The Gaming Den

Okay, so I'm working out some details on what I want play to look like in the kingdom-ruling minigame portion of my Fantasy Heartbreaker.

The fundamental premise is that characters have a collection of powers. Play would consist of using those powers to make your contribution to the success of the kingdom. Structurally, I'm imagining that it'll look and play similar to Republic of Rome.

For those that aren't familiar with RoR, the game is a constant struggle between the necessary altruism towards the empire required to keep it functioning and your own personal goals and victory conditions, and how that altruism will not always appear as an obvious need and/or will benefit your opponents. There's a deck of historical Events that require action (mustering Carthaginians or outbreak of a Punic War, or the emergence of Hamilcar or other enemy leader, Macedonian hostilities, plus the expected famines and uprisings and what-not), armies that need supplies and money (and therefore the assigning of those troops and money to one of the players who might well use it to conquer the Republic and install themselves as dictator), and similar stuff.


I've hit a few snags:


1. Maintaining both cooperation and competition
I've mapped out how I want this to work, with actions taken by A to deal with situation X adversely affects B. Still, RoR is formulated as an explicitly competitive environment. Ideas on how to implement this in an RPG's general coop-mode are welcome.

I'm currently positing that your success at running the kingdom leads into the next stage of the game, where you Transcend mortality into divinity, therefore binding the characters together with that.


2. Differentiating the characters
Currently I've imagined the powers that the characters have are differentiated by the main component of society that they're working on: religious (in a game setting/environ where religious faith empowers the faith's champions, so the Pope can actually do more badass stuff the more worshippers he has), economic, military, criminal, nobility (this is better understood as "children of heroes or other empowered people", where bloodlines actual matter and empower lineages rather than just give you a fancy name and a bag of money), or commoners. The general idea is that (through the characters' powers) each social division would have the ability to address the various Events with advantages and drawbacks to each response, with some clearly better than others.

The problems with this is that characters become attached to the divisions rather than any specific organization. This impedes roleplay since its become too abstracted. I need a way to make the interactions more meaningful and personal for the characters, rather than "I use my Economic power of Abundance and weaken the Nobility in order to prevent the negative effects of War Affects Trade". That's just too gamey for an RPG.

Also, there's the problem of reconciling the Criminal character with the nice guys - making Criminal powers really useful for some Events is one way, but it's one thing where a character burgles off-screen occasionally, it's another when he's using his Smuggling Contraband power to increase his faction's wealth at the expense of another character's efforts to deal with the Doppelganger Infestation. Thoughts here are really useful.

I still want the system to be relatively light and I'm wary of introducing too many individual organizations (the Cult of Mammon is both Criminal and Religious and Economic, the Church of the Bountiful Mother is Religious and Commoner, the White Heralds of Dominance are Military and Noble...), if only because I'm concerned that it'll make city/kingdom creation a little too onerous. Not too worried, mind you - your main base of operations deserves those elements. I'm just worried about what it means as scope increases from one city-state to a kingdom of ten cities to an empire of eighty.

I'm not adverse to creating a state creation function that provides a budget of points based on its size/influence/whatevs to a GM, who then distributes them between X explicitly-meaningful entities (with the quantity range again driven by size/influence/et al), I just wanted to see what folks had to say about it.


3. Scaling[/i]
Scaling isn't too difficult, in that you can have a "your favored division/faction must be this tall to play at the next level" function that means your rulership activities are all driving towards taking control of the city, then province, then kingdom. The trouble there is that the characters can become uncoupled from each other, in that character A's pushed his favored faction to the next level but character B is still having trouble getting his criminal empire off the ground. How would you do that transition? I mean, the GM can just keep the available NPCs as less-appealing so that A drags along B to the next level (for the same reason the GM makes sure you never replace the PC Bard with an NPC Wizard), but it's still not exactly awesome.


4. Integrating Warfare
I'm already working out the kinks in the Warfare/mass combat system, and I'm doing it such that resolution can be both detailed (minis on a hexmap-style) or abstracted (a la Napoleon in Europe, or 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars). However, I'm not really sure how to integrate the differing time scales of Warfare and Rulership. I mean, if one character is a general and wants to fight the war he should be able and encouraged to do so, but it still has to resolve fast enough that the other players don't get bored... by the same token, is it even worth it to detail a hexmap method of resolution if all it takes is one player not interested to kibosh it?

I've made it so that characters acquire a set of Warfare powers at no cost while their Rulership powers accrue (or vice-versa, if you want to be a general) so players have something to do, but that still doesn't feel totally put together to me.


Thoughts?

In general, a large scale mini game works better when it is more similar the mechanics of the rest of the game. If you're doing a dicepool system, your minigame should have pools of dice. If you're playing diceless card-based resolution, then your minigame should do that. If you have a flat or curved RNG with modifiers and target numbers, you should do that. Don't make players wrap their minds around a different kind of action resolution system when stepping into a different part of the game. There is no reason that a die has to do different things when you're hacking than when you're sneaking, and no reason it has to behave differently when you are storing grain than when you are looting coins.

Now, on to your specific questions:

1. Competition works better in no-DM games. In fact, it's generally pretty fucking shitty in DMed games, because the DM is so powerful that favoritism makes competition inherently unfair and uninteresting. Competition mechanics are easy enough to grab. Settlers of Cataan, Court the King, Junta, and many more provide great examples for games where competition exists without necessarily requiring that people be constantly fighting. Cooperative games are harder to find, especially good ones. Arkham and especially Pandemic are pretty awesome.

2. I think conceptually you'll be wanting to think about Alpha Centauri a lot. Factional modifiers that affect how they can utilize certain kinds of resources would make for an obvious set of incentives. Added to a basic set of Cities and Knights of Cataan style diminishing returns system and you've got a pretty blatant setup why the Knight might naturally end up with a lot of military resources and still have a little investment in clergy and criminal resources.

Conceptually, I see no problem at all with the smugglers being useful all the time. Maybe smugglers have a high cost and a high reliability to get stuff into your faction's reserves. So normally you smuggle rare high cost items like spices, art, and poison in order to resell for a profit. But during the war you might seriously use your smugglers to pull food into your faction's reserves and then distribute it to the people to keep city morale up and raise your personal popularity.

3. Depending on how competitive you want to make it, you might seriously have people waiting for other players to get big enough or rushing to complete the Manhattan Project before the other players get rocketry. But in general you have two ways of doing it:

• When you break the barrier to open up the next stage, every other player gets ported to the next level with zeroes in every influence category they haven't pushed to the breakpoints to get a one on conversion in.
• You don't move on to the next stage until everyone meets the minimum requirements, so if you're struggling, the other players get to spend their time point whoring and developing future tech to give themselves carry-over bonuses in the next phase.

I don't honestly see as how it makes that much difference which way you go so long as you're consistent.

4. The obvious thing to do is to pull up a leaf from Junta and have a "coup phase" where people march units around for a few turns on one phase if there's a war going on. That system works really well.

-Username17

Metaconcerns
Overall I'm having the minigames play out similarly but different. Having a unified feel to it all was the jumping off point for the mechanical development once I'd solidified what I wanted the game to be able to model. That's not really a concern at this point - I'm a little deeper into the weeds than that. I'm surprised that you'd think I wouldn't get that. That shit is fundamental.


Re: Competition
I'm actually trying to implement some kind of mildly competitive element because otherwise I think it'd be easy to constantly make the altruistic choice, and at that point I'm concerned there's no tension to the play, only dealing with a series of random Events and maximizing abstract stats. That interplay between players and their characters' desires is good and I want it to mimic the choices that occur in stressful combats between self-preserving action A and risky ally-saving action B.


Re: Timescales, War and Ruling
Junta actually is a prime example of what I want to avoid, since I've played it with wargamers and non-wargamers; the coup resolution is precisely the point where the non-wargamers' eyes glaze over and they cease to care. Even when the wargamers had speedily plowed through the diciest, closest of coups in 20min, the non-wargamers were just being ordered around by those "in the know" with no real interface or appreciation of what was going on by those that didn't grok the tactical elements.

I don't know what I'm going to do at this point other than have abstract interjections, because wars between cultures/kingdoms will necessarily have interplay between social actions and the warfare elements.

Metaconcerns: I don't know, you never mentioned core mechanic standardization and you're talking liberally about some pretty radically different action resolution systems. I don't think it' a given at all.

Competition: Off hand I could see secret personal missions being thrown in with dire personal consequeces if they are failed ad big personal prizes if they are passed. So this month there's a plague, an orc invasion, and you have to make sure the library is expanded in order to personally secure the loyalty of the Yellow Glyph Faction. While true maximization would indeed be for the Knight to "trade" you all the scrolls resources you need for nothing while you commit all of your sages to studying the pestilence, I think that the result in virtually every game would be for you to commit enough sages to write up the scroll resources you need and send the rest of the sages off to fight the pestilence while everyone else did something kind of similar.

You could also have a system across between Dune and Cities and Knights. Where people actually commit resources to problems in secret and whoever contributes the most gets the credit if it succeeds and whoever contributes the least gets the blame if it fails.

Timescale and War: I don't know how you think you're going to be able to make a tactical minigame that appeals to players who aren't interested in tactical minigames. That's a design criteria that is doomed to fail before you write down a single number.

But if you did want to take a step in that direction, you could have shifting units around be an action you could take with economic fiddling being another. So presumably the players who liked to push soldiers around the field would select the Knight and the people who just wanted to play cards like "harass supply lines" without actually putting units on the board or worrying about specific locations would play the Rogue.

-Username17

FrankTrollman wrote:You could also have a system across between Dune and Cities and Knights. Where people actually commit resources to problems in secret and whoever contributes the most gets the credit if it succeeds and whoever contributes the least gets the blame if it fails.

That's how the Game of Thrones boardgame handles wildling attacks. It's a good system.