Power and Politics as core gameplay - Broken Hills

[Jeff Turner]

I was struck with an idea on a game I would like to run, and I was wondering if anyone here had any thoughts, criticisms or advice.

The Concept

Modeled after the HBO show Deadwood¹, players take the role of "Pillars of the Community" in a small but prosperous and growing settlement.

Game play comes from the players working together to ensure the survival of the settlement (whether from destruction by raiders or the elements or from annexation from outside powers) and from players competing for power and wealth within the community itself.

Player Characters

As Pillars of the Community, the players have roots in the town and are indelibly linked to its prosperity and survival. They'll operate local industry controlling (or trying to control) areas of commerce like prostitution, booze, supplies, communications, utilities, etc. They would also hold public offices and promote the protection and development of the town. They can use these offices to promote their own interests but they will still need to perform their public duties to the satisfaction of the public.

Conflicts and Complications

The settlement is still small and reliant on the outside world for supplies. Players' power bases will partially come from controlling these supply lines but could be reliant on alliances with outside powers who have their own interests. The players will have to manage not only how supplies and interests come into the town, they will need to control what leaves the town, lest their benefactors become displeased (the church finds out that heresy is rampant and demand that town morality be improved or their support will be removed) or too interested (the drug lords decide that the town is extremely profitable and decide to cut out the middle man and setup their own operation and begin to remove the competition).

Players will also have to manage relations with powers who border their settlements, but do not claim the area as their own. Each of these powers will have their own interests in mind, and if they decide to move into the area, they will be looking for friends that they can work with. The town is not capable of repelling the advances of one of these powers so it would be in the players' best interests to keep relations friendly, but they also need to be careful about inviting unwanted attention and/or intervention.

Players will also have to manage direct threats to the settlement. Raiders and road agents could threaten the roads. Tribal peoples may claim the settled land as their own and demand their share (maybe with the help of an outside power). Natural disasters and epidemics would need to be managed, with the town looking to the Players for leadership.

A Typical Play Session

A play session would encompass the events of a day/week/month of in game time (depending on what is happening in the plot).

At the beginning of each session, the status of the town and the status of the player's power wealth and influence (at least the public parts of these) would be recited. The player's success would be measured as a rank and/or hierarchy in the town (with contacts, alliances, wealth and power lending to this rank). Who ever is in the lead has the best chance of survival and prosperity.

Each player would be given privately a list of problems and opportunities presented to them, with the quality of this information being dependent on the contacts that they maintain and their levels of power and influence.

Each player will then declare publicly what their stated intentions are for the session (and privately what they want to accomplish if it acts against one or more of the other players). If there is enough drama created by this, the session will revolve around this alone.

If the players are unmotivated or bored, a Mcguffin² will be introduced. Scouts from one of the outside powers could descend on the town when a curious discovery is rumored. Settlers are feared to be carrying disease and masked vigilantes are killing everyone who tries to come to the town. A fire breaks out and in the aftermath one of the players is implicated in its cause.

At the end of the session, the player's position in the town, and the overall health, progress and safety of the settlement itself would be calculated and experience points would be distributed accordingly.

Any comments or suggestions?

Thanks.

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood_%28TV_series%29
2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mcguffin

[Callan S.]

Hi Jeff, welcome to the forge!

Is there an end game? Gather enough resources and that session or a series of sessions is over and complete?

From what I see of the structure play perpetuates. I'm pretty sure players will recognise this - that no matter how hard they work at it, it just keeps going anyway. So they will stop working hard at solutions, basically seeing how little they can do without failing. If you can't actually fail and be punted from play, that means they can actually do very, very little and still be in play. Which they will, I estimate.

Have you considered an endgame? Or a fail state where you get punted out of play? Though I admit, the idea of players sitting out is a little verboten in RPG cultuere, even here at the forge apparently.

[contracycle]

I strongly agree you need some kind of end point,and some sort of better timing system over all.  Both real world sessions, and the amount of game time they comprise, will vary from occasion to occasion, and this will likely making the accounting quite difficult.  Consider, how much time will you need before you absolutely have to pack up to perform that step? You will need to flag that up so that this can be done.  I also think such a process would run more smoothly if there were a fixed periods.

Traditionally RPG has used turns in combat rather than at the campaign level, but I think games at that level will need campaign level turns.

[Jeff Turner]

One endgame I had considered was a time limit.

4 years, in game time, until some predestined catastrophe (it would differ from setting to setting).

Another would be the annexation of the settlement by one of the neighboring powers. In that case, the players best established with that power and within the settlement would come out the winners.

A player could be removed from play when he has been run out of town, killed or ham-strung in his endevers..

Alternatively, the player's position in the town give him the power to choose the camp's direction and take the lion's share of th brides.

I was thinking about different lengths of time being represented by each session due to the fact that the early sessions would primarily be concerned with establishing the player's and setting their strategies. It would also recognize that while the settlement is being established there would be less interesting opprotunities and encounters to actually role play. Once their holdings, contracts and problems are established and the settlement starts to grow, it will start attracting more and more interesting (and dangerous) happenings, requirely more close attention (thus slowing the rate of time that progesses from session to session).

[Callan S.]

Well in general those seem good to me - but what's more important are your goals. Do some/all of them meet your goals for this game? If they do, since you have a start and an ending now, you could do a rough sketch of the games overall structure.

[zoom]

Hi Jeff

I recently went to a gaming convention in Stockport called StabCon. At this gaming convention I played a new game called Reign. I believe it's been out awhile but you can only purchase it through ordering it online from the US.

The game concept was very similiar to what your trying to achieve, in that each character had a personal side to them, which showed things like their skills and attributes, but also each character had a special Reign attribute like Treasury or Might, which represented the area of the empire or city they were in control off.

The game could then be played on two levels as each month the "council" would come together to discuss what was to be done about the problems facing the empire. At the time we had a war to fight so in the case of above, each month we determined how things went in the war by combining our reign attributes to make a roll. So for example if we decided that the treasury would spend cash to help the war effort then the two reign attributes "Might" and "tresurery" would be rolled together.

It worked really well and the sessions were run over the space of 12 months (in-game time) where each month we had to role play ourselves discussing the direction and decisions to be taken to rule the empire. It was very good.

don't know if that helps.... hope it does.