Space Lords and Ladies
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I feel like the term originated on WORA a couple years ago as a catch-all for these kinds of games and now people just kinda use it. Like PHB.
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@Three-Eyed-Crow
... ok I don't know what PHB is supposed to be, either.So it seems to me like Lords and Ladies games are the games of succession and marriage and nobility and gentry, etc, but without other systems to give life to the world for those not involved in finding an attractive noble and putting them ass over teakettle?
Or do we use the term to apply to those more rounded games if there's an element of that? Because like, GOT to me is not all about marriages and sex and babies. It's a strong theme, but there's a lot more going on.
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@Kanye-Qwest said:
@Three-Eyed-Crow
... ok I don't know what PHB is supposed to be, either.Psycho-Hose Beast. Which is from the movie Wayne's World, though I also first read it on WORA (or one of the even older WORA-like boadrs) to refer to a particular type of terrible staffer.
I rarely stop to think about how random the MU* lexicon is. I think the WORA Wiki had a quasi-dictionary at one point, but it's lost to the mists of time.
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@Kanye-Qwest Long and short? If it has Lords/ladies/nobility/succession/marriage games...be it sci-fi or fantasy...its considered by slang to be a Lords and Ladies game. It doesn't matter if it's hardcore realistic, lots of TS, magic, dragons, or mechabeasts, if the baseline tropes are Lords, Ladies, Houses, Noble succession, it is a Lords and Ladies game.
A Dune game would be Lords and Ladies just as much as a GoT game, regardless of how serious or whimsical the rp is.
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Does succession ever really figure in? That would take an accelerated timeline I would think.
I have a waggish sense of humor.
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@Misadventure said:
Does succession ever really figure in? That would take an accelerated timeline I would think.
From what I've seen, most such games start at the cusp of a generational shift, with the older power players (often NPCs) likely only having a few years left at most. This allowing the folks that rush in at launch (or are buddies with the staffers) to app all the young and attractive heirs and their prospective mates before they inherit all that wealth and power.
So basically on most 1:1 timescale games succession is relevant....about once for each organization unless the game runs a long time or other circumstances cause IC turnover.
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On a silver platter?
adds that to his design notes
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I think saying it has to specifically be about succession, marriage, war, or anything else isn't really accurate. Its a category as broad as any (like 'Superhero game'). Really, I imagine all you need are nobles doing noble stuff. Firan, Crossroads, all of the GoT games, Star Crusade, 5th World, Eternal Crusade/Creation's Edge, Realms Adventurous, etc (probably to the annoyance of the guy running it), etc. Probably many more.
How much it turns into 100% marriage simulator/who is rogering the duchess is usually a measure of how successful the game staff is at promoting anything else. If staff is lazy and has little to no vision and relies entirely on vague definitions of setting and PrP, it's what you'll get. If they do stuff, you'll get that stuff. But this is the same as WoD games, which reduce to relationship drama in the absence of other shit, too.
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Place prestige bounties on rogering the Duchess.
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Elective monarchy. Heredity and good breeding matters, but if you can't get along with your peers, you either have to be with enough guns and money to take control or you are not going to get elected. The overall system I envision is less feudal and more of an aristocratic environment that is halfway in-between a feudal state and a democratic republic.
Encourage assassinations.
Discourage marriages. Love marriages are frowned upon and unlikely to produce children other than those with severe birth defects due to some sort of planetary/biological agent. Children need to be engineered and your marriage is going to be chosen for you. You may be paired off with Ugly McGee because he may be homely and a dwarf but he has super genius genes that your parents want your offspring to have because you tend to drool on the table and can't multiply past the 6s.
Encourage assassinations.
Flatten decision making but make the important positions matter. Remember Star Crusade and the Curia? What was the whole point of an executive council of Counts if at the end of the day, they will be constantly overridden by the remainder? All players can elect a councilor to the council per family but they themselves have limited ability to make decisions other than a large scale referendum that should rarely work because of family rival interests. Councilors make the decisions and vote to have someone be the executive head of the council. Day to day decisions are devolved amongst the various factions and they operate differently with different rules. This gives players a sense of stake that isn't by luck of who you chargened in.
Encourage assassinations.
Organic game balancing. One of the issues that I keep seeing is that staff, because of theme, want to preserve game balances at the detriment to normal development. Sometimes a family is going to die off. Sometimes a faction is just built wrong and no one wants to play. Don't encourage people to try and join a dying faction. Let them march into that one faction that everyone is playing in. Know what happens when that happens? They start fighting within and the faction breaks apart into multiple factions.
Did I mention, encourage assassinations? Encourage a messy, bloody environment where life is brutally short for those who aspire high. The lowest grass doesn't get mowed first. The more distant they are to the political center, the more likely they're not going to have a bulls eye on their back and they can spend their money dating or killing monsters.
I dunno. Honestly, I'm with the understanding that most MU*s are going to collapse and implode some time in their life span. Why not just let the whole damn thing accelerate to chaos, have some fun, and then reboot? Many games just limp along too long for their own good anyway.
Kill Kill Kill.
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@Apollonius said:
Elective monarchy.
I love it. A good excuse for the next leader-person jumping over someone who is more senior if that next leader-person is more active/well-liked ICly/skilled at playing the game.
Discourage marriages.
LnL players aren't going to go for this. If you want to discourage love-matches, don't advertise as a LnL game, because it will drive players batty. Don't get me wrong, I think that the loveless odd-couple match that turns into mutual respect (or mutual IC hatred) can be quite interesting. But if there's not an outlet for love-matches, you're going to drive many of your players crazy.
Organic game balancing. ... Let them march into that one faction that everyone is playing in. Know what happens when that happens? They start fighting within and the faction breaks apart into multiple factions.
If you can manage this... awesome. Especially the part about splitting a single faction into multiple factions. But be wary, there are a lot of carebear players out there who don't want to ever do anything (in public) that would even slightly annoy another player, and they tend to band together to play WhiteHat whenever someone stirs up factionalism/antagonism/villainy.
Did I mention, encourage assassinations?
The modern generation of MU*ers are extremely character-death-averse. They want to build the story that they want to build, and they don't want it to end until they're ready for it to end (ie, when they've "won"). There are outliers, and they are awesome. Encourage them, give them XP for their next characters when they are WhiteHatted to death, and keep encouraging them. But don't be surprised if either 1) barely anyone dies, or 2) people start leaving (or hiding in private rooms doing private RP) when characters start dying.
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My gaming philosophy has always been one of letting players suffer through their decisions. If it is game ending, all you need to do is reboot it. World ends? Play in a post-apocalyptic setting. Staff should obviously manage the parameters of the game and rules, but let the players just hash it out. This requires some power balancing because most XP is driven up and dinosaurs exist. Give them reason to leave their dinosaurs. Or one option is to give plenty of warning that their PC will be subject to NPCization by staff if they achieve a position high enough or they can go quietly into the night. A mature player may be allowed to continue playing their PC-as-NPC but their growth and evolution is over and they are now a tapestry of the game. Literally a win condition.
The way I would formulate this is as follows: the game is played on one part of the total game universe, whether it is a single city, region, or planet. While there may be governors and councils and people that have day-to-day rulership, the aspiration isn't to stay on the planet but to get the fuck off it to the capital. If a PC is built to specifically want to rule on the planet, they should be aware that people and culture will think that they're insane, stupid, or both and will not be entrusted with the authority they seek. The end game for a PC should be to be a permanent part of the game tapestry but no longer actively involved.
It's kind of perverse and I know that entrenchment is very real. I know this because I play the entrenchment game all the time although I've been a lot better at it. Some may disagree. If I am the elected executor-general of the local council of nobles, this is my platform to being something bigger off screen. Hell, reroll with half the XP you gained as a son or a daughter or a sibling if you want continuity of story. Your old PC may not be able to give material benefits but you're not going to log into the very bottom of the totem pole. Which shouldn't matter anyway because the totem pole should be shallow.
The no-marriage thing is to block the propensity of Lord and Lady games to devolve into a very badly managed breeding program. I'd set up a randomized code that will result in a love pairing to either be politically exposed (resulting in lost benefits in terms of family resources) or otherwise put in such a disadvantage that their ability to 'succeed' in the political game is outright out. Now, maybe you just want to be a pretty princess who lives in (relative) squalor, is looked down upon by most of their peers, and in a hot romance with a knight against all odds. You know what? Go for it. People need to be soldiers and outcasts. Most aristocrats and privileged class by birth in the late 1800s and early 1900s in Europe and Asia were destitute second and third sons. But that love romance is not going to get you political benefits and favors... unless you have like a 10 inch penis and abs and the 60-year old duchess is needing some loving.
I think the general push is to have semi-disposable PCs. Part of the entrenchment game is the loss of XP and having to start over. How about a 1:1 carry over for a dead PC who died as a part of a plot or PK? They may need to rebuild social connections but they can start where they were before.
How do we keep dinosaurs from massing XP? Have an XP cap and the function of XP being both time (ex. 3 XP a week) + Activity (ex Up to 5 XP a week). This rewards activity but allows for the occasional player to keep up. Make XP readily easily convertible and less focus on buying attributes (which are permanent for a PC) and more of a focus on buying things with XP, like a new ship or a new bodyguard.
I'm throwing all sorts of game ideas right now. Not all of them will be good ideas. Some are theoretical ideas. But I'll be happy to know if something I propose is adopted and makes a game better.
Also, no staff power alts. Staff alts should primarily be NPC quest givers and maybe auxiliary roles with no political aspirations. See loveless marriages or no power gains by TS. Staff should promulgate rules that are independent of staff caprice and are handed out fairly and consistently. Staff can play and TS and do whatever they please, but give the players full power to destroy themselves.
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@Apollonius said:
Elective monarchy
Yeah, I definitely agree. Deals with MU problems of people who stop playing nicely as well.
Also has the advantage of more or less being how things worked for most of history. We romanticize a shit out of primogeniture (I assume because it goes along with our masturbatory princess fantasies), but even places that had it often ended up forcing one brother out in favor of another often enough (legally or otherwise) that it was effectively this.
Flatten decision making
I actually had this discussion with someone just the other night, referencing both the Firan CC and the SC Curia. While both had other problems, I think its important to make your politics clear and obvious in this way so that people can actually grasp them. Games where people are just supposed to 'uh plot and stuff' basically fizzle into people doing nothing and GM fiat.
Encourage assassinations. x 4?
This is where you lose me. I'm not shocked that this is coming from you (and I don't mean that in a bad way, either, just... you know!), but I've always seen this kind of thing as being very hard to do in a MU.
Sure, if a PC can actually go out (or get someone to go out) and kill another PC via whatever rules, that's great. But once you're into 'oh roll X dice and then he drinks the poison wine and dies' you're going to have problems. The system will either make it way too hard (and no one will risk it) or too easy (and it will be the far and away dominant strategy/stat build, ie telenukes in WoD) and regardless you'll have several players quit every time it happens.
I mean I don't disagree in a vague principle but this is something MUs have basically never pulled off in decades of being a thing.
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@bored re assassinations. To be honest, this is one of my grand theoreticals in a game I would theoretically run. It is also where I got a lot of opposition in a game that I did run and also where my grand idea of a perpetual TT rather than a static perpetual world came in (where player would be mature enough to give up their PCs for the overall narrative being built).
One idea I had was to build in social rules against certain things IC and create incentives for certain behavior with the hopes of encouraging decisions. Vague, I know. Some ideas:
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IC disapproval of assassinations and murder based on telenukes or prevent telenuke scenarios entirely. Conversely, if telenukes do exist, create a cold war mentality where one telenuke can potentially result in a series of related and unrelated telenukes.
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Encourage assassinations and PK based on defendable positions. Combat heavy society that allows for trials by combat where the loser typically dies. Give an XP incentive to all involved but give a higher XP incentive to those that get killed in the process.
I can foresee things getting toxic if either of the above are not handled in the most transparent manner. I expect players to be both mature about PK as well as being mature about IC consequences. I would personally keep a game small and tidy with like minded people rather than expand scope and have a more dynamic playerbase that is often OOCly at odds with each other philosophically. Again, a lot of these are my personal experiment ideas that may or may not ever come to fruition. I've been out of the MU* ecosystem other than Shangrila for months now for all the reasons why Lord and Ladies exist as a trope. My last game was Kushiel's Debut where an effort to do some paradigm busting politically was met with such stiff opposition that I was stuck in a position where I had effectively 'won' as much as I could in that position and there was no where else for my PC to go. So instead of trying to change things or get upset, I vacated out of the position. Sometimes things just don't happen.
I am still bitter about 5th World because I had an amazing PC out there and the very IC mindset of the PC was more or less a banned concept (high technology mad scientist with an interest in outright destroying the planet where a major existential threat to humanity existed). Like, it wasn't even something I could talk about because it was inconceivable as a topic for any PC because the game was predicated on fighting the enemy with sharp pointy sticks and that was the only way.
I tend to subscribe to the runaway freight train model of staffing. Let things run off the cliff. No game is so sacrosanct that player decisions are trumped by staff fiat. My PC was pushing for the development of nuclear weapons and planet destroyers (both which were somehow banned technologies... against a foe that EXISTED TO MURDER YOUR SPECIES' ENTIRE EXISTENCE with no real reason why IC such weapons were not allowed against such an existential foe). Granted, he was going to then use those weapons to plant in each of the major cities and threaten the monarchy to abdicate in favor of one of his House's members and threaten to detonate one each hour until his demands were met. But who's counting? It never got that far outside of a single scene on that topic that got funny looks. He was modeled after Kefka @ Final Fantasy 6. If you know the reference, you're awesome. Along with the theme song.
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@Apollonius
Sounds legit. I would have played with that. -
@Bobotron https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0s8n3lvsFQ
http://theywillreturn.wikidot.com/cid I think his musical selection explains it all.
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I think the toughest part of changing the nature of Lords and Ladies games would be that for the most part to population of those games has refined the play to the way they want it and most of the folks who would desire something other from the games have given up on the genre.
For example I would love to play third or later no inheritance coming ever, son of a noble and go out and have adventures. The things is the L+L games never really have much in the way of adventures so I have given up on the genre. No sense beating my head against that wall again.
The L+L game crowd has essentially three parts, smallest, those like me who want adventures, next the middle sized group who want the political/empire building game, and largest currently the marriage simulator folks.
I am not sure how you reverse the trend, though for the most part it is not really an issue since the change from marriage simulator to four ex game without graphics does nothing for me either. -
My goal at least is that the main in character aim of characters should be to impress larger Space Noble society, of which the game is only set in a small part, though it spans multiple worlds.
Social oomph is system based to some degree but while the easiest way to gain Prestige is to spend money, the most efficient is to do Awesome Shit and also obtain fantastical loot on amazing adventures. A lot of games like this have had this weird as fuck tendency to 1) Allow some characters to be TurboNobles who have literally hundreds of times the wealth/money/influence of others, plus entire armies of NPCs as competent as a PC and 2) Massively crack down on the ability to get cool stuff or money from looting people. Eternal Crusade was especially weird that way.
My view is that ruling a bunch of cities and having huge piles of income consistently is one thing, but if you raid the palace of the Space Elf Prince, kill a Space Elf Duke and steal a Space Elf Treasure Ship? You should absolutely be able (among the three PCs involved) steal four years worth of cash for a rich planet. Certainly not every day, also maybe five PCs started on this quest and two of them died, but rewards should potentially be huge and PCs who's 'Thing' is badassery should be the characters in setting who are the best at it.
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I think someone else hit the nail on the topic a while back (and apologies to that person, I'm too lazy to scroll up to quote). Marriage simulators are in a lot of ways a function of nothing else better to do. It is, of the three: adventuring, politcking, marrying, the safest and socially most cost effective means of generating RP. It's why soap operas and telenovelas exist in the world and people used to stare at them endlessly until we got stupid drama crap like the Kardashians and the Real House Wives of X town.
There's really no way around it. A game that focuses on adventuring needs to have a staff that is dedicated to being servant leaders for players' fun but also have fun in telling stories and building a narrative with players. It requires a huge amount of time and resources and it also requires at least a bare majority of the staff to be reasonably sane so crazy people like myself or P or whomever don't drive the game into the ground before its time.
At the end of the day, I can whip up a game based on Fading Suns around Leminkainen or Gwennyth (Paltrow not withstanding) where the focus is on raids against Vuldrok raiders and petty Viking-style politicking with big Blots and drunken brawls that lead to death... in space. It's an environment where being a pretty pretty princess is actually a detriment and where being a TS whore is pretty much going to give you STDs, not give political favors. But I don't have time to run that shit even if I found a dedicated coder or out-of-box MU* kit to get things working. Marriage simulating is going to be between a bunch of rednecks or crazy knights or possibly crazy Vikings where the life expectancy is short and brutish. It'd be run TT style where your PC may not be standing at the end of the day but you will get compensation to jump back into the game if something happens. Your PC's actions will be logged in the game narrative and at the end of the day, most of the PCs will have some sort of effect on the overall metaplot, giving a sense of buy-in to the process where we are all storytellers rather than mere players.
I'm hijacking Packrat's thread because I know he wants a more stable political game but at the end of the day, I feel like any and all Lord and Ladies game will fight the trend of becoming a marriage simulator. It is staff's vision and drive to keep those forces away. Or blow up said weddings.
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Well I am not exactly posting here a whole lot, the joys of dealing with intra family drama over Easter and being confined to a laptop.
