Building a Mid-Level “Domain Game”

If there is one lesson I have learned from years of oodling around with domain-level play is that bounded, “lower-level” domain game activity is often way more gratifying and fun in a well-aged D&D-like campaign than playing a game of high-rolling rulers. 

The nature of D&D with its emphasis on micro-site exploration and granular personal advancement just plain makes it better suited and more enjoyable to play a petty wanna-be lordling clearing a fragile hold in a vast and hostile wilderness or the mayfly life of a warband chief than it is to be even a lowly baron stuck with the static play (and bean-counting) of rulership.

And I've found the more you can ratchet down the frame, the easier and more natural a fit it seems. A natural extension of this is creating more avenues for players to carve out power positions inside society well-below name level.

What follows is my first stab at instituting it in the Hill Cantons campaign. As always feedback and yakking about your own best practices appreciated.

Hill Cantons Social Advancement

At fourth level a player is eligible to worm/buy their way into local office broadly speaking: an entry-level position within the Canton government/legal system, a contrada society junior officer, guild journeyman (and this extends to a business such as owning an inn), magical college good standing member, mercenary officer, criminal society officer, etc. See below for a list of current open positions in Revoca Canton (a much larger list coming down the pike for Marlinko).

Co-creation and Creative Down-time. Players are encouraged to co-create details about both their position and the local branch of the institution. Players also have the option of creating elaborate downtime plans though mechanical adjudication/impact is completely at the GM's time/energy level for the week.

Obligations. PCs holding office are assumed to have to rote duty Obligations happening in downtime, see position listing for exact number of days. These obligations are often localized (as in the PC has to be around town). Failure to meet Obligations due to being away for adventuring/travel or incapacitated produce a small cumulative chance of 5% per day (rolled at the moment the PC resumes duty) for a demotion or loss of position. Before the roll is made the player can opt out of the roll by “Throwing Money at the Problem” (a “tax” of 1d6 x 100 gold suns).

Career Opportunity. Once a real world month or upon attainment of a new level, a player holding office may invoke a Career Opportunity (none of them involving opening mailing bombs for you) at the beginning of a session that they the player are in attendance. Opportunities provide the following:

1. The PC must sit out the session (again this must be a session the player is in).

2. The player must play a henchperson or hireling that session. Players lacking a decent henchperson can roll up a backup character at 60% their current exp. Henchmen and hirelings tied to the position (ie your underlings) can be played and gain a 20% bonus on exp in the session with 0-level hirelings earning 1^st level at the end of a session.

3. Player invoking a CO rolls on either the Fabulous Prizes or Advancement chart. The die used is dependent on the Position listing. Players can add  +1 on their die by throwing in inducement money at 200 gold suns a pop (up to a +3/600 gold maximum).

Fabulous Prizes Chart

1-2	This Shit was Just Laying Around. Pick up 1d6+1 pieces of mundane equipment for free (value no more than 20 gold suns each).
3-5	Little Bites. Bribe money of 1d4 x 100 gold suns straight into your hot pocket.
6-8	The Clothes Make the Man. You have acquired an extra-ordinary piece of fashion worth 1d8 x 100 gold sun (and half the exp).
9-10	The Corner Office is Open? Player gains personal control of rooms or structure commiserate with position. A position inside a castle thus gaining a suite or a shrine priest is given a small hut. 1D4 x 100 exp for the new digs.
11-12	Rank Does Hath its Privileges. Major graft/bonus chance this time PC level x 300 gold suns.
13-15	My Precious. Magic item “falls off the cart”. Randomly determined or by GM discretion.
16+	Fuck Yeah. Roll Again Twice (ignoring this result).

Advancement Chart

1-2	That Bastard Pavol Out Maneuvered Me. Again. NPC rival (if none, gain one) gets the roll instead, no effect. +1 to you next Advancement roll due to the resentment inducement.
3-5	An Embarrassing Yet Hilarious Faux Pas. Your character is the in the news next week, strangely you still get +2 to your next Advancement roll. Otherwise no effect.
6-9	Missed My Window But Patient I Am. No effect, though add +3 to the next Advancement roll.
10-11	Oh I Suppose I Can Make Do. You are not promoted but you have made your current position much comfier, take a roll on the Fabulous Prizes chart at +2.
12-15	That is Clearly Under My Job Duties. Minor Expansion of an aspect of your character's current position and a +2 on your next Advancement roll. GM and player negotiation, typically this would be something like an extra hireling (or two) or bumping up to the next die for Advancement or Fabulous Prize rolls etc.
16-17	My Obvious Talent is Appropriately Awarded. You are either promoted to higher office (if open) or can take a Major Expansion of your current position.
18-19	How the Mighty Have Fallen. A rival is disgraced/demoted or the office above you is vacated through a death/demotion/promotion.
20+	The Right Place at the Right Time. You can choose any two results from the Advancement chart.

Current Entry-Level Offices in Revoca Canton

A number of mostly ceremonial and not-particularly lucrative--though relatively prestigious and open to quick advancement—positions with the Revoca Cantonal Rada (council) or Lady Draga's household retinue (the line being blurry since by right the Lady holds five of the Rada's nine seats) are currently open. 

Rada Prestidigitatior

Entry: Fourth level magic user or white wizard. Purchase of new tea set and party clothes, 400 gold suns.

Income: 5 gold suns per week stipend

Superior: Rada Thaumaturgist, Princess Zuzu

Hirelings: Buc, a talking honey-badger and scribe.

Obligation Days (per week): 1 (tea-party and discussion of agenda)

Fabulous Prizes Die: d8

Advancement Die: d8

Perks: A musty sigiled night-blue robe and pointy hat. Learning new spells from Zuzu at half rate. Access to the cantonal library (such as it is)

Brevet Lord-Consort

Entry: Fifth level and at least gentry pedigree (1,500 gold suns forgery). And the Lady must take at least a minimal shine to you. Gender strangely unspecific.

Income: 40 gold suns per week, spending money for baubles.

Superior: the Lady Draga (duh)

Hirelings: Himek your personal valet who might be stealing from you.

Obligation Days (per week): 2 (date night and ceremonial duties)

Fabulous Prizes Die: 1d6

Advancement Die: 1d12 (promotion to official engagement and Lord-Consort if male)

Perks: fancy velvet doublet with the Lady's monogram, signet ring with small container of snuff. Sugar (though of a platonic and proper sort).

Haruspex of the Leshy Contra-Movements

Entry: Fourth level and a spell caster. 500 gold suns worth of slop bucket contents to your immediate supervisor.

Income: 5 gold suns per week stipend

Superior: Cantonal Patriarch, Father Hog/Sister Sow

Hirelings: Mu'u [whistle-whistle noise] the Xom (old, inscrutable yet unpleasant like much of his race).

Obligation Days (per week): 1 (entrails reading at Rada meeting)

Fabulous Prizes Die: d8

Advancement Die: d8

Perks: pile of salt, sacrificial animals, the Vertz blade (a wicked, flanged copper-hilted dagger, +2 vs. Old Pahr spirits of the forest)

Full list can be found here. 

Rethinking Domain-Level Play in the Hill Cantons

If you've followed this blog for longer than you reasonably should, you may remember that 3-4 years back I had spent a good deal of time exploring domain level play. Indeed I ran two whole campaigns, the Domain Game I and II, revolving around that kind of play while trying to hothouse a whole rules supplement, the Borderlands.

My own gaming and writing was swimming around in a zeitgeist pool at that time--with ACKs and An Echo Resounding coming into being as the best published answers to that great supposedly unfulfilled promise of the “End Game.”

Eighty-odd pages of Borderlands were finished and it was closing in on that last push for being published. And then I balked it. I won't get into the nitty gritty (and some of it was an easy "I'm kind of tired of this shit" answer) let's leave it at “I was deeply dissatisfied with how it played.” In a nutshell it failed in the same way I believe most other attempts have failed by not making the “main thing” the main thing.

Anywho there is a lot meat here for a post debating the game design question “why most domain rules for D&D don't build meaningful, engaging long-term play for D&D campaigns.”

That's not this post.

This post is some show and tell of the rough, rough experimental system that we've been using on the Feral Shore portion of the Hill Cantons main campaign. The idea was to develop a system that is neither overly abstract “boardgamey” nor “beancounterly.” 

Instead it aimed to be more like the King of Dragon Pass and the freeform wargame Matrix Game. With NPC advisers carrying and hiding most of the actual domain business (by being “clicked on”) and presenting decision points that gave players choice without swamping the site-based adventure that is D&D's main thing. The system is still pretty underdeveloped and the results somewhat a mixed bag from my perspective to be sure. 

But that's the fun of hothousing these things in actual play, right?

An explored section of the Feral Shore.

Here's an actual example from campaign play. (Okko is a frozen-in-time trap engineer NPC the party rescued and recruited to be the chief steward of their Feral Shore colony.)

Okko's Report on King's Ten
Okko seems to warm to his job and appears to be loyal, able and competent from what you observe. He gives you the following report on how he sees things.

What Okko is buying/building with the 1000 suns (all work listed will be done before next week by the available labor):
1. Two 10-by-30 foot cypress-wood and thatch longhouses. One to be used as a workshop, the other for meetings/light work in the day and sleeping area for 15 at night.
2. A cypress-wood stockade roughly 6-foot high to enclose the area before a proper wooden palisade can be built.
3. 10 medium-sized tents for temporary housing
4. An on-site worker of wood and blacksmith
5. Food for the party and all the hired help for a month.

What Okko wants to know:
Do you want to keep this site as the basecamp? He lays out the pros and cons of the site below and says that since no work has been done yet that he can hold off on the work above if you want to place it  somewhere else.

Site Pros
1. The soil seems fairly rich and arable.
2. Killing off the two crocs seems to have cleared out the area of its most spectacular resident menace. There are normal-sized crocs in the area but nothing as comparable or aggressive.
3. The surrounding flooded areas and serpentine-like higher ground areas are pretty defensible
4. You have plenty of fresh (if brackish) water.

Site Cons
1. It's in the Weird (makes the hired help extremely nervous and likely to mean higher chances of encountering beings who live in the Weird.)
2. It's surrounded by a swamp (bugs, humidity and mud).

Domain Skills and Resolution
Each PC can take a Major concentration and a Minor from the following list and computes their skill on the second chart below.

Domain Skills
1. Martial (Strategy, Tactics)
2. Sorcery (Magic, Science)
3. Supernatural  (Religion, Mythic, The Weird)
4. Skullduggery (Intrigue, Diplomacy, Criminal)
5. Steward (Planning, Economic)
6. Ranging (Scouting, Hunting, Expeditions)

Domain Score
x1 level for your Major
x.5 level for your Minor (round down)
+/- best single ability modifier for INT, WIS and CHA
+/- special circumstances (things like education in a certain skill, upbringing, etc)

Example: Kraggo of the Mountains is a 4th level fighter with a 7 INT, 11 WIS and 17 CHA. He takes Martial for his Major which gives him for 4 for his lets plus 2 for his CHA for a total of 6. He takes Ranging as his minor for a total of 2.

Domain Ring NPCs

The Domain Ring is your team of NPC advisers. Beyond providing for gamable action points in and between sessions Ring NPCs are the ones taking on the actual (and often boring and/or granular) tasks of running the demense. Delegating work to the Ring represents “rule by sinecure” inherent for a game where the PCs are adventurers first and has a mechanical advantage as such. A single PC can add their skill level (must be the exact skill being used by the NPC) to any domain action roll taken by a Ring NPC.

Current Ring Members:
Okko, Steward 6
Balzas, Martial 4
The Holy Drunk, Supernatural 3

Priestess of Marzana, Sorcery 3, Supernatural 3

Domain Action Resolution
If there is a particular situation that I think will call for a roll against an appropriate PC or NPC's relevant skill. The relative difficulty of the course of action described will be adjudicated secretly from my judgment of what is described.

Near Impossible: 5d6 against relevant Domain Skill
Unlikely: 4d6
Fair: 3d6
Good: 2d6
Excellent: 1d6

Slam Dunk: 1d6-3

Settling the Feral Shore

It's been quiet here blogside as of late, real world business, writing and gaming (ironically) have conspired to delay my triumphant return into regular blogging. (But really how much is there to say about a hobby?)

Besides the Reavers of the Weird miniatures campaign which launched this week with six players, the weekly Hill Cantons game has been going in some interesting directions in the new explore/clear/colonize the Feral Shore sideline. In other words doing domain-level play several levels before "name level" and firmly shaking out the notion that it is some kind of end-game retirement phase. 

A thriving (if squalid) little Jamestown-like fort settlement has sprung up and the players have already accomplished some rather heroic (for their general murderhobo scumbaggery) feats such as freeing an old pagan god chained to a lakefloor (who they think is the Cantons version of the Slavic god Veles), finding a book of a god, clearing a massive dam made wholly of human bones, exploring the Valley of Grot and its temple, etc.

As the foothold in the Weird expands, I find myself adapting many of the collection of subsystems designed for the two Domain Game experiments and the Borderlands (yeah, yeah eventually). Here is one of the ones I am currently using to set out what kind of broke-in-the-head people would be attracted to a muddy little clearing in the howling wilderness.

Settler Rules

Colonists can recruited to the settlement by the promise of free or cheap land. Colonists will only begin to arrive when the following conditions are met:

1. A two-mile hex and it's surrounding hexes have been rigorously explored and cleared of threats.

2. The players have set twice a week patrols of all six of those hexes.

3. The passage from the coast to the settlement is also explored, cleared, and patrolled.

Every three months a call can be issued back home in the Cantons. With each seasonal call, the player can grant and settle up a square miles of arable land in the settlement hex. Each hex is assumed to have four square miles of potentially grantable land.

Colonists work their own land and provide their own means, thus the players have no direct obligation to house, feed, and pay them as they do for their retainers, hirelings, and followers. They do however come under the obligation of paying taxes, tithes, fees, tariffs and obeying the rules set by the players within reason. An average rate of taxation—1 gold sun per family per month--will tend to not produce riotous conditions.

Roll on the following two tables for each seasonal settlement (or if a special campaign event calls for it).

Interesting Immigrants Table

Roll d20

1	Crazy old coot
2	Village idiot
3	Local gossip (also practices some kind of trade)
4	1d3 wanton harlots or strutting gigolos
5	Slave trader/Indentured Servant dealer or other scum bag, 1d3 slimy henchmen
6	Tavern/Wine den/Hallucinogen parlor keeper
7	Smelly kozak horse caravanserai and trade herd
8	Evening or Morning Star society heretic (also craftsmen)
9	Starry Void mystic (also craftsmen)
10	Silent God rebbe or Old Pahr pagan (also vinter, metalsmith, or sage)
11	Feral Dwarf hill scout
12	Half-Ogre goon
13	Black Hobbit professional maker of trouble
14	Fishing boatkeeper and family (or hunter if not on navigable water)
15	Recovering (perhaps) bandit/outlaw/poacher
16	Kezmaroki shabby gentily family (extravagant title but destitute)
17	1d3 defaulted Bonders (mercs) from Kezmarok (come with armor and weapons)
18	Guild of Condoterrie, Linkboys and Scalawags member (owes back dues)
19	Non-inimical monster from the Weird
20	Something truly fucked up (GM's discretion).

Boring Immigrants Table

Roll d10

1	none
2-3	16 families of tenant farmers
4-5	14 families of tenant farmers, 2 families of freeholders (80 suns for sale of land)
6	12 tenant farmers, 4 freeholders (160 suns sale)
7	12 tenant farmers, 4 military colonists
8	10 tenant farmers, 2 freeholder (80 suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)
9	10 tenant farmers, 2 military colonists (160suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)
10	8 tenant farmers, 4 freeholder (160suns sale), 1 boyar (160 suns)

*Any emigrating family can be substituted for a family of tenant farmer if desired.

Tenant Farmers

Free farming family that works a leased grant of 40 acres in exchange for farming work, militia service, and taxes. Typical family will be five with three working bodies that are available to work the landowner's seeding and harvest. The household will provide one unarmored combatant with club, dagger, or other makeshift weapon.

Freeholders

Free farming family of five that works a purchased grant of 40 acres. In an emergency situation, the household will provide one combatant with leather armor and a long bow or spear/shield.

Military colonists

Family headed by former mercenaries, landsknechts or Kezmaroki bonders that works a leased grant of 40 acres in exchange for militia service. The household will provide one combatant with half plate, short sword and a pike or crossbow.

Boyars

Wealthy, but not titled landholder that purchases 120 acres. One family of five with 12 servants. In an emergency situation, the household will provide one mounted warrior with half plate, shield, sword and lance and three unarmored combatants with club, dagger, or other makeshift weapon.

What the Hired Help Say About Ruling the Gygaxian Implied World

“Who built the seven towers of Thebes? 

The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go?”

-Bertolt Brecht

Remember my series exploring the scattershot (yet more far more comprehensive and interesting than is normally given) domain-level play and implied world in first edition AD&D? Longtime readers may remember that I had a few more posts lined up that I never really finished off, posts that have continued to nag me despite me having them buried like the tell-tale heart deep in the drafts box. (You can read the whole series here, here, here, and here.)

Hark! Louder, louder, louder. Argh. I dissemble no more, tear up the planks and let's finish this long due series.

Let's come back around with some Talmudic readings of the section on Hirelings in the DMG (p. 28-31), a section that yields quite a bit of information on what the AD&D domain game and implied world is.

Working Stiffs and the Making of Things

The section on hirelings explicitly begins—with the first sentence—in the context of domain-play and the power arc of the AD&D character: “Most hirelings are dealt with under the section entitled EXPERT HIRELINGS - those which are typically employed at such time as the character in question has an established stronghold. Common, standard hirelings are basically the usual craftsmen or laborers taken on by lower level player characters.”

That's clear and straightforward: one entire class of hirelings revolves around life in a stronghold, the other is more the straightforward useful hacks for adventuring.

A quick look at Standard Hirelings seems to hold this view you have the porters, teamsters, and pack handlers that deal with the copious (and mightily heavy with coinage at 1/10^th a pound) amounts of swag being hauled out of murderholes. You have linkboys to free up your torch arm for that Fauchard-Fork and perhaps a valet to shine your boots, high, hard. These stiffs are easy to come by (most if not all can be found in your average village) and mostly work in short stints of work paid by the day.

But now this is where things get (somewhat) interesting. This is where there are hints at a “middle game,” a sort of higher-level play where a character hasn't gone through that long, tough process of carving their hold in this post-apocalyptic AD&D world but has resources enough to start acting on a larger social scale.

Because, see, the Standard Hirelings list is not just the adventuring-specific mooks above, but includes a broader range of semi-skilled and skilled artisans. So you have carpenters, leather workers, painters (limners), and tailors too. Significantly you can hire all these hirelings at a monthly scale but this “assumes that quarters are provided for the hireling, and that these quarters contain a bed and like necessities.” It assumes further that you actually possess a base of operations.

More over it sets up a freeform way to handle production of goods:

“It is not practical to try to determine the time and expenses necessary to accomplish everything possible for the scores of standard hirelings possible to employ, so each DM will have to decide. For example, assume that a player character hires a tailor to make plain blue cloaks for all of his or her henchmen. This will take only about 1 day per garment and cost the stated amount of money plus 5 c.p. (10% of the cost of a cloak) per cloak for materials. However, if the same cloaks were to be fashioned of a material of unusual color and have some device also sewed upon them, time and materials costs would be at least double standard, and probably more.”

That first sentence strikes me as a great example of the overall design philosophy of that edition--a sweet spot for me. It acknowledges the near-infinite imaginative possibilities of each individual campaign and implies that the hireling list (and the following production rules) are just guiding models and that you can and should be specifically tailoring lists of such working folks to your own quirks. Black lotus powder distillers? Pleasure barge shipbuilders? Sure here you go, here's a detailed example/baseline for their wages and what you charge the players.

Spun a different way, this whole subsection is toolbox support for the level of owning a creaky old caravel, running a scurrilous hole-in-the-wall tavern, squatting a cleared-out mini-dungeon, raising the standard of your own free company, or any other thing that I remember being a big post-lower level goal of our play groups as a kid.

And despite the ostensibly more-comprehensive approach to domain-play of the other best attempts of D&D editions from the Companion set to Birthright, AD&D alone is the sole attempt in the game to orient such a specific, granular approach to work and working people.

There is no beancounter automatic table of population growth. To entice these folks to said base the player actually has to put some effort into it, “if the offer is for long term employment, only 1 in 6 will be willing to accept unless a small bonus is offered--day's wage is too small, but double or treble that is sufficient to make 3 in 6 willing to take service.” The implication being that you have to hustle and bribe normal folks (to get over their fears, I suppose) and leave the walled confines of beleaguered civilization.

It's not abstractions like “peasant families” and “domain levels” producing things in the Gygaxian world, but NPCs with at least some identity and face. Frankly, that's a game-world vision I find more human scale and interesting.

Onwards and upwards, next we look at how these sections imply certain things about urban life, guild work, the life of mercenaries, general handwaving of duller aspects of domain-play, etc. Stay tuned.

AD&D's Domain Game: Pity the Poor Name-Levels and Their Private Warbands

Enabled by some of you dear readers I continue exploring the domain game scattered through AD&D today. (Parts 1-3 can be found here, here, and here.)

No Easy Entry to the Ruling Class. AD&D's Domain Game reads to me as a rougher and less assured ascent to power than in many other iterations of D&D's domain game. You get the impression that busting into the existing nobility is difficult to impossible task and that the PCs can only manage to tentatively push their way onto the lower rungs by carving out a small hold far from the civilized centers of power.

My read on this became reinforced when I started rereading the long sections in the Monster Manual on Men. It's startling to me how frequently high level NPCs show up not as lords and the captains of great realms but in relatively low-status commands. Indeed the wandering bands of humanity (what is driving all this restlessness? Political collapse?) seem sloppy with formidable characters. The MM makes a special point of emphasizing this fact: “Note that there will always [my emphasis] be higher level characters with any group of men encountered.”

Take your garden variety band of bandits that roam (only a 20% chance they are in “lair”) the wilderness in packs of 20-200. From the entry:

“Bandits will always be led by an 8th, 9th, or 10th level fighter...To determine the level of the bandit leader use the following guide: if under 100 bandits are encountered the leader will be 8th level, if 100 to 150 the leader will be 9th level, and if 150 or more the leader will be 10th level...For every 50 bandits there is a 25% chance that there will be a magic-user of 7th, 8th, 9th, or 10th level (roll a 4-sided die for level if one is with the group).”

These name-level “lords” rule over the most rudimentary of “strongholds”: “Bandit lairs will be informal camps 80% of the time, but 10% will be cave complexes with a secret entrance, and 10% will be regular castles with 1-4 light catapults for defense.”

Some of these high-level characters are even further down the status ladder. Merchants for example have a caravan guard leader that's a 6th-11^th fighter. 11^th level and all you can add up to be is the leader of some pot-bellied traders' guard detail? Slacker.

Looking back at how rigorous the steps to creating your hold are by the book—you must find a plot of land without a flag planted on, rigorously explore and fight for it, pour a very large stash of money into construction, and continue to fight and patrol your turf while fending off the newly jealous--no wonder you have so many powerful humans just grabbing the small amounts of power they can.

(Personally I have always found this supercharging of NPCs not to my taste and as a rule of thumb cut all the levels in half, but I think the point stands.)

Build it and They Will Come. Circling back to that second to last paragraph above, building a stronghold is no easy task. Presumably the sheer difficulty and audacity of the rare name-level character who succeed is what creates that automatic pull for bands of followers. Indeed by the book, their new private armies start at the moment you have completed that task.

The DMG states bluntly that “fighters and clerics will be the principal territorial developers” (remember that only the three old OD&D core classes are even allowed to rule politically). The type of followers those two classes attract reflects that.

Clerics get a pretty sweet deal when it comes to followers—and early too. As an 8^th level Patriarch or Matriarch after building a “place of worship” they get two bites of the apple: 20-200 (presumably civilian laity) followers and “men-at-arms”. The DMG gives a healthy mix of seven different troop types as followers: 10-50 light, medium, and heavy cavalry and from 25-140 light and heavy infantry.

What's more the cleric's army of zealots “are fanatically loyal and serve without pay so long as the cleric does not change deities and/or alignment.” Nice.

Fighters get a tough-cookie lieutenant (5-7^th level fighter) and a slightly-smaller unit. Fifty percent of the time a company of 20 light cavalry supported by a 100 heavy infantry. There is a 40 percent chance of getting one of two smaller, but better armed companies of heavy infantry and a further 10 percent chance of getting a shock group of 60 medium-heavy cavalry

The common thread for both the fighter and the cleric in follower type is that they are the only classes receiving what is essentially an army (albeit a small one scaled to a petty warlord). Interestingly in composition and numbers they run pretty close to the groups of men description in the MM.

All other classes generally receive much smaller bands of similarly-classed individuals, here the ranger gets 2d6 creatures, there the assassin 7d4 lower-leveled assassins. More of a henchman/apprentice set-up writ slightly larger.

Why is this significant at all?

Mostly because it seems pretty dang hard to find and hire up large bodies of armed men in AD&D. Skip over to the DMG's description of mercenary soldiers on page 30. While it leaves it up to the DM to determine the likehood of encountering mercenaries, it does suggest in detail how many of such and such type you do meet. Significantly the numbers are pretty small by the standards of raising an army: 70 percent of the time you will only find a range of 1-12. A further 20 percent of the time you're only getting 2-30 and only 10 percent of the time are you reaching numbers getting into the low-range ballpark of those groups of starter followers.

Shewww so much still to cover, we have peasants revolts, construction costs/time (and it's larger implications to building settlements), hirelings more broadly, etc. Tomorrow perhaps and then on to tackle B/X, Mentzer, and OD&D.

AD&D's Domain Game: the DMG

Taking where we left off from yesterday, I look at what the Dungeon Master's Guide (the one with the ugly red dude and chainmail bikini gal on the cover) says about AD&D's implied domain-level play.

The longest and most direct section that handles this is the Territory Development by Player Characters section (page 93). There are a number of obvious observations here and some interesting subtle ones both in it and in the accompanying sections around it that I never caught until rereading these passages through this lens. Let's check through them.

Feudalism is Not the Default. One of the consistent themes you see in other treatments of D&D's domain game is that the political structure is almost always based on an idealized version of European feudalism (maybe with a few token nods to the title ranks of other cultures). You have a graduated hierarchy going from barons, counts, dukes, kings each owing fealty to the other. You have peasant families tied to the land. And you have the PCs inserting themselves into that existing structure.

I have written before how Gygax explicitly breakswith faux European medievalism as the one and only implied backdrop of AD&D in the Social Class and Rank section (which precedes and is clearly tied to the Territory section). Indeed he repeats this more succinctly in the first paragraph here saying “the exact culture and society of the area is up to you.”

Interestingly if you flip back to the section right behind it (Peasants, Serfs, and Slaves) Gygax states that, “any character who forces peasantry, serfdom, or slavery upon any inhabitants of an area he or she controls will have to be very careful to guard against uprisings.” There is a strong backwards implication here that slavery, serfdom and even a freeholding (perhaps tenant?) peasantry is not the default state of most of those settling into a cleared hold. Given the fact those rural laboring classes made up 80-90 percent historically of most west European medieval societies that's quite an assumption.

Wilderness Clearing is the Central Adventure. The real meat of the Territory section is the example of how to handle the mechanics of wilderness clearing. (It's important to note that Gygax sets it up as an example, as in here's how a DM could handle it if organically developed in the campaign, there is no set one way on how to adjudicate it.)

Example or not it's a pretty fascinating glimpse of play that clearly focuses more on the adventure of carving out a section of the howling wilderness than the routines of established power. It's not about courtly intrigue or political machinations with other civilized powers and it's definitely not like retirement it's about barely holding on in the wilderness through continuous exploration, adventure, and combat.

Let's parse it out point by point:

Domain Carving Starts Way Out in the Wilds. “Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town.” Not on the border of civilization but so deep in the wilds to be half a week or more travel to the edge of civilization.

You Need Detailed Zoomable Hex Maps. The player chooses (or co-creates a site as in the example where the player says he wants a site with a high bluff overlooking a river) a site and the DM presents him with a rough map showing the campaign hex and the six surrounding hexes. (It's unclear here if these are the whopping 20-40 long hexes described in the outdoor section.) You also need some very small-scale detailed maps 200 yards to a hex with an imposed larger hex at a one mile scale (nine smaller hexes wide).

The Clearing is an Intensive Hexcrawl Adventure. Now Gygax starts talking about the clearing much as he is describing the dangers of exploring hexes in the wilderness but in a through search grid like operation—and it's clearly meant to be an adventure to be done by the PCs themselves over several sessions almost a mini-campaign if you think about the scale involved:
“The player character and his henchmen and various retainers must now go to the construction site, explore and map it...Use actual time to keep track of game time spent exploring and mapping (somewhat tedious but necessary). Check but once for random monsters in each [200-yard?] hex, but any monster encountered and not driven off or slain will be there from then on, excepting, of course, those encountered flying over or passing through. After mapping the central hex and the six which surround it, workers can be brought in to commence construction of the castle.”

Danger Continues Well Into Construction. Interestingly this exploration and fighting doesn't end after the first bout but continues throughout the long period of building the hold:

“As [construction] will require a lengthy period of game time, the player character will have to retain a garrison on the site in order to assure the safety of the crew and the progress of the work (each day there will be a 1 in 20 chance that a monster will wander into one of the seven hexes explored by the character, unless active patrolling in the territory beyond the area is carried on).

While the construction is underway, the character should be exploring and mapping the terrain beyond the core area. Here the larger scale of about one mile per hex should be used, so that in all the character can explore and map an entire campaign hex. There are MANY one mile hexes in a 30 mile across campaign hex, so conduct movement and random monster checks as is normal for outdoor adventuring.”

Constant Adventuring is Required. Even with all the intensity of the above two phases the stronghold is never assured of a dull safety it remains on the edge only barely mitigated by the counter-moves of the PCs: “1) Once per day a check must be made to see if a monster has wandered into one of the border hexes which are adjacent to unexplored/ uncleared lands.

2) Once per week a check must be made to see if a monster has wandered into the central part of the cleared territory.”

The nature of the set-up demands that the PCs and followers be constantly exploring, expanding and holding the territory:

“Monsters which are indicated will generally remain until driven out or slain.

Modifiers to this are:

Posting and placement of skulls, carcasses, etc. to discourage intelligent creatures and monsters of the type able to recognize that the remains are indicative of the fate of creatures in the area.

Regular strong patrols who leave evidence of their passing and aggressively destroy intruders.

Organized communities whose presence and militia will discourage all but organized groups who prey on them or certain monsters who do likewise.”

And even when they are settled in and “patrolling the territory regularly--about once per week on a sweep basis, or daily forays to various parts of the area, the character will need only check once each week for incursions of wandering monsters...on the Uninhabited/ Wilderness table.”

That's a lot of vigilance and if handled imaginatively a heap of fun trouble to rain down on player's head. In otherwords little to nothing of political tedium or record keeping and the like, just more emphasis on a larger stage version of core D&D play areas: exploration, combat, and their related resource management.

Today's analysis is growing overlong. I will pick up later about how the copious encounter tables play a central role in providing a simple, workable (and fun) system for handling the mechanics of domain growth and ongoing adventures. I will also look at other sections on hirelings and followers to see what they say about AD&D's domain game.

AD&D's Domain Game

The secret we should never let gamemasters interested in domain play know is that they don't need any rules.

Yes, that's a clumsy paraphrase of a likely apocryphal Gygax quote and, yes, it's hyperbole—role-playing games need some kind of rules structure to keep them from just slumping into amateur theater hour. (And yes there is much to use in later supplements and games digging into this realm-ruling realm—including my own Hill Cantons: Borderlands when it's tarrying rear sees the light of published day.)

But it's an exaggeration that amplifies a simple truth, you may already have more in your head and hands about how to run this then you realize. For one you the ultimate baseline: your own capacity to imagine a robust imaginary world and adjudicate on a situational basis. Though a victim of scatter-shot organization there is also the fact that a fairly substantive rules framework for domain-play in D&D was already in place as early as 1979--in two books that you likely already own.

Let's do some textual analysis of the explicit and implicit domain game lying in those lovable old hardbacks (coming again for an encore this summer). Here's part one mostly from what we can gather from the Players' Handbook (part two of this post deals with the smorgsborg scattered throughout the DMG).

Different Classes, Different Domain Games

When you put together the various scattered paragraphs on higher level play you get a sense of a few overall themes (I will present a few more when we get to the DMG) that what class and race you are highly colors what you can as a charcter when you get to name level, enough that it feels like you have not just one domain game but several.

Only the three original core classes are able to “rule”. Only clerics, fighters, and magic-users are able to exert political authority enough to be able to squeeze income out of a local population. Furthermore they collect this revenue in varying amounts implying that the classes have different spheres of activity in the realm that can control.

There is an implied subtext I see in the terseness that the only beancounting that is important to AD&D domain ruling is knowing what the population of the land you control is and how much swag you can pull out of them.

Cleric (income from “trade, taxation, and tithes”): 9 sp per inhabitant per month

Fighter (income from “trade, tariffs, and taxes”): 7 sp per inhabitant per month

Magic-User (unclear but they “rule much as a noble”): 5 sp per inhabitant per month

Domain play does map neatly to name-level. Clerics begin in a limited way—they can build a temple and attract followers but not tax--right before name level at 8^th level. On the other hand you have Magic Users who cannot build a stronghold and rule until 12^th level, one after name level.

Ruling is for humans. Level-caps make it a humanocentric part of play for PCs. Only Dwarves with 18 STR and Half-Orcs can become name-level fighters. No PC demi-human can achieve a qualifying Cleric or Magic User level. So ruling is really left as far as PCs go to humans.

Class determines type of “stronghold.”

Clerics: At 8^th level must build “a place of worship, a building of not less than 2,000 square feet in floor area with an altar, shrine, chapel, etc” to attract followers. At 9^th level to rule they have the: “option of constructing a religious stronghold. This fortified place must contain a large temple, cathedral, or church of not less than 2500 square feet on the ground floor. It can be a castle, a monastery, an abbey or the like. It must be dedicated to the cleric's deity (or deities). The cost of construction will be only one-half the usual for such a place because of religious help.”

Fighters: Have freeholds which are “some type of castle” based in a cleared radius of 20-50 miles.

Magic-Users: Have strongholds based in a cleared radius of 10-20 miles.

Thieves: Cannot build strongholds (i.e. a building that serves as a seat of power) but can “build a tower or fortified building of the small castle type for their own safety; but this construction must be within, or not more than a mile distant from, a town or city.”

Assassins: Like thieves cannot build strongholds but can build guild headquarters when they reach 13^th level and defeat the sitting guildmaster “the headquarters...is always within a large town or big city...It is typically a warehouse or other nondescript structure, with safeguards and traps added.”

However evocatively at 15^th level, “the headquarters of the Grandfather of Assassins can be virtually anywhere and of any form--cavern, castle, monastery, palace, temple, you name it. However, if it is a large and obvious place, the headquarters must be located well away from all communities - such as in the midst of a murky woods, a dismal marsh or fen, a lonely moor, a deserted island, A remote coast, or far into forsaken hills or atop a mountain.”

Druids: vaguely “When attaining levels above the 11th, characters will generally inhabit building complexes set in woodlands and similar natural surroundings.”

Paladins: Beyond personnel costs they can only keep enough treasure “to construct or maintain a small castle.”

Monks: Can either steal or build one: “The monastery or monastery-like headquarters of the monk can be that of the character he or she defeated to attain 8th or higher level, or it can be a building specially constructed by the monk player character after attaining 8th or higher level. In the latter case, the monk may retain up to 250,000 gold pieces value in treasure in order to finance construction of the place.”

No Easy, Guaranteed “Endgame”

There is an implied style of play that often seems to crop up in OSR circles that domain-level play is either: (a) part of an automatic and assured process (you get the required level and poof); or (b) consitutes some kind of partial or full retirement. The AD&D domain game seems in its sparse detail to be about fighting your way up and fighting to maintain your position.

Indeed three classes—assassins, druids, and monks--have to literally do both. As they reach name level they must fight and defeat increasingly smaller circles of high-level characters (and presumably must be fielding the same from NPCs and other PCs) culminating in a single character of the highest level. No gentle coasting to oblivion there.

And even ruling for the three main classes implies a small-scale and intense experience. Only wilderness clearing—and constant vigilant patrolling--of a relatively small scale is mentioned at all. There is zero mention anywhere in the books of coasting into the higher and safer higher ranks of the nobility surrounded by a cast of tens of thousands of soldiers, retainers etc. There is a strong implication that you are right there at the edge of the howling wilds and you don't get out of that until you actually handover your character sheet to the DM.

More perhaps tomorrow on followers, wilderness clearing, political forms, and military matters from the book with the screaming, butt-ugly red fiend.

Better Fewer, But Better?

I have been noticing traffic flowing to the HC from Big Purple for several days now. The RPGnet thread that is spawning the page views is—for a refreshing change—near and dear to this blog's heart, posing the question: when did domain-level play drop out of D&D as a major play area?

The various responses are uneven, but interesting. The most interesting dropping (perhaps not surprisingly) from Michael Mornard aka the Old Geezer, one of the most OG of the hobby's pioneering souls having having hit the trifecta as a player in the original Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Barker's Tekumel campaigns.

I could spend several posts parsing his comments in that thread and linking back to thoughts about Borderlands and domain-level play in general. But one somewhat tangential one stuck out for me. He answers some of the out-loud wondering about what was particular about play groups back then that more readily supported his concept by saying:

“Remember that 'the group is one, solid, and indissoluble' was not a concept. We were all roving adventurers who would band together at times, but the highest form of play was to play solo. So once strongholds were built, one player might be a wizard staying in his tower and sending minions out to gather components for spell research, one might be building a mighty army, one interacting in the political intrigue, etc.”

The FLAILSNAILS experience developing on Google+--an ongoing series of mostly old school D&D dungeoneering linking by my guess a 100 or so players to more than a dozen different campaign worlds--seems to model more and more the open world feel of the big tent original campaigns. Players float in and out in mostly ad hoc combinations between the various campaigns, maps and magical items are bartered between sessions.

While I have been running the hell out of my Hyborian Age, Petal Throne, and Domain Game II campaigns in that pocket universe, until this week I have been merely a player and not a GM of these games. Last week I finally threw my hat in the ring and ran two open world sessions in my home face-to-face campaign in the eponymous Hill Cantons (session report from the foray into the Golden Domed Battle Barge coming later).

All tremendous fun, but I keep thinking about the second part of that middle sentence “the highest form of play was to play solo.” Big tent type of play, lots of players moving between worlds, was part of my own experience of the game even as late as 1981, but more frequently were the near-daily games we ran for several years with small groups.

As our early characters ramped up the power arc more and more there would be these sessions with one player. Back then it would have taken no effort to pull in at least another smallish group, but it was something of a prestige thing. Indeed it was a badge of “making it” as a player to be tough enough to tromp around the Suss Forest, either alone or with a private army of few NPC henchmen and men-at-arms.

And as a DM there was a certain quality of play that I enjoyed about those solo forays. You didn't have the rollicking camaraderie of a group, but you did get this laser-beam focus, a certain deeper intensity of play. And yes, as name-level crept in there was the stronghold building, the wilderness clearing, the army raising, and all the elements—come to think of it they were always in those intense me with the player sessions. Building plans would be drawn, great menaces to the freehold dealt with, mass battles run with small hordes of Heritage and Ral Parthas.

I find myself yearning for that “quality time” again as much as I do the big tent. Two of my current campaigns really lend themselves to it in fact.

Some of my best experiences playing and running Conan/ZeFRS have come with only two players, the system with its focus on high action, swashbuckling like the genre it emulates really lends itself to a smaller cast. And given what raised the question, the Domain Game II is also crying out for at least a session or two of such play (of course, most will still be the bigger "y'all come" sessions.)

Is any feeling this too? Or running or playing in solo games out of choice or necessity that you enjoy? Why so? What do you get out of them (or hope to) then you don't get in the troupe sessions?

Fifteen Minutes of Fame for Dwarf Fortress

Its a slow, lazy Sunday morning in the HC. The ritual of coffee, bagels, and the Sunday New York Times is one that has only been broken by stretches overseas or deep in the wilderness.

Pawing through the magazine section today, I was pleasantly surprised to see a full feature spread, nine pages no less, devoted to that obsessively granular computer strategy game, Dwarf Fortress—a game that commentators on the Borderlands/Domain Game project have noted many times here.

On the surface of it seems like the NYT couldn't have found a more unlikely game to highlight, with the archaic ASCII rogue-like graphic interface and bewilderingly complex domain-play. But you do get the half-baked brilliance behind it—and its appeal to the kind of gamers who love this kind of play-- by reading the piece.

You can find the NYT piece here. And if you are really feeling like you have an extra 20-40 hours a week to dump into a dark hole, you can also download the game for free here.

The article also reminded me that I wanted to return this week on the blogging to talking through the dilemma for tabletop domain-play. What areas can the pen and paper format do better? Can we develop computer-driven tools that will mesh and enhance our tabletop game play? What areas should we just simply cede the field to computer games?

Big questions, ones that I believe broke the backs of the domain-level games of the last two decades.

Cherry-Picking Domain-Level Play

Because the Internet is often tone-deaf, I wanted to be 100 percent clear about how I see the relationship between the Domain Game and Adventurer Conqueror King: f-bomb those guys.

Now that I got the interest of those who have a teaser-line feed, I don't mean that in the slightest. In fact, if it wasn't crystal clear from my last post and from Tavis's comments, I believe something(s) highly interesting and useful to our corner of the hobby is going to arise out of this. I don't know the exact shape of the end result, both parties still have some talking—and I have some writing and editing—to do yet.

There are a couple things that should get addressed in the mean time.

Thread one is the opinion that Austrodavicus (man, what a great handle) voiced here and on his matching post at Dungeons Down Under. Dave's punchline is that “people will pick through both works for their own games.”

My gut says this “yep, this likely is pretty what people in our DIY hobbyist end of things are going to do.” Hell, it's what I would do.

Although it came from a different impetus at the time, I should repeat that acknowledging that fact has been part of the core vision of the Domain Game for sometime. Cherry-picking is hardwired into the project.

I tried to accomplish this in a number of ways:

1. By making it fully, or at worst mostly, compatible to existing older and neo-classical flavors of D&D. You won't have to switch games or shoehorn what you are already playing overly much to use it.
   
   
2. By dividing certain sections into “basic”,“advanced”, and “narrativist” parts. Want to hand-wave the nitty-gritty details on how a domain gets a monthly income, but want a simple chart-based system? Stick to basic. Want to see how the sausage is made? Go with advanced. Want to take a freeform, off-stage approach to ruling? Go with the narrativist.
   
   
3. By making the granular, “advanced” parts modular. So you want to keep most domain-play basic, but you want to keep some detail on say how the annual grain harvest works or exactly how one attracts colonists to a strange land, you can use this piece or that in with the basic framework--or one of your making.
   
   
4. By having three distinct layers oriented to three different places in the power arcs of D&D characters. The “Pendragon D&D” work for the first layer (roughly levels 3-7). Clearing (or adapting) the wilderness--and scratching out a subsistence--for early name level at the second and larger-scale kingdom level action for even higher-level characters. One also has the flexibility to use any of these layers at any level, if that's where your think your game is going.

The second thread, on the nature of the old school second-wave--and where all this fits in--coming at you later today or tomorrow. 

Domain Game, the Last Stretch

First the good news, I rounded the 2/3rds done mark with the manuscript Tuesday—a highly-satisfying personal benchmark. Probably even more so if you've been anywhere around me in the last two months and had to suffer through my litany of whining about the horror of making it so much like real work (witness the recent post about Escapism).

The “Pendragon D&D” portions of the work were the real game-saver for me as it really gave me a jolt of energy to latch on to a way to bring domain-level play down to the mid-level character range. It didn't hurt that all those sections felt “right” and genuinely fun to my hobbyist gut—a notion only confirmed from the generous, thoughtful feedback from you fine folks out there.

Now the “bad news”—well, at least for me—yesterday evening I also got a heads-up from Ken, one of my former players from the Austin campaign, about Adventurer Conqueror King, a full-court press project that is taking on integrating domain-level play into a complete set of what they are calling a “second wave retro-clone” (think DCC RPG and LotFP here).

Much of it sounds a lot like parallel evolution (with some different mutations from what I read) to the granular, bottom-up domain-level goals of the DG. Big sigh.

The “worse” news is that the project is backed by an extremely talented team, Tavis from the excellent Mule Abides blog and the developer and business kingpin Alex of The Escapist website fame—and that the execution sounds damn good to me to date. I further love the fact that it sounded like some of the ideas grew organically out of real campaign play at Tavis' table. Potentially great stuff. 

All I can say is that I am damn glad that I am DIY hobbyist with zero percent interest in making my fortune and fame in the rpg industry (I already piss that opportunity away in my day job). 

Seriously though, my main goal in this whole project is purely of the “I want to see domain-play finally reach it's promised potential, so I can play it myself” kind. If that can happen with ACK bully for them, I'll play it. If not, hopefully the Domain Game will come through—or maybe fulfill different enough aspects of that overall goal to recapture "High Arnesonism".

If neither comes through, then, hell, I guess it's up to one of you to build this beast.

What Are We Escaping From?

One of the most enduring annoyances I have with blogging is the speed of its “news cycle”. Topics and threads appear quickly, gain--or more often fail to gain—momentum over a day—perhaps at best lingering over a second one or spawning follow-ups. But quicker than their mercurial rise is the even more abrupt disappearance. The topic drops down the roll, the comments trail off—and that energy tends to dissipate into the ether.

Part of me revels in the immediacy, but a larger part of me rebels at it. By nature I ruminate, at the healthier moments I like to savor ideas—letting thoughts glide over the tongue for a while. I like to pick things apart and see if they hold up. I like to plow into readings to back up the sand castles in my mind. It's a long and pleasurable process for me, especially when it gravitates around fantasy world-building.

So chances are if you have left even a half-way interesting comment on this blog in the past I have thought about it; mulled it over at least few times; perhaps even debated it in my head with a straw man you.

Case in point is a comment made a half a year ago by the ever-perspective Bombasticus on a post I made asking about people's experiences playing at the domain level:

For our gang, the tween years--10 to 12--were the developmental "sweet spot" for this kind of domain creation. There was something hugely appealing about the construction rules at that age and we all spent many hours outfitting hidden valleys, cloud castles, secret undersea lairs. I wonder if that's why we were able to be such dedicated dungeon masters in those days...I wonder if more adults don't do more domain management because we can get a lot more of that kind of thing at home, so to speak--maybe for some of us the responsibility of running the roost is part of the problem.

This comment has stuck around in the comment chorus of my brain, in the main because I have swung violently in my opinion about that last sentence. Something just kept nagging me about it as I have been toiling away trying to get the Domain Game out the door. It struck a deep nerve as it pointed to a deeper question about why we are all here in the broader sense.

What drives us into speculative fiction and fantasy gaming? What keeps us there, book after book and game after game? What are we escaping from. Does that escape always neatly map to something opposite from what we are enduring in real life?

My gut has a hunch that many of you reading this, like me, are quite comfortable with the notion that our hobby is an escapist one. I have seen Tolkein's famous quip that the group most bothered by escape are the jailers quoted on several occasions in our circles with great relish, and approve of its spirit. Life in our madhouse of a world necessitates some kind of safety valve, our hobby is perhaps a bit saner than most by virtue of its honesty.

To be sure there are boulder-sized specks of truth in his statement specifically about the mega-stage of kingdom-running. When I drifted back into the hobby three years ago it was consciously as a revolt against the stress, frustrations, and boredom of a life running “domains”: both in real life as a managing editor of a small-circulation national magazine and in gaming even as someone highly addicted to the most complex of computer strategy games.

The old, comfortable package of D&D fit very nicely for me. It was “coming home” as Arky aptly put it on his own blog, Rather Gamey. The smaller scale of rootless adventurers tramping around a mostly unmapped blank slate of a world unmediated by the flickering light of a computer screen—and filled with the laughter and groans of flesh-and-blood players around a kitchen table—was like getting thrown a life preserver at that time.

Blessed escape.

My life shifted, and the work became more of a roller coaster since leaving Detroit to come back to Texas. There were two lay-offs and two long stretches of getting my sea legs in very different, challenging work situations. The above feeling of escape attached with that kind of gaming never let go through it—it's still the tent-pole of the HC tabletop campaign.

Almost paradoxically I did find, however, my appetite returning for the larger stage games, especially as the blog evolved and took on its own momentum of things it wanted to explore. My real life was just as complicated with as much of the burdens of leadership as before, even more so with the complexities of my personal life thrown in, but that old itch was there. Weirdly, even I found myself not just loving some of it, but loving the most granular parts of it.

But I also have found that I have a hard times with pieces of it, they don't feel like “escape”. I loved the hustle and bustle and ambition of the play-by-post experiment but hated feeling like the organizer trying to keep it all on track (my day job). (Sorry Domain Game players here is my colossal pokiness in that area laid out straight.) In writing the game I found my mind thrilling on some subjects and not others (taxation, legal systems, yawn).

In other words, I have noticed that my love of escape is highly selective, topical even. I may love resource management and tough choices in the game, but I personally hate keeping track of encumbrance both as a player and a GM. It reminds me too much of packing my car for a trip. 

What pieces of games you love do you rebel at or feel conflicted by? Not just dislike because of this or that game mechanic, but the deeper things that feel like the parts you want to get away from? What are you running from, dear reader?