An interesting take. However, I intentionally wrote it this way on the following ideas:
- The lord is usually competent. If not enough to run the army by themselves, they have good advisors to help them (the Oifey, the Malledus etc.). However, what if the lord simply isn’t competent and doesn’t get competent. It helps show that giving authority to people by virtue of lineage isn’t always the best option, especially when said person isn’t competent.
- Another issue I find is that oftentimes despite the lord being relatively minor on the world stage with power players like the Rudolf, the Nyna, the Gharnef, the Jiol etc. all with their large plots and plans, by the end of the game the lord’s army has become one of the dominant forces on the world stage due to absorbing other armies and becoming powerful. However, what if the lord’s role as the Nyna’s enforcer was all that there is, in that the Nyna is still the overarching leader with all the authority and that the lord only follows the Nyna’s orders, and hence when the Nyna brings out their much larger army, the lord is ultimately just following their orders. The lord is not the face of the anti-Rudolf coalition and their army is just one of many doing the Nyna’s work in the field. When the Nyna does properly show up, they Nyna is the authority of the army, and thus becomes the new lord in a sense.
That being said, this isn’t meant to be a pure deconstruction; there is to be some reconstruction in it.
- While the lord is incompetent, he eventually does undergo character development and learns that he can’t do everything himself. He eventually hands control over to the starting party members who are competent while he himself makes use of his talents to be useful to the army without harming it in the process by acting as a morale booster and inspirational leader, as well as the face of diplomacy when involved with other authority figures. When this happens, player-hostile map design also eases up significantly as the lord’s incompetence isn’t placing the army into disadvantaged situations anymore.
- When the lord’s father dies early in the story, it’s because the father was assassinated by the Empire in preparation for their invasion. The lord’s duchy is justifiably shaken but the lord is not the heir; he has a competent older brother who has no issue getting everyone’s act together and competently fights the Empire. While the lord makes legitimate contributions which lead to the Empire being forced to retreat, his older brother ultimately still does most of the work. Likewise, this serves as a foil to the lord, in that both he and his brother were born into nobility, his brother did actually have the useful talents and made use of the resources available to him to become a competent leader that is respected by his subjects.