irdeggman I feel your pain. Getting a team all on the same page and working coherently rather than at cross purposes is something that comes up very often in my line of work. Without having the ability to fire anyone you are doing quite well and must have the patience of a saint. But in considering your call for open discussion, I think some methods that Ive used with teams in programing and analysis might be helpful. Please disregard any of the following as too tedious, too involved, or just plain silly (millions of engineers and scientists have done the same).
Mission Statement
A set of general specifications or ground rules for each project can be helpful. Without getting into the nitty gritty details we as a community could use such a document to help establish broad goals for the domain rules. Success of the final rules could be measured off of the goals we set at the begining. From what Ive seen on the forums the following items might fit on such goals:
needing spreadsheets (aka a computer) to calcuate should not be required.
where possible core rules and d20 mechanisms should be used.
Bloodlines are crucial to regents and ruling domains and will be infused throughout.
compared to current BRCS rules RP useage should be more required.
Ruling province levels up should be slow and hard (or not?)
The domain rules should work for either characters made for traditional adventure based D&D or characters made for domain-only activity.
[I warned you that my suggestions might be a bit silly or tedious, but these things can help us touch base ocasionally. And the mere act of deciding what kind of rules we want will make making those rules much easier.]
Modular development.
The chicken and the egg problem that we have discussing the base DC and check modifiers is what brought about this open discussion. irdeggman has attempted to make the discussion of the rules easier by breaking it down into more basic elements (or units of analysis). Base DC, base costs, skill modifiers, and loyalty/attitude modifiers have come up so far in various polls and discussions. I think this is great approach because thinking of the whole thing at once is just a bit too much for my brain. Some people have suggested action by action lists that may be great, but are hard to consider for consitency and balance as a whole. However, it has been noted that everything depends on everything else. Let me mention one typical solution to this kind of problem.
This kind of problem comes up very often when teams of people program together. Say you hired 100 people to design and program a totally new computer, and broke everyone up into obvious teams (monitor, mouse, cpu, keyboard, etc). Nothing would ever get done because any change the one group made would have a ripple effect and ruin all the plans that everyone else was working one. The way computer designers have gotten around this endless loop is to define interfaces. An interface is an established rule of how one part will interact with another part. Everything that designers of other parts need to know about a specific parts function is described in the interface. The inner workings can be ignored and can be said to be hidden from veiw. If both teams working on their side of an interface obey the agreed upon rules, then neither side needs to worry about what the other is doing.
In our case, I can see several basic components for determining the success of a domain action; cost, modifiers, DC [final or base], actor [regent, court, leutenant, etc]. If for each actor we could establish an interface between the cost, modifiers, and DC, then we could independently craft and tune each element to reach the level of simplicity and realism we want.
That last sentence was rather involved so let me provide a more concrete example. Say we agreed that the total of all modifiers for any action done by the regent himself would most likely fall in the range of plus or minus 0-5 (with 5-10 for exceptional events). Then we could place modifiers out of our minds for a moment while we considered what we wanted the final difficulty check for each action to be. When we later attack the more complicated issue of all the individual modifiers we would keep the 0-5 range in mind for the total. This would let us work on the modifiers without worrying that we are making the action too easy or too hard. [0-5 might be a bit low…0-10 might give us more room to work with]. Creating an acceptable common range for our modifiers would help us tune the difficulty of an action separate to the modifiers. Creating and sticking to a range of modifiers would also help in balance issues. Note this is a range of the total of all modifiers which might act on a domain action. What the modifiers are and what their weights are dont matter as long as the total falls in the pre-specified range.
Looking at the v3.5 Core rulebooks, they have probably used a modifier range interface in their design process as well. The non-stacking of bonus types (DMG 3.5 p21) and the usual range of bonues 1-5 are probably an attempt to create a range of modifiers which they can plan around. Using their system you can create a totally new monster and make sure it is balanced to a set EL by considering typical ballpark bonuses that a certain level party would have on attack, AC, spells, etc. With our modifier range in mind you could probably create a domain encounter or domain-level adventure in a similar balanced way, without worrying too much about a huge inconsitency between using different domain actions to resolve the encounter.
[Non-stacking named bonuses are an effective balancing tool we might also consider to control domain action modifier ranges].
Testing.
Anytime anyone posts a proposal or poll we all do a little math in our heads and try to figure: is that okay? is that balanced? is that better? Some way or another we do a little testing. Indeed anyone playing 3e BRCS or a home rule has been doing alot of testing too (playtesting). The more testing we do in the desiging stages the less playtesting of unworkable, unbalanced, and unfun product everyone is going to have to do. So Ive got a few tedious, involved, and silly suggestions about testing our design proposals.
Consider the whole spectrum of regents. Run a variety of regents through a new rule. How bad would a horrible incompetent regent fail the check? Take a few of the example charaters or NPCs from the PHB and DMG, how do they stack up at 1st level or 10th [many characters arnt so far off these guys]? Consider not just class matched regents (rogue running a guild), but how would a wizard or some other cross-classed regent handle running law? Can there be a min/maxed regent made specificaly to crush your new rule? Would a powerful wealthy regent who is rolling in RP unbalance the rule? What about that new weak Great Captain?
Perhaps test using regents from the Atlas of Cerelia? A few representative regents from the Atlas would really give the rules a good shakedown. These will be the PCs models and rivals, and already are serve as a definition of what Birthright is. These RP and GB stores, modifiers, courts, loyalty, classes, holding levels, province levels, and domain sizes are the touchstone of the rules. Even without the new 3e Atlas I always try to think of the spymaster Guilder Kailen, the Gorgon, Gavin Tael, Darien Avan, the usurped Moergen, and etc. A few examples from the new atlas might work wonders.
So in conclusion let me say that I’ve hired an outside consultant who has suggested downsizing all of you, outsourcing development to a low cost bidder, hiring a hot Madison Avenue ad firm, scrapping the pension plan, and upping executive pay. We have set an unrealistic deadline and will be shipping a surely flawed product at the end of the fiscal quarter. This has been your random management message of the day. Good Day.
