Thanks for the detailed response!
[quote="jedavis"]
Understood, and taken in good faith. I agree that it is a trivial rule to drop, but it perplexes me that it is still there. If you want to approximate steady state, it is easier to just not add noise by default, no?
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It's there because when I ran the game, it felt like there needed to be some fluctuation in population for the player's domains that might model random events. At the same time I wanted a mechanic I could drop for NPC domains without impact. Hence the +/-d10 approach. (More on this later).
I suspect I run NPC domains how you run PC domains - how much gp does the NPC have to spend on his army to fight the PCs.
[quote="jedavis"]
There are nine distinct morale values, all of which modify slightly different facets of the domain, and then there's a table of 12 modifiers to the roll. Me, I'd be pretty happy with domains having two morale states ("tolerates ruler" and "open revolt"), with a d20 roll triggering a revolt on a 1+ (or 5+ or 9+ if the ruler has done something egregious lately) and revolts persisting until either egregious ruler behavior has been addressed / peasant demands are met, or they are put down by force. That's about the level of complexity I'm in the market for.
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Got it. More on this later.
[quote="jedavis"]
At the end of the day, my players only want to deal with one layer of henchmen. As a consequence, PC domains are practically limited to one layer deep (if they weren't already by other factors). Likewise, I have a limited amount of prep-time and interest for NPC realms, which is best served by paying attention to the count/duke layers of the chain (who make reasonable patrons or villains; not too high that the players are irrelevant, not so low that the players can kill them trivially). I don't care if there are marquis or whatever below them or not, and my players sure aren't willing to manage a multi-layered domain structure, so any actual rules for low-tier (or very-high tier) vassal rulers are wasted space as far as I'm concernd.
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Got it. My own experiences as a Judge have been very different. Each time I've run ACKS my players have assembled domains, then conquered other domains and ultimately ended up running realms at anywhere from prince to king tier. The campaign villains have been at king to emperor level.
[quote="jedavis"]
It's not that I can't ignore them - it's just one more thing I have to houserule around, particularly given shrinking maximum personal domain size. Houserules are expensive; in a complex system, the number of unexpected possible interactions between parts grows superlinearly with the number of parts. ... I'm not willing to worry about it.
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I do understand this approach. It's why I always try to offer standard or averaged outcomes for every area of the game - here's a standard caravan, here's a standard kingdom, here's an average treasure type value. At the same time, I've always felt that as a designer it's better to offer more detail, then to offer too little detail, thinking that it's easier to ignore what isn't needed than to create what isn't there. Or, put another way, unexpected results are more likely to occur when adding new rules than from simplifying and averaging existing rules.
[quote="jedavis"]
As far as my players are concerned, a domain is a thing that gives you gold and XP every month, and helps offset the cost of the mercenary army you wanted. Broadly, the point of the game for us is killing things and taking their stuff (because these give you XP). Everything of interest is one of: threat, weapon, loot, simultaneously weapon and loot, or Not Sure Yet. The value in a domain is measured in how much better it makes you at killing things, and how much stuff it gives you, and we measure its cost in paperwork against its value in those terms.
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Ok. So I would say the point of ACKS for me as designer was to allow players to achieve and exercise power. Killing things and taking their stuff is a means of achieving and exercising power, and a fun one. But as a player and GM, I've always felt frustrated that in most RPGs, the dungeons and the characters get tougher hand-in-hand - the player is always fighting "level appropriate" challenges and as such is on a treadmill. So I wanted to offer an opportunity to achieve and exercise power in qualitatively different ways over time.
Hence, rules for managing a domain, creating magic items, defeating enemies on the battlefield. It's certainly true that the domain game is over-designed if actual play stays focused on traditional adventuring throughout. One could simply say "for each hex you control you get XX gp per month to spend on troops" and that's that.
To what end do your players use their mercenary armies? Do you do mass combat in your games? If so, what system do you use?
Thanks for the feedback, again.