@Lisse24 said in Make a Game with Me!:
As mentioned, I have some systems in mind that would really benefit from having someone work with me on them. However, the TLDR; is that I think you reward what you want to see, and so XP is tied to healthy conflict to some extent and especially to 'losing.' I think the more a character 'loses,' the more XP they should get. Ideally, this should serve the dual purpose of keeping dinosaurs from ruling the game and encouraging loss as positive thing. Although, of course, game atmosphere and proactive staffing is equally important in this area.
I like this idea a lot, although it might a bit tricky to pull off. One thing to support it that I might suggest is to consider reframing it from 'winning' and 'losing' to opening a different set of opportunities. Political battles are at their best when parties are open to maneuver and come at issues from different angles. One of the ways that L&L games tend to falter is that opportunity only really goes up with social status. So the higher your status, the more opportunities you have - a high level noble can FUNCTIONALLY slum it in the poorest parts of the city as well as attend the finest parties in the city, and suffer no repercussions, while a commoner can only do one of those thing (and maybe not even that, if the local dives are filled with nobles throwing around money and influence).
So, perhaps, conceptualize instead of an objective social status, sliding scales of reputation/influence with different groups that are mutually exclusive - If you suffer a major setback/scandal with one group, you lose reputation with that group, but may gain it with another opposing group (who now sees an opportunity to take advantage of a disgruntled member of another faction). So, the commoner who "makes good" and becomes popular in high society loses a lot of his connections with the slums, because he's "better than he ought to be", but the noble who is disgraced in a scandal might lose standing with high society, but the local Hellfire Club thinks she might make a fine recruit.
Now, this could get rather complex, true, depending on how many factions you have, and you have to make sure that the factions are well-balanced in the things they can do (they don't need to be able to do THE SAME THINGS, but the things they do need to be equally fun and useful - Nobles Who Can Do Everything and Hunted Petty Criminals are not balanced factions, for example, but a powerful trading consortium and a powerful smuggling network MIGHT be).
Edit: I'm also going to make a tremendously unpopular suggestion regarding character advancement - if you want a fairly 'realistic' (as in not epic heroism) setting and play, then advancement regarding the characters /inherent attributes/ should be incredibly slow, and likely capped fairly low. Political play is best facilitated, IMO, by spending a lot more time tracking and playing with changing RESOURCES, not static attributes. If you want a truly political mindset, then you need to think of characters in terms of what they have access to, and what that access allows them to do, rather than a stat-block. Also, you need to decide what kind of access is MOST important. For example, a political intrigue game is probably going to prioritize access to information most of all, which means creating, discovering, and tracking secrets is going to need system support, as are things like blackmail and bribery (and they're going to need TEETH). On the other hand, a land-and-trade political game is going to be hugely concerned with finances and trade resources, and so you're going to spend the bulk of your system resources tracking things like production of goods, market prices, trade routes, etc.