@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 think the biggest opportunity here is developing a system with interesting consequences. Yeah, there’ll always be players who only want to win no matter what, you can’t work around that other than identifying and getting rid of people who simply won’t play the game where it’s at. But one of the big reasons IMO that so many players have issues with this in games with any sort of competition or PVP (not talking about PK level PVP, just social reputation PVP here) is because the consequences suck to play. I think if someone wants to do a good L&L or Regency style of game, the number one focus they should have should be “how to make opportunities for consequences that are interesting and allow for a healthy cycle of winners and losers.” If you lose rep with the upper class, make opportunities to earn rep with shadier factions, that sort of thing.
It’s easy to say that players don’t like dealing with consequences, but often I think the issue that comes up on games is that consequences too often end up as All Or Nothing situations. Or players don’t have a good sense of what they can do to enact consequences on others, and without a variety of mild to medium severity consequences, people tend to only think of the biggest consequences that tend to be much more character-ending.
