A Hypothetical: Doing away with the provinces...

Dungeons & Dragons The Royal Library
1

I’ve been trying for a bit to do a domain rules conversion for a different system (true20) and I’ve pondered a few system agnostic changes that would probably require some rethinking.

Of these, the biggest/most daunting has been mostly trying to do away with provinces, because while they can provide some interesting info, they also feel limiting due to the basic “one ruler per province, borders never change” approach. Basically, I tend to use province levels as a marker of population (and have a different holding indicating land development), and I also tend to use tables where province levels indicates a population progression relatively similar to that of 3rd edition experience points (it used to be in the old accessories on the site, although I tend to use multiples of 4.000 or 6.000 instead of 2.000 (so I get actual medieval densities; 4.000 and I boost Anuirean and Brecht and some peripheral realm levels by 1, or 6.000 no modification).

Province holders would be both feudal landlords and sovereign princes; this means that a non-subinfeudated, undivided Avanil would be just 3 points shy of a level 14 province (assuming the trianglar sequence continues after level 10; on a sidenote, Medoere would be a level 6 province). It could also be split into 102 baronies. Both extremes would obviously be silly. I also use a quick rule of thumb from a rarely if ever applied french royal ordnance, so I use for minimal personal domains as level 1 for a baron (1 point), level 2 for a count (3 points, actually more like 4) and level 5 for a duke (15 points, actually more like 16), plus vassals if any.

Potential causes for splitting up holdings I can see would be

  • Personal unions, keeping both realms separated
  • Administrative divisions, provinces, shires, although I’m a bit iffy on this still.
  • Distinguishing personal domain and the realm, as with the duchy of Lancaster and the kingdom of England.
  • Exclaves, the province holding would have to be contiguous land. A potential source of nightmares, however, when you consider things like this, although it’s a relatively more modern phenomenon, and the split level 1s of Avanil do average about 80-90-ish square miles (Liechtenstein is only a tad smaller).

A province holder, even non-sovereign, would get the entire benefits of holding province levels, however the non-sovereign ones would be considered vassals, with obligations. A powerful vassal could eventually be powerful enough to resist militarily to attempts at removal, depending on the realm.

This would likely mess up with the level parity in some ways (say, your level 14 province can end up having 105 level 1 guilds), and needs further thought, but I’m not at playtest point yet (what with me only really gaming in the springs and summers anymore), and I figure a limit on the number of holdings might work out as well, although it could still leave a discrepancy between the total levels due to using this triangular numbers method to determine the link between population and province level. It also has the potential to monumentally mess up source if I keep it as is, but pooling source over an area might allow for less “squishy” sorcerers as well.

2

So, rather than having provinces, a domain would effectively have a “population” attribute - that would in turn determine how many of each holding-type it can have?

The Prince of Avanil would therefore not need to know where his borders were, but merely how many people he ruled. That would certainly make it easier to handle many elements of domain management…

But IC, the people are in particular places on the land. Would warfare be wholly-abstracted, so that troops fight over ‘points’ of population rather than specific physical locations? If not, you still need some way to link population to specific areas of land… at which point you’re presumably back into some sort of province or city system.

There have been some efforts to write up systems in which a domain has a ‘character sheet’, gaining or losing traits as a PC would, without needing particular resources to be specifically mapped and tracked. Is that the sort of result you’re after?

3

Would it still be possible to have holdings in an area that has no ruler and no law holdings?

Sorontar

4

Yes and no, it would be tied to both population and land area, but the land area would have to be populated area; not quite splitting the provinces themselves but more of the order of “a village here, a village there”, so mostly population tied.

But IC, the people are in particular places on the land. Would warfare be wholly-abstracted, so that troops fight over ‘points’ of population rather than specific physical locations? If not, you still need some way to link population to specific areas of land… at which point you’re presumably back into some sort of province or city system.

This is one of the consequences I’m not sure about yet, that’s part of why I’m still partial to having some sense of land division (whether shires, cities, etc), basically, it wold end up being possible to treat all cities like Anuire, assuming the right political circumstances.

Basically the abstraction level and the consequences on other holdings are my two main issues: I already figured it messed immensely with sources, and fighting is another one of these things. At the same time, the population divisions could be tied to land: a citadel here, a county there. Basically, it would be easier to pull with modern positional warfare, but at the same time it could probably work with siege warfare to some extent. What changes hands when the peace is signed can potentially just be done by level rather than the whole deal. It would, however, potentially reduce the abstraction of war, if Avan’s lands happen to be a single large province holding (I figure he probably runs about a third to one half of his domains by himself), then it becomes realistically possible to campaign over the area without having a mechanic where the losing army is expelled from it, and it’s likely that they could spend days and weeks in the area without so much as a skirmish. Basically, I’m trying to suppress the urge to turn warfare into something too tactical, but at the same time there’s possibility in having ways to go from the complex to the abstract; I like a system that can do the extremes.

As for holding levels in uncontrolled areas, sure, I don’t see why not, although there would be few if any of these, most would probably end up being republics or under the control of various strongmen, unless the population was a nomadic band or a pastoral tribe…

For the return to the land, I was of two possible minds on that:

  • The first option was making urbanization into “feats”, however this fails on account of the fact that when the higher levels are hit, larger domains risk being terribly underurbanized, especially once the system allows for going above level 10, however, the rural overpopulation of England and France compared to Italy was pretty notorious at the end of the middle ages so it might not be too bad, and if “shire” holdings are allowed to be put together (but not tied to the province, basically they’d just be an amalgamation of population points over an area, the provinces could be more or less that, but it’s still not thought through; I guess at this point it shows I’ve been playing Victoria too much :p). In a similar way other holdings could have branches/dioceses/pools, of varying sizes, that might not be entirely tied, although keeping track of how a particular branch is spread politically might end up having them follow political borders to retain some semblance of simplicity.
  • The second option would have been to treat cities as discrete holdings, however forcing players to split up even more of their holdings to have cities might actually penalize a lot for, say, army musters (how much can you subdivide the holdings and still have room for cavalry, or knights, since for a single troop of knights you’d need a minimum of a level 4 holding). It could be balanced with character rules (you need to have sheriffs/provosts/bailiffs/governors to control these administrative divisions after all, which means further maintenance or good charisma to go with leadership to recruit those)

There have been some efforts to write up systems in which a domain has a ‘character sheet’, gaining or losing traits as a PC would, without needing particular resources to be specifically mapped and tracked. Is that the sort of result you’re after?

Not quite, sort of, but with more possibility to go from complex to abstract, although these did interest me a lot. Like I said, I’m pitching a work in progress which I’m still trying to balance out. And of course, the vagueness of borders would be pretty historical for the period, sure the villages and fields will tend to be clear, but who is really entirely sure where the border begins and ends in a forest, or on moors and mountains, unless a river has been set as the border (common, but not quite that common, many small principalities could end up being river valleys, having the river right in the middle and no clear land border).

5

It’d add a good deal to the set-up work involved, but you could potentially name and (approximately) site towns and cities in each realm - so Oxford is West of London and Warwick West of Oxford and East of Bristol, but that’s about all you need to know…

That would then give you pre-defined “population units” (and containers for holdings) scattered across the map, over which people can fight (politically and militarily).

For small changes in power, small-scale medieval peace deals quite often did involve the transfer of “four villages in the area of La Marche”, or whatever - you could handle ‘rural’ populations that aren’t in particularly strategic sites simply as a pool of floating points.

6

So, more thought.
I realized something checking through the BRCS revisions again, and it dawned on me that the holding limits might provide some way of measuring things. I figure some sort of relative limit on how much of a holding and how many holdings a regent can rule efficiently might work. I also have a table somewhere for the resulting holding splits, and realized that it would also lead to some sort of balance between income, regency and maintenance costs and incomes; keeping a hard limit of 10 on holding level might also help (although I’m not sure it needs it, but there’s a point where you hit diminishing returns in the regency/gold/military balance, to a point where I doubt you’d be likely to find a level 20 holding instead of 4 level 10 ones (more accurately, 3x10+1x9)), not that a regent would only be able to rule a single holding, but it would allow some degree of consolidation, and maybe a quick rule of thumb as to how to split feudal domains, and the pita that is appanage-seeking heirs. I would be tempted to do the limit on the number of holdings on a bloodline basis; no bloodline would limit to one holding, +1 for each level going from tainted, minor, major, great and true, an unblooded ruler/republic would have to federate more or have much higher level holdings (I’m dubious but it’s the option that comes to my mind atm, charisma bonus, synergy bonuses from lead, diplomacy or knowledge (law), or from size of the ruling assembly might be additional options).

I’m still somewhat using the provinces, though, as a rough guide on what kind of population density the land can support, with some overruling where it’s obviously ridiculous (e.g.: the Zweilunds are probably barely the surface area of 2 provinces at the absolute most, while Spiderfell is 2-3 provinces on its own), and these may go to/over 11 if the proper conditions are there. Some elements are slightly houseruled to make sense: waterways and climate will affect level potential, as will a few more things, and the holding split resulting from a province going over 10 could explain away the division of Anuire-city and Anuire-county.

7

Gwrthefyr, I first was shocked by the title of your post (“How can anyone take away provinces!?”)
But you developed your argument well and I’m actually starting to see a lot of value in it;

Even before doing away entirely with province boundaries it made sense for me that different parts of a province constitute some sort of points;
Example: In a large province 3/4
The elves in the mid-size forest surrounded by humans might constitute a 1/1 “sub-province” – and the dwarves in the mountains have a 1/2 and really the human village (with the local Jarl) only constitutes a 1/0 with the remaining 0/1 being sparsely populated fields where brigands, orogs and nomads travel through… it would help explain a mix of populations in the giantdowns: where Dwarves and others are sparsely populated but still hold “something”.

If I take a step back though it would seem that by design the provinces were meant to be “small” – both in terms of population and size; and I’ve ran micro-birthright campaigns that worked well (you, your 5 retainers and your party constitute a 1 law holding and if you recruit a lieutenant you can raise it to law(2)! etc…)

As for movable province boundaries – I’m totally open to it and feel that it make sense from a medieval comparison standpoint (besides, Endier was part of another province – the Spider fell – was it not!?) – it would fit too with the “create province” action – so a 3/5 province would be split into a 1/4 and a 2/1 province; I’m assuming too that two smaller provinces could be united… The Lord would have to spend quite a bit of influence in order to get the population to identify with the new provinces (or risk having their aliegeance stick to the original province.) – so that kind of split could not happen in a very fluid way!

“Say master Dunberg, are you on your way to Ustjukil?”
“Yey and Nej, I’m bound for Neu-Ustjuk if that’s what you mean!”
“Well, to me it will always be Ustjukil; I was born there and so was my father and my father’s fathers before me. Can’t figure out why Vari had the mind to split off the east of the province and give it a name that means nothing to anyone but to a few nomads who aren’t for staying half the time anyway!”
“I kind of like the name, and besides the king’s men guard the road better now that they can focus on protecting merchants. The province markers are clean and welcoming to the visitor – surely people are now proud to be neu-ustjukians!”
“Neu-ustjukyou-what!? Vari can spend gold and influence on justifying his folley but never will they make me believe that people will buy into this; Ustjukil is still the name of the land that rings true in the people’s ears.. and even should goblins clean out the last man, woman and child – to those displaced it will be the land they yearn to return to; the land they will always want to re-take… Ustjukil…”

8

I’ve always felt that provincial boundaries should be fluid. I chalked up their existence to rule and mechanics limitations.

9

At 08:41 AM 4/5/2010, SirRobin wrote:

>I`ve always felt that provincial boundaries should be fluid. I

chalked up their existence to rule and mechanics limitations.

If you`re going to do away with provinces entirely, you might
consider using villages, towns and cities as the basis for the
population rather than a fixed population number. That is, a village
might represent 0-1 levels of holdings (and 1 level of population)
while a town could be 2-3 and a city 4-6. That would make the
population the center of the holdings and province borders would be
as fluid (or not) as you wanted. Plus, it parallels the existing
materials on how holdings work: they manifest as small, medium or
large structures/facilities or magical sources.

In the long run, I think a system like that makes as much sense or
more than the static system of provinces, and its a bit easier to wrap ones head around when compared to the weirdness of population levels.

Gary

10

The province border non-fluidity is there only for the sake of play. Surely no one IRL conquered the entire province or nothing. It makes life easier, like which holding and how many levels of it are there, how many people are there. If you go and split, what is the new domain level now, what if this piece of province is merged with that one, etc. And that is some work to be done.

Like Gary says, villages and towns could do the trick if you abandon the province level. But still, if you are playing Cerilia, you need to map all that villages, towns, cities, etc, so again there’s a whole lot of work to be done.

House rules certainly could overrule some of the nonsense from the books.

11

My main problem is not really the lack of fluidity really, it’s the fact that the provinces look, well, they basically look like something that could have been drawn up by the american government (straight lines, no exclaves), which you won’t see happen with pre-modern states, there’s a slight tendency to try, but even today there’s leftovers from these eras. There was also the issue of the size of the province: how do you get a smaller domain, then. How do you represent the smaller states of the period?

12

Ha! Hilarious! Yes, I have been trying to use “existing maps” for birthright campaigns and I always have problems because provinces are not normally “all the same size”
=> But then you should just allow players to combine two provinces to make a bigger one (create province variant… perhaps with a DC based on the final provinces level!), or allow them to split provinces into smaller parts (as I had detailed in my previous post)
That would allow the map to be packed with both small 2/0 provinces and huge 4/9 provinces…

13

I suspect that part of the basic idea was that domains below a certain territorial level wouldn’t have the ability to perform some functions in a significant way, and therefore didn’t need to be represented in the same fashion as larger ones. The individual Duchies and other major Anuriean states in the base setting are around the size of Wales: at as little as 20-25 miles across (and less, for some islands), a single-province state can really be quite impressively small.

You do have enclaves in the form of holdings across borders (e.g. Avanil’s law holdings in Diemed), and though truly tiny holding-only domains (Law or otherwise) are distinctly rare in Cerilia, there are a few around (e.g. Mourde Alondier in the Erebannien, or the holdings in the Basilisk’s realm).

It’s also worth bearing in mind that handling the weight of NPCs tends to be one of the major problems for DMs as it is: adding many enclaves and tiny statelets may add flavour, but it will also add work for anyone running the game.

14

Except I feel “holding as land” feels like a weird way to do it when the game is built around the idea of “province as land”, which is why I’m trying to rework that part of the holding system into something that can work for “x as rulership” - one of the alternatives I’d thought of was completely removing province and just having law, which causes issues though the further in time you stray imo (say: restoration England: how do you do the separate power of parliament and the king while having the king still be overall ruler sort of thing, or the simple fact that the three crowns spent a good chunk of the period being at war with each other despite having the same king, all without having the crown losing said law holdings entirely until the end of the 17th century)

I’m also not thinking about millions of statelets, there weren’t that many with any significance all told that fell under the size of a province outside of some areas: sure the holy roman empire was split into 300 statelets in theory, but of those, a large number were “imperial knights” whose states were just an estate with none of the powers of a prince (and ended up as barons in Prussia and Bavaria when all was said and done), and the others tend to be close to the size of an average BR province with a few dozen exceptions (who would eventually end up absorbed by more powerful families)

Italy would be a similar situation, sure on paper it looks extremely split, but by the 15th century, only about 8 states of the peninsula would be too small for a BR province (Asti, Guastalla (but often an exclave), Massa, Lucca, San Marino, Malta (but an island), Piombino, not Monaco (Genoese exclave though at the time) and later the Stati dei Presidii (leftovers of the republic of Siena, spanish exclave on the Tuscan coast))

I’m not suggesting millions of them, but just an optional house rule for the purpose of realism, as these tend to appear on tense borders especially. Well, realism and rule of drama: making things messier is fun for some :wink: - also the plan involved consolidating holdings and removing the 10 level limit, basically while there would be a number of feudal landholders and more npcs to keep track of, each of these NPCs would also have less complicated bookkeeping by virtue of the holdings being reduced to a handful for each type (my initial example has the principality of Avanil put as a single high level holding after all; for that conversion I tend to go for provinces having triangular population, squared wealth and I’m torn between linear and triangular holdings, and in fact still a few more things - this also has an effect that there’s a point where just improving the population won’t give much more, which is where I’m tempted to have domain traits or holding splits (say form a city) happen, as all you’re getting over time is rural overpopulation): more than the NPCs to keep track of, my limited BR DMing experience has been that it’s the book keeping of vast, complex and numerous domains which tends to suck out your soul.

It will probably be put as an alternate option when I’m through with putting together my TrueBirthright conversion draft…

15

Why not just treat province levels like other holding levels?

Thus Avanil might control 1 level of Alamsreft while Tuornen controlled 2. Represent this however you want on the map–the province could be split with some internal border, or the dispute could be waged across towns or with no definitive boundaries, but rather intermingled peoples owing their allegiances separately. This would create more conflict and more fluidity among borders.

I prefer a somewhat different holding system, anyway.
I consider provinces to be well-settled, already having populations at the max geographic potential (unless the region is specifically sparsely-settled, like frontiers, where a manual arbitrary adjustment reduces that potential).

Thus every plains province in the Heartland of Anuire has 8 levels (9 if by river, 10 if by sea).
This means that every other holding type can keep advancing until the total for that holding type reaches the maximum. Guilds, for instance, can outstrip Province levels.

By this system, Province levels represent governmental, administrative control over the general populace. One does not have full control (extensive tax collection apparatus, sufficient ministers, and record-keeping to control a given population) until one has all the slots filled, and administrative control can be mixed. However, often realms will try to declare boundaries (i.e., claim a whole province without filling all the slots) and back up the claim by force.

In addition to Guilds, Laws, Temples, and Sources, I include two other holding types: Manors and Trade.
Manors represent the manorial system: landholders controlling agricultural or resource-extraction type operations with tenant workers. They produce some money and can exert some influence like laws, but can choose between more money or being able to call up military units for seasonal service.
Manors and guilds can compete for slots if they exceed the base slots for their provinces.

Trade holdings represent trade routes in this system. They are more fluid than other types of holdings.

There are some additional rules implications of these, but what I’m getting at is that between the mixed province holding types, manor holdings (representing the power of the lesser nobles), and the ability of the trade, guild, law, and temple holdings to outstrip the province level, you can represent quite a variety of different situations and heterogenous borders.

16

I do like that idea, but it does sound very complicated!

17

I worked some time ago some ideas that remember me a little of this, specially allowing holdings to go over the province level, something that always bothered me.

For this what I did is to duplicate the duality between population-law to the other holdings, so I had economics-guilds, faith-temples, and magic-sources. Those three new “things” were the equivalents of the province level but for the other holdings (economics could be always maxed at 10, faith depended on the race and magic depended on population).

It worked pretty nicely, although I like a lot Rowan idea.

18

The biggest complication comes in just re-envisioning the system. Starting holding levels from ROE don’t work out so well–gives people a lot of room to advance. Also increases the gold in the game quite a bit, which suggests some adjustment in domain action costs and may require a good mass combat resolution system for larger armies. Those larger armies are more accurate anyway, though, if the common Plains provinces (level 8, 9 if by river, 10 if by sea) have 80,000 to 100,000 people in them.

Also, adding new holding types does add more regents. In small games this isn’t much of an issue. I’m currently working on a project to automate turn submissions through a form so that basic action resolution is handled automatically. The DM then just handles exceptions, adds the RP flavor, or overrides results if appropriate. I was doing this in Access, but I think I’m going to build it in SharePoint now. I have the intent of making it possible to run all of Anuire, perhaps all of Cerilia, fairly easily this way.

By the way, the new holding types and the ability to expand beyond province levels makes for more competition among all types of domains.

One nice thing about this system is that the realm rulers can compete with each other directly without necessarily going to war (though they may provoke war this way, as well). Also, with the Manor holdings, you get lesser nobles mattering more, with the ability to potentially stage meaningful rebellions. Further, with Manor and Guild holdings ultimately being able to occupy the same space, you get a conflict between the nobility and the merchant/artisan classes. In real world history, you’d see Manors eventually replaced perhaps entirely with Guilds. Brechtur has more Guilds than Manors, and Anuire more Manors than Guilds, for example. Also, the surprisingly high province levels of Brechtur in the source material are no longer out of whack; Anuire’s common plains make Anuire’s population much higher, since Brechtur is more mountainous. Ditto for the terrain limitations in other areas of Cerilia; Anuire is most powerful because Anuire has the best terrain for humans and thus the larget population.

I have variants that work particularly well with this system for somewhat modified versions of Contest, Diplomacy, and Agitate to make them more encouraged and common, as well. Also, I make Vassalage and Lieutenancy mean more and become more common.

I know, I know, lots of changes means its harder for other people to use. I actually do think my version is ultimately simpler and more intuitive. Once I get my turn submission assistant working, I’ll launch it and publish my version so people can take what they like from it (since we all like to tweak the system so much!).

19

Lol, I also liked Rowan’s ideas a lot (my draft document constantly refers back to these rules for some material; the square wealth formula also came from there, and the urbanization “domain feat” was made with the idea that it would make it possible to have more guilds/trade than the level allows, the alternative in my mind was allowing to split off cities from the main holding but cities would be limited to only guild and trade as economic holdings, but I never reached a point of satisfaction for that one)…

Also, I tend to run with the underlying assumption that there is about a major lord (count and above) for 2 provinces (excluding the city provinces of Masetiele and Anuire), with about one head of a patrician family for every level as is in the basic rules (this almost fits with MMS:WE’s tables when I do the add a level to each province thing), counting the princes above. That’s obviously not a flat figure but an overall: some areas will have more division than others.

EDIT: for quick math: that’s about 400-500 princes for the whole of Cerilia (roughly 110 are the main rulers, the remnant are their vassals), and more or less 2100 nobles overall. With the population numbers I’d gotten in some of my notes, multiplying by 4 for households, assuming that the nobility is very interrelated within each region, and adding a x10 knightly class I got about MMS:WE’s assumption of about 1/500-1/1000 people being of the aristocracy, which is also one of the guesstimates for blooded lineages that’s been used by some. Also this gives a maximum potential of about 420 knight units for all of Cerilia (likely much less possible) assuming all the heads of households are raised and assuming the knight unit only has 50 of them, which sort of fits one of the knight limitations house rules xD - I’m tempted to have a separate action to deal with knights and scutage.