I've put up so guidelines for yearly expenses, which are based on the,daily expenses in the PHB.
When I put up the marriage dowry stuff, I made it very roughly multiples of the yearly expense, but stipulated that half of the dowry would be real property or tools.
I am totally not married (cough) to the dowry figures as written, and now that I've seen your dominion draft, thought maybe they could be changed to a mixture of cash and BP
I'm thinking that this might be a role-playing situation where we could probably sort out the dowry from the NPC chosen as the spouse.
Also, did you try to scale cash value of various dominion outputs to the living expenses in D&d 5e?
I have not done that, yet. We could probably decide on that, though. I would argue that the high-end of living expenses would necessitate a royal court, which itself could become a source of intrigue and adventure as well as a boon to the PC who spends that money. We should make the cash value to “Kingdom Turns” which equal a season (3 months).
Does having kingdoms break our economy? Why adventure for cash instead of protecting what's theirs? Basic equipment basically doesn't even need a price list anymore when PCs may be paid in Build Points.
The economy should be the first thing nailed down. I'm in favor of keeping the domain small and more abstract. I think we should work with the Stronghold and maintenance costs in the DMG, but add an income for number of inhabitants. Apart from fortifications and maybe the personal dwellings of the PC's, I don't think we need worry about particular buildings. A village is going to have a blacksmith, a few speciality carpenters, and a public house. Every household is made of part-time weavers, basic carpenters and farmers.
Yeah, the more I think about it the more I'm thinking that we want to play two completely different games. Choosing what buildings to build and who to hire to run them is kind of what I want my game to be about.
I think that if you want to run the game you want, it would be best if you took the driver's seat for 4-5 sessions in a row up front, rather than alternating back and forth. Just like I ran straight through Skull Mountain, because I wanted to run a mega-dungeon (although it was rather modest for a megadungeon). After the game is established, I could run “the B Team” on occasion. But, to run a political game and place-focused, you're really going to need some consistency, especially up front. Once a month isn't going to cut it.
Unfortunately, I now realize that the game I want to run is Lord and Master rather than D&D 5e. I think I'm going to completely scrap my work. I don't want to build a palace-focused game so much as a “defensive” game where instead of the PCs going out for adventure, the challenges come to them.
I had some sense that what you wanted was not really suited to 5e. Bringing up Lord and Master, remember that L&M was a play-by-mail game. Before you junk your work, maybe you can re-cast it as a play-by-email or play-by-forum post game. That way, you can bring in a bunch of people who can't do regular game sessions, you can create your own setting without my map meddlings or need to structure game sessions around the campaign turns. I'd certainly want to play in that.
I still like your overall campaign idea. The idea of starting by claiming a castle or manor, and defending the village against outside threats sounds great. I just think that if we are going to play 5e, the focus has got to be on individual characters in combat during the sessions, that's what the syhstem is designed around.
I think it might it be better to just keep the players actions in the village limited. I think I'll start another thread with some ideas.
So I'll spin my current thinkings out to a much different turn based play by email type game. I'm skeptical about my overall campaign idea now, but that could be just because my PC will probably want to be building crap and fixing up the village rather than adventuring and stuff. Hard to adventure if you're a homebody. I'm not sure what you are going for with these “models.” I'm going to step away from this stuff for a bit until I get my very own 5e Player's Handbook.