r/BECMI

The Domain rules are evocative, no doubt about it, but after reading them, they always felt half-baked to me. For one thing, it's at a 24m hex level; it's great detail for a starting barony but the rules as presented aren't scalable for larger kingdoms or empires.

Another sticking point: while we have 3 types of dominion income, there isn't much detail on how that income is actually used. Yes, you can spend the cash income on troops and on the large menu of castle staff, but what about economic improvements like bridge, ports, roads, and other infrastructure mentioned, such as inns to entice settlement? There's no detail on this stuff or even guidelines on how to judge cost versus domain income.

I also never felt like Confidence was a workable system in this ruleset. Maybe that's just user error on my part.

One other thing that has bugged me about the Companion Set: the War Machine. I have always wanted to incorporate mass combat into a D&D campaign. X10 and CM1 are beautiful pieces of work that cleverly incorporate the War Machine rules into various scenarios. But, after trying X10 out on my group (after they had successfully gone through X4 and X5 but didn't destroy Hosadus' real body), the mass combat in X10 left them cold.

One problem was that the mass combat was consuming the bulk of our session time. But, I think the biggest problem was simply lack of interest on the players' part. They wanted to play characters rather than move armies around on a map. I'm not sure what to recommend to improve or to change about War Machine. But, something less detailed and more narrative, if that makes sense, might have retained their interest.