Expanding OSE with the BECMI Companion Rulebook, Part Four! 

Sounds awesome! What domain rules did you use?

@@HexedPress Homebrew. The rules were good in the sense that all the players were very engaged and most had a lot of fun. But at the cost of being unsustainably taxing to run. So is that really a good rule set? Probably not. I was able to keep it up for 20ish week during a long lull at work. I wish I had the programing skills to automate a lot of it, I might try it again.

Did you write it up anywhere?

@@HexedPress No, and my notes are probably only decipherable to me. Most of them are just lists in excel. I didn’t have to write much because one of the ‘features’ of the rules was that the players wouldn’t know them and would discover the rules during play. For example you could hire a weaponsmith, but the player would only have a vague description of what a weaponsmith would do for them. The weapon smith can make weapons, but how many? How does that interact with the mechanics of your soldiers and militia? Mass combat? He can make fine weapons for his lord but what bonuses do they give? How long does it take? The player would only be told after they hired one. Or the PC could ask one of the other PCs that already hire a weaponsmith, but the dominion part of the game was somewhat competitive so they might not tell you unless you could give them something in return, or they could even lie. You talk sometimes about balancing the amount of crunch in a rule set. I’d be literally embarrassed to write up the rules for you to read because they are so far beyond the pale in terms of crunch. For example, one of the random events you could get was a plague. But its not just your fiefdom has a plague, yes or no. There were 7 different plagues (and you could have multiple plagues at once) and I tracked active infections, death/month, and if each of your followers had each plague each month. Each plague killed a different number of serfs a month, had a different chance to spread to the other players’ fiefdoms each month, was affected by the general health level of the fiefdom differently, could have different effect besides just killing people (some plagues lowered productivity because serfs couldn’t work the fields, STDs made religious leaders less happy with you [but only of some religions, other religions wouldn’t care], etc.) Each plague had a different cure condition (no deaths for 2 months, no new infections for 3 months, increase the health level of the fiefdom to at least 2). Some followers you could recruit or improvements you could built affected all plague (if you had a Barber/pharmacist any time a plague should start there was a 50% chance it didn’t, if you had ‘improved public water systems’ dysentery killed less people each month but other plagues were unaffected). Paladins could cure individual followers of plagues, but couldn’t cure a whole fiefdom. If you were in good standing, you could spend a meta currency to ask the religious authorities to help with the plague. Additionally, Druids had a secret cure for 1 of the plague so if you had a druid follower that plague could be instantly cured, one of the other plagues had a medical cure you could discover. Once you discovered that cure, it was a piece of knowledge you could trade or give away. The other plagues just had to run their course. Because plagues could spread between fiefdoms, even though the players were competing for the best fiefdom they were sometimes motivated to help each other tamp down plagues in each other’s fiefdom, other times they were motivated to let a plague burn through another player’s fiefdom. That’s most but not all of the complexity for dealing with plague in the rules, and this rule set was not a ‘plague simulator’… managing plagues was maybe 5% of the game. This post is 75% admitting how incompetently complex I made the rules, 25% bragging how awesomely complex I made the rules.

@@dungeonmastermasterclass7311 there’s definitely a lot of awesomeness in there but, yes, I would be daunted by the complexity needed to potentially make all of that happen! 🤣 I wonder if there would be a way to simplify things like this to get maybe 70-80% of the results with maybe 20-40% of the crunch.