@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.

I am curious how people define Lord’s & Ladies games.

For me, a critical aspect of a L&L game is the pageantry and the scale, which ties into the pageantry. You could have intrigue and politics in a game about a few tribes living on an island or something, but the conflicts will be small scale (we don’t have enough food for our dozens of tribe members for the coming winter season, so we must go raid the tribe next door). The same can be said of a game that focuses on gangs in a city. Sure you have the conflict, politicking, and intrigue, but you don’t have the balls, the dresses, and the, dare I say, romance, both in the passion meaning and the nostalgic romanticism meaning.

I just want there to be actual politicking and intrigue. The set dressing, while enjoyable, becomes just meaningless decoration otherwise and the game stops holding my interest. Then again, I would also be down to play a bunch of tribes on an island fighting each other over the best hunting grounds. I just don’t think many others would be.

I see another possible design that might work with a one player to each character structure. All of the high-level characters are NPCs but are very active. The players play the lieutenants, sub-lieutenants, drones, etc. Every month or two months, they would get orders from on high to try to accomplish. Depending on how well they do, they get rewarded with better titles, trusted with more responsibility, and publicly acclaimed. A mission might be “Priority one for this month is to obtain 20 units of iron. Of secondary importance is 50 tons of timber. You MUST NOT trade away more than 30 tons of our coal. Our preferred trading partners for this deal would be the Lilliputians and the Lannisters. You MUST NOT do business with the Minbari.” Then leave it up to them to get that done however they can. Then everyone is wheeling and dealing, moving armies and navies around, promising future favors, etc. However. No faction is going to collapse from a player “losing,” because the characters with the ability to cause a faction to completely go down the toilet is controlled by staff, and they can take actions to right a sinking ship before its totally sunk.

@Faraday The original RPG, D&D, was built around players having a stable of characters, not the one character per player paradigm that developed as teens and college kids who had no background in the wargaming culture D&D came out of took up the game. Ars Magica has troupe style play. Collaborative storytelling forums/games on the internet are a thing with probably an equal sized playerbase to the MU* playerbase. Storytelling games are growing in popularity and we are starting to see them overlap with traditional RPGs. Sure, there will be people who decide such a game isn’t for them, but let’s not pretend that the idea is some left-field ramblings of a crazy man. This has been done and was being done longer than one character per player, and the solutions to any issues should be out there already ironed out in the particular spheres mentioned.

You also risk wildly inconsistent characterization, plot holes, dropped threads, and conflicts as multiple players try to steer a character in different directions from one day to the next. I think it would also be harder to make meaningful connections with other players, since you don’t have shared character bonds to latch onto.

It would definitely work better with a smaller group of players on the server, say 10 to 30, not an Arx-sized 100+. Scene logs would be required for any actions to be considered “canon.” If it isn’t in a log on the website/wiki, it didn’t happen. That way everyone knows which characters have done what.

Another option and one that might work for a larger server, is to allow players to have a character or two that only they can play and make these characters the big players in the setting. If it were a fantasy game, I would compare them to the demiurges from KSBD or the patrons from 13th age, nearly-immortal god-queens/kings and their lieutenants or something like that. That way the setbacks in the “Great Game”, while costing hundreds of “lesser” lives are again just setbacks to them rarher than complete ruination. Then make all the sub-lieutenants and drones be playable by anyone. This would be comparable to Ars Magic with players having one magus and custodes and the gross being shared.

Otherwise, I feel like you’re limited to cooperative settings, which somewhat limits the scope of the setting. For instance, Arx’s cooperative nature felt off considering how big and varying the cultures were. The lack of infighting felt off.

On the other hand in the John Company board game, what the houses are vying for is who has the most pensioners in their family living in nice retirement estates. Losing isn’t so much your family being eradicated as it is living in an estate that’s only 200 acres compared to your rivals who got an estate that’s 500 acres. The real loser in that game is India and its people as it gets raped and pillaged by the colonialism (unless the game ends by the company going bankrupt or India driving out the colonizers, resulting in all of the players losing). In Republic of Rome, one of the players is going to end up as Dictator, but that doesn’t mean the losers got culled from society. The only way that happens is if everyone loses because Rome falls to the Carthiginians or the Gauls or the Germans…

So perhaps a server could keep the one or two characters per player structure but the fighting is more over “The Senate gave my family three magistrate positions this term and yours only got two” style stuff. Still the server needs to play that stuff up more, because on most servers it just feels like increasing random numbers that don’t actually mean anything. Firan did a somewhat decent job of that but only somewhat, and it had plenty of other problems.

By all means, if you think a game like that would be fun you should run it.

When I win the lotto, making me indepently wealthy and therefore having the time to dedicate to such a project, I’ll get right on it.

@Raistlin said in Games we want, but will almost certainly never have:

1: Players who are willing to have characters that “lose” in these political games and who’ll accept consequences. It should still lead to engaging and imaginative RP but, in my experience, most people just want to “win” and don’t like being on the other side.

I have a solution to that, but it always gets waved away - any character can be played by any player. When you log on, there’s a list of characters available, and you select who you want to play that day. Then there’s less connection between one player to one character, and any given character “losing” isn’t going to be devastating to that player.

A L&L game with actual politics, maybe incorporating ideas from board games like Republic of Rome or John Company, instead of just being Bridgerton, i.e. worrying about who’s the best dressed, worrying about who’s fucking whom, and gossiping about both. I mean that stuff is fine and part snd parcel, but how about some underlying politics driving all of the standard courtly antics.