Dungeons & Dragons came from players of miniature wargames. And, in the earliest days, there was an expectation that the characters would become powerful lords and archmages and command territories and armies.
The funny thing is that this rarely happened. The origin of the game came from the players assuming the roles of the leaders of the territories and commanding armies, but it dropped down to the players controlling individual heroes exploring a dungeon and rarely came out the dungeon afterwards.
Oh yes, there have been attempts. Birthright, Kingmaker, Bloodstone Pass, and – possibly most successfully – the Companions Rules Set released in 1984 and edited by Frank Mentzer.
But the main course of the game has just kept chugging along with the characters as individual heroes who command no-one but themselves. Even henchmen and hirelings rarely see play!
And a large deal of why this is the case is that people who play Dungeons & Dragons aren’t here to play civilisation-builders or wargames. They’re here for heroic action.
It’s worth considering this: What sort of game do you have to play when you control a barony or kingdom?
I believe the answer isn’t obvious to most. People are still in the D&D heroic mode, where you play a team of characters working together.
Mostly, when we talk about territory acquisition in D&D, we’re talking about something that is an end-goal, with the character retiring afterwards. Or a story-related status symbol. It’s only rarely that players make ruling kingdoms the centre of their D&D game.
It does happen. But it’s not, by any means, standard.
For a game where you control domains, you need to be playing against the other players. You’re attempting to attack, subvert, or steal the lands and populations belonging to your opponents – and, because of the scale of forces required – those can’t be controlled by the DM. It’s all very well to think “Oh, we’ll all band together to stop this threat”, but the task of actually running such an opposition to a group of allied kingdoms is something that most DMs can’t handle. Most players of miniature wargames would have trouble being the sole controller of an army while five opposing armies – even if smaller – were pitted against them.
But if each of the players controls a domain? You get fascinating discussions between the players where they form and break alliances and seek to gain advantages. That’s the way to make it manageable.
The player against player aspect is visible in some stories of the early games. Gary Gygax’s unwillingness to reveal the stats of any of his characters is a case in point. There were times the players couldn’t trust each other: Was someone chaotic? Was someone a thief? Were they hiding treasure?
My own experiences with this come primarily from the Kingmaker Adventure Path for the Pathfinder RPG. I GMed that entire series. And, while the players enjoyed the early stages of setting up their kingdom, soon it became tedious. And that series only slightly looked into what happens when a nation goes to war (with a completely flawed mass combat system!) By the time of the final adventure, the plot wasn’t the kingdom in its full power taking on its foes… no, it was high-level characters hunting down the Big Bad in her dungeon. Back to the normal tropes of D&D!
It’s not that you can’t do it. But you’re generally going it alone – or moving to other rules sets. For it’s not something the game supports.
Running a campaign where all the players controlled separate realms and competed against each other would be fun – but it’s not Dungeons & Dragons as most of us know it. It’s something else!
Your thoughts are almost exactly the thoughts I had when I sat down with the team to design the Acquisitions Incorporated rules for running a franchise. “Franchise” was just a stand-in term for any endeavor, from a business to a castle to a ship to a merchant guild to a thieves’ guild and more. Any system would have to deal with the reality that adventurers… adventure. And that complicated rules (hello, 3E’s Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook) only appeal to a limited number of players and offer very little payout. This is why you see the franchise rules as collaborative group design, with high concepts that have a lot of flavor but then discrete benefits. Your headquarters can be a walking statue, a flying blimp, or a tavern that has portals connecting it to all other taverns. You gain fun features, motivation for downtime to keep it running well, and you gain some neat benefits. And you take it with you as you travel, so it remains relevant. In campaigns, it has worked well for me. It has a flexible enough system that it was high-fantasy silly for my teenage players who wanted a “building on roller-skates” but completely serious for my Tomb of Annihilation campaign where the players wanted a way to stay in touch with Port Nyanzaru and keep influencing its events and thwarting rivals while they explored tombs.
I think your points are valid, but couldn’t you make it work if you reduce the ‘wargame’ to two armies: the ‘Good Guys’ i.e. the PC’s and the Evil Overlord’s Empire of Doom? That way things are easier on the DM, and the players can collaborate against a common foe, taking different positions within the army. You could blend traditional D&D with this overarching war mechanic pretty seamlessly, just have the PC’s do quests for the war effort, taking out generals, sneaking into enemy territory, there’s loads of military situations where a creack team of highly skilled operatives is worth 10 legions.
This way you keep the cool fantasy idea of leading an entire army, upping the stakes and seeing the scale of your campaign grow, but the game doesn’t lose focus on the PC’s themselves as the most important players in the story.
The trouble partly comes from complexity. For the game to be engaging for the players, we generally want a certain level of complexity in the mechanics of what we control. However, if the opposition runs from exactly the same rules, with one player controlling five times the forces, the complexity that is right for one is overwhelming for that role.
It’s very true. This is the reason why characters were—and still are—expected to accumulate literal tonnes of gold in their careers. I wrote about this in an article I posted a while back on my website, which I’ll quote a bit from that might be of interest to those reading this article:
“[Gold] wasn’t intended to permanently sit as a figure on a character sheet. Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax both planned their campaigns (Blackmoor and Greyhawk, respectively) such that the endgame involved becoming leaders of massive armies that would be played out with the original tabletop army battle rules that had led to the creation of D&D. And such leaders need coin to build fortresses, raise armies, amass fleets, et cetera. The original rules included prices for such massive investments like castles and ships, as well as to hire the men-at-arms to put in them.
The problem with this was, of course, that this ‘endgame’ play didn’t hold the same interest with most of the player base. It wasn’t even just new players who were more interested in the dungeons, it was the original players themselves who kept returning to the monster-filled underground labyrinths in hope of another score. Dave Arneson’s crew spent so much time in the dungeons beneath Castle Blackmoor—originally intended as a minor diversion to the war on the surface—that he eventually declared his players had lost the above-ground conflict by forfeit! D&D, it would seem, was to be a game of slaying monsters and collecting treasure hoards to make Scrooge McDuck blush in envy.”
The game has come a long way since its first imagining as the prologue to the tabletop war gaming side. We don’t play characters to see how they become mighty warlords anymore, we play them to see them grow and oversee challenges. It’s a very different game to the original rules.
The domain-management rules in Kingmaker put my group off so much that we abandoned the Adventure Path. Sounds as though it wasn’t just us.