MP: Chronicles_MA - General Game Discussion

[Hadrian_II]

I would be interested in playing in this game.

[Lokean]

Well, it looks like there's sufficient interest to pursue the idea, so here's a few of my thoughs/preferences.

CBM would certainly be an important choice, and I'm in favor of it, specifically because it promotes diversity, rather than having the midgame AARs all consist of "[My puny mage groupies cast spells on me/I cast spells on me] and I smashed the entire opposing army with my magic sword"

Given whay djo says, I broadly agree. An alternative would be to use one of the maps with specific VP sites, but the only ones I'm aware of are the ones on the Llamaserver, so suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I was initially thinking of doing the first few turns as 24 or 48 hour quickhost, while the initial expansion goes on, then throttling back to between 72 and 120 fixed hosting. As I see it, the difficulty is more to do with having something you wish to write about, rather than the time and effort to write it. A reasonable hosting time allows players that feel inspired to thrash something out during a single turn without people that don't feel like writing something getting too drained by the delays.

Depending on the number of players, I would probably set an expected contribution rate at once a fortnight, which would mean that the tales would be coming in almost daily, on average, if people can keep up that pace. More, of course, would be better.

What I'd really be interested in trying would be a map that had starting positions for every nation of the age chosen and victory point locations that were special sites of interest. However, that would mean making a new map, which is quite a lot of work.

[quantum_mechani]

Have you considered using the dawn of dominions scenario?

Oh, and I'd definitely be interested in this game.

[Lokean]

It's too uneven, really. Since there's no built in victory condition the odds are good that some nations would simply get obliterated early.

[quantum_mechani]

Originally Posted by Lokean

It's too uneven, really. Since there's no built in victory condition the odds are good that some nations would simply get obliterated early.

I'm not sure it's that uneven, compared to an average map. RP wise I don't think getting completely wiped out is a huge issue- anyone that wants to keep up a guerrilla campaign can usually do so almost indefinitely. Anyway, I'd certainly volunteer for one of the 'at risk' nation and probably other vets would do the same.

I just think it would be hard to find a more perfect map for RP purposes.

[Lokean]

I don't see why it could be thought of as a particularly good map for RP in general, or a narrative game such as I'm proposing in particular. I suppose the province names and poptypes being specifically chosen to reflect the terrain and proximity to nations is nice, but that's about it.

Plus, it restricts the possible nations, which is definitely going to hurt the chances of getting people writing, since there's less freedom to pick and play a nation you love.

If this one goes off acceptably I might make a semi-regular feature of it and put together pseudo-scenario maps for future games.

[Zapmeister]

This concept sounds quite similar to a game I started back in the days of Dom2, call "Yarnspinners". In that game, writing your AAR was the main point and that was reflected in the rules of the game as follows:

1. Each turn, each player submitted a couple of paragraphs of narrative to an independant, non-playing gamemaster that scored the submision as follows:

- 0 points if nothing was submitted
- 1 point for overly terse (one-liner) or excessively verbose submissions
- 2 points for anything else

After a nominated number of turns (I think we chose 60) the game ends and nations are awarded further points for being the front-runner (10 points) or runner-up (5 points) in each of the score graphs except army size.

Nation with the most points is the winner. The idea was popular enough to spawn a second game (Yarnspinners2) although I wasn't involved with that, and I think they tweaked the rules a little.

Anyways, good luck with Chronicles!

Zap

[sansanjuan]

....nudge

KC .. I'm attacking T'ien Ch'i. Not sporting of me to battle someone in a stale-spin. I have no doubt you can put a hurt'n on Caelum with those ponies of yours.... and you likely have 1E6 gold for more...

-SSJ

[sansanjuan]

doh!

should be addressing KO not the mysterious "KC"
-SSJ