Let's all be evil overlords!

[Academia Nut]

Well, since the last STGOD I was in imploded, I felt it was best to stay out for a while, and I have avoided both the revival of the space STGOD and SDN World, but the urge to get in on some sort of forum game is slowly driving me mad.

Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone else was interested in perhaps coming up with some sort of fantasy or possibly supervillian styled game where we all play the roles of evil overlords seeking to conquer the world in the face of the forces of good and each other. The basic ideas of most of the other STGODs could probably be adapted to this sort of thing, although probably with some necessary tweaking as this would be a more fantastic setting where individuals would have more power.

That said, I think the biggest idea I have right now to contribute towards this is to have the moderator(s) of this game take on two very important roles aside from the usual ones of moderation between players and controlling NPC actions. The first, and probably most important role would be for the moderator to take on the role of the Forces of Darkness or some such thing, whose role would be to encourage evil overlord like behaviour by providing incentives to act like a dick. Committing amusing acts of villiany will get you points with the FoD, who would also be susceptible to bribes. Ideally in fact it would even involve bribing the mod to agree with you on a ruling, although that is perhaps getting a bit too metagame. The other big idea would be to have the mod(s) have access to the Powers of Fate and just randomly drop things in the paths of our villians, everything from "A paladin walks up to your castle and challenges you to single combat" to "Bandits enter your lands" to "Someone left a half ton of cheese on your front doorstep, you're not quite sure why".

Actually, overall if there was enough interest three mods would be great. You could have one guy represent the Forces of Darkness, giving bonuses for being evil and being metagame easily bribed, one guy being impartial Fate, ruling either neutrally or just leaving it up to random chance, and one guy representing the side of Light to play as the good NPCs and possibly rule unfairly against those trying to be evil. It would definitely be an interesting set up to intentionally have the game moderators be clearly biased. Obviously if there isn't enough interest to support three mods the Fate duty could be split up.

So yeah, does this sound like the seed of a potentially fun and quirky fantasy STGOD and we should continue talking about it and how to run it, or should I go back to sitting in my corner writing weird fanfiction instead of playing weird games with other people.

[White Haven]

That's just bizarre enough to be intriguing, and 'yes, this mod hates you. The other one loves you. AND IT'S IN CHARACTER' would cut down on some of the typical whining. I'm interested.

[Pulp Hero]

I'm totally up for this. Just post a setting(time period, tech level, etc), and any villain creation rules and I'm set.

[Darth Raptor]

Oh hell yes.

[Invictus ChiKen]

I'm interested. Unlike most others on this board I have lots of experience working for evil organizations (Wal-Mart, Books-A-Million)

[Academia Nut]

Well, as for setting, I was thinking of your basic psuedo-medieval fantasy setting so we can get the full range of the various evil overlord archetypes: dark sorceror, vampire lord, barbarian warlord, lich king, demonologist, etc. The tech level would be rather more of a magic level and would be fairly high up, probably in the D&D scale, although obviously there would need to be some rules to make sure that you don't get people abusing magic (well... at least in ways not intended to be abused anyway). Definitely nothing like "I teleport my entire army into the middle of my archrival's fortress and wreck his shit".

As for villian creation rules, I think that if we modified some of the point based STGOD rules that have already been worked out we could have it so that everyone starts off with their overlord being an uber-unit that is fairly easily upgradeable, but once they lose that character its game over. We would also have to come up with some way to represent the various differing powers for the various archetypes, especially the undead kinds. The same system could also be used to build the rest of the characters.

The ability to upgrade characters would also make the random encounters more important as they could provide potential for "free" upgrades. So if say you get "A paladin comes up to your fortress and challenges you to single combat" your actions would affect how your character would grow. So if you go down there and kick his ass yourself, your combat stats would increase and you would probably also increase your ability to inspire fear and gain followers, but you're also risking your key character so it might not be worth it. Conversely, going to the ramparts, saying "No" and then having your crossbowmen cut him down would be a dickish, dishonourable thing to do, just the sort of action the Forces of Darkness appreciate.

Give me a bit to think up a a stat system that could be workable.

EDIT: Okay, how's this for a starting point for making our overlords? I really suck at this sort of thing.
Basic Stats:
Strength- A general measure of how good a character is at dishing out physical damage.
Health- How much damage a character can take before dying
Defence- Be it heavy armour or just being really nimble, how good a character is at avoiding being hit
Sagacity- A general measure of intellect. Used primarily for spellcasting and determining the limit of controlling unintelligent minions
Dread- A general measure of a character's ability to inspire fear and awe in others. Used for determining the number of intelligent minions that can be controlled and for intimidating less powerful foes

You would start off with say a some as yet to be agreed on number of points to make your character and you increase each stat with them. I'm still not sure whether or not increasing stats should be expensive (ie purchasing another point costs more than the previous one) or regular (ie it cost the same to go from 0 to 1 as it costs to go from 100 to 101).

Further suggestions would be appreciated.

[Tasoth]

While I probably won't play in this (yay university!), Dread shouldn't be a point buy stat. Burning Wheel/Empire has me on this kick where stats like that are built based on a series of yes or no answers that tie in with your character's background. You could do such things as 'Is character stat over X?', 'Has character been delivered a fatal, crippling blow and recovered to take vengeance?' and etc. Of course, in order to keep such a stat from becoming horrifically game breaking as it climbs, cap it at a certain exponent and explain it away as the point where your overlord is so menacingly evil that even his minions and the peasants rise up and tear him apart.(good backstory hook there too).

[Academia Nut]

Well, actually, I was thinking that perhaps you can only upgrade your characters if you would have conceivably earned experience for them, so you can't just pump stats up, but here's how I was thinking dread might work:

Most people do not have direct control over their entire army, but have to delegate the task to captains and lieutenants. Your dread ability represents your capacity to keep control over these necessary and powerful minions. If we could figure out a way to gauge level (or perhaps they in turn would have their own dread rating), we could have it somewhat like this:

Minion level >5 below dread = Completely loyal
Minion level 5 below dread = Entertaining treasonous thoughts (5% chance of revolt)
Minion level 4 below dread = Contemplating getting new deal (10% chance of revolt)
ML 3 below dread = Planning treason (25% chance of revolt)
ML 2 below dread = Ready for overthrow (50% chance of revolt)
ML 1 below dread = Starscream (80% chance of revolt)
ML equal to or greater = Open revolt

This would make managing your minions a big part of the game though, especially if we make dread a very fluid stat. So if say you are sitting around, one of the mods could say that you're getting a reputation for passivity, that's -1 dread, so now your lieutenants who were before loyal are now starting to think about maybe changing their relationship with you. Also, if you have a minion executed for incompetence/being too big for their britches, you have the potential to increase your dread and you get rid of a potential rebel, but you also lose an expensive unit.

Also, conversely if you get a really high dread rating the chance of the peasants deciding to try to overthrow you goes up, along with the additional prospect of some goody two shoes four man group of adventurers trying to lead an expedition into your fortress to put an end to your reign of terror.

How does that sound?

[Invictus ChiKen]

Sounds good. What about the option of going a David Xanatos route and rewarding your followers greatly for there service?

Perhaps there could be a stat that factors in with dread to show this or it could be a love/dread thing. Or just call it inspire (Dread/Loyalty).

[Zor]

Were you thinking of something along these lines?

Zor

[Darth Raptor]

There needs to be other ways of inspiring loyalty besides intimidation, even if that's the quickest, easiest and most cost-effective method. The precise nature of the overlord-minion dynamic will probably be different for everyone. It should be about trade-offs. "Rule through fear" is cheap, easy and effective for those who can back up their threats, but it's also dangerous in that minions are prone to desertion and outright treachery when the opportunity presents itself (say the tyrant is incapacitated, maybe the clerics decide to let nature take its course). Conversely, providing wages, full health and dental insurance and periodic morale-boosting, team building activities is ridiculously expensive and not all that evil, but minions who like you and like working for you (double plus if they're on board with your plans) are more reliable than personnel that are little more than frightened animals and constantly in "fight or flight" mode.

[Teebs]

This sounds like fun, but I've never done anything like it before. Is that a problem?

[Keevan_Colton]

You know what, we have a subforum for stgod related goodness...or evilness...so you can go plot in there.

[Darkevilme]

I think i might be interested. The space STGOD seems to have stalled so i certainly have some time for this.

Would a villain themed around steampunk/madsciencey stuff be appropriate?

So alchemically mutated children as shock troops, clock work horrors powered by blood or something for heavy infantry. Airships, big lumbering metal walkers, landships and weird unstable glowing technomagic artillery that fires lightning.

Artificer magic plus technology basically.

[Vehrec]

Vla! I am interested in your ideas. My Vampire Lord is here to suck your bluud, vhevah you ar ready.

I would follow on the Evil Genius model of having Minions and Henchmen-Henchmen are the special ones, while Minions are the little fools who don't even get nametags (Named Minions is an available option, but they cost one point more and you have to name at least one them whenever you use them.) While each Henchman is lovingly crafted, and has a life of his onw, Minions are mass-produced. For example:

Ghoul: 2 points durrability+2 points offense(teeth and claws)+2x points turning

or

Naga sorceress: 2 points durability+1 point offense (fangs)+5 points magical skill+1 point special ability (aquatic)+1 point Named Minion.

Or something like that.

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, the henchmen/minion split is definitely something that is needed. Minions are faceless masses, easily expended and disposed of, while your henchmen and trusted lieutenants should be carefully crafted and have a bit of their own minds so that you can execute them later if they get too uppity.

Basically, whatever system is used should have these traits:

1) Be easy to play on a forum
2) Allow for the creation of interesting overlords and henchmen while also allowing for simple minions
3) Give personality to the characters by having some sort of loyalty stat
4) Reward being evil while not having it descend into Chaotic Stupidity
5) Allow for various fantasy archetypes in the D&D vein

Can anyone think of any good ways to meet these goals? I'm fairly good at brainstorming general ideas, but when it comes to numbers I tend to degenerate into Excel mania and its not pretty. So if anyone thinks that they are more mechanically inclined towards that sort of thing, please speak up. Let's make this a brainstorming thread for the moment.

[Darkevilme]

Okay my musings will cover two subjects, the forces of good and what i'd want to be able to have if i was a villain in this.

1. The fact is a lot of villainy is going to be directed at said forces of good ((evil on evil lacks constrast)) to the extent i doubt there's anyone able to play that side as whole and keep up. So of course it'd probably have to be split between people and there's two ways i can think of to do that.
A. you allow people to outright choose Lord Smile of Happyvale as their character and nation. or
B. You allow the villain players to use a system similar to the mininations in the Space STGOD to control small parts of the forces of good such as elvish retreats, human townships and what have you...which has more potential to be abused perhaps but does at least allow people to not feel cheated out of evils inherent coolness.

2. This is gonna be a sort of vague wishlist of things my villain should have.

A pyramid of evil that goes.

1. Nefarious leader
2. henchmen/leightenants
3. Clockwork golems, loyal, powerful but limited in number and not possessing names and personalities like the henchmen.
4. Minions, most likely with halberds.

And a few toys.

1. Evil castle, probably not flying though.
2. Airships, unarmed but allowing say a henchmen, one or two golems and a mob of minions to go places quickly on errands of sinister intent.
3. Magical/technological field guns.

With the option to create later on in the course of the game

1. Alchemic mutant creatures by dipping children in vats, shock troops?
2. Big clockwork golem thing of doom

Additional thought.

How big a scale is this going to be? evil genius scale? 100-200 or so minions a villain? or something bigger, with thousands of minions and actual dark armies clashing with eachother and the forces of light in titanic battle?

[Academia Nut]

Okay, I think I've settled on how to generate the characters. We'll use a modification of the standard STGOD point buy system. 1 point gets you 1 attack point and 1 health point, but then there are specializations, etc. I think the specializations should go something like:

Ranged attack- 1 point invested lets you deal 2 points of damage in combat unless there are insufficient melee units to shield, in which case it counts for nothing. This lets you have archers and glass cannon wizards, but if you don't have some guys protecting them they'll get raped. Conversely, a force of all melee units against a balanced group will get smashed.

Immunity- 2 point invested allows you to ignore attacks that deal 1 point of damage. I was thinking of calling this stat just outright immunity, because that is the basic intent. Just the guys who can shrug off most lesser attacks. You could make a total juggernaut like this, the sort of guy who can crash through ranks of lesser minions, but he wouldn't do much damage. This is what the ranged stat is made for though, dealing with these guys (Note: this stat probably needs work)

Speed- lets you move faster on the strategic map. If we really want to, we could make it carry over to a tactical map, but that's probably unlikely. This would represent everything from swift horses to the ability to fly to teleportation (if we include rough or impassible terrain the latter two might need to be represented differently). This one will probably have to be capped somehow.

Transport- really only good when combined with speed, and should only represent big things like ships or dragons or such. Each point allows for 10 standard units to be carried.

There are probably some other stats that could be dreamed up, especially for things like undead or such where representing them right might be tricky (I would go for some sort of logistics reduction system there). However, here's where things take a turn: Size caps. Minions can be max 10 points. Characters however are a little different. For characters you have:

Leadership: 1 level of leadership costs 10 points and represents general fear, loyalty, charisma, or other such factors. Each level allows for the command of 50 points of minions or 1 character slot. 1 character slot allows you to command a character of 50 points or less. Characters commanded this way cannot have a point score that equals or exceeds their commander.

So let's say your evil overlord starts play with 150 points to make his character and 1500 points to make the army. If you invest all 150 directly points in your character... you're fucked, because he can't command dick all and you'll probably get steam rolled. But let's say you buy 10 levels of leadership for 100 points. You now have 50 points to spend on making your guy awesome, but you can now also buy ten 50-point henchmen, spending a third of your army budget. If you make each one of these guys directly 50 point monsters... you're still fucked, because two-thirds of your budget is wasted. But if you only make them 30 point characters and each buys two levels of leadership you can command 10*2*50=1000 points of minions, which is the rest of your army group. Obviously you could play around with these numbers a bit. For example you could buy five 100-point henchmen, and have each one of them get four levels of leadership. This would mean that your minions would be stronger than you in battle, but you are much better at convincing people to follow you.

Also, to make sure that people have a bit of wiggle room, another way to spend points would be magical (or superior or steam or whatever you want to call it) equipment. Magical equipment is basically just anything else in how it works, but it has to be attached to something, it can be captured in battle, and your equipment cannot increase a unit's total cost more than 50% its base cost.

For example, let's say that you've made your army and you note that you have (for argument's sake) 30 points left over but you don't have enough leadership to turn those points into commandable troops. So instead you turn it into magical gear. You could make 30 dinky [1 point] +1 swords and attach them to an elite unit of minions already at 10 points a piece (I realize that this also increases their health, but we'll just say it lets them parry better or something, or you could say that the gear is armour and weapons, whatever). You could make a bunch of [1 + 4 point immunity] armour for your lieutenants and make them harder to kill. Or you could make a [30 point ranged] crown of immolation. For your 1 character slot guys (ie 50 points), this crown is far too epic for them (max equipment bonus is 25 for a 50 point character) but a 2 slot guy (100 points) or your overlord (150 points) could use it.

Hmmm... I was going to post something on some of the other points raised, but I think I'll stop here and make another post so that this doesn't become too huge. It will also give people time to look over what I've posted and make comments and suggestions.

[Darkevilme]

Looks okay so far. Except for the character slot business, what if we want henchmen who are less than 50 points each? and assuming lightning cannons are equipment could i make it so its an object that needs X number of crew in order to get around the 1/2 rule?

[Academia Nut]

Yeah, something like that with the cannons would definitely work, as it would mostly just work out to the same thing mechanically. So if you want a 10 point lightning cannon, you need 20 points of crew to work it. The only thing that would be bad with that is that since the crew is distributed if you lose part of the crew you can't use the cannon, or at least you can't use it properly (maybe reduce the efficiency so if you say lose 10 points of crew you can only use 5 points of the cannon's power).

Theoretically you could have a character less than 50 points fill a slot, its just probably not worth it as much. The point there is more to keep people from having ridiculous numbers of henchmen, or to command one huge creature, but to still allow some flexibility. So if you say want a 100-point dragon to serve as your mount and bodyguard and a general fuck-off monster, you can spend two character slots there. I mean, your average human soldier is probably only worth 1 or 2 points, a 50 point character with everything in combat stats can pretty much slaughter the better part of an army single-handed. That said, changing it around so that say your lieutenants can only have say 50% of your point total could also work. Might need a general show of interest as to whether a fractional system or a slot system is preferred. I like the slot system, although if we allow your henchmen to get upgrades to their base stats that could cause problems as you would either have to upgrade them a full slot's worth or if you have a 51 point character you would need a whole extra slot. These are things to consider.

Now, onto the next bit I was thinking of: the good guys. Here's how I think the good and neutral factions should be run: they're all NPC's under the control of the "good" mod, however the good mod will have the option to farm out control over smaller groups to the players for individual battles and such. Here's the kicker, if we do it like this we add another layer of gameplay with a metagame element. If you play the NPCs well then the good mod would owe you a favour, ranging from saying that your faction finds a treasure chest or say a guarantee of a ruling in your favour later, or some such thing. But to add a twist as well, the "evil" mod can also offer you things or owe favours... or be owed favours.

For example, let's say that Alice, an evil overlord player, is attacking a small, neutral kingdom, and the good mod notices that Bob, another evil overlord player, has nothing to do at the moment so the offer is made for Bob to take control of the NPCs there. Not necessarily expected to win, but if Bob says, "All of these guys declare loyalty to Bob" the good mod will smack him down and remember that Bob is a bad player. But let's say Bob takes up the task and is playing well, stalling Alice's efforts, and he can't be subverted directly. But Alice is owed a favour from the evil mod, and calls it in. The evil mod could offer to loan some of his endless armies of demons, or he could approach Bob and say, "If you throw the fight, I'll owe you one". So now Bob has some choices. He could keep doing what he's doing and stay in the good mod's graces but earn the annoyance of the bad mod, he could throw the fight blatantly and piss off the good mod but earn the favour of the evil one, or he could be a sneaky bastard and throw the fight without making it look like he threw the fight so he has both mods owing him a favour. Then, if both owe him a favour, he could say use some metagame knowledge to launch a surprise attack on Alice, whose forces are elsewhere. When the mods try to call him to task he can say, "You owe me a favour" to each of them and be guaranteed a majority ruling. Bob can justify how he knew what he knew after the fact, like saying he did a special scrying spell, but he gets the advantage because he's a skilled player, both in game and at the metagame.

Of course, you can also make deals with the devil, so to speak, and if a you want a favour from a mod you can ask for one, but now you're in the hole and if that mod asks you for something later, you damn well better give it to them. You could do the same with other players, although obviously debts between players and mods would be considerably greater. This, if done correctly, should encourage the sort of manipulative bastardry that seems to proliferate in STGODs while making it fair. If we can't prevent metagaming, we might as well control it.

[Ohma]

I'd be interested (I just got my schedule for this next week and the set-up crew aren't needed at all...yay...at least I'll have no excuse for not responding to STGOD related stuff for a bit).

I think that a territory system like the SDN World TGOD would be helpful for this game, maybe have a certain amount of starting points each player gets to spend either on their territory itself (representing the cost in lives/resources to take and hold the territory) or their initial evil lair (less resources needed to take and hold the territory means more resources for building up their underground arcanofortress)?

[Darkevilme]

This morning i had two other thoughts.

1. At what point cost is something too powerful to be considered a minion and is a character instead?

Would a heavy cavalry man with a horse, sword and full plate armour be a minion or a character. 5 points, base 2, immunity 1 (2), speed 1 ?

I ask this cause well my golems are gonna probably be quite pricey to get the feel of them, maybe 25 points, but not with leadership, names or personalities like a henchman.

2. If an airship is a piece of equipment (A low level of immunity, some speed and transport for instance) then how do we deal with HP and how much damage is needed to take it down? do we need to buy hp for it? or does it use a star control system where it dies at the point the remaining crew can no longer afford more than say half of it by the 1/2 rule? or something else?

[Vehrec]

This morning i had two other thoughts.

1. At what point cost is something too powerful to be considered a minion and is a character instead?

Would a heavy cavalry man with a horse, sword and full plate armour be a minion or a character. 5 points, base 2, immunity 1 (2), speed 1 ?

I ask this cause well my golems are gonna probably be quite pricey to get the feel of them, maybe 25 points, but not with leadership, names or personalities like a henchman.

2. If an airship is a piece of equipment (A low level of immunity, some speed and transport for instance) then how do we deal with HP and how much damage is needed to take it down? do we need to buy hp for it? or does it use a star control system where it dies at the point the remaining crew can no longer afford more than say half of it by the 1/2 rule? or something else?

1.While I'm not sure where one draws the line, but from where I stand anything more than 20 points is pushing it for even advanced Minions. However, just having 50 points spent, does not a henchman make.

2. Airships are vehicles. Drawing some inspiration from Firefly, I'd have three tiers of damage and resistance to it-Personal, Vehicle and Fortress. Each level deals 10x damage to things below it on the list, and 1/10th damage to the ones above it. So a fortress with 2 points of damage capacity from catapults and balistae would have 200 points of damage for the elvish ranger unit that's trying to sneak up and open the gate. Likewise, an ork Trebuchet with 15 points of damage would score 1.5 points against a castle. At the same time, Vehicles and Forts need crew and garrisons. Estimate the number required at around 20 for every point of a fortress, and 2 for every point of vehicle? If they are killed, then whatever they crewed or manned becomes inoperable and possibly salvageable.

[Darkevilme]

1. I suppose that's fair, just have more golems instead.

2. Not to get ahead of ourselves but i suspect most other players wont have vehicle like transports instead relying on ships, horse, dragons, writhing carpets of flesh eating maggots and what have you. So if we do go for a tiered approach i'd suggest the middle tier is just marked as generic mega unit. To represent everything from dragons and trolls to golems and airships... though this does open a whole can of worms as far as pricing is concerned and may be better off left alone.

Thusly if i may divide transport into three categories i might be able to make something out of this.

Category A: Living creatures, anything with its own base points able to move on its own. Takes up loyalty points, apply damage half and half between transport and cargo?

Example: A dragon

Category B: Equipment, crewed. Something without its own hitpoints, requires a certain number of minions to make it move as determined by its price(Twice the amount of minion points as their are points in the vehicle) and these minions stand in for the hitpoints. If the number of minions aboard drops below half necessary the transport stops moving/crashes slowly, whatever.

Example: A floating disc held up by chanting acolytes on its rim, a steampunk airship.

Category C: Equipment, personal. As above only its owned by a henchmen or leader, and as henchmen and leader characters are special i doubt specific rules should be made for how to apply damage to such. Common sense and rp will prevail.

Example: Floating castles, magic carpets.

Thoughts on this solution? I know it's rough i'm just sounding out the idea.

[Academia Nut]

Okay, a few things here. First is that with the way the leadership works, most henchmen are going to have a lot of their points tied up in that stat. But I think the way its written now a basic halbadier is a 2 point minion, an archer is a 1 + 1 ranged, and a goblin is a 1 point minion. What does this mean overall? I means that your average henchman is going to be commanding between 25 and 75 average men on the battlefield, and you're going to probably have between 5 and 10 henchmen, to start with. However as you grow, your henchmen will be able to command more troops, and your overlord will be able to command more henchmen. So sure, you start off with a couple hundred regular guys or maybe a hundred really tough guys, but there's room to grow.

That said, we definitely need to figure out how to do bases, crew served equipment, and unintelligent creatures like zombies and golems and clockwork men (oh my!). I have no good answer to that yet, although I think somehow allowing intelligent creatures to go over the normal caps but they need oversight would be a good way to work it.