Most of the people I game with know that I’ve long wanted to
run a Strategic Game where each player runs their own nation. Something like
Risk, but with more granularity. The guys who ran Battletech released one a few
years ago that (surprise) wasn’t well play tested, was missing some rules,
contradicted itself in parts, and (of course) required a 5th dimensional spreadsheet
to play. None the less, my appetite was thoroughly whetted by this disaster of a
game.
Why? Masochism.
Ultimately, I want context
to the games I play. Sure, you can play Magic and reduce someone’s “life” to 0
and say you’ve “won,” but what have
you won? What’s been accomplished? I want to fight for graduated levels of victory
in different conditions, taking games outside of their inherently narrow
context.
XKCD strip courtesy of XKCD.
It’s made more difficult because most games are number and
resource management with a thin metaphor of non-game objects draped over it. In
Monopoly, you pay money to put a house on a piece of property. You aren’t doing
that of course; you’re exchanging in-game, money-like resources for an in-game
resource that changes how players interact with a space on the board. The items
represented are often finite, while most games can mathematically produce
infinite quantities, stretching an already thin metaphor.
10,000 Exarch’s please, oh and one Diet Exarch. I’m trying to watch my Cleric
intake.
The story should come before rules; this strategic game is
also a roleplaying game.
I’ve tried running an internet-based nation-running
roleplaying game set in the Battletech universe before. It was a while back,
before I was old and jaded. I was young and optimistic. 2008 was a better time.
Too much?
Roleplaying games are great because they have a certain
level of flexibility that forestalls the occasional transmutation into a
retarded numbers game (Exalted’s Great Cleave[1]).
But roleplaying games do have numbers. They have stats and
probabilities and runs of both good and bad luck. I don’t necessarily believe
in numbers in roleplaying games, besides giving players ideas for what kind of
character they’re playing and how they want to play it. Lucio Pavlec’s low
Wisdom score and area attacks are what helped make him less of a generic mage,
and more of a selfish, shortsighted jerk who wasn’t all that concerned about
the safety of his teammates. “I can play my wizard like a jackass?!” was a
great thought, and one that followed directly from his game stats.
Making this game seems to drift somewhere between quixotic (to
think that one could satisfactorily simulate running a nation with few to no
game stats) and egotistical (to think that I, of all people, could handle
running the non-systemic requirements to my players’ satisfaction). Is it a
bridge too far?
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