(Hi! As you might have guessed from my post count, I'm new here. This idea only reached the conscious parts of my brain today, which is why I registered. Also, people seem to be smart and amiable (and literate) here, which helps. Please inform me if I breach some point of etiquette!)

As any hoary book on the subject will inform us, roleplaying games evolved from wargaming. (The usual imagery invoked is of pewter pieces progressively acquiring names, personal characteristics, &c. as the number of them commanded by the player reduced, until, bam!, Chainmail.) What if instead of extrapolating from small unit tactics to character-level immersion the switch was from statecraft to immersion at the national level? ("Immersion" is probably the wrong word here, since countries don't have subjective experience.)

Regardless, the idea - which I'm certain can't be original, but haven't really seen in pure form - could be variously phrased as "an RPG where players take on countries instead of characters," "a 'statecraft'-genre board game that isn't wholly gamist," or "a non-MMO version of NationStates." After all, RISK is always funner when you wear a giant Russian hat and blast "Wellington's Victory," right?

Influences and What I'm Aiming For

The above was not how I got here. That would have been intuitive and stuff, so naturally my brain chose a more circuitous route. Here are some things that I enjoy, in gaming and out, or that led to the development of this thought:

1) Combat in Exalted. In every other crunchy game I've played, combat bores me. I'll be sitting there, and then it's my turn, and I can't do anything strategically useful because I couldn't pay attention to who moved five feet in what direction et cetera. But Exalted has stunts. They're fun to hear, they're fun to describe, they're rewarding to get a stunt bonus for. Stunts allow me to play through a mechanically involved situation without leaving my simulationist trance. And because, within that trance, I can picture everything, I can even focus on the gamist aspects because they're no longer just a system of equations.

2) World-building and reading setting information. One thing I like about creating characters is that it's a miniature exercise in world-building. I like exploration of worlds and I love reading the large blocks of fluff, when it's decently written. I enjoy "Create-A-Setting" and other threads on RPGnet that are all about collaborative world-building and riffing off each others' ideas, and I like it as a solitary time-waster. Also, as far as writing setting fluff, I always enjoy the outlining bits more than the actually-writing-everything-out bits. (I do, though, enjoy writing short vignettes.)

3) When I played god games on the computer (I don't really do any computer gaming nowadays, but that was my favorite genre) I would always subconsciously roleplay, even though they were usually single-player. I adored SMAC and Tropico for their feeding of this sort of play, and I'd almost always end up with pacifistic secular social democracies who throw everything into science regardless of the strategic wisdom of that, because that's how I'd run a nation, by golly.

4) The above-mentioned NationStates. It lacked significant player interaction and got repetitive quickly, but the basic premise was great. There's also, as far as things that are the closest to the concept, the Mandate of Heaven rules from Exalted. Those are still designed with the assumption that they won't be the focus of play, however.

5) In real life, I like discussing politics and economics. (My girlfriend jokes that the only way to snap me out of my ADD is to talk about politics.) This probably contributes to much of the above.

6) There was a Theory thread on RPGnet that caused me to think about why Immersion happens on the level of the character.

So what I want, if my goal is the rather fatuous one of creating a game that is exactly suited to my tastes, is statecraft-type game where the world can fleshed out in coherent detail, the vast majority of play is taken up by dramatic description, and gamist challenge exists but is not central.

A Rough Sketch of How Mechanics Might Work

1) The system is "generic" in that it should be able to handle a space opera, or a medieval fantasy setting, or even gossiping suburban families. The default assumption is that the players will come up with the setting, but they could just as easily play in Congress of Vienna Europe or Middle-Earth or whatever.

2) The system a slightly more elaborate version of Levi Kornelsen's [ur=http://members.shaw.ca/LeviK/Exchange.pdfl]the Exchange. I want some pre-established structure and stakes for various sort of conflicts - war, obviously, and some built-in internal "major problems" like mass starvation, revolution, coup d'etat and so on. I want there to be some numerical ratings in addition to the Exchange's Traits - economy, population, things like that.

3) National "character sheets" are mainly organized collections of traits. A player would give, say, three traits to their government, three traits to their economic system, three traits to the land, a trait for their intelligence services, and so on, though the categories and the number of traits they have under them would be something yet to determine. Categories are probably where static values are located - the strength of the military, of the economy, et cetera. Traits should be as easy to use "against" the country as "for" the country, or at least capable of each. Maybe Important People could be traits. (There should also, of course, be room for flag designs, national histories, et cetera.)

4) Players are assumed to take author stance rather than actor (as the government or whatever) stance. This is mainly be to allow for internal conflicts where two players have an exchange concerning and using the traits of one nation (unless another nation's trait can be creatively incorporated.) The opposing player can just as easily describe the actions of concerned nation's government (within reason) as the player "whose" nation it is.

5) There's probably some sort of rotational turn structure that dictates when players can start an internal challenge in their own nation to improve it, when they can start an internal challenge in another nation to hurt it (possibly dictating what nations a player starts internal challenges in, maybe it rotates clockwise or whatever, regardless of how friendly the nations themselves are), and exchanges between actual nations. Even friendly behavior can be opposed - for instance, the rules might state that a peace process is an exchange between three players in which all players use the traits of the two countries involved to determine whether or not a treaty is made. (Or maybe initiating a peace process is an antagonistic act between players, where both players use the traits of both countries to determine whether it comes to fruition or not.)

After writing that all out, this sounds a little more gamist than I had originally conceived. Though that's neither a good thing nor a bad thing.

An Idealized, if Miniature, Example of Play

This should be expanded upon, since what I have is really small, and it's probably one of the best techniques I've seen here for clarifying thought. (I've lurked here every now and then.) Maybe I'll do it as various parts of the system are fleshed out. Wendy's nation is Vandar, the other players' nations aren't important.

Jim: "War it was! The countries began to Mobilize, starting with Vandar..."
Wendy: "It was a clarion call to arms, and the war economy began in full steam. The people harvested from the rich coal mines to feed an armada of planes and warships..." (She picks up a die.)
Rocky: "But it was at that moment that key sectors of Vandar's unionized workforce, including the largest mining union, went on strike, saying that the increased production had not been matched by commensurate gains in wages..." (He picks up a die.)
Wendy: "And so Vandar's captains of industry, in their infinite patriotism, hired elements of the country's rampant organized crime to bust up the strikes..." (She picks up a die.)

Focusing Questions

1) Is there any place for a GM in this? "The rest of the world," maybe, or an adjudicator of appropriate trait use? That could all be outsourced. Jim (n.b. the way he reminds the other players how the steps in the war process work - mechanical statements should be able to be phrased as part of the narration,) who seems to be regulating the flow of the game, might be the GM or might just be a player. Perhaps "the rest of the world" could be an external sheet of traits?

2) How should world and "character" creation be handled? The simplest way would be for players to discuss the sort of world in which they want the action to happen and then to create nations in line with that world, but the steps could be more integrated than this. The extreme opposite end would involve no previous discussion (or discussion at all) and feature a round-the-table assignment of traits - Jim assigns and announces a trait to his nation, then Wendy does the same to hers, and so on, with booing to veto things that contradict other traits. The latter option could be really amazing (as far as spontaneously creating a setting in ways nobody could anticipate) or really tedious.

3) Should there be any sort of "win" condition? Should nations be eliminable? (Players can obviously stay on to participate in exchanges, even if their nations are eliminated.) And should the default assumption be for one-shots or campaigns (or short campaigns)? I group these all together because they so obviously affect each other.

4) Might bonus points accrue to players for good description, as judged by their peers? Is this superfluous in the Exchange system or needed when players will be involved in exchanges that don't affect their avatar states?

5) I'm not terribly well-versed in theory, but I do understand that the sentiment here is that incoherence Is A Bad Thing. Is what I've outlined Gamist, Simulationist, too unformed to tell, or straddling the line? If the latter, how are its challenge and exploratory goals in conflict?

All questions, criticism, commentary, and ideas are appreciated, obviously.

You want to look into Agora, in a big way.

http://kallistipress.com/agora/playtest.html

You might also want to check out Chris Engle's Matrix Games, since they were originally built to do something very similar to what you're talking about.

Hi, Matthias. Welcome to the Forge, first of all! You've come to the right place. Three substantive things:

1)
I hear you, absolutely; this is the game I've always wanted to play, myself. I'm the guy who kept year-by-year notes on his Medieval Total War single-player campaign that turned into a pseudo-chronicle complete with statements of religious bigotry and dynastic vainglory, then found myself unwilling to massacre the inhabitants of captured cities in Rome: Total War, arguably the best strategy, unless I captured them with my one general I thought of as an appalling butcher at odds with the rest of the family.

2)
This will probably b a bit disappointing to you: the style of play you describe in your "Vandar goes to war" example is already fully supported by a game called Universalis (Mike Holes & Ralph Mazza), which has a sub-forum on this very site. It's a GM-less game (that answers one of your questions righ there) in which the gaming group as a whole can formalize house rules -- e.g. "every character in the game is a country" -- and then use "tokens" to add and subtract traits from the various characters in play, traits which can then be called on by either side in a conflict (and no, there's apparently no need for a GM to decide whether a character's trait should count for or against them in any given situation; the game plays just fine without it).
If you want to get a bit wackier, you could also play this game in Capes (Tony Lower-Basch, also with a subforum here), which is nominally a GM-less superhero game with many structural similarities to the earlier Universalis but in fact allows you to write up and introduce, in less than five minutes, a "non-person character" like "The Country of Blatavia" or "The Mining Union" or even "Monumentally Bad Decision" (I've seen Tony play that one a lot) that operates the same way as any other character. Capes is distinguished by a very cool incentive system that basically pays you to lose the current conflict with more power to win the next conflict, creating rollercoaster-like negative feedback loops, and by a certain devil-may-care attitude towards continuity reflecting its comic-book inspirations.
Plus I'm sure you could do it with FUDGE, or with any number of suitably generic, non-crunchy-simulation game systems, e.g. Levi Kornelson's Exchange. No problem.

So where's the need for your game?
Aha!

3)
I'd suggest you hone in on the things you want that cannot be delivered by a "suitably generic" system -- in other words, on the things that countries do that individual characters do not -- in still other words, the differences between individuals and countries that are qualitative, rather than simply a matter of scale. "I hit him on the head" scales up neatly to "I invade his border provinces," but maybe there's no individual-level equivalent of "I develop a rich tradition of civil service" or "I bind the nobility to the monarchy by giving them meaningless sinecures at my lavish palace in Versailles."
Now, you've already made a good step towards this in your initial post: It sounds like you like a sort of free-flowing repartee among players trying to top each others' cool descriptions and letting that drive the numbers, rather than racking up numbers and then describing what you did to get them. But what aspects of "politics and economics" in particular get you excited that other games don't let you convey properly -- because there're countless possibilities, but you need to design a game to focus on the things that excite you.

P.S. Don't worry about Gamist vs. Narrativist vs. Simulationist at this stage. People tend to look at that particular aspect of the Ron Edwards "Big Model" and imagine three mutually exclusive boxes each with its own unique, incompatible contents; in fact, they're high-level priorities, only one of which a given game can pursue well, but all of which can draw from the same toolbox of techniques. One of my favorite Edwards posts is http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18177.msg192280#msg192280]this one here, where he talks about tactical crunch as a useful "turbocharger" for any of the big three agendas -- it's a propulsion mechanism that can be used in conjunction with any number of steering mechanisms on any number of roads.

Thanks to everyone who's responded thus far, especially Sydney. I've downloaded Capes Lite and the Agora Preview, though I haven't all of them, and I'll make sure to look at Universalis should I get the chance. I'm well aware of Matrix games, though I wasn't thinking of them when I wrote the post, and they were probably a subconscious influence on the player stance.

Vaxalon wrote:
You want to look into Agora, in a big way.

http://kallistipress.com/agora/playtest.html

Sydney wrote:
This will probably b a bit disappointing to you: the style of play you describe in your "Vandar goes to war" example is already fully supported by a game called Universalis (Mike Holes & Ralph Mazza), which has a sub-forum on this very site. It's a GM-less game (that answers one of your questions right there) in which the gaming group as a whole can formalize house rules -- e.g. "every character in the game is a country" -- and then use "tokens" to add and subtract traits from the various characters in play, traits which can then be called on by either side in a conflict (and no, there's apparently no need for a GM to decide whether a character's trait should count for or against them in any given situation; the game plays just fine without it).
If you want to get a bit wackier, you could also play this game in Capes (Tony Lower-Basch, also with a subforum here), which is nominally a GM-less superhero game with many structural similarities to the earlier Universalis but in fact allows you to write up and introduce, in less than five minutes, a "non-person character" like "The Country of Blatavia" or "The Mining Union" or even "Monumentally Bad Decision" (I've seen Tony play that one a lot) that operates the same way as any other character. Capes is distinguished by a very cool incentive system that basically pays you to lose the current conflict with more power to win the next conflict, creating rollercoaster-like negative feedback loops, and by a certain devil-may-care attitude towards continuity reflecting its comic-book inspirations.
Plus I'm sure you could do it with FUDGE, or with any number of suitably generic, non-crunchy-simulation game systems, e.g. Levi Kornelsen's Exchange. No problem.

I'd suggest you hone in on the things you want that cannot be delivered by a "suitably generic" system -- in other words, on the things that countries do that individual characters do not -- in still other words, the differences between individuals and countries that are qualitative, rather than simply a matter of scale. "I hit him on the head" scales up neatly to "I invade his border provinces," but maybe there's no individual-level equivalent of "I develop a rich tradition of civil service" or "I bind the nobility to the monarchy by giving them meaningless sinecures at my lavish palace in Versailles."

Now, you've already made a good step towards this in your initial post: It sounds like you like a sort of free-flowing repartee among players trying to top each others' cool descriptions and letting that drive the numbers, rather than racking up numbers and then describing what you did to get them.

But what aspects of "politics and economics" in particular get you excited that other games don't let you convey properly -- because there're countless possibilities, but you need to design a game to focus on the things that excite you.

P.S. Don't worry about Gamist vs. Narrativist vs. Simulationist at this stage. People tend to look at that particular aspect of the Ron Edwards "Big Model" and imagine three mutually exclusive boxes each with its own unique, incompatible contents; in fact, they're high-level priorities, only one of which a given game can pursue well, but all of which can draw from the same toolbox of techniques. One of my favorite Edwards posts is http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=18177.msg192280#msg192280]this one here, where he talks about tactical crunch as a useful "turbocharger" for any of the big three agendas -- it's a propulsion mechanism that can be used in conjunction with any number of steering mechanisms on any number of roads.

Hello, Matthias. Sorry to be slow getting back to you on this; you've got some neat ideas here.

Let me just push on one thing, though:

You're thinking of each country having (a) a fixed number of quantitative ratings (which are "static") in different areas, where a higher rating is unequivocally positive and a lower rating is unequivocally negative; and (b) a variable number of qualitative traits, any of which can be positive or negative in a given situation. (Right so far?)

Now: Do you need the fixed ratings, the "static" element, at all?

Or could the whole game be about adding and subtracting qualitative traits?
Could the qualitative traits be given numerical ratings for how important they are (e.g. "broad civil liberties 2" have a lot less impact on the course of history than "broad civil liberties 7")?
Could a trait's switch from positive to negative (or vice versa) be depicted as a hostile player "capturing" it and taking control of it away from the country's player?

My own game-in-prolonged-and-frustrating-development, apocalypse girl, tries to take this "capture" approach for characters and character traits in a more conventional RPG situation; check out http://www.1km1kt.net/rpg/Apocalypse_Girl.pdf for a very, very broken first draft.

The other thing I would suggest is that the uniqueness of your game, in terms of evoking the more-than-personal scale, is intimately tied up in making Economy, Government, Military etc. do different things. How or what? Well, that's a barely formed thought at the moment, but Economy might only be good for building up traits, Military only good for tearing them down (but that includes erasing negative traits), etc.; or Cultural change might be very powerful but very slow, while Economy growth is a more near-term, and Military victory is instant gratification but easily reversed; or you might get a scissors-paper-stone dynamic going among the different elements.

I've been part of a group which used a great deal of Civ and tacked it on some revised rules of Empires of the Middle Ages to create what your describing.

It worked very nicely I must say.

This was the sort of impulse that led me to develop REIGN.  However, it's less authorial, inasmuch as players still control discrete characters.  Those characters, however, are expected to be in charge of some kind of action group -- a nation, a cult, a fleet or whatever. 

I think most players like having an individual character who is "theirs" and who provides a handle for the bigger setting and events.  I mean, the Civil War is a lot easier to grasp if you follow it from the perpsective of Lincoln or Jackson or Grant.  (Isn't it?  Maybe I mean, "easier to identify with".)  While the big groups have their own stats and can crash into each other, the actions of individuals have a drastic influence on the groups' rolls.  If you go to the summit, seduce the ambassador's wife to find out what he's worried about, then play to that during negotiations, your nation is going to do better than if you'd stayed at the summer palance working on your suntan.

-G.

And I see Reign is currently in layout, too - tasty....

I'm all for focusing the big history through individual people -- I'm currently agitating for a Burning Empires game with my group -- but that does add a whole layer of complexity. Especially for a political leader (e.g. a Lincoln) or a military commander (e.g. a Grant), the protagonists spend much, if not most, of their time trying to get their stupid subordinates to do what they're supposed to and trying to keep their stupid superiors (e.g. Congress) to provide resources instead of interference. For someone truly "middle management" like a battalion commander, "the enemy" is often almost completely lost to view behind the thick walls of conflicts internal to your own organization (see Jim Dunnigan's How to Make War).

So if you don't want to follow the route of Reign (which, if it's derived from the Godlike "one-roll engine," is presumably pretty darn crunchy) or of Iron Empires (656 pages, people!), there's something to be said for "my character is my country, my stats are all national, and individual characters are just color narration."

Now maybe there could be a rule that any narration has to include at least one named individual -- but no such individual has stats.

Hm.  Well, I designed the Company rules for REIGN to be modular so that you could chop that chapter off and stat up TNI and Mak Attax for a UA game (or your local vampire covenants for V:tR) but I always assumed people would have their PCs to tip the scales.  You could play it PC-less though.  In fact, one early playtest the gang had "characters" but they were statless.  Each character just controlled one aspect of The Empire and they worked together against their neighbors.

-G.

Greg, given your experience with different permutations of REIGN during playtest, do you have any specific advice for Matthias? He's provided a very detailed summary of what he'd like his game to be like.

Best, Ron

Before I adress all the helpful comments - thanks Sydney, Greg, Ron - an additional focusing question, which I should have posted much earlier. I'm obviously interested in Levi's answer to this, since he's the brain behind the Exchange, but obviously anyone could be helpful in it:

In the default version of the Exchange, there's a very clear structure on what traits can be used, and when; and there's a natural limit to how many traits can be brought to bear in a situation. As it stands here, nations have a multitude of traits with no hierarchy. Is this essentially broken and in need of a hierarchy (perhaps organized around being in/out of the relevant category) or doable, provided the stakes for the exchanges don't really go up depending on the degree of victory? That is, perhaps, more of a playtesting question, but I want to get a more concrete idea of how things will mechanically play out.

Sydney wrote:
You're thinking of each country having (a) a fixed number of quantitative ratings (which are "static") in different areas, where a higher rating is unequivocally positive and a lower rating is unequivocally negative; and (b) a variable number of qualitative traits, any of which can be positive or negative in a given situation. (Right so far?)

Now: Do you need the fixed ratings, the "static" element, at all?

Or could the whole game be about adding and subtracting qualitative traits?
Could the qualitative traits be given numerical ratings for how important they are (e.g. "broad civil liberties 2" have a lot less impact on the course of history than "broad civil liberties 7")?
Could a trait's switch from positive to negative (or vice versa) be depicted as a hostile player "capturing" it and taking control of it away from the country's player?

The other thing I would suggest is that the uniqueness of your game, in terms of evoking the more-than-personal scale, is intimately tied up in making Economy, Government, Military etc. do different things. How or what? Well, that's a barely formed thought at the moment, but Economy might only be good for building up traits, Military only good for tearing them down (but that includes erasing negative traits), etc.; or Cultural change might be very powerful but very slow, while Economy growth is a more near-term, and Military victory is instant gratification but easily reversed; or you might get a scissors-paper-stone dynamic going among the different elements.

Sydney wrote: So if you don't want to follow the route of Reign (which, if it's derived from the Godlike "one-roll engine," is presumably pretty darn crunchy) or of Iron Empires (656 pages, people!), there's something to be said for "my character is my country, my stats are all national, and individual characters are just color narration."

Now maybe there could be a rule that any narration has to include at least one named individual -- but no such individual has stats.

Ron wrote:
Greg, given your experience with different permutations of REIGN during playtest, do you have any specific advice for Matthias? He's provided a very detailed summary of what he'd like his game to be like.

I just saw the thread. Looks cool and I'm always gratified when I hear someone has heard of my games. I will use your initial posting to contrast Engle Matrix Game solutions to the problem. I started off on the same quest - to role play entire countries - but with the additional rule that I would use words rather than numbers.

Matthias wrote:
1) The system is "generic"

2) I want some pre-established structure and stakes for various sort of conflicts. I want there to be some numerical ratings in addition to the Exchange's Traits - economy, population, things like that.

3) National "character sheets" are mainly organized collections of traits.

4) Players are assumed to take author stance rather than actor (as the government or whatever) stance.

5) There's probably some sort of rotational turn structure that dictates when players can start an internal challenge

Jim: "War it was! The countries began to Mobilize, starting with Vandar..."
Wendy: "It was a clarion call to arms, and the war economy began in full steam. The people harvested from the rich coal mines to feed an armada of planes and warships..." (She picks up a die.)
Rocky: "But it was at that moment that key sectors of Vandar's unionized workforce, including the largest mining union, went on strike, saying that the increased production had not been matched by commensurate gains in wages..." (He picks up a die.)
Wendy: "And so Vandar's captains of industry, in their infinite patriotism, hired elements of the country's rampant organized crime to bust up the strikes..." (She picks up a die.)