Dungeons & Domains

Keeping the End in Mind

I recently talked with Gus on his Classic Adventure Gaming podcast about domain play and mass combat in RPGs. One of the really interesting questions he asked was about domain play “scenarios,” I imagine angling to get at the sorts of building blocks of politics and warfare as we are more familiar with in dungeons (both the exploration procedure, and the empty/monster/trap/special framework for conceptualizing and designing dungeons). Taking my cue from the Alexandrian’s excellent series on game structures, I’ve put some more thought into what that might look like.

First, such a procedure needs a name. “Domain play” is hard to make into a verb, so I propose that a gameplay scenario focused around politics and warfare in that fashion be called an intrigue, just as a scenario focused around exploring a terrifying underworld is a dungeoncrawl and one aiming to discover what happened is a mystery. Mass combat endeavors are one element of intrigues, just as personal combat is a component of dungeoncrawling that exists as a sub-loop within it — “war is merely the continuation of policy with other means.”

A concrete attempt to make progress within an intrigue is a maneuver, analogous to a delve of a dungeon or an expedition into the wilderness. “The princess has come of age and her father is looking for a favorable marriage to strengthen his position” is the bones of an intrigue; “infiltrate a spy into the princess’ retinue” and “send troops to pose as brigands on a rival’s lands to pull him away” are schemes. The number of major contenders in such an intrigue will determine its complexity and difficulty.

Second, a gameplay procedure needs a default goal to focus it. In an old-school dungeon, this is generally to recover treasure (in a new-school dungeon, it’s more focused on eliminating the monstrous denizens). In a mystery, the goal is naturally to solve the mystery and figure out what happened. In that same vein, the default goal of an intrigue is to secure political power (which in turn consists primarily of resources, relationships, and rights). That is not to say that one cannot use an intrigue to take vengeance on a hated foe, any more than one cannot crawl a dungeon to eliminate a threat to one’s domain, but simply that those are not the default goals. The default goal is always a factor in any scenario following the given structure.

Thirdly we come to the substance from which the procedure is made. The basic gameplay loop in a dungeon is to move to a new area to interact with new content. In a mystery, exposure to game content is mediated by finding clues. So what’s the basic action to find new aspects of an intrigue?

I had to really think about this, it’s quite a tricky question to pin down. To qualify as the default action, it needs to be available in any conceivable intrigue as a way of engaging with new material. In examining this, a noteworthy dimension of the problem became apparent. Virtually all game structures the Alexandrian discusses are asymmetric. A reverse dungeon delve (where you defend the fortress against invaders) follows an essentially different structure from a dungeon delve proper. The same is true for hexcrawls, mysteries, and all the like. But an intrigue is symmetrical: the king, the princess, and all her rival suitors are all playing a very similar game, and the basic game structure is the same for all of them.

Scenario Structure

With the above taken into account, intrigues begin to resemble mysteries wherein you play both the investigator and the perpetrator. And the default action for each is the same: to gather information, to understand the interplay of resources, relationships, rights, and schemes. Intelligence gathering yields knowledge of the disposition of resources, relationships, and other schemes, which naturally calls for and enables one’s own schemes in response. Scheming requires actionable intelligence, and leverages it in order to seize resources, develop relationships, and foil rival schemes. “Gather intelligence” is somewhat more vague than “move to the next room,” but not especially more so than “look for clues.” I do think this contributes to why this mode of play is not a core game structure, and leaves it somewhat fragile and really benefitting from proactive players.

In concrete terms, I might suggest the following as a list of fairly standard ways to gather intelligence (not an exhaustive list by any means):

• Subterfuge — Acquiring information by illicit means. May involve hiring carousers and eavesdroppers to get a sense of what’s going on, bribing a palace guard, sending spies to shadow a target, kidnapping someone for interrogation, infiltrating an informant into a rival army, etc. Generally takes time, and costs money or personal risk; may or may not be targetable to acquire specific information.

• Social Interaction — Whether by asking questions of craftsmen over business, seeking an audience with some official (or the prince of thieves . . .), attending a high society function, or otherwise interacting with people who have a better idea what’s going on than you do.

• Scouting — Acquiring information by physical presence in the target space. Generally by abstract reconnaissance, but can certainly occur via adventuring or boots on the ground with small advance units. Generally requires an army and/or exposes the actor to personal risk, and is targeted by physical space rather than actor.

• Sorcery — Various spells, such as scry, wizard eye, divination, commune, speak with [target], prophetic dream, etc. serve to provide information directly. Requires sufficient level to cast the relevant spell, and the spell itself, but is otherwise fast, cheap, and targetable (unless you’re hiring someone to cast it for you . . .).

Information has value because it can be leveraged. Understanding the layout of a dungeon lets you plan ambushes, lead monsters into traps, and recognize where treasure might be hiding or what further dangers might lurk ahead. Understanding the play of resources, rights, and relationships tells you what’s at stake, how it’s secured, and who’s involved with it. It may not always become necessary in its own right, because smart players can turn most actions into opportunities for information gathering, or pick up much of it passively — but in the absence of some other clear option, it always remains on the table.

I was asked on the podcast to share more about the basic moves of play. Information gathering is the most central of them. I have since revised that list somewhat, to fold Coalition Building into Soft Power more generally. I likewise considered the addition of Sabotage to this list, but I think it either falls under Counterintelligence of Hard Power and those categories are more useful.

• Intelligence — Gathering information on the web of resources, rights, relationships, and schemes.

• Counterintelligence — Concealing or misinforming the web of resources, rights, relationships, and schemes.

• Soft Power — Acquiring or improving your resources, rights, or relationships by non-coercive means.

• Hard Power — Acquiring or improving your resources, rights, or relationships by coercive means.

Counterintelligence typically deploys similar means to Intelligence gathering proper. Soft Power and Hard Power develop Scouting into Adventuring and Warfare to round out the set.

Naturally these all work together in unison, but most actions fall into one category or another. You might deploy counterintelligence measures over your intelligence gathering to disguise your meetings with your foreign spymaster as tariff negotiations. You might deploy hard and soft power together, if you were discretely funding bandits on a lord’s domain, while also courting his daughter with tales of your military prowess.

What about if you have no such grand pretensions, and just want to go adventuring and get rich? You might leverage your information on a band of brigands to persuade the local lord to grant you full claim to their possessions (instead of taxing you on their value, or requiring them to be turned over to the merchants’ whose goods were robbed). If you’re quick, or persuade the lord to offer that reward to you specifically and not in general (thus keeping the arrangement quiet), you might also persuade the local garrison to loan you equipment so you can solve the problem and keep them from getting deployed. And then you might again go to the local merchants who were robbed and persuade them to put a bounty on the bandits. Opportunities abound. Exploiting them draws you into this web, and might make an ally of the lord and an enemy of the aforementioned traders, but if you can call that a wash you still made a tidy profit in the meanwhile.

Scenario Design

So then how does this impact scenario design? With this framework better understood, we should be able to use it to streamline the creation of “domain play scenarios” (and here I thought hexcrawls had a relative dearth of solid modules). I’ve broken out some core principles that I think contribute to interesting intrigues, but this is very much something I see as incomplete, worthy of more consideration and concrete development.

Dynamism

Moreso even than other scenarios, intrigues need to evolve on their own and take on their own life. If PCs never involve themselves, something still ought happen — the city is sacked by invading armies, a rival claims the princess’ hand, a coup is enacted and the ruler slain. This is the essence of time pressure, but also of meaningful stakes for all the parties involved. NPCs that are stationary, self-sufficient, and unambitious are the death of intrigues; those that maneuver on their own and make others their pawns are rife with opportunities for adventure.

Connections

Everything connects to everything else, and small changes ripple outwards; one of the best ways to build verisimilitude in a setting is to show the impact of change. NPCs need connections to each other, stakes in the game, secrets and friends and enemies; the outcomes of an intrigue likewise ought to change the world. Maneuvering to establish oneself as the archduke’s preeminent advisor is far more interesting when one’s competitors for the position are distinct and active. If one is a rash warmonger with friends in the army, and the other a corrupt pawn of the queen of thieves, the situation is suddenly much deeper. New avenues and approaches present themselves, and perhaps then this issue entirely can be sacrificed for grander aims. And if the PCs do win, they too will change the lay of the land and mold it in their image.

Treasure

Any scenario needs treasure, but the treasure to be won in an intrigue might be nontraditional. A city conquered may be pillaged for raw gold, or held as a revenue stream, or given to secure a vassal’s loyalty. At lower levels, legal rights such as the privilege of bearing arms in town, the charter of a mercenary company (allowing them to retain troops), access to a private library, or exclusions from certain taxes may prove rewarding. (Your NPC lords and nobles do tax treasures recovered, do they not?) And cementing an alliance, being owed a favor, or otherwise building a relationship are similarly valuable. Intentionally seeding an environment with these sorts of offerings, both visible and hidden, is an important component of making it gameable — just as it would be in the dungeon or wilderness, even if the nature of the treasures may be different.

Multidimensionality

Adventuring. Subterfuge. Warfare. Social Interaction. Sorcery. If these are the pillars of an intrigue, use them, and use all of them. A dungeon that was pure combat, or pure traps, would both grow repetitive quickly and focus overmuch on the specific characters who excelled in that sphere. Likewise, an intrigue that is purely social interaction, perhaps with a bit of intelligence gathering, will fall rather flat.

Being given permission to court the princess is, on it’s own, hardly even a full scenario. It’s really more like a treasure map, awarded as loot from one scenario to lead to some easy prizes later. A proper scenario might focus around her being stolen by a rival king to be married to his son, and her furious father promising her hand to whoever recovers her. This gives us a much broader scope of what is involved, direct competition with other suitors, and many more possible approaches. That is an adventure hook. Likewise, a straight wargame is in my opinion considerably less interesting than a multidimensional Braunstein-type event. On the podcast with Gus, we talked about civil war as a scenario, and I think this is a big piece of what makes it so interesting. It is by nature multi-dimensional in a way that the stereotypical socialization-focused intrigue is not.

Final Assessment

Some last pieces to round out the typical assessment model the Alexandrian offers.

Are intrigues easy to prep? Not so easy as a dungeon, because things are more interconnected and open-ended, but easier than a mystery. There’s no way to miss a clue and break it. Perhaps with more formalization and practice, it could be made as easy as a dungeon to prep — some spreadsheets to streamline domain stats and army building, spy rings, a more mechanically robust way to track relationships (wishy-washy stakes make for wishy-washy gameplay), and a chart format for plotting out relationships would all be handy. Plus some standard floorplans for noble houses.

Are intrigues easy to run? I’m going with “no.” Content is not firewalled, and instead intersects along both physical and relational connections, with asymmetric knowledge the norm. I’m still working to determine the best way to list out resources and relationships and not have to repeat it in a bunch of different places, so that it can be easily updated in play. This probably contributes to the difficulty in making modules of this sort.

Can intrigues be played flexibly at an open table? I think yes, certainly more easily than a mystery. A mystery has a big payoff at the end, with the steps to solving it very focused on that specific mystery. Intrigues seem to be more positional, more about maneuvering into advantageous positions, forcing errors, creating openings, and as such are easier for one group to pick up where another left off. Perhaps the bigger issue with that is the question of whether they’d want to, if they have different goals and power bases, but it could definitely work in an open table game where the players are members of some shared organization.

Are intrigues a closed loop? I suppose I have yet to precisely define the loop, but I imagine it as proceeding along a web of the points given above: Adventuring, Subterfuge, Warfare, Social Interaction, Sorcery. The fundamental framework is whatever system manages day-to-day actions (e.g. ACKS II’s activity framework). Each component drops us into the the respective gameplay loop for that sort of game — Adventuring is typically Hexcrawling and Dungeoncrawling; Subterfuge is Heists (if played out) or Hijinks (if abstracted); the loop for Warfare is well defined at a campaign scale in Domains at War and ACKS II; Social Interaction likewise has a concrete framework laid out in Axioms 6 and ACKS II; and Sorcery is handled by the spell and magic research rules. In building an intrigue, it seems wise to run through a list like this one and confirm that each element is represented (in a modern game, Sorcery probably becomes Computers or similar, they seem to play a similar role).

Of those, ACKS is missing a good procedure for Heists, though one can be fleshed out without too much trouble, and doesn’t have a good meta-loop for Social Interaction (to determine when and under what circumstances it occurs). The latter is a problem I’ve pondered for a while, because ACKS does have all the tools to build out NPCs in bulk and know their proper quantities, so building a proper framework out of that shouldn’t be an impossible task. Anyone know of systems that do that already? Or have thoughts on what would be most valuable to see development here?

On the whole then, this seems to me like it lays out the core components of how domain play proceeds in practice and how players engage with it. The ideas of how to build modules for it will require some more work, but sooner or later I’ll put together a module of my own to attempt to identify and share more of this (once I figure out how to do so while extricating it from the surrounding setting . . .).

The above is a remarkably Gamist analysis of the role and nature of domain play in RPGs. The team at CAG are I think firmly of that persuasion, but others may question why a Simulationist such as I should put this work into it. This comes back to the cardinal error of GNS theory: it claims that its three pillars are mutually exclusive, and has given us a generation of one-legged games. With the recognition that each pillar enables and supports the others in a natural progression, my actions above should be more clear. Elucidating a more clear and comprehensive vision of the role of domain play and warfare within an RPG makes it easier to prep and to run, and is a start towards having a concrete language of intrigue-design just as we do for dungeon mapping. This does not exist in a vacuum, but rather draws from and builds upon the demographic and economic analysis we have in ACKS, and ultimately generates scenarios that tell interesting and dramatic stories of the highest order.