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[Erk]

I'm using DF world gen to create histories for a pencil-and-paper RPG, and a simple but (I think) awesome mechanic has occurred to me.

There should be an Entity Token for civilisation instability. Each year a civ would have a random chance of total government collapse based on its instability. There might be secondary tags that increased the instability, eg. a particular entity might be destabilised by the death of a king or the loss of a war. If the RNG made the government collapse, the top 10-25% largest sites of the civ would each become the capital of a new civilisation. The remaining 75-90% would be subsumed into whatever civilisation was closest to them (either one of the newly formed ones or another nearby group).

This would allow some interesting things. For example, if a goblin civ that had adopted lots of humans collapsed, sites with more humans than goblins would reform as human civs, but using the goblin culture (ie. entity entry). There'd be little practical difference in gameplay, but in story terms that implies a revolution by the adopted. Neat stuff.

Thoughts?

[Jeoshua]

I'm trying to do the very same thing 

What's more than this suggestion, it would be nice if sites that were abandoned became overgrown after a few years of worldgen, and disappeared altogether as a site after some longer period of time.  I know ruins are planned but after a while, theres just nothing left, you know?

[Erk]

I'm sure that is on the list for eventual play for D&D purposes I find just having something marked 'ruin' is sufficient for me. But I do agree in DF that will be awesome.

[Dutchling]

I would rather want that to actually happen (the instability, the reason for it, etc) and not just some random event that causes the kind to go berserk and the civ to split up because of nothing more than the RNG.

[Bohandas]

I would rather want that to actually happen (the instability, the reason for it, etc) and not just some random event that causes the kind to go berserk and the civ to split up because of nothing more than the RNG.

Agreed.

[Erk]

I would rather want that to actually happen (the instability, the reason for it, etc) and not just some random event that causes the kind to go berserk and the civ to split up because of nothing more than the RNG.

Personally I'd like to see both implemented... the RNG splitter would represent things that are very hard to simulate, like peasant revolt. The destabilisation caused by the death of the king, loss of a war/site, etc would represent a keystone event causing the collapse. Since both factors would be programmable in the RAW, you could turn the chance of the 'no cause' destabilisation down to 0 if you didn't like it.

[Dutchling]

^
I do not remember where I know this from, probably an old interview or a DFTalk but Toady does not want to add scripted (random) events he wants to remove them. Like what he did with HFS. You used to have a x% chance (x=amount of candy mined) for you fortress to get a death message and it will be gone and unreclaimable.
Now the demons actually are there and will kill your fort and they also make it hard to reclaim.
The same thing will happen to revolts and things like that. If it's harder it will just happen later in the game's development state

[NW_Kohaku]

I'm kind of reminded of the board game Civilization (the one the computer game is very loosely based off of)...

In that game, much of how you advanced your civilization was through building cities to get trade cards, which you could use to purchase technological advancement.  The problem is that, mixed in with the trade cards, were disaster cards.  Especially in the "Advanced Civilization" expansion pack, there were something like 20 different disasters in 9 different decks of trade cards, and you typically drew one card per player from at least the first 5 decks per turn, meaning you typically saw at least one disaster card per player per turn.

Because of this, you generally had to play your game based upon the assumption that every given turn would involve something like an earthquake or a flood or a civil war or an Iconoclasm and Heresy card would pop up and wipe out at least two cities a turn - which actually isn't too hard if you are prepared, it just means you keep population tokens ready around the city sites so that when the city vaporizes, you have enough people to rebuild it the very next turn.

In fact, because you have tax revolts if you have too many population tokens on the board, it's actually useful to make sure you get hit with a disaster, just so you have something to sink some extra population into.  (Unless of course you're just starting a war for shits and giggles against your neighbor.  That's always a great way to get rid of extra population.)


AAAAANYway, I would have to say I like the idea of some random disasters, but like Dutchling and others have been saying, it would be better if the "random bits" were more indirect causes of civilizations or cities collapsing than simply rolling a 5 on a 1d100 roll. 

Right now, we have cycles of famine and plenty in food production, which is capable of causing periodic city collapses, but where there are more variables in play than a simple percentile destruction of a city - there are food stores and dependencies that the cities have upon villages, and cities aren't entirely wiped out, but are mostly just reduced.

Having some sort of set of variables for civil unrest would be fun, where you could randomly roll that the new king is really unpopular with the people for spending all his time with the nobility, but oppressing the people (nobles unrest -10, popular unrest +15), and then having a spike in food prices (popular unrest +20), and having a war that is starting to turn against the king (nobles unrest +10, popular unrest +10) leading to a popular uprising that the king has to send in the army to quell.