Civilization(TM) RPG game?

[fabien]

In a previous thread about innovation, I ended asking about some kind of Civilization-like mechanics in RPG.  By this, I don't mean a RPG where you're playing God-like creatures building civilizations, but instead game mechanics that allow PC to influence the technological, social and even (why not?) magical level of their civilization, and be influenced back.  The system must handle things like Building Wonders, Science Discovery, New Exploration, Political Revolution, etc.  Also, the PC are influenced by such things, like easier access to some skills and technology, gain of reknown, etc.


Currently, my first draft on this is really minor: a set of ten cultural domains, that are used to determine the current cost (and so presence) of different skills in this civilization/culture (that include special culture like an hermetic group, or specially trained troups) and players can influence it by making great things (like research, discovery, influencing enough people, teaching or simply heroic actions of great visibility).  Details are still needed but I would like to know what exist on the subject or what people are working on currently.

Note that I aim for a very classical RPG, without anything new in terms of meta-gaming (I mean by this, may be wrongly, aspects like balance of power, flow play, etc.).

Bruce Baugh was nice enough to talk about his Gamma World game due to fall.  Bruce, I would like to learn a little more about this, on your approach of the problem and how you see it fit in a play flow of RPG.  Any other people are working on similar thing?

[Mike Holmes]

I've worked on several projects like this. Here's somthing that we tentatively started on the fora here:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=1454

Also see the following thread for a more overhead approach:

http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?t=3831


Mike

[fabien]

Thanks Mike for the links!

The concept is very interesting and I'm pretty sure I would love to play such game (currently,
FreeCiv, a Civilization Clone, is one of my preferred game on PC).  However, as I state in my first post, I doesn't aim for a far different play flow of traditional RPG.  I just one to include
some mechanics to make elements like culture, technology and civilization in general able to influence the characters and vice-versa.  May be it's more a Torg-like game, indeed, but in a more down-to-earth twist?

Clearly, I'm on the Simulationist side, at least on the static part of the game. ;)

[M. J. Young]

Fabien--in your comments on this on the rant thread, you mentioned Multiverser, and wrote it off as superficial in this regard. I hadn't seen this thread yet, and that one was closed, so I responded to those comments on the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=63694#63694">Rant Against a Rant thread.

--M. J. Young

[talysman]

the canonical example of a role-playing that allowed civilization-building is Aria, although I think it would need to be tweaked if if you wanted to use it for a game that built civilizations from scratch; I don't remember there being any rules for civilizations to generate subcultures within themselves, for example, other than subcultures being mentioned in the text descriptions of some indices (like the religious index or the humanities index.)

Aria did not really seem to be aimed at a group creation of a civilization, but more towards a GM creating the basics of a civilization, which was then used either as a traditional RPG setting or in interactive societal-level play, where the players took on specific social factors or subgroups within a society and developed the setting further through actual play.

there were hints of this kind of thing in other games. an early GURPS product (detailing Caithness) mentioned ratings for cities/political players in terms of food, military, and other resources and suggested using these as modifiers to standard GURPS-style rolls to determine social changes.

several years ago, I started a project to simplify Aria using some FUDGE terms. I set it aside and haven't worked with it for quite a while, but you can see the crude beginnings of it here. it's missing a lot: I never described how to use any of this in actual play; I'm not even sure if I would have developed it in that direction, since I was mainly interested in it as a descriptive technique.

[fabien]

Fabien--in your comments on this on the rant thread, you mentioned Multiverser, and wrote it off as superficial in this regard. I hadn't seen this thread yet, and that one was closed, so I responded to those comments on the http://www.indie-rpgs.com/viewtopic.php?p=63694#63694">Rant Against a Rant thread.

--M. J. Young

Hello!

Far from me to diminish Multiverser!  I could even said that if I knew it some years ago, I would have switch to it instead of starting my own rpg.  It's a nice system and I really like the bias rule.  However, it doesn't correspond to my current vision of "how things should work in my games".

In the "System Matters" way, what's I'm looking for is a society-building mechanics that the player can directly influence and be influence by it, not only on the narrative side, but also on the game side (and I'm not referring to GNS here).  I want to make specific difference from culture and world.  For example, even if Newton where really brillant, he should have need a really great insight to discover the general relativity.  Still, such insight must be possible and, correctly deploy, can influence the whole world, making it "progressing" in that direction.

So, what I want may be described this way:

[*] Society-level descriptors (just like we find in game like Torg, Gurp, Multiverser, etc.)
[*] A mechanic for Society development (like the one found in Civilization both more RPG
  oriented).
[*] A concrete link between PC-level mechanics and Society-level mechanics.
[/list:u]

Currently, I have a system that allow me to set the cost of each skill using different factors, each skill being interelated to each other using some generalization/specialization mechanic.
I also have a premisse of Society Descriptors using 8 differents domains.  What's missing is to link both of them and to, may be, give secondary descriptors to society mechanics.  So just like PC go to some training to acquire such and such skills, influencing both their skills and stats, they can also take some actions to make their society progressing in different aspects, influencing both the primary (technological, political, economical, etc.) and secondary (electrical energy, democratic government, capitalist market) domains.

Hope this is a little more clear (really sorry, I often miss the correct words to express myself in English).

[fabien]

Talysman:

Thanks for the comment on Aria.  I will try to find it to see how they approach society
development.  I was looking at your adaptation and that sound great, although I doesn't
follow the same approach currently (for example: size and age of society are just like the
same attributes for PC: they can influence other stats but doesn't usually need to be specific stats by themself).

Thanks you everyone for your hints, it really the wonderful diversity of RPG.  But unless Bruce's Gamma World is what I'm looking for, I think I will still have to work on my ideas. :)