GENERAL QUESTION:
People, how do you feel about the basic mechanics of hyperspace and shoals? They seemed to work in SDNW4, because they gave us decent travel times from place to place (especially if we want the game to run at any meaningful level of time compression), while also letting us create regions that were inhospitable and gave us interesting places with a bit of 'terrain' to have frontier stories (Wild Space/Badlands/Outback/H-12/etc.)
I propose keeping the SDNW4 travel rules broadly unchanged as guidelines. The basic concept is one day per sector trip times on average, maybe faster for Extremely Fast Ships or ships that are using specially charted navigation routes. Then there are shoal spaces which are difficult to get into, slow going when you do get there, hard on ships, et cetera.
Re: Demi
Yes, Demi, the answer is "whatever the hell you want." Be advised that playing something hyper-serious and hyper-powerful is ill advised and arguably impossible under the rules. The Star Wars Empire and Star Trek Borg are the biggest, meanest things in their respective settings. No one country in SDNW4/5 is coming anywhere
close to being that dominant and powerful over the overall setting. So make sure any concept you want to implement can be adapted to a setting where it isn't the biggest player on the block- and isn't necessarily even the biggest player on
its own personal block.
Also, try to avoid any concept that relies on control of Earth. That would otherwise become something of a prize to be disputed among a few dozen players, IMO.
Siege wrote:Perhaps it's good not to call them 'rules' then. I know this might seem an inconsequential thing but calling them such does mean people tend to cling to the notion that these are The Rules and by god are people expected to stick by them. Whereas from my perspective they work better if you call them guidelines and allow players to interpret them loosely.
Hm. [thinks]
Do I
have any real rules that I can't just as well call guidelines?
One that comes to mind: points are points are points. 20 points of space triremes are still worth as much as 20 points of
Blitz-class.
Another: that
most players should have a roughly uniform process to work out how many points they've got. Because this
is SDN when all's said and done, and you do
not want anyone arguing that their spherical masses of iron are bigger than your spherical masses of iron, or have more gigatons.
Actual weapon yields per point of combat potential will remain [DATA REDACTED]. Ship sizes will remain on a wildly, no
proudly inconsistent framework, where a 60 point vessel may be anything from a heavy cruiser to a patrol minimicrosubthingamabob, and may be physically anywhere from a few hundred meters to the size of a small mountain range, and we just Do Not Care. Or don't need to.
Pretty much any other 'rule' I can construct could just as well come with the coda "unless you have a really cool reason, and talk to me first, OK?"
For example: "Do I have to have planets? Can't my nation just be a big floating collection of space habitats?" is a cool reason.
Which I guess would make it a guideline.
For example: nobody even knew what the score was on the Collectors, how many Monoliths they had, or how many worlds, and that made them work so much better in their intended role than they otherwise would have. And the Karlack Swarm would've been way better if Shady had played a teeming and threatening mass of unknowable gribblies without being constrained by a ruleset that, let's face it, caters pretty much exclusively to the bog-standard navy-army-planets setup of all utterly average mil sci-fi everywhere.
Point.
OK. New rule! [watches Siege shriek in horribel agony] Just kidding. Guideline!
Anyone who wants a secret order of battle, wants to keep the
real size of their military secret, or something genuinely zany and unconventional that can't be easily modeled by "generic" point structures, can do it as long as they can convince whoever's moderating this thing that they
should do it, for artistic reasons. It worked for PeZook.
Though I don't want this to be abused- there are many players here who, frankly, I'm just as glad
wouldn't have the power to trivially overrun their neighbors. In general, for myself, secret OOBs and zaniness that grants more power will be disproportionately handed over to people I know aren't in it for the power-grabbing. Some of us, even some of the good players, need a few checks and restraints on our behavior, I don't think anyone will deny that.
My own intent is for an openly published order of battle, because I for one have no interest in doing it any other way.
Siege, I must caution you that there
is a reason for the navy/army/planets setup. A lot of other players will want to play that way, including some good people; I want to make sure that in the event of inter-player conflict, no one has to struggle to think of a way to make the existence of their own armed forces
relevant to a conflict between players. If I represent my nation as having super-HOOAH space marines, I need some way to make them actually matter in a fight- so having enemies who go "LOL just bombard everything from orbit" is a no-no. If I represent my nation as having spacegoing warships IN SPAACE, then having enemies who go "LOL just mind-war you from the next star system over you should have thought of that before you decided you didn't have super-psychics" is unacceptable. And so on.
I do think the ruleset of #4 is easily the best we've had so far, and I don't think we need to ditch it completely, but at the same time I believe players ought to be free to run with a more exotic setup even if it doesn't fall wholly within the boundaries of the rules. This does require moderators to be more proactive in beating down CN-style munchkins, and players to be more open about what they are setting out to do (and cognizant of the non-competitive nature of the game), but in the end I suspect that more freedom to configure a polity just like the player wants will mean a more diverse, and thus better, game.
On it.
This is arguably true. There is, I must say, a counter-argument: the clubhouses can foster creativity as well as negativity.
Fair enough; it probably depends on what people set out to do in those clubhouses. If it's sharing ideas and working out fun stories that's dandy. If it's bitching to the in-group... Well, I've gone on at length about this. Just beware the echo-chamber effect.
I'll bear that in mind.
Off the top of my head:
-Balance of power should be multipolar, especially if the game has two dozen or more participants. Having some blocs is good, though, because the people playing a bloc can collaborate on stories about their friendship (you and Fin), while rivalry between blocs motivates stories about enmity (you and Shroom). But the blocs should not be too large, or they become un-coordinatable (the MEHstomp; Pendleton suffered from this but the effects were partly suppressed because it broke down into a few discrete stories and collaborations).
The blocs should define themselves organically.
The most important thing is that inter-bloc rivalries should always be played out in a friendly manner. It seems to me that alliances in these games occasionally have a tendency to develop bullying behavior that I suppose has its parallels in how big power blocs operate in the real world -- but this isn't the real world. It's a game. It should be fun for its players. If it isn't, then something has gone very wrong indeed.
Bullying behavior is at its worst in a bipolar setting- SDNW2 turned into this. That said, I'm hoping that the nature of the game and the relatively narrow gap between major PC states (less than 2:1 size disparity) will prevent anyone from being able to
casually threaten a PC state with destruction in the way necessary for bullying behavior to succeed. I'll keep an eye out.
In the past, especially in #2, there have been instances of players - including myself - feeling like big alliances were fucking with them just for the sake of fucking with them. A lack of communication between players was a major component in that situation and the lack of open communication meant that players got annoyed, things got heated, protection was sought, and what otherwise could have been a very interesting dynamic ended up game-defeating because everyone got locked up in one of two big alliances staring at each other over the barrels of their enormous nuclear arsenals.
If you want to avoid that sort of thing, and I think you do, then you need to get people talking about their actions and reactions in order to prevent players from getting the suspicion that they are being picked on.
True. Here, there is no equivalent of nuclear arsenals. I'll see what I can do about the open communication- but remember that I can't
force people to communicate, and that the OOC threads are a singularly poor vehicle in which to carry on a fully developed conversation.
Any advice you have would be appreciated.
Also, membership in one of these power blocs shouldn't be necessary. Players ought to be able to make their own way without being immediately stepped on by some big alliance out there. If they make their own bed then fair enough, but they ought to at least be able to make it first.
Totally agreed. Choice of location may impact this, mind you.
-Getting people to play villains is an ad hoc thing. It is advisable that 'villains' be played by intelligent, devious, and responsible players. Players who are stupid will get themselves into bad positions and look foolish, which causes ragequits. Players who are not devious will not see good ways to be antagonistic. Players who are irresponsible will cause the wrong kind of antagonism.
I certainly agree. I don't think we've had many good villains yet so I'm not entirely sure how to go about achieving this; it seems that villainy very often leads to people ganging up on the villain, be it Shepistan or Astaria or the MEH. I suppose that's what's begot by highly overt villainy, but it would be interesting to see if it's possible to conceive of a credible villain that isn't so easy to get rid of.
Yes. If you want to try your hand at it, go ahead.
One key, I think, is to make it such that the villains are not
overtly worse than anyone else. They're just relatively ambitious and well-armed, so that the neighbors eye them nervously and don't want to strip out their defenses against those neighbors. "Villain" is the wrong word, why don't we go with "
armed and agile nation?"
-Compensating for dropouts... that's a really tricky one. Brute force retcons only work up to a point. One thing I'm hoping to do is put unreliable players on the periphery, I've already talked about that. We might hand off control of a dropout to another nation, such as an 'antagonist' player who could use control of the nation effectively to create more Interesting Times.
That's probably the best way to do it. Appropriate the nations of non-active players and blow them up in an interesting manner so that their place can be taken by something that is contributing to the game instead of just sitting there. It's similar to what happened to Libertopia in #1, and it worked very well there.
Noted.
Agent Sorchus wrote:I think that instead of creating nations in a vacuum you really do need to decide your neighbors and how you all will work together to craft story.
Yes, indeed. Communication really is key to anything here. If players don't talk about their ideas then the game's backstory will become a jumbled mess, motivations will be misunderstood, different ideas of what constitutes fun and interesting will arise, and everything will just be made needlessly difficult.
Noted. This is one argument for a very long run-up to the game, with plenty of conversation in OOC about it. We may have to go through several iterations of the map to make it work.