Help with Fief Management Mechanics

[Catullus64]

My players have succeeded in lifting a fortress of its curse, and for that deed they have been awarded stewardship of the fortress and its lands by the local chieftain. I want to develop mechanics for modeling the settlement and production of their new estate. I want a gameplay cycle something like this:

Key elements are Population, Food, & Money. Players have a certain starting amount from different sources; money from the treasure they found in the fortress, population from the initial group of settlers they're able to get to follow them, and food capacity set by the animals and food reserves those settlers bring with them.

Population must = or < Food, or else people start starving or deserting. Non-food-producing specialists like merchants, clerics, craftsmen, full-time soldiers, etc. count as multiple people for the purpose of determining your Population.

Food is a fixed number determined by the number of farms, pastures, and other food-producing land use that the players have built. The players' starting reserves will provide a certain Food level until a set amount of time has passed, giving them the opportunity to actually set up food-producing improvements.

Major improvements to the fortress, forces, and land affect Money and Population. Money to actually build (though cost may be defrayed by securing resources from the land itself). To build, your food-producing people are temporarily converted to non-producing, as they labor in construction, thus increasing your effective Population relative to Food. The improvement may also permanently increase Population by creating/attracting non-food-producing people.

The players can call up militia forces from among the populace that cost nothing (determined as a percentage of actual Population), but any other military followers must be paid a regular upkeep in Money, in addition to their Food requirements.

With that vague idea of how I want these things to interact, can anyone propose some guidance about how to model this sort of thing? I intend for all of the mechanical simulation aspects to be mostly on my side of the screen; the players will be receiving diegetic reports from their underlings, and mostly dealing with this stuff as diegetic roleplay rather than number-crunching. If anyone has done domain-management that somewhat resembles what I've described, please share your experiences!

[J-H]

Have you discussed this with your players, to see how in-depth they want to go?

5e doesn't fit this paradigm very well.

The timeframe for 5e encounters is minutes/hours for combat, or days for exploration. The timeframe for harvests, construction, and population growth is years/decades.

[KorvinStarmast]

Matt Coleville has a 3rd party thing with strongholds (5e) that you may find helpful.

Also, head to Original D&D (Volume 3) or AD&D 1e (DMG) for some cut and paste mechanics that you'll want to reshape a bit to fit 5e. (If you've got access to them).

AD&D 2e has a Castles and Strongholds book that was pretty good for stuff like this, but I never bought it and now I wish I had.

[Melphizard]

I feel the best thing the players could do to make this whole thing easier is seek out nobles, merchants, and other knowledgeable people to do such tasks for them. Find somebody to manage the militia. Find somebody to manage the farms (and cast Plant Growth). Find somebody to manage trade within the fief. While the players could do a lot of that themselves, and I do admit it would be cool, it'd probably be easier to have them go out and try to find the sort of people who specialize in stuff that doesn't involve having to judo-throw ghosts and dragons.

[Catullus64]

Have you discussed this with your players, to see how in-depth they want to go?

5e doesn't fit this paradigm very well.

The timeframe for 5e encounters is minutes/hours for combat, or days for exploration. The timeframe for harvests, construction, and population growth is years/decades.

We discussed it when they took the quest to reclaim the stronghold in the first place. They're all up for a domain-management style game. I've had this group do management gameplay before with ship management.

I had hoped to do a kind of middle ground in terms of the timescale, with weeks or months passing between the adventures.

[Sparky McDibben]

I think a sense of the basic unit of time would be useful here. You could go with a month, but I think the season (spring, summer, fall, winter) makes a bit more sense for an agrarian society.

As a quick aside, I think for this kind of thing, the concept of fronts from Dungeon World would be supremely useful (because it telegraphs information to pull the PCs into an adventure and away from their base). If you are not familiar with fronts, I recommend this article by Sly Flourish. Develop at least three and have two going at any given time. Or develop five for starters, and juggle three at a time.

So, the basic unit is set, and we can describe a quick progression through the season:

1) Season Introduction. Telegraph what fronts are active through an encounter or two. You want the players to know what they'll be doing over the next few in-game months. The encounters can be weighted to social, exploration, or combat pillars, but I find that leaving the design open enough for the players to pick how they want to interact with the scenario is more effective. So real quick, let's say we have three fronts: the goblins of the Black Tooth Society, the miners of Clan Durzhold, and the Darkenwold Forest. We want to highlight the goblins and the miners, so we have a quick scene where the PCs are riding the borders near one of their farms, and find a group of dwarves fending off a small goblin raid, with the goblins clearly having stolen food from the PCs' farmers. Depending on how the PCs play that out, they might find out that the goblins are slowly developing alliances with other groups in the mountains, and that the dwarves are carrying surveying / mining equipment and are bound for a rocky tor on the PCs land.

This encounter is intended for foreshadowing, but let the PCs pursue it for as long as it is productive. You're looking for quick, evocative encounters that telegraph the primary themes of the available fronts. If the PCs choose to ride out and deal with the front now, let them, transitioning to the structure of your choice.

2) Seasonally-Depending Events. Each season, the PCs have to deal with different problems. In spring, they might have to plan what projects they want to pursue, whether that's clearing land for another farm, acquiring construction material to upgrade their castle, etc. In summer, they might have to deal with bandits on the high road, marauding knights seeking glory who come by to challenge the PCs, etc. In autumn, they might have to deal with the fallout from their spring choices. Did they clear forestland for timber? Oops, pissed off a dryad. Set up a farm? A peasant stole grain to feed their starving family. In winter, you probably want to highlight scarcity: resources are running low, sickness sets in, and monsters desperate for food start to come down from the wildlands.

You want a single scene or two that sets the tone for the time we're eliding. How do the players deal with that angry dryad? How is she expressing her anger? Their decisions have repercussions, not just for themselves, but for their subjects. I'd also tie this in to the fronts. Maybe those knights bring rumors of goblins raiding caravans for magic items and spells. Or the peasant who stole grain mentioned that the dwarves
would trade gold for wheat...which is interesting, since the dwarves didn't appear well off when the PCs met them earlier. Finally, this scene should result in additional resources lost or gained based on the PCs decisions. If they just killed the dryad, her sisters grow angry, and starting abducting settlers to turn them into dryads (-1 Population).

3.) Grim Portents Abound. At the midpoint of the season, the fronts grow in import, impinging on the PCs' operations. The dwarves have openly fortified that tor, and are reputedly giving merchants short weight. The merchants are complaining to the local lords (the PCs) for justice. The goblins have kidnapped the local blacksmith to teach them how to work iron into steel. The blacksmith's family pleads for mercy, and your settlement can't build anything (for lack of nails), or train any troops (for lack of equipment).

These are adventure hooks, just framed in a way that hits the PCs in their responsibilities, not so much in their wallets. You want both fronts active now, but the time-scale of the adventure should be enough that resolving it means the PCs will have to pass up the other hook. It's not necessary to have two hooks if you only want the PCs to focus on one - just prep that front. The one that the PCs didn't deal with will continue to grow next season (the goblins subjugate the nearby orc tribes with their new steel weapons and magic; the dwarves declare an independent autonomous enclave inside their tor-fortress [tortress?], immune from the PCs' taxes on the rich gold deposits within).

Depending on how the PCs resolve the front, they may gain additional resources. Convince the dwarves to swear fealty? That's Money and Population. Convince them to send you a tribute? That's Money. And so forth.

4.) Tallying the Costs. At the end of the season, you want to quickly summarize what the PCs gained. Your Farms produced X, your Population ate Y, and your upgrades cost Z. Then factor in PC performance bonuses for their decisions, set up the new totals for next season, and roll on.

Questions and Notes:

• Is this an away from the table issue or an at the table issue? If it's at the table, how much game time are you OK with this eating up?
• It would be interesting to randomly determine the kind of Population gained by letting each player roll on a distinct sub-table to see who shows up. See Strongholds and Followers by MCDM for an example.
• Other games you can check for these kinds of encounters include Pendragon, and Adventurer, Conqueror, King
• You generally want to focus in on one or two domestic or low-stakes scenes per season: interactions with domain NPCs, travelers who've requested hospitality, the liege's tax assessor, for example.
• You want to avoid having the events of season modified by the events of a prior season to prevent a death spiral or a virtuous cycle.

[Tanarii]

Rules Cyclopedia (BECMI edition) or the Companion booklet specifically has rules which can be used with any edition of D&D. They're abstract, they're easy to use, they're great, highly recommend them. They're the only version of D&D domain management I've ever seen that weren't either overly complex and tightly tied to the setting (2e Birthright, Coville's strongholds) or basically a version of handwavium.

Also the BECMI War Machine mass combat system was simple and good for roughly equal sized and power enemy groups, but unfortunately it was fairly heavily tied to assumptions of the system. You'd have to rejigger some of the math to use.

[Porcupinata]

Rules Cyclopedia (BECMI edition) or the Companion booklet specifically has rules which can be used with any edition of D&D. They're abstract, they're easy to use, they're great, highly recommend them. They're the only version of D&D domain management I've ever seen that weren't either overly complex and tightly tied to the setting (2e Birthright, Coville's strongholds) or basically a version of handwavium.

Also the BECMI War Machine mass combat system was simple and good for roughly equal sized and power enemy groups, but unfortunately it was fairly heavily tied to assumptions of the system. You'd have to rejigger some of the math to use.

There's a 5e conversion of both those sets of rules in the Immortals Companion, from the same guy that did the Dark Dungeons BECMI/RC retroclone.

They're somewhat simplified from the original rules, but that's no bad thing.

[KorvinStarmast]

I think the season (spring, summer, fall, winter) makes a bit more sense for an agrarian society.

Good idea.

As a quick aside, I think for this kind of thing, the concept of fronts from Dungeon World would be supremely useful (because it telegraphs information to pull the PCs into an adventure and away from their base). If you are not familiar with fronts, I recommend this article by Sly Flourish. Develop at least three and have two going at any given time. Or develop five for starters, and juggle three at a time. {snip rest of post}

What a fine post, I may steal a bunch of this.