Civilization roleplaying

[quozl]

Jon,

So, decide what you want the players to represent, and then you're off and running. Are they Kings and Queens, who have the support of their country only so long as they mainatin their power structure? Or does the player represent the entire will of the people of the country? In the first case, the player is out of the game if the leader they represent is killed, while in the second example, if the leader is killed, another one comes to power, and the player continues as the country. See the distinction? In Aria, you represent the nation on one scale, and then "drill down" to another scale to examine the actions of certain members of the nation.

Does that help?  

Or have you made this choice, and you're just looking for a particular set of mechanics. Once you've let us know what the player represents, I feel certain that I can point you at a game that does what you want. There are lots of them.

Mike

Mike, that helps a lot.  I think what I want is your second example.  I would very much appreciate any links to game that do something like this.

Thanks!

P.S.  It's interesting to see that wargames and RPGs aren't as far from each other as I previously thought.

[Mike Holmes]

Let's narrow down a bit first. What level of detail do you want to be possible? Certainly you don't want to have to worry about what each and every individual is doing. As such you have to resort to a certain level of abstraction for some game elements. The question is which of them do you want to focus on, and how detailed do you want to be able to get with these.

For example, Diving Right, is TSRs silly little fantasy game from the waybackwhen. Each player gets a kingdom, which includes certain numbers of resources such as troops, leaders, etc. Then one performs diplomacy with other nations in an attempt to get them on your side, and conducts military campaigns in an attempt to destroy the other kingdoms. Very simple, and has a very limited number of areas that are involved. Military, and diplomatic, mostly. Economic matters are notoriously ignored.

Now, on the other end of the spectrum would be something more freeform, and less restricted to certain preset areas of conflict. One can theorize about such a game, but the problem becomes limiting the amout of time it takes to play the game. If one can, for example, mess with the lives of each and every peasant, then it's going to take a long time for events to occur. As such, the level of event description is usually proscribed by the relative speed of passage of time. That is, if you want to have one month of game time pass per four hour session of play, you are limited in how much stuff you can cram in. So, you may decide to limit the depth of detail (how small the detail gets), the areas of detail (what the game is about), or how many of each thing a player can adjudicate (number of actions per time element).

There are games where each one hour turn represents centuries of game time (Civilization, frex). Then there are games where in game time actually passes more slowly than real time. In such turns some games consider only one element (most wargames), and some allow you to consider almost any sort of action (Kuma from RPGnet made such a game recently). In the latter case there is usually some resource that limits the player in number of actions that can be taken (as in Kuma's game).

So, what sort of scales are you thinking? Timeframes? Limitations on areas of interest?

Most importantly, what's the point of play? As you are looking at this as an RPG, you should consider what sort of impulse that this is supposed to encourage in players. Is it competitive? Just a neat sim (Sim Kingdom)? r is it an attempt to create story from a very high level POV?

Mike

[quozl]

Most importantly, what's the point of play? As you are looking at this as an RPG, you should consider what sort of impulse that this is supposed to encourage in players. Is it competitive? Just a neat sim (Sim Kingdom)? Or is it an attempt to create story from a very high level POV?

Mike

I want your last option: creating a story from a high level POV.  I think that wargames would do a better job from the sim point of view.  

As to scale and timeframes and areas of interest, I don't know.  I want it all but I know that's probably impossible.  If you could provide a link to Kuma's game, I'll take a look and tell you what I like and don't like about it.  Maybe that will provide a good baseline for discussion.

[Mike Holmes]

Here's the thread where Kuma released his idea:

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

I think in attempting to do everything it makes everything a bit bland. Further, the Narrativist balance is skewed. He was going to revise it, I guess, but I can't say how far he's gotten.

Try combining this with a keyword system like Hero Wars, maybe. That might fix some things.

Mike

[quozl]

Very interesting.  I'm not sure what I think of it yet.  I'm going to have to playtest it.

[xiombarg]

Or have you made this choice, and you're just looking for a particular set of mechanics. Once you've let us know what the player represents, I feel certain that I can point you at a game that does what you want. There are lots of them.

Mike makes an excellent point here. It's a subset of the classic question here on the Forge: "What do you do?" Obviously, before you know what you do, you have to have some idea who you are.

[Kuma]

Here's the thread where Kuma released his idea:

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

I think in attempting to do everything it makes everything a bit bland. Further, the Narrativist balance is skewed. He was going to revise it, I guess, but I can't say how far he's gotten.

Well loogit that!  Here I am sweating that someone's going to stumble onto the premise of Elsewhere before I get the damn thing out the door, and I'm referenced in the same thread!  :)

Elsewhere is in fact a much larger organizational RPG, as I have termed it.  The rules that I posted here are in fact a narrativist riff off the core of Elsewhere's rule system.  Elsewhere was inspired in part by Aria - I saw that someone posted Juha Vesanto's stuff on Interactive History, he was big into Aria.

Anywho, yes - I have been revising it, but I have to re-collate my notes and republish the system.  I've taken out everything that had to do with tokens and established the following:

* Any time you successfully challenge a card out of somone else's played hand, you take the card, which now carries a negative connotation (placed inverted in front of the player - i.e. faith becomes either lack of faith or the rise of some negative belief).

* Whenever a player acts on another player, in either a positive or negative fashion, the culture gains a descriptor.  'Warlike', or 'benevolent'.  These descriptors can then be used in some fashion - I haven't decided what part of play, yet.  Perhaps all of them.  The descriptors can add +1 to a hand of cards, or another player can invoke an opposing descriptor to take away from a culture's action.  Something of that sort.

Actually, Diplomacy isn't a bad jumping-off point for a civ RPG.  What makes it even better is that it's about as far away from Elsewhere as possible.  :D  Oh, and Diplomacy *is* a proto-RPG.

Good luck.

[quozl]

Please let me know how your revision goes.  I'm definitely willing to playtest.  Also, do you have a more complete listing of sample cards any where?  I could expand the given list on my own but I may skew the game into something it wasn't designed to handle.

[contracycle]

I'd like to see the revision too, the original looks very interesting.

So, would you see the cards detailing certain things, like ideologies or locales, being tailored or geenric?  Do you have a card with "mountains" or a card with "Mountains of the Sun" on it?

[vorlon]

What games out there allow you to roleplay a kingdom, a civilization, a nation, or a planet?  Has anyone tried to design such an animal?  What are the limitations or obstacles in roleplaying this way?

Have you tried "Pocket Empires"?  a Traveller 4th Edition game by Imperium Games... its out of print but you can pick copies up on eBay.  In that game you roleplay an entire dynasty during Travellers "Long Night" and manage one or more worlds of a small "Pocket Empre" to boot.  Good Stuff.

Pete