Coming, sooner or later: Valorous Dominion
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Just a thanks here real quick. Speaking with @ganymede almost a year ago regarding politics and a KISS system lead me to the association with a simple game system; Catan. A simple necessity list of a few generic commodities (that represent a slightly more broad approach than those in Catan) and how to buy various things with them, extrapolated to work in only a marginally more complex system that couples with the basic Pendragon character mechanics. Much thanks to Ganymede, I look forward to seeing the system devised on Dark Ages.
I'm just a surge protector doing my job, sir.
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@lotherio said in Coming, sooner or later: Valorous Dominion:
Much thanks to Ganymede, I look forward to seeing the system devised on Dark Ages.
I'm still working with the team on that one. We've hit a snag of sorts, but we hope to have something in written form sooner rather than later, so that changes may be proposed from those interested in the game.
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One of the last things we're working out is Valor. Valor replaces glory for Valorous Dominion; simply because Glory has a large tie to chivalry. Valor is very similar, fame and reputation, status and standing, gossip in the shadows and glory on the lute of musicians. But, it's not really chivalrous. Vendetta is a large part of daily life for the nobility, and thus courage to act and defend honor is a sign of valor. Likewise, it is reputation. Doesn't have to come from good deeds; best example I can think of is Cersei Lannister's walk of shame. It may have been humiliating, but her courage to do it or her gumption to do it in spite of everything might have bolstered her reputation from the event.
House management and Vindicti are systems in place. One of the uses of house commodities is to hold social events, sporting events, tournaments and the like. Not only is this a way to impress/turn the ear of NPCs of influence, it is a way to increase house reputation. We are focusing less on combat (it's there) as a means to gain Valor, this concept is similar to hosting tournaments in Pendragon. The net 'glory' is instead awarded to the house as reputation. Individuals that attend the party gain 1/10th that reputation as personal valor. It will mirror the levels of glory for tournaments, with a progression for importance of the event; one can raise the level by attracting influential/famous NPCs to the event. The easiest way to get an NPC to show up is spending of house or personal reputation to draw them to the gathering, increasing the reputation for the house to host such notable individuals and, thereby, increasing personal valor for being in attendance at prestigious events. We're hoping a lot of the drive to gain and earn valor is player driven.
Another implementation post-opening we are planning is a quirk/hook/goal system. We're not requiring any of these for characters, but those wishing to add them and play them out will be rewarded. Our focus in the system is on houses, anything we don't see is something we won't know about. Using this system will prevent reliance on +requests to earn Valor, but like all systems it will take effort and this will require logging on some level to supply to the system as proof of goals. Rather than define levels of goal/quirk/hook involvement, it will be by the month and the amount of scenes/etc in which the goal is worked on or the hooks played out. No matter how many listed, there will be a limit of Valor awarded per month.
All that said, we are settling on an opening of Monday (23rd). It's a full opening and we're sure there are plenty of things missed or overlooked. It will come with changes, code fixes, theme clarifications and anything in between. Once we open it will be a persistent setting for the characters developing. We could call it alpha, but even if anything needs fixed changed, the characters, there will be little cosmetic difference as the story persists.
