Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Barbarian, Soldier, Conqueror, King… and then Barbarian Once Again

The Appendix N books that originally inspired D&D frequently featured protagonists charting a picaresque path through a dangerous world. In many instances, these characters would enter a given location or scenario as a humble outsider, but by the end of a given short story (or chapter, in an episodic novel), they’ve risen to a position of power or influence, usually through their cunning and guile.

By the beginning of the next chapter – often presented in media res – they are on the road again, returned to the itinerant state they began in. Such stories often do not even include an explanation of how the character left that last position of power and influence, but it’s usually easy to imagine. There’s something compelling about a character who is good at exploiting an unstable situation and rising to power, but then either becomes bored with the work of maintaining that power, or simply gambles it away with the same impetuousness that empowered their rise.

Thinking about the way these characters rise, fall, and rise again got me thinking about two otherwise-unrelated characteristics of old-school and traditional RPGs… domain building and level drain.


Barbarian

Pixel art by Hal0Badger

I'm Losing My Edge, but I Was There

It goes like this. When adventurers reach high enough levels to oversee a domain, the game switches to domain play, under whatever system the DM and the players choose. This could work well as a single session, where the action zooms out and the game skips over longer periods of time. It could also be done by email or Discord messages, in between conventional adventuring sessions.

Each PC of sufficiently high level to manage a domain identifies actions they would like to pursue while in power. These should be goals that would be difficult or impossible to achieve through adventuring. Politics, warfare, arcane research, proselytizing, building things; whatever they can imagine. It can be helpful to think in terms of nations, organizations, and populations (factions, in short). Some good universal prompts can include the following:

  • Supporting or expanding an existing faction
  • Opposing an antagonist faction, by war, politics, trade, or all three
  • Creating a new faction, or reviving a fallen faction

Each goal takes an in-game year to resolve. For every year that passes, each character running a domain loses a level. This works just like classic level drain, except it doesn’t represent undeath eating away at a character’s lifeforce. Instead, it is the loss of the adventuring edge as the domain-ruling character is either softened by the luxuries of life at the top, or weighed down by the burdens and obligations of leadership.  

The rewards for pursuing domain goals should be substantial enough that they are tempting even to players who hate level drain. There should be little or no rolling the dice, and the DM should adjudicate deferentially whenever it makes sense; after all, the players are giving up something real here. They should get meaningful results.

Characters can “spend” as many levels as they wish on these domain-level actions. Different characters can “spend” different numbers of levels during domain play, or opt out entirely. When no one wants to spend any more levels, the characters return to adventuring, at whatever lower level they now find themselves at – years later, in a world changed considerably by their time at the top. 


Title screen from the 1991 video game of the same name (?)


OK, Would YOU Actually Play This?

Me? No. I’m always eager to retire a character and move on to the next character. For me, the thrill of rolling up a new 0 XP nobody outweighs the familiar attachment of a highly leveled character. I think this is typical of people who DM more than they PC, and are accustomed to treating characters more like a fun time, while they last, and less like a semi-permanent avatar of oneself.

But I also think I’m in the minority. Many players are far more invested in playing a character they love, and reluctant to just retire. The desire to gain levels is in tension with the desire to stay in the sweet spot of character progression – leveled enough to be unique and somewhat powerful, but not so leveled that domain matriculation pulls them out of the dungeon. This idea would just be a new way to resolve that tension. 

So ask your players – is the idea of gaining power, squandering it, and starting all over again compelling? If so, they may want to try being barbarians, then soldiers, then conquerors, then kings… and then barbarians once again. 

Back on the Road

Barbarian, Soldier, Conqueror, King… and then Barbarian Once Again

The Appendix N books that originally inspired D&D frequently featured protagonists charting a picaresque path through a dangerous world....