Running a Dominion in Fantasy RPGs

 While I adore the original domain management rules in the D&D Companion set, they always felt incomplete to me and needlessly complex. For example, extensive rules are given on how to account for expenses for a baron getting a visit from his king, but there’s no breakdown of how players can spend resource income. The rules mention trade routes and tolls as something that could be valuable to a dominion, but there’s no specifics on how to incorporate them in a dominion’s statistics.  

 And forget scalability! Can you imagine rolling for hex resources and population changes for every hex in an empire?

 What I propose instead is a much more abstract system, where a dominion consists of jurisdictions, or portions, that happen to be under direct rule. When establishing a dominion, roll a d100 for each province (whether a hex, a duchy or an entire kingdom) for resources. This die roll is multiplied against several factors that then determine resource production. These resources can be used for building stuff, like strongholds or roads, or for retaining troops of mercenaries. Each month, events can occur which will increase or shrink the initial roll.  The fact that resources may vary so much is easily attributable to a variety of factors like seasonality, unexpected expenses, droughts, loss of divine favor, etc.

 I also want something simple. I don't want myself or players having to read a large rule set from a 3rd party publisher. Lots of professional designers have written many books on this subject and i have yet to find something that's what I'm looking for. 

 While abstract, players are still confronted with meaningful choices. They can keep tax rates low to draw in more population or they can raise rates, risking events like rebellions. While they can invest in their dominions to make them more economically productive, they should not also neglect spending on troops. It would be tragic to build a gem of a province, only for a greedy neighbor to swoop in and flood it with foreign troops.

 This picture may help clarify my design goals: 

 

Stated simply, here's what I'm shooting for:

• Shouldn’t be an end game in itself; rather, should act as a relatively simple springboard for adventure ideas and to launch new ways to challenge PCs

• Needs to be scalable, whether the PC is a new baron with a single hex of land or is building a continent-spanning empire.

• Needs to be abstract so that the game doesn’t get bogged down in minutiae; players should be encouraged to invest in their dominions to make them stronger and more productive, but we don’t want to spend time tracking the quantity and condition of every road, bridge and port

I've still got quite a bit of fine-tuning on the numbers. The nature of this beast is that it's numbers-intensive. But, at the end of the day, I want something that tells a player you get X amount of wealth from your domain and the following Y things happen (uprisings, diplomatic stumbles, monster incursions, new veins of ore discovered in nearby hills, etc).  And then let the players decide how much more wealth they'll plow into their new roads versus paying for a new legion of troops. 

 And, yes, they'll still go into dungeons, too. 

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