Your reputation should effect villages differently. After you trash a couple of villages reducing them to burnt offerings after they refuse tribute the rest of them should get the hint.
It works like that already. Kingdom Fear >= 2*village size (so 2-10) will make them pay tribute or not fight back during robberies. Plus you get some infamy that also raises Kingdom Fear. Scourge of the Plains ought to make you gain enough that if you kill all the mobilization, only towns will continue to resist.
But all of them falling in line
fast would make for poor gameplay and break the fluff a little. Medieval communication - especially for peasants or serfs - was positively
glacial, and rather unreliable as well.
One thing I would like to see but have no idea on how to include it is you being able to to set up a "baronet" with a human collaborator as your human "face".
Has been proposed and rejected several times due to centering the game on minions (or delegated minions). I'm not 100% opposed to that, but it is
way too much work to redesign and rewrite the game to shift the focus from the Dragon to minion management and politicking.
So DDM is a game where you play a supreme
predator (with some cannon fodder on the side) and not a political manipulator. It's something more unique than the latter as well, IMO. Scheming is common enough in games and fiction. Naked,
unapologetic and reasoned malice is not, or at least not without hinting at some form of mental illness or social maladjustment. The Dragon is a loner and does not care about mortal mores, he goes around doing whatever fuck he wants.
If someone wants to make a sub-mod for that, be my guest. I'll even give you advice and pointers, if you want. But the last attempt to give minions some agency got stalled and is pretty much in indefinite limbo right now.
Basically the dragon equivalent of 'Nice village you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it.'
The dragon way of doing that is to show up at the edge of the village and say the above in person.
Remember, the Dragon is an
alien creature. He does not think like mortals do. He
enjoys the personal touch, the thrill of the hunt and the pleasure of subjugation. The Dark Lady is the big brains of the operation, and she already
lost once. So she keeps releasing hatchlings for now, and sees whether any of them might work out. She
really doesn't want to get so involved in the politics that the King decides enough is enough and invades Dragonia before she's ready.
DDM is also a game about dragon tropes, and the archetypal dragon does not let henchmen collect the virgins, sheep, cattle or other tribute. He flies out and does the collecting himself. The game just adds some stat checks to the process.
Finally, the premise of the game is that the Dragon is not yet powerful enough to
openly defy the
whole Kingdom or significant parts of it. Hence moving lairs, knights and thieves searching for them, using wild tribes as proxies instead of human collaborators. The only humans who do the Dragon's bidding
directly are the smugglers&co, and they have plenty of deniability and virtually nothing to gain from fucking with the Dragon.
