Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Reign and the D&D engame

Have you heard of Reign? The game showed up on my radar when I was reading Unknown Armies. Apart from being a game with a very cool setup, that game is the best written game I've ever read, so seeing who had written Reign I thought that it was bound to be at least a good read. It did have some other qualities, and one that I'm focusing on in this post is the so called "Company Rules".

To begin with I'm going to let you know that you can buy Reign from here. Hopefully I will be that convincing.

Reign describes itself as a game about "Lords and Leaders". What could then be more fitting to use as inspiration for the endgame?

A company could in theory be a way to play the whole party of PC at once, but I'm going to consider it more for domain management. Just like a character, a company have stats. Inspired by Reign, I'd suggest to at least have Fortitude, Wealth, Psychological Strength or Influence as stats for your company. Now, when you have stats, you can treat that realm as an entity that can take actions, and be affected by actions.

To consider your fief, thieves guild or wizard's school like a character like this, you can use it to play long term actions while playing on the PC scale, and you can use it together!

Consider this.

Say your realm have a Fortitude of 12 on a scale of 1 to 20. If your DM have told you that there's a drought in the lands, you roll a d20 at your Fortitude, or better, to have the realm handle the problem without penalty. On the other hand, if you need to do something like influence the politics of a nearby realm, you use the Influence of your company as a modifier to a die roll for your character. Maybe you divide that rating from 1 to 20 by 5 and have that as a d20 roll against CHA to see how well your diplomatic mission went after preparing the neighbour with your Influence.  You get the idea, right?

This way the domain rules wont be a totally different game, but just a more abstract way to handle a character with a few basic stats. I imagine that that would lower the bar, and make it easier to not only include domain management, but also integrate it as die modifier to the regular character level.

I'm not sure I'm making sense, or that this became as well presented as I would have liked. On the other hand, maybe I can just get the message across that Greg Stolze's Reign is a game with a very modular system that can be borrow outright, or used as inspiration for what I consider a fascinating aspect of higher levels of play. I strongly recommend it. Let me know if you manage to pound the suggestions above into something cool. I'll probably try to massage it a bit further myself.
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