Making the epic of history come alive

[contracycle]

Well that's an, umm "interesting" defence.  So, your assertion that there is a One True Way to construct RPG's - and your subsequent dismissal of other modes as "awful" - is to be taken as "challenging", while disagreement, even in a parenthetical aside, is "trolling"?

That's some hubris you got going there.

[Robert Bohl]

Hey, can you guys take the flamewar elsewhere?

[Patrice]

I won't get into this, Robert, it's not my habit. My apologies, Michael. Don't let yourself be influenced by this necessary but nonetheless foul derailing and carry on with your design, it has much to offer if you find a way to reward the actual RP happening inside.

[Eusebius]

At the risk of being snarky, you are describing the computer game Civilization IV - Rhye's and Fall Mod. 

I love history and personally think this could be very cool.  But I think the key question you need to answer is why this is an RPG instead of a board game or a computer game.  If you can do that, you may be on your way.

Eusebius

[Vladius]

We never started a flamewar. One person is being a jerk not only to the original poster, but to everyone else in the forum. He is being a pretentious fool who vaunts HIS HOLY, EPIC, AND GRAND GAME DESIGN while decrying the PITIFUL MASSES OF PLEBIANS AND IGNORANT FOLK.

I'm glad that I'm on Contracycle's side, because it looks like I normally wouldn't be, judging from his "Impeach Bush" link.

Let's work on game mechanics, and answer the question. I presented my answer already, and I don't appreciate being yelled.

[Ron Edwards]

Luke - where do you think you are? Do not post here the way you are posting.

Vladius - change the way you are posting. You are flaming by Forge standards.

They aren't alone, either. This thread includes a few substantial responses to Michael's initial post, so I won't close it, pending Michael's reply. But I am disgusted by the ego, jostling, and general stupidity of most of the posts. I can't believe I have to wake up to see this.

Shame on you. Do not post to reply to me. Change your behavior.

Best, Ron

[Michael S. Miller]

I'll thank everyone to knock off the arguing about ethics and posting behavior in this thread. Take it to Site Discussion or drop it.

LUKE

On the ground, the "sweep of history" is a very dirty, petty, sordid affair. Is your game about the truth of these personalities? Or is this a romance about the power of the individual in shaping history?

This is, without a doubt, a romance about the power of the individual. I've read too much Jared Diamond to believe that exceptional individuals make a crucial impact on the overall shape of history. Day-to-day life is a "dirty, petty, sordid affair" and I want a game that offers a grander, more significant alternative--even if I know it is a daydream, an escapist fantasy.

Looked at from that vantage point, the game is about individuals making choices that affect multitudes. I need to digest that a bit, and put it on a big note on my desk.


JASON
You're right that I want a tactical board game fused with a weepy emo RPG. I just don't want them in separate phases. I want us to resolve our weepy emo RPG scene by the way we move our historical boardgame pieces. More thoughts on the captain problem below.


JOYWRITER
Thanks for the thought, but the Polaris-style play structure has never meshed well with my personality at the table. And since I'm going to be doing most of the playtesting...

CONTRACYLE
Time is an issue, but figuring out the player-fictional links is more fundamental.

BILL
That's a great breakdown of options. Thanks. I'm particularly inspired by one bit:

The focal character eventually dies, and it's the next player's turn to frame up a new focal character.

This opens up a possibility I had never considered: serial focus. Besides the obvious Pendragon and Hero's Banner, in also reminds me of Rebecca Borgstrom's Tree's Heart Dynasty. Each player might have a turn as the central influential character, with the others playing supporting and opposing roles. When that character dies, the next player takes the central seat, her character having inherited the consequences of her predecessor's decisions, and facing them with some inherited assets and some unique to the character. That could be VERY promising way of focusing the game on "indivuduals making choices that affect multitudes."

VLADIUS

You could also have it so that the players have a stake in the success of multiple nations

In my experience, I've found that the best games have the clearest goals. Players understand how to compete, and how to cooperate. They understand how to add an undercurrent of one when focusing on the other. But constantly shifting from one posture to the next feels like a recipe for confusing gameplay and exhausting players' patience and interest.

ROB
I don't think the game can do both. There will be design choices that would enable one type of play that will undermine the other sort. The players of Misspent Youth can't choose to play the Authority, can they?

I'm thinking that Bill's generational rotation of the spotlight might do a great deal to solve "the captain problem" and bring sharper focus to what the game's about: Individuals making decisions that affect multitudes over millenia. (And it's even got some alliteration going on! Bonus!)

PATRICE
In this thread, please comment on my game idea or not at all. Thanks!


Synthesis
A game about individual decisions affecting multitudes over millenia. How does this affect the play structure question? Well, we've got to present individuals with vital decisions and then display their consequence.

At its core, we've got the multiple players, one nation model, but with each player having a turn as ruler. The problems of the nation are most likely generated by the game system itself, and the solutions to those problems create assets and new problems for the subsequent rulers.

What about the non-ruler players? They portray supporting characters who are either ancestors or descendants (biological or ideological) of their own ruler character. They contribute assistance to the ruler, or occasionally attempt to worsen the problems the ruler faces. Why? If they haven't yet had their turn as ruler, they want to inherit the nation in decent shape, but not so good that they can't improve it. If their turn as ruler has passed, they want their ancestor's reign to be remembered at the Golden Age--so they don't want the current player to do too well--but if the nation completely collapses there will be no glory for anyone.

That sounds like a workable play structure to me. If I've overlooked something vital, let me know. With that in place I now need to work on translating it to mechanics. I'll post more when I have something. Thanks!

[Jason Morningstar]

I'm reminded of Dust Devils, where securing narration means you can direct conflicts in ways that directly benefit your character, regardless of the mechanical constraints.  Becoming ruler in your model means you get to do something similar, and it is a natural generator of adversity.  If you balance it out right, becoming the ruler means it is you against everybody, which makes it sort of a GM role to boot. 

[contracycle]

I think time is going to be highly significant to the player-fictional links, as you put it.  It is already implicit in the model you favour, in that if everyone is to have a turn as ruler, then game time is going to have to skip along pretty rapidly to get these different reigns into play.  So, one device that may serve for isolating playable scenes out of the whole lives of each generation might be the device used by Four Weddings And A Furneral, which is to say, character-acting gaming occurs at those moments when the characters are all perforce gathered in the same spot, required to interact due to some greater issue at hand.  The periods between these moments, when many of the grand scale events arise, may in fact be conducted in the abstract.

The ruler-by-turns idea certainly seems viable, and opens up a specific oportunity, that of the heir designate.  You might have all the active characters being of the same generation and obviate this issue, but it also might be interesting to have the heir as an active character, with the possibility that the designation may change.  It depends on whether you want to allow some conflict between characters in terms of their own dynastic aspirations.

On the matter of the romance of history etc, these views are both true and not true.  That is, history is not made by isolated geniuses; but on the other hand, the personal if indeed often the political, and general trends can be catalysed by individual actions.  The impetus that drove the Reformation did not derive from Luther, and was not his creation - indeed he disowned much of it - but without Luther, or someone like him, to serve as a lightning rod around which positions could coalesce that impetus would have been fulfilled, or not, in a different manner.

Especially if you are looking at dynastic, monarchic systems, personal arrangements certainly have impact on large swathes of people, time and territory, such as the example of the Spanish Netherlands.  So, I don't think this needs to be seen as escapist fantasy too much; and even if it were, would it be a daydream, to believe that the rest of us are but victims of an enlightened few, dragged along in their wake?  That might be seen as rather dystopian instead.  Either angle could be played up, but the inexorable relation between dynasty and political arrangements is quite significant enough in its own right.

[Josh Roby]

I hate to be that guy, but have you seen Agora (http://agora.kallistipress.com), Michael?  "Civ with a heart" is sort of exactly the space that I've been designing in for that game.

Also, would it work for your purposes to use a set up where each session you play through a crisis in one era of a civilization, with one person 'in charge' and others playing support roles, and the result of that session determines who plays the in-charge person in the next era/session?

[Double King]

MSM,

I'm not sure if this is implicit in the boardgame refs upthread, but i was thinking of a limited resource ccg style of board-mechanic when you mentioned this.  Perhaps in the vein of Puerto Rico or more recently Dominion.  Where the Macro level evolution could be distilled into ten or so themes and players got personal actions and macro actions.  X actions could be traded for a scene.  Each macro scene would allow you to shift the overall tilt of the environment: say you move a resources card to a politics pile and the play begins to spiral into the few stacks that players make selections for; or, you get to trade your macro cards for different types of author/captain scenes - one action for city planning but two actions for regal edict etc.

[epweissengruber]

Why on earth did you bring up ethics on the first place, if this is about game mechanics?

Stop talking about ethics.

Start talking about game mechanics, and answer the original question.

Sorry in advance for this long post.  But I have been thinking about how to get the sweep of history into my games for a long time and these are some of these ideas that have been bouncing around my head for a long time.

If Ethics is related to the behaviour of agents in stories (fictional or historical) and we are talking about games that enact or invoke stories, then Ethics has a place here.

If we are just concerned in creating a sweeping sequence of events, it might be possible to create a game that never dealt with the kind of ethical concerns that drive individual actions.  But if we are creating a game where the actions of individuals does hook up with a large-scale pattern of events, and that hooking up is embedded in mechanics, then the ethical bullet can't be dodged.

Think of it this way: many of the events of The Illiad are caused by feuding gods and individual human actions have little effect on the outcome.  But Homer begins by telling the audience that his will be a story about the wrath of Achilles and the woe it brought to the Greeks.  So ethics and history are both present in the epic.

Ethics in the ancient sense of a individual person's ethos (not airy abstractions about right and wrong) seems to be important here.  Aristotle put ethics high in the rank of a drama's qualities, but not at the very top.   He ranked the components of a tragedy as follows (and these components were part of the academic discussion of narrative structure in subsequent centuries).

MYTHOS or "plot" is primary.  Even a fictional story has to have a general sweep of events in which individual characters are embedded.  For Aristotle histories are mythoi about the things that have happened and dramas are mythoi about the kinds of things that can happen (drama being more philosophical than history)
ETHOS or "character": you need the right kind of characters with the right kind of flaws for the plot to unfold properly
DIANOIA or "thought": your characters have thoughts, sure, but these are elements that grow out of the bundle of powers, liabilities, and habits that make up the ETHOS of a particular character.  The actions of the character are more fundamental than this or that formulation of ideas.
LEXIS or "diction": the characteristic style in which a character expresses him or herself.  It must reflect both the individual and the social reality in which he/she is embedded.
(OPSIS or "spectacle" and MELOS or "music" are most related to drama and not to narrative as such)

We gamers seem to believe that a plot can grow out of the contentious interaction of characters whereas Aristotle believed that a plot had to be in place before a writer could do proper work in the creation of a tragedy, and that the whole effect of a drama upon the audience was dependent upon a proper structure.

Is some kind of middle ground possible, one where contending agents (nations, tribes) begin bouncing off of one another and, eventually, a sweeping story of historical change is told?  It seems like a tall order.

The crux of the matter is this: The sweep of history can make for compelling myths but the relationship of individuals' deeds to that sweep is complicated both in reality and in the stories that are made about history  Historiography can adopt a number of narrative modes analogous to those of fiction:  The romantic tale of marvelous persons accomplishing striking things; tragic tales of powerful persons torn apart by the forces unleashed by their own actions; comic tales of good things being created despite the varied flaws of the persons involved, and ironic tales of grand efforts ending in perverse results for all persons involved.  I can also read The Three Musketeers, Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream, and Catch 22 and come across those same modes.  But its only in those fictions that I come across protagonists of the sort that I could imagine myself playing in a game or using in fictions that I could create.

J. Huizinga tells a compelling story of Europe's middle ages.  Nietzsche tells a wry satirical/ironic story about the origins of "good" and "evil."  Historians talking about the Promethean efforts of Germany to overcome backwardness and division only to fall prey to aggressive nationalism often use tragic patterns of storytelling.  But none of these stories has a protagonist except in the loosest sense of the term, and certainly not a character of any kind that I can imagine playing.

- Under what circumstances would a player have a chance to make an individual character (king, general) speak?  When I take on the role of such a character in the game am I using verbal creativity to shed light on the character, offer a clever narrativising of the events played out in the turn of a wargame, or really shaping how the sweep of history is going to flow? 
- Is there a reward cycle that takes into account my verbal performances or is it just colour on top of a wargame?
- What relationship would an individual character's actions have to the mythos or the grand sweep of the history under construction?  (the idea that some sort of interpersonal conflict generates a narrative action is part of Schiller's literary theory in the 18th century, G.W.F Hegel  projects this agonistic struggle onto the unfolding of actual history in the 19th c., but for Aristotle a well-planned structure of events is the basis for the creation and reception of a tragedy)

Compelling fictions seem to depend on an ethos but how on earth could you make the ethos of a nation, a class, a town, a language, and economic system into an imaginable, useable, and gameable fiction?  It seems like diction, character (ethos), thoughts and plots are all part of role playing.  How does the epic game relate them all, tie them to currencies and reward cycles?

What is the relationship of these narrative elements to spectacle, to a gameboard or tokens which provide visual reminders of story, action, character/ethos, etc.?

These are mechanical questions.

[Vladius]

- Under what circumstances would a player have a chance to make an individual character (king, general) speak?  When I take on the role of such a character in the game am I using verbal creativity to shed light on the character, offer a clever narrativising of the events played out in the turn of a wargame, or really shaping how the sweep of history is going to flow? 
- Is there a reward cycle that takes into account my verbal performances or is it just colour on top of a wargame?
- What relationship would an individual character's actions have to the mythos or the grand sweep of the history under construction?  (the idea that some sort of interpersonal conflict generates a narrative action is part of Schiller's literary theory in the 18th century, G.W.F Hegel  projects this agonistic struggle onto the unfolding of actual history in the 19th c., but for Aristotle a well-planned structure of events is the basis for the creation and reception of a tragedy)

Compelling fictions seem to depend on an ethos but how on earth could you make the ethos of a nation, a class, a town, a language, and economic system into an imaginable, useable, and gameable fiction?  It seems like diction, character (ethos), thoughts and plots are all part of role playing.  How does the epic game relate them all, tie them to currencies and reward cycles?

What is the relationship of these narrative elements to spectacle, to a gameboard or tokens which provide visual reminders of story, action, character/ethos, etc.?

These are mechanical questions.

Okay, but you're doing it right. The first part of your post bothered me a little, but I already know everything that you're saying.

What I mean to ask is exactly what you just asked, meaning what is the function of tokens, counters, cards, the board, etc. We don't need to go over the fact that a roleplaying game gives you choices.

[Michael S. Miller]

Thanks for all the ideas everyone. It gives me plenty of directions to mull over and has pulled me out of my rut. I appreciate everyone's contribution, but let's close it here.

Thanks!