Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Hey all,

I'm contemplating hosting a role-playing heavy game, era yet to be determined. By role-playing heavy, I mean that players will be actively encouraged to play via diplomacy and "in-character" discussion, nations that are historically at war will be expected to at least begin play in that regard, players will be asked to make posts to the main thread once every ten or so turns with some flavor about what's going on in their campaign, etc.

I saw at least one Dom2 game (Council of Wyrms) that went in this direction. Any thoughts from would-be players on fun themes or ideas for such a game? Given my time contraints and my prior commitments to three other ongoing games, I can only host one that I will participate in myself, but I'm curious to see if this format intrigues enough people to get a committed group playing.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

YEah! I've always wanted to play something like this!

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I love roleplaying, (A)DnD and other pnp rpgs, but role playing seemd missing from strategy games like Warhammer Fantasy/40k or Confrontation on tabletop. I think to play an online strategy game with role playing elements is a great idea. I would like to try Man in Late era in this case. I think the background story in manual is a great idea, but it's not developed enough, so a good role playing ground. (Figh between the old ways and the new frontiers, witchcraft versus scholarly ordes...)

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

good idea! Id like to take a part...

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Oh yeah I'll play Patala if it's going to be Late Era. Since I'm assuming Jayded, you're taking Dreamland? If not, then I call Dreamland. =)

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

*smile* Very cool to already have some interest.

What would suit you most in terms of such a game? Toss out ideas of what you would and wouldn't like to see in terms of frills that a normal Dom3 game doesn't immediately implement. For example, the Council of Wyrms thread in Dom2 is great because of its emphasis on politics and role-play (lots of voting and discussion), its rules re: Pretender creation (if you play a Dragon, you get to vote; if not, you don't), and the way it implemented those to make a second form of game above the Dominions baseline experience.

Ideally, I'd like to do something that also creates that sort of a second game. Not Wyrms per se, but perhaps something that fleshes out some of the nations in Dominions or that gives individual Pretender choices more flavor, something that makes Death/Blood nations a bit more reviled by nations that don't resort to such tactics, etc.

Not sure what Era I'm leaning towards. I love the dying feeling of the Late Era, but I'm open to ideas. If nothing else, I'll just use the enthusiasm generated here and come up with something on my own as a test run for this sort of experience.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I would love to play Ashen Empire Ermor. Evil is always fun!

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I thought that Council of Wyrms turned out to be a total mess? I seem to recall players constantly looking for replacements so they could get out of it.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

To be honest, I have no idea. All I have to go with is the pretty amazing website that they created for the game that shows a -lot- of player activity and the hundred or so posts that they tossed into the Dom2 MP thread which seemed to indicate that it had legs beneath it and that people were having a good time.

If there was unhappiness there, I wasn't around to see it. I've only the record to look at.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

To be fair to everyone, I'm not going to take placeholder choices of nations until I settle on an Era and rules and people commit to playing long-term under that paradigm. I'll put out an introductory post after everyone's offered suggestions and I have an idea of what I want to run, at which point if folks're interested, it'll be first-come, first-serve for the various nations. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Depending on hosting scheduel and era i may be in, so what if im in 2 server games and a PBEM game?

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Council of Wyrms was fun, but if you couldn't keep up with the diplomacy and voting, you were pretty much screwed. Which was the whole point. I made some terrible decisions and only had 6 provinces the whole game, and without any power or political capital, I just sat there and sold hammers and my votes. The game ended when Dom3 came out. It was neat to have various AAR-like stories and debates on the CoW wiki. Some players like Ygorl and Puffyn were really into it, so I would not call it a total mess. Some people like complication in their games, I hear.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I'd like to join that game, but i'm not the best player.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I am -far- from the best player, having played in only a handful of MP games and only recently discovering how to exploit and win in the SP game.

All are welcome. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Most of the games I've joined, I joined because they have RP elements (I'm not a strong player).

In Council of Wyrms, I think things went mostly well, but we needed a "timer" to put pressure on the game. If we had D3's cumulative VPs, I think it would provided the final perfect element. If you look back at it, we did manage to generate a lot of diplomacy, and nearly one proposition per two or three turns. We stalled late due to a number of things (D3, fatigue, complicated alliances, fear of getting into a war). The theme aspect (all Wyrms) helped a lot, I think.

In the Yarnspinner games (I was in YS2), we were obviously mostly RP. It worked because enough (about 1/2) of the people were able to keep up with the writing. That formed a nice core where we had incentive to keep (a) writing and (b) interacting in character. In YS1, they got by with only 2 active writers. They developed their own theme toward the end (the coming final battle).

My thoughts on how to make it work:

(1) the people have to be into it; no insane max/min people--you've got to be able to do stupid things if it's in character or thematically appropriate (eg, Titan pretender is better for Arco than a Vampire Queen)

(2) theme helps a lot; I like your idea about mapping out who should be hostile or allied, at least initially (eg, Marignon should hate Ermor); good vs evil might work, hot vs cold; I'll try to think of some more unifying themes

(3) you can get by with the forums even though outside websites don't hurt

(4) did I mention the players have to be into it? you want people who are thinking to themselves right now, "wow, now I have an excuse to buy an army of (insert favorite inefficient unit here)"

(4a) and spells! who hasn't wanted to summon one of every (for example) death summons, whether you needed them or not? because it's fun! and possibly thematic for your nation!

(5) and don't forget the trash-talk! Pasha is our pioneer in this area; games with lots of in-character trash talk can be a lot of fun

There's a strong probability I'd join this game

[edit: added 4a]

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I might be up for it. I'm in two games already and I don't want to get in over my head, but I'd love to take part in something like this. If the pace is lax enough I'll certainly join.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I consider CoW a bit of disaster, not just because it drug on forever but because of the emphasis on diplomacy rather than RPing. Diplomacy is already the driving force in most long term games, there is no need to focus on it. Besides, in my opinion it goes against the spirit of dominions- agreements with false gods should be a last resort and almost meaningless when their usefulness expires...

Also, I don't see any problems with players making good strategic choices... personally I like to role play smart characters. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Sure, roleplaying a powergamer; that's the spirit!

[tease mode off]

All that may be needed is to encourage roleplaying and a bit of creative writing. Another idea might be to adopt a diplomatic idea that has come up in history on a number of occasions: "Open Covenants Openly Arrived At." That is, diplomacy is allowed, and encouraged, and encouraged to be in character, but can only be conducted through through the game's thread, not through in-game messages or email.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I got an idea. What if in the late age a guild of tradesmen would have formed that gained enough reputation and money to rule the world slowly. Then it was torn apart by the richest houses. Each house would be represented by a nation, and the patriarch/matriarch would be the pretender god and the first born the prophet.
But to gain wealth and reputation one needs to concentrate on this and thus negating the magical practices. This would be represented with the following logic:
Number of votes in the Guild = 10 - Number of Magic levels after the first, cumulative. With a minimum of 1.
I tell you an example:
A patriarch who has Fire 9 and Water 9 (very popular nowadays). Would get 10 - ((9-1) + (9-1)) = -6. Max(1,-6) = 1. So he would get 1 vote.
In the other hand if a patriarch would have Air 3 only, that would mean: 10 - (3-1) = 8 Max (1,8) = 8. So he would get 8 votes.
To get the maximum number of votes you should get only 1 in any magic path. Well, you could take 1 in every magic path, to a nice rainbow pretender, but for this (hopefully rare) case to compensate I suggest that if a patriarch will be adept in more then 3 paths, then he would get a cumulative -1 vote for every path after the 3rd.
So an example: If a patriarch would choose ASDEFNNW for some reason, then he would get 10-1=9 for having 2 levels in Nature, then -4 more for the paths above 3. This would lead to a total of 5 votes.
I'm waiting for suggestions an opinions.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I don't think Council of Wyrms had any/many more problems than any game in its circumstances. Too many players, where generally speaking, the more players there are, the more are going to lose interest or suddenly realize that they're moving someplace with no internet access just two weeks after the games starts. And, with any game that winds up going for so long (think it nearly a year, possibly a bit more), there are going to be players whose circumstances in life change to where they can't invest the time or interest. (This is as opposed to the ones who were just too thoughtless (being nice here *g*) to realize this from the start.)

As it was, it was quite a nice change from the usual Dom2 games, and with some tweaking it could have been even better. The cumulative VP provinces would have helped a lot, albeit Illwinter making them only get counted once a year isn't nearly as nice as it could have been.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I'm hardly an experienced Dominions player, but I have done quite a lot of roleplaying and writing, so this rather interests me. I've read over some of the Yarnspinners and Council of Wyrms games (I could've sworn it wasn't just Dragons that could vote, couldn't Wyrms themselves do so also?) but it's my understanding that the writers' stories never seemed to interact much on a smaller scale. That is, a character (commanders, usually) in one nation never seemed to make much effect on other characters in others. I'd kinda like to see something like that, I suppose.

Of course, I have my doubts that Dominions is really made out for that sort of thing -- the only nonfriendly commander likely to make a major appearance in your own nation's story is a raging, wrathful skies-ing Air Queen or some such supercombatant rampaging through your territory. *shrug*

Anyway, I'd play.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

If you want to play, I encourage you to sign up in the other thread ("RP-Heavy Late Era Game (Accepting Players) -- OOC").

Speaking from the yarnspinner perspective, it's really hard to get small scale interaction, simply because it takes a lot of back-and-forth between the authors. And speaking for myself, I never had enough time to do that, what with getting a yarn out every week. We did see characters in the stories appear on the battlefields (I got a thrill the first time I saw that happen).

Besides the coordination is the difficulty in writing someone else's characters. On one hand, you have to go with the flow (as in roleplaying), but on the other hand, you don't want the interactions to screw up a long-term storyline you've planned (yours or theirs).

We had better interaction in the diplomacy. A lot of the diplomatic messages--I would say nearly all, actually--were in character. They never appeared in the yarns, but you can see the effects. When Man's yarns talked about Vanheim's ambassadors, that reflected the role-play messages we sent back and forth.

There's a difference between the yarnspinners game and this, though--that game used roleplaying to further the creation of stories. This game looks like pure roleplay. I think that will make it easier to interact--no worry about your future stories.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I would like to participate. I would like to give a try at MA or LA game as man. Please let me know the next step.


BTW...I will also write an AAR from my nations perspective (as a diary written by a commander in the field and a member of the high councel of Man and include screenies compiled in a pdf document at the end..

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I would be pleased joining as Panagea or T'ien Ch'i.
Heavy RP is a great idea if only time allows people genuinely participate.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

afaik

this game has died a long time ago

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Yeah, this one never got off the ground.

I think there's enough interest in an RP game if someone wants to organize it. But I wouldn't recommend trying to start one until after the holidays. Easier to stay in character without any breaks in game play.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

when i get a few more games under my belt i would like to play this game. maybe a rip of the black company. oh that sounds so fun. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif Bwaha

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

I would also like to take part in something like that. BTW, Renjoustin tried to make something similar in late Ascendancy, though he didn't state this as requirement. Probably it would be better if he did. Also, it died with the late GandalfParker's server... http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/frown.gif

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

great idea, i'd be very interested in such a game.

Something with a world background story that defines some kind of rules like we hear about this council of wyrm game where the dragons had a council and only they could vote in it, sounds like alot of fun.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Oh ouch. Please dont word it that way. How about Gandalf Parkers late server? http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Good news update. The server should be going in for repair today and I fully expect none of the information on it to be lost.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

These RP games are a lot of fun, but so far no one's managed to get one going in Dominions 3 (including the one in this rather aged thread). I think the closest is the "global war" game now going on. But I may have missed others.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

Wow, I just noticed that this thread is over two years old...

Do you need a server to host the game? I would be able to host by email, and I'd be willing to to get such an awesome game off of the ground! Seriously, we NEED to do this!

I think I'll start a thread for the game soon! Call it 'The Council, a RP game' or something like that.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

The problem with an RP game is that the more people you get into it, the more definitions of RP you end up with.

But there are a number of threads in this forum which are almost entirely RP posts which I consider very fun to read. The estimate on getting back my big server (able to handle a game like this in direct tcpip connection mode) is 1 week. Since it takes about that long to discuss all the particulars to a final answer, someone might consider kicking off a thread now for such a game.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

You're also very welcome to use my automated PBEM server. One way or another, finding a server to host shouldn't be a problem.

Re: Suggestions on RP-Heavy hosted game?
 

True. But if you keep it simple and let people do nearly approximation of role-playing they want, then even after half of them stop RPing (and they will), it will still be a lot of fun. Heck, you can go a long way with nothing but 3 or 4 people posting elegant taunts and pompous proclamations.