L&L Options?
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The problem I've had re: political RP is when there IS no 'sheet' option for it (either it's a non-statted game or there just aren't +sheet options) and it all comes down to 'who staff does and doesn't like.'
So those of us who are politically savvy and can make stuff happen IC find that everything occurs 'behind the curtain' by people either @mail'ing staff or putting in +requests to say 'I want X' and then X happens. No actual RP. No IC messengers. No actual legwork at all. Just buddying up to the right Staffers. And then they preen and flutter and claim they're a political genius.
Meanwhile, someone who did the legwork, RP'd their ass off, finds that weeks of work is thrown out the window because you woke up one morning, sent off a +request, and didn't leave your IC room all day.
Awesome.
And I guess, arguably, it could be called political savvy to not lift a finger and get everything you want but yeah. It's why I am hella picky about where I actually pursue political RP (even tho I love political intrigue) because it's just not fun when you realize that there's people out there who claim to want political RP but what they really want is 'Staffers that I can beg to give me things without any effort on my part whatsoever.' aka 'I don't want to ever actually risk losing.'
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Lisse24 said in L&L Options?:
The thing is, we don't run combat by fiat. The ST doesn't get to say, "Yes, throwing a punch here is better than a kick, so you win," and I'm of the opinion that political RP should be the same way.
There should 1) be systems that players can manipulate and then 2) How well they manipulate it should come down to their sheet and their rolls and 3) When a player is way off base, but is playing a character that is supposed to be savvy, then the ST might want to step in and let them know that they're not going to succeed at Task A until they've done some more ground work to prep for it.
On the other hand combat is fairly straight-forward. You can't really screw up throwing a punch too badly unless you try, so a roll can fairly easily align with the pose describing it.
You can totally and absolutely do some real dumbass things without realizing the political blunders. I've seen it in a variety of games - people throwing non-existing weight around, insulting higher ranking officials for basically no reason, threatening physical harm in minor disputes alienating parties that joined in good faith... the works.
In my personal opinion although you can base it all on a contested roll anyway it will cheapen and eat away at the source of what makes politics work - well depicted skill at getting people to do what you want them to. Yes - as you noted - this is subjective and yes it's dependent on the player's skill at posing a convincing, charismatic character but... that's just how it is. Oversimplifying the result by making it dependent on a single roll is not going to work, it'll do the exact opposite.
What should be mechanized is tracking the resources available to players because that's something political games in general have often been very unsuccessful at. PCs throw money around like it's inexhaustible, access to troops - or their quality - is up in the air, influence over NPCs and regions tends to be a kind of... fuzzy matters altogether, yet those are absolutely things MU* can be better at tracking down automatically for players.
If that happens then characters can actually be forced to make interesting choices which to me is the heart of what drives politics as well as good gameplay.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel said in L&L Options?:
In my personal opinion although you can base it all on a contested roll anyway it will cheapen and eat away at the source of what makes politics work - well depicted skill at getting people to do what you want them to. Yes - as you noted - this is subjective and yes it's dependent on the player's skill at posing a convincing, charismatic character but... that's just how it is. Oversimplifying the result by making it dependent on a single roll is not going to work, it'll do the exact opposite.
Almost none of us are real life swordfighters. If I'm fighting somebody and lose the combat rolls, I don't really care what the other person poses, unless it's some super egregiously stupid shit (which I could easily call them on and ask them to repose). And I'm not expected to "play along" with the other person's "demands" or anything.
Social and political stuff does not work like that. If you win a roll, but can't write to save your goddamn life, people are going to lose interest in playing with you, and in playing with their character, since they now have to go along with your awful shit because the dice said so.
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@Arkandel said in L&L Options?:
What should be mechanized is tracking the resources available to players because that's something political games in general have often been very unsuccessful at. PCs throw money around like it's inexhaustible, access to troops - or their quality - is up in the air, influence over NPCs and regions tends to be a kind of... fuzzy matters altogether, yet those are absolutely things MU* can be better at tracking down automatically for players.
If that happens then characters can actually be forced to make interesting choices which to me is the heart of what drives politics as well as good gameplay.
Completely agree, which was why my first point was that the game needs to have systems to support political RP. I have opinions on what some of these systems should be, but we may be wandering away from L&L at this point.
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@Tempest Which is something most Lords and Ladies games sorely lack: compelling political vicissitudes to drive a story. It always ends up being a zero-sum game where two political interests are aligned in complete opposition, because even if there's a peaceful transition for someone's rise, someone likely gets dinged for it. Conversely, it is why player vs player action like civil wars and stuff never end well or are just killed in the cradle by staff: because the attrition will cost the game players or derail the theme.
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@Tempest said in L&L Options?:
Social and political stuff does not work like that. If you win a roll, but can't write to save your goddamn life, people are going to lose interest in playing with you, and in playing with their character, since they now have to go along with your awful shit because the dice said so.
It's also a scale of 'work' involved, too.
If I'm RPing a lawyer, a lot of it is off-camera (unless I'm playing on Court Room: the MU and no one wants to play there). The number of times I have to roll for that on-camera is slim. I can get away with not being a lawyer IRL.
I remember on Firan, if you were a Guard, you were expected to actually go out and be a Guard. To investigate stuff. To arrest people. You had to actually do the job on-camera. You couldn't just say you did. You couldn't just roll some dice and rely on your sheet. You had to actually do the thing and play it out.
Political stuff, IMO, should be the same way. You want to be a political character? Do the thing. Don't just handwave it away or roll some dice or submit a +job and have staff fiat dictate that you won. You chose the role. You do the work because it is an on-camera position (at least in the context we're discussing here) that needs to be played out.
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@Lisse24 This sounds a loooooot like social combat, which everyone hates and will gripe over.
Take a shot for the drinking game, and be sure to never create a master martial artist without having several real world titles and styles under you belt, as we come full circle to 'only people good at real politics can politic'
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@deadculture said in L&L Options?:
@Tempest Which is something most Lords and Ladies games sorely lack: compelling political vicissitudes to drive a story. It always ends up being a zero-sum game where two political interests are aligned in complete opposition, because even if there's a peaceful transition for someone's rise, someone likely gets dinged for it. Conversely, it is why player vs player action like civil wars and stuff never end well or are just killed in the cradle by staff: because the attrition will cost the game players or derail the theme.
One of the frustrating narratives encountered in political games is that the zero-sum game is a predetermined outcome - that in each encounter someone has to win, and that means another has to lose, the same way that it happens in a sword fight. After all if you're sparring with Joe either he wins or you don't, and it's clear who the winner is.
Politics doesn't work quite like that. For starters the very idea you walk away from a negotiation with Joe leaving him red-faced and fuming while you get what you want is a silly one; it's kind of a trope in books, but that's because the author set it up that way and the geopolitics are perfectly aligned to accommodate the total win for the protagonist. On a MU* player agency guarantees this is rarely seen; piss Joe off and he (or perhaps his player) will rather take a bigger loss than give you a win.
Worse, political games aren't that different than action-based ones (or any others, for that matter); it's all done for fun. If you piss off everyone you meet then they won't want to play with you, and how well is that going to work for your illustrous career as a political force? This isn't even a rhetorical question - I've seen disagreeable players of highly-ranked characters rely a hundred percent on their title to try and carry the day, thus missing the point of both how to be political and to play games.
The best politicians on MU* are people whose scenes you love being part of. Which, weirdly enough, is the same as in any other kind of MU*.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@Arkandel Just as in a sword fight, politics take a level of strategy. You can turn that early loss into a long-term consolidated win if you have the right resources or if you manage to make your interests align with those that have said resources, while trying to obtain a measure of them for yourself in order to be autonomous. Pulling rank almost never works in MUSHes; players are very oppositional to this kind of stuff and would rather have their character be seen as the rebel if they're overt, or they will subvert your character's demand of obedience with a subtle power play if they're not. There's no outcome that's pre-written when it comes to human dynamics, because the human element strips politics of determinism.
You're right regarding the best politicians on MU being also the friendliest.
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For the record, I've been working on and off at a political game for a while. It mostly sits dormant with me getting bursts of inspiration and working on it once a month or so. As others have noted, working on a game by yourself sucks motivation wise.
While some aspects of it are set in stone, there's plenty of stuff that's still up in the air, and even more that I'd be willing to change if someone came on board who was very passionate about something. If anyone would like to help get this project get off the ground, they can hit me up.
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To me, any political game - truly political game - needs to be built from the resources up. The essence of politics is "how do we divide a limited number of resources among people who a) all want more than we have and b) don't want to just murder people". Everything that you do in politics is really negotiating that resource division question, whether the resources in question are land and tons of grain, or sparkly magic powder, or the favor of the Crown (or other equivalent social intangible resources).
So, you have to have a) limited commodities that every faction needs, b) limited commodities that each (but not every) faction has a source for, c) mutually agreed upon procedures for negotiating for these resources that you don't have using the resources that you need, and d) a schedule of escalation that is reasonably well known, reasonably predictable, and which requires risk and cost to employ.
A are your resources in play. These can be solid, immutable things like land, they can be transferable things like money or trade goods or people, or they can be intangible but desirable like whatever proxies you want to use for respect or favor, or something like a 'vote' if you want a republic or corporate board setting.
B means that every faction (whether you're going for small-politics where every PC is a faction in and of themselves or something more traditionally L&L like houses or families or guilds) has SOMETHING to bring to the table that they can use to negotiate for the things that they need but don't have. Every faction needs to have power, but they shouldn't have the SAME power, and no faction should have all the things they need as a stable entity. Stability kills political pressure.
C is both your IC setting culture AND your procedural help files - ideally, there is a procedure up for 'how do I overthrow a leader I don't like' and 'how do I grab someone's land' and 'how do I create NPC pressure' BEFORE ANYONE ASKS, and that procedure is widely disseminated, universally available, and referred to regularly. Culture plays into it by setting boundaries for IC behavior which, again, should be aggressively referred to - if yours is an honor society, then define what 'honor' means for people of that setting, define where it comes into play, define how to get around it, define how to recover when you fail to get around it, and make it clear what you can (and can't) get as a reward for successfully navigating it.
And, finally, D is where you lay out the powers that each faction can bring to bear when things aren't going their way, ideally with levels of escalation and specific costs to use. What's worthy of a border raid (and how much does a border raid cost in soldiers/supplies/time), what's worthy of a trade embargo (and how is that likely to impact my own lands), what's worthy of a declaration of war (and how do we run a war anyway).
I think that without all four domains of this, any political game runs into a lot of problems, because people want to fall back on their own assumptions and, quite frankly, very few MU*ers know a thing about politics, state-level economics, or historical/historically inspired versions of either. The great thing about breaking it down like this, though, is that no one has to. You don't have to be realistic, you just have to be consistent and predictable.
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I think we are seeing that, as usual, genre X is interrupted differently by different people. To some a L & L game is political intrigue, GoT type while to others it's Lara Croft Tomb Raiding. Someone one should make a thread discussing how to make sure everyone is on the same page about what a game is about.
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@Pyrephox I think a good gauge of whether politics really work well on a MUSH is when you can't really answer the question "who won that negotiation" until later, down the line.
Sure, distributing your resources (influence, money, troops, etc) might sound reasonable done a certain way today. You can run it by your advisors, look at it OOC as well, and it all looks great on paper. If you do so, then if either due to brilliance by one of your adversaries or even coincidence and luck - which are perfectly valid causes for the best laid plans to fall apart even in real life -- this all backfires terribly in the future then that's fine. It's more than fine... it's great.
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@Pyrephox said in L&L Options?:
To me, any political game - truly political game - needs to be built from the resources up. The essence of politics is "how do we divide a limited number of resources among people who a) all want more than we have and b) don't want to just murder people".
Hey, we've known each other a long time.
How many times have I said exactly this and in how many ways?
I have labored extensively to create these systems. They take time. If people are patient, this can be a reality.
But few have the patience, and we are left with the Same Old Vampire Sphere over and over.
@Arkandel, @SunnyJ, and I had something going. I know we had a website somewhere.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@Ganymede You know what's funny though? A lot of us have said this exact thing, and yet it's yet to be done. At some point the-collective-we need to put our money where our mouths are.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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I wouldn't mind helping build systems and setting for a game. I'm too much of a flake to run one, but I like writing and testing systems, especially these sorts of systems.
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stares at her last post
Again, aaaannnyyyone who wants to actually do something can contact me.
(No, this offer does not include people who just want to put in two cents, but don't want to do work of STing/coding/building wiki/etc.)
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@Arkandel said in L&L Options?:
@Ganymede You know what's funny though? A lot of us have said this exact thing, and yet it's yet to be done. At some point the-collective-we need to put our money where our mouths are.
Yeah, you know what really prevents this? Players who say that they want it, and want things to be limited, and then get ten levels of shitty when they don't have complete and total access to everything they want exactly when they think they should get it.
These systems have been tried. For all that a handful of people say that they want things to be limited and scarce and whatever, more (and a few of that exact same handful) will whine never-endingly if you actually try to put any sort of gates in their way.
These systems don't exist not because nobody's bothered to make them, but because people have bothered to make them and found them not worth the effort when the backlash came back.
Racism isn't Tinkerbell. It doesn't need you to believe in it for it to exist.
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@Derp said in L&L Options?:
These systems don't exist not because nobody's bothered to make them, but because people have bothered to make them and found them not worth the effort when the backlash came back.
That's not at all true. I made and used a system way back on Gilded Promises / Due Rewards. We also did the same for a short period on Denver by Night. They used a system on Requiem for Kingsmouth as well. I maintain that it's not the backlash, but the time needed to create a political economy that fits the system.
As an example, the World of Darkness wasn't made for this level of crunchiness, so you have to adapt the game accordingly. For the Dark Ages game I was working on with Arkandel and SunnyJ, SunnyJ had taken part of Damnation City and adapted it whilst I worked on creating a set of bloodlines that fit the location (Livonia) and the timeframe. (Admittedly, we were really ambitious and started to delve into bloodlines for the Julii and Pijavica, but I digress.)
As another example, FS3 was also not made for this level of crunchiness. In developing a Mass Effect system, my progress essentially ground to a halt when I started to think about how to create a system that'd both the universe and the system. Add to that my ambition to have Advantages make a difference in Action Skills, and that system was tabled.
After I'm done slap-dashing bloodlines for RDC's game, I am probably going to work on something for City of Shadows. More than happy to collaborate with Lisse24 or whomever, but much will depend on future discussions with Taika on how deep she wants to go. And by 'deep' I mean 'getting a coder on board that is willing to create new systems or revise existing systems to automate as much as possible'.
But, no, I disagree, mostly because you know that I don't give a shit about the whining. People will play the game or they won't, and if you make the game simple and easy enough to understand and use players will overlook minor problems.
@Arkandel said in L&L Options?:
You know what's funny though? A lot of us have said this exact thing, and yet it's yet to be done. At some point the-collective-we need to put our money where our mouths are.
You know what's funny? Patience. A lot of people demand it, but few actually have it.
If we all agree that this is something we need, it makes absolutely no sense for people to open up new games without it. I know people have been working on one system or another but, at least as was the case of Fallcoast, game developers simply don't wait.
And, surprise surprise, games go up, games go down, and we all still agree that something was missing.
