvesting, gleaning, separating, milling, and so on. Much of that can be abstracted by the fact that the farmers live and work on their farms all year, but there are still a number of steps that come after you have flailed upon your grains and separated the chaff and so on.

My inclination is that before it becomes bread on a table that a laborer is eating that 40% plus distance modifier has been absorbed by specialists and merchants. That is, the farmers close to town actually take hone 3 Gold per month for every five Koku they provide to town (and pay taxes on that), and farmers that are far from town take home 25 sp or less for each 5 Koku they provide.

Filling in that space for margins of intermediaries means that you could zoon in and play Harvest Moon or zoom in and run an inn or zoom in and play the Brewers Guild if that's what you wanted to do.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

In actual play, you'd be zooming out, and I think the game needs to be built from the bottom-up in that way for this to work.

So for tiers, you have:
- Tier 1, in which you are murder-hobos. This is roughly D&D levels 1-5.
- Tier 2, in which you have flunkies. This means you can run a farm, or an inn, or a brewery, or a thieves' guild, or a band of merry men/mercenary company. This is roughly D&D levels 6-10. If you end up at the bottom of the sea or in hell, it's a big deal and you're not expected to survive the environment without NPC help.
- Tier 3, in which you have hexes to govern. This is also the tier in which you routinely adventure in cloud castles, at the bottom of the sea, or in hell. This is roughly D&D levels 11-15.
- Tier 4, in which you have a dominion modifier. This is the tier when you teleport-ambush Demogorgon in order to shift the cosmic balance towards Law. This is roughly D&D levels 16-20.

So, in the tier 1 to tier 2 transition, where you are running the farm instead of just fighting off bandits for the farmer, the systemic effects of fighting off said bandits need to be consistent between tiers. The considerations around equipping your 20 2nd-level tiny men should roughly-match the equipment challenges the PCs faced at 2nd level, and so on.

In the tier 2 to tier 3 transition, each of your hexes has farms in it and the output of those hexes needs to make some sense as a scaled output of the individual farms. That is, you should never say, "I want to zoom in on all my farms at once in order to optimize each one", because the outputs shouldn't be sufficiently disparate. Likewise, when your province defense fights off orcish raiders along an entire front, you shouldn't have to set up 26 different miniatures skirmish battles but each zoomed out battle needs to give results which are roughly similar to what you would've gotten if you did run each battle in detail.

Finally, at tier 4, each kingdom in the Alliance of Light needs to have a total troop strength that roughly matches what you'd get if you ran all of it's hexes yourself, plus whatever dominion bonuses and fight achievement bonuses and such you bring to the table.

[Username17]

At the other end of the scale the margins taken by intermediaries are a lot higher. A fancy meal probably has three times as much literal food as a basic meal, but it also costs a gold piece in a restaurant. Meaning that if you ate fancy for every meal, you'd be out 90 gold for the month, almost a hundred times what the laborer is paying to eat at the slop house.

So where does that money go? Some of it goes into there just being more food, but that's a small sum. Some of it goes into getting more expensive ingredients. You're getting meat instead of beans (a virtual koku increase) and your getting foods from different areas (if your barley comes from distant Dwarven lands the farmer payment is unchanged but the merchant caravan gets more money and the cost goes on to you). But truthfully all of those price increases together account for just a few coppers, and the meal itself costs one hundred coppers.

Some of the intermediaries are taking higher cuts. You aren't giving the basic miller a silver per koku for basic flour, you're getting cake flour for a few silvers. You are getting beer made by brewmeisters and they take a larger cut as well.

But the biggest single chunk is going to the restaurant itself. While the slop house is taking in one copper for every ten meals or so, the fancy place is taking in five silvers per meal. Their staff isn't cheap of course, but you can tell that it doesn't take that many fancy meals to keep fancy chefs and trained wait staff employed. That a master chef can and does command a wage of a gp or more per day and that can be maintained with just a few dinner parties.

What this means from the domain perspective is that the amount of metal currency in play that can be taxed and stuff goes up real fast with urbanization and development. To a first approximation, rural areas pay rents only in Koku, and urban areas pay taxes in gold. Because that's the part of society that is meaningfully monetized.

-Username17