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[Harry Baldman]

Might not be a bad idea. But, honestly, nobody gives a shit about Belgium. France might be decent though, lots of weird stuff going on there. hmmm.

But Belgium's interesting because it's arcane, largely unknown and often confused with France, Germany or the Netherlands. Perfect Cthulhu country, really. They've also got Walloons and Flemish and who knows what else in there, I hear. They even got invaded twice by Germany for reasons of "the French will never expect this!", when by the second time the Germans really should have known better.

[monk12]

Clearly, the reason the Germans keep invading through Belgium is to harvest an unknown (and possibly unknowable) source of occult power, one which gives them great strength in war but ultimately proves their undoing in the end.

[Yoink]

Holy scheisse it all makes sense now.

[Pancaek]

Screw it, I'll somehow make Belgium work as a first stage. Europe's battleground will be used in an rtd. I give it 5 turns before the entire thing burns to the ground.


Again.

[poketwo]

So, any one knows where my last post here was???

[Persus13]

-snip-

Might not be a bad idea. But, honestly, nobody gives a shit about Belgium. France might be decent though, lots of weird stuff going on there. hmmm.

Britain's spy network got massively taken down and repurposed to feed false information in WW2 in either Belgium or Holland. Also Tintin.

Might not be a bad idea. But, honestly, nobody gives a shit about Belgium. France might be decent though, lots of weird stuff going on there. hmmm.

But Belgium's interesting because it's arcane, largely unknown and often confused with France, Germany or the Netherlands. Perfect Cthulhu country, really. They've also got Walloons and Flemish and who knows what else in there, I hear. They even got invaded twice by Germany for reasons of "the French will never expect this!", when by the second time the Germans really should have known better.

Well the second time the Germans did even better then the first time. But not because of the Belgian thing.

[Fniff]

So, it's been a while since I did an RTD. This is because I've been trying to figure out what would be a good mechanic to base an RTD around. So, I took some inspiration from a combination of Space Station 13, Paranoia, and game theory.
The Servant's Plot!
You are a servant in a fairy palace nestled under Dublin, Dolcan's Meadow. A plot has been launched to overthrow the queen and replace her regime with a worker's paradise. You are part of this plot, but you must keep up the facade of being a loyal servant while also slowly sabotaging the kingdom in preparation for the uprising!

This would be a mission-based RTD, with every mission having an objective set by the rebellion. Objectives require multiple non-specific players to complete and are usually things like "one player must give the prisoner a bottle of rotshroom wine, another player must chop a rose from the private garden, and the last player must steal a key from the spymaster's daughter". However, every player also has a job that they choose at the start, like being a chef in the royal kitchen or a teacher for the fairy princes, and the longer you don't do your job the worse your performance will be.

Completing an objective gives everyone involved in the objective a unit of Respect from the rebel leader. Respect means you can pull in favors to make things easier: in game terms, this gives a roll a +1 at the cost of a unit of Respect. Doing your job well means you get a promotion, earning a level of Reputation. Reputation means you can abuse your authority to immediately complete a task: in game terms, this means you auto-succeed at a task (As if you had gotten a 5) but lose a level of respect.
Both of these start out at 1 for each player. If your Respect goes to 0, you can't get any more favors and you actually have to start doing favors for NPCs. If your Reputation goes to 0, you are put on a watch list and if you do anything suspicious you might be captured by the queen's guard, interrogated, and even executed if things go really wrong.

What do you guys think? Would you be interested in some servant-based political pixie intrigue? Is there anything about the rules that could be improved?

[Person]

It does sound quite interesting. Don't think its something I would play, but I feel like I remember spy like gameplay being fairly popular in the past. I'd suggest making it clear that the player's actions have an obvious impact on the rebellion. Ideally it'd have a fairly well defined ending point. Probably nothing as blatant as a rebellion meter, but giving vague hints on the state of the kingdom would be good motivation.

In other news, I'm rather tempted to build one of those card games where no one knows the rules and unleash it on the forums. That feels more forum game and rp territory though. Plus I've really got too many games in the "building" stage right now, where "building" means that I have all of 2kb of data, and that only covers the basics of the setting/idea and basically none of the rules.

[Fniff]

Hey, thanks for replying! I was thinking of making sure the players have direct cause and effect with what objectives fail and which succeed, but another good idea would be explaining why the rebels need these actions done with each objective. So the prisoner needs the rotshroom wine to bribe a guard to let him out so he can teach the rebels how to manufacture explosives.

I was thinking of having status updates between missions framed as the two newsletters from both sides: 'People's Paper' for the rebels, and 'Reports on the Realm' for the royalists. Both of those would probably portray the situation fairly well. Along with that, the Uprising has a set date, so the date and time could be given at the start of every mission along with the vaguely ominous '[n] days before the Uprising'.

[Person]

Sounds good. The newsletter idea is definitely the sort of thing I had in mind. Anyway, I'm sure there will be a fair few people willing to join. Optionally, have another team of players trying to PREVENT the rebellion. That might be a too much work though.

[Gatleos]

Paraphrased and enhanced from irc
<Gat>: I was thinking about this concept for a game
<Gat>: The players are running some possibly-magical business in a fantasy setting
<Gat>: "Business" meaning they found a mystical artifact and are hogging it to themselves like some asshole wizards, running a magical racket
<Gat>: Inevitably the players start to turn on each other and have to deal with thousands of other problems as their business grows explosively
<Gat>: Eventually there are whole country-razing wars being fought on their behalf and they've crashed the economy several times in their lust for gold

The problem comes when I realize that there's no way to run this game as an RTD. The only way it could work is with a timescale around at least a week per turn, but that doesn't seem to work no matter how I tweak it. One problem is the fact that a large timeskip after every action means players have to plan ahead with their actions. If there's any uncertainty about what's going to happen (and there always is), they have to give two or more actions to account for other possibilities. Player actions will look like choose your own adventure books.

[darkpaladin109]

Paraphrased and enhanced from irc
<Gat>: I was thinking about this concept for a game
<Gat>: The players are running some possibly-magical business in a fantasy setting
<Gat>: "Business" meaning they found a mystical artifact and are hogging it to themselves like some asshole wizards, running a magical racket
<Gat>: Inevitably the players start to turn on each other and have to deal with thousands of other problems as their business grows explosively
<Gat>: Eventually there are whole country-razing wars being fought on their behalf and they've crashed the economy several times in their lust for gold

The problem comes when I realize that there's no way to run this game as an RTD. The only way it could work is with a timescale around at least a week per turn, but that doesn't seem to work no matter how I tweak it. One problem is the fact that a large timeskip after every action means players have to plan ahead with their actions. If there's any uncertainty about what's going to happen (and there always is), they have to give two or more actions to account for other possibilities. Player actions will look like choose your own adventure books.

Maybe run it like those Choice of Games that have been getting popular in Play with your Buddies section recently? You know, when an event comes up, let people decide what they want to do.
Example: Player A posts that he's going to use the artifact to brainwash people so they give him their money. Then someone finds out about what they're doing, and goes to extort money out of the player. At that point, the player would get an action.
Something like that, anyway.

[IronyOwl]

One problem is the fact that a large timeskip after every action means players have to plan ahead with their actions. If there's any uncertainty about what's going to happen (and there always is), they have to give two or more actions to account for other possibilities. Player actions will look like choose your own adventure books.

I don't see why that'd be necessary, any more than "I attack him but if he's not dead afterwards also run away" type actions have to be valid. It'd get a little disjointed if very short actions got thrown into the mix, like "Reach into the Bag O Stuff and grab some magic beans," since if imps come out instead you'd figure he might try to deal with them rather than attempt to plant them as intended. But even that's more because it's actually multiple actions ("Acquire Beans" + "Plant Beans") at once anyway, not because there's anything wrong with "[1]: Your bean fields look great! And by great you mean seared and terrible, because there's imps everywhere."

[lawastooshort]

Crikey.

[Gatleos]

I don't see why that'd be necessary, any more than "I attack him but if he's not dead afterwards also run away" type actions have to be valid.

Yeah, it might work out fine. I just want to make sure the players never lose control of what's happening. If one player's action makes another's useless it's usually okay, because it's just one turn. But on a large timescale, I might end up deciding 90% of what the players do for them.

Maybe run it like those Choice of Games that have been getting popular in Play with your Buddies section recently? You know, when an event comes up, let people decide what they want to do.
Example: Player A posts that he's going to use the artifact to brainwash people so they give him their money. Then someone finds out about what they're doing, and goes to extort money out of the player. At that point, the player would get an action.
Something like that, anyway.

You know, that could work. An "asynchronous" structure to the game where players don't all submit actions at the same time... On the other hand, I could end up only focusing on one player for a long time just because they made some actions on a small scale.

Maybe I should just make this into a suggestion game. It would fix all the problems with timescale, because the characters wouldn't have a specific player associated with them.