D&D Domination

Or rather, D&D's rules for domination.

(I have longer, more meaningful posts I want to write, but it's late after a very pleasant day spent with bluelang, magentamom, their son, and wtimmins. We chatted, we exchanged gifts, we ate, we played Aquarius, Gouda Gouda, Tribond, and Bohnanza. It was good.)

I'm not satisfied with the way domination works in D&D, but I don't have a clear vision of how it ought to work. Some things that seem wrong:

- Domination is too powerful. Making a save once doesn't provide any protection, so a vampire who takes a prisoner can just try repeatedly until the prisoner is dominated.

- Domination is not powerful enough, because dispel magic is sufficient to trivially banish domination. (In D&D 3e, that is. In D&D 3.5, dispel magic doesn't work against supernatural abilities, so it would work against a dominate person spell, but not against a vampire's domination. I rather like that, but I wish I didn't have to make the 3e/3.5 choice there.)

- Domination is too powerful. Once a victim is dominated, there's no further saving throws; if the dominator doesn't thrust him into 'against his nature' situations, the dominatee has no way to break out.

- Domination is too powerful. Once dominated, there's nothing prohibiting the dominator from renewing the domination (if he can contact the dominatee), keeping a victim dominated indefinitely.

I had a couple of other points in this vein, but I've forgotten them at the moment. But the point remains that I can have my own personal flamewar about domination. In particular, under the current system, it's hard to justify maintaining the situation of Turok being dominated and Prolix being free but in chains.

I'm likely to tweak this, but it's not yet clear how I want it to work.