Solo Patron Play and Domain Management Megagames
The OG AD&D DMG contains a wealth of rules and guidance on domain management for dummies. In his inimitable manner, Gary presents a scattershot approach to kitchen sink gaming, but while the bones are there, Gary leaves it to the players to figure out the connective tissue. Or not, as the case may be.
The ur-D&D books are short on step-by-step instructions, and long on isolated mini-games that support play on an as-needed basis. Huge chunks of the rules can be safely ignored until the element they cover shows up in your game, and then they are right there and usable out of the box. This is genius design that maximizes the management of complex systems (like cities, dungeons, nations, and whole ecologies) without the need for tedious spreadsheets. You don’t need to know the precise path and schedule and makeup of a goblin patrol when you have a wandering monster table.
One often overlooked aspect of this design philosophy is that it inspires a variety of gameplay. Unlike single mechanic systems – and here we pause to give the side-eye to the d20 system – the profusion of these subsystems leaves space available for the players themselves to add spice and variety to the campaign by dipping their toes into a long neglected subsystem. If you get bored of your monk flipping about pimp-slapping spellcasters, you can take a break by experimenting with an assassin with a predilection for poison. Or spin up a sumo wrestler to play in the overbearing sandbox. [Ed. Note: just remember to take a few friends when you do.] Or go off-road into wilderness adventures and build your own domain…
And here I introduce my own recent maunderings on the gaps Gary left us to explore: domain management.
The generally accepted narrative is that first you get the gold, then chyou get the levels, den chyou get da henchmen, an den chyou get the domain play. Gotta clear that hex and earn your stake to hire the muscle and draw the settlers to your colony out among the always restless natives.
But recent advances in RPG technology developed by those lovable rapscallions in the BROSR have successfully demonstrated that there is more than one path to domain enlightment. AD&D is a wargame, and in no other wargame do you start with a private and hope to make it to general. You’re given an army, as are your opponents, and nobody blinks an eye. Suggest that AD&D can be use in this manner and everybody loses their minds.
But we can change that.
We just have to step back, adjust our mindset, and see if we can’t come up with a new approach.
The first thing to be aware of is the resolution at which you view, and resolve, the risks and rewards of play. That might seems obvious on the face of it, but given fifty years of ossification in D&D, best practices and the preponderance of one-man-one-problem rules in the books, that approach has atrophied among gamers. It is an understandable limitation, even if it is self-imposed. Lucky for us, can be partly remedied by looking at the extant domain management rules.
You can see the glimmers of underlying philosophy in this passage, so let’s make it plain: what is needed is a shift in the focus of the rules. We need to step up a level in management and think about things at the executive level. In that passage, Gary shows us that the game steps up from 2-6 encounter checks per day to one check per week. Or even three times once you have earned the advances of “civilized” and “roads”. This is a natural reward for going to the trouble of clearing the area of monsters and policing the community to discourage them from returning.
Sidebar: There is an interesting and neglected relationship between the above and the Inhabited table. Jeffro, as usual, inspires us to think about the differences between Uninhabited and Inhabited wandering monsters. “A good chunk of encounters in inhabited areas are going to be with patrols. These patrols are no joke. They are combined arms units.” Add to his observations the fact that you’re rolling three times as often, and you’ll find that a road running through your territory means that you’re going to be swamped with units of wandering soldiers looking for loot or hospitality. There’s always men on the march in the land of adventure and here you see the wargame roots showing once again! The implications of these subsystems is one of those areas we talked about above ripe for exploration through play. Or a few theorycraft blog posts for you OSR types.
Ahem.
As I was saying, for domain directed play, you stop worrying about a henchman here and there. The resource management steps up from the individual to the squad level. Twenty spearmen require two sergeants and a lieutenant to hire. Get four of those units and you need a captain to manage things. You also need to double your blacksmiths. And now, aside from the support staff, you’re not thinking about lone spearmen, you’re thinking in terms of units. Your playing pieces become squads, and if you step up another level in management, you’re going to need to combine squads into whole platoons. Two squads is only one figure in a mass battle game, after all. If you’re playing with a ten-figure unit on the table, you’re no longer thinking about lone figures, but two hundred men at a time. It isn’t Nervous Joe, great in a fight but only if he sticks around – you’re thinking about the Broman First Spear, veterans of the McMaximus Crusade.
It’s been noted before that Gary provided a game that perfectly scales up through all those levels of executive command, but that’s mostly when we’re talking about combat and logistics. When it comes to clearing that hex, we’ve got some obstacles in our way. If you’re running at 1:1 time – and you are if you know your business – then those daily forays and weekly patrols will keep your Prime Characters too busy to engage with anything but the routine cleanups on Aisle Kobold.
What’s needed is some way to run the hex clearing operations at the middle-levels. What’s needed is a new suite of mini-games that give players the ability to manage squads and send them out into the unknown in a way that offers reasonably predictable risk-reward analysis within the bounds of a single hex. Those lairs and dungeons and ruins aren’t going to clear themselves, but at the middle-management level it’s no longer the Name Level PCs job. They should only be called on to crack the toughest nuts that surpass the ability of their units to handle.
And this is an area that few dare venture. Alexander Macris is probably the only guy doing it, as usual, and by way of example he offers us an abstracted dungeon delving mini-game in…one of his books that I don’t own. It’s well worth a look for those interested in his approach.
For the rest of us, this is the sweet spot of home-brewing, filling in the gaps left behind by Gary as we find ways to use the extant rules to their fullest. This is where the true hobbyist steps to the fore and leaves the paper salesman to his wares. This is where your creativity has room to explore.