I was wrong to call what I was creating Risk. Only about 2/3 done with the massive map's provinces... not even started naming them. It's not Risk, it's Birthright. Except I don't want that cluster fuck of rules. God did it suck and digging out that horrid module, it leaves a whole hell of a lot to be desired when compared to the last decade and a half of empire building game advancement from 1996 to today.
What did my players want to do immediate when they got land? They wanted to develop it. To pour countless tons of wealth into the land to turn each province they had so lovingly stolen from the minor nobles in isolated lands to turn them into real cities. They wanted to do what they do any game of Civilization or Master of Orion or Alpha Centauri or Hearts of Iron 3... or any of the later Total War series games.
Except you can only do the most rudimentary of upgrades in Birthright. There is nothing to allow a person to develop a backwater province and turn it into a powerhouse if they pour enough roads and make it attractive enough. It assumes in the rules that you go in with the idea that using their maps and regions is the only way to play!
Screw that!
I am a die hard empire builder and I know at least 2/3 of my players want to also build an empire. They want to know their money is doing something. I want their money to do something. They are also patient. They are playing long lived races and are more than content to take a decade or two to build up a nation from next to nothing and into something that might eventually make a stand against ancient powers. The satisfaction of knowing they took disparate provinces no one cared about on the frontier and turned them into a Prussia or better. Some dream bigger than that.
This means I need to throw off the cheap way out and start to work to help fuel their desires, to help stoke the fires of ambition and see where this takes them. Will they build something that will last or will they try to reach too far too fast and end up in ruins, an occupied shell under the rule of an empire? That means newer and better rules.
Simple rules that can be easily understood but big enough to cover the level of detail they request... like their armies, infrastructure, crafting capacity, income makers, and critical resources... but avoid the minute details that would bog it down too much under paper work. They are to be kings, not accountants... that is what the Hand is for. Btw, that's me.
But it is a neat experiment honestly on my part to see what my players when forced to make the BIG choices do. They have been adventurers across a number of campaigns for years. Now, they have to take on the mantle of being something far, far more.
All because a simple map with silly names was put before them and they could for once actually plot out their actual size of their tiny holdings and think. So glad I listened to my room mate that day and spent the time working on it... even if I was distracted with the Ninja Warrior marathon because the main entertainment was knocked out thanks to the hurricane knocking out the web servers.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Risk and D&D
Hillariously, I was digging through my shelves not too long ago and I stumbled across a whole slew of empire building games. You know the kind... Risk, Shogun, that sort of game. So pulling out some simple blank paper, I started laying them out over the reversed side of the board.
There I was, standing there, looking at a blank game board. Nothing of note there when my room mate spoke up and said I should draw my game world map on it. I kind of blinked a few times and asked, "Which one? There are two."
"The one we are currently in. It would help us out in our mass scheming."
Then it sank it. He was right. I have drawn hundreds of maps over the years. Each time redefining the political borders of the world as time has advanced and changed or where the predominate language and dialect is spoken. I've even redrawn them to show the environmental effects of massive cataclysms that the players failed to stop or were responsible for themselves. Ruined and lost cities, ancient relic locations that have long been lost to time. In fact, it is odd pulling out a bit of parchment from folder and tossing a stack of unlabled maps that I know what they are that only show a year... sometimes two or three hundred years out of date and watch players pour over those maps for clues or a fragment of information that might lead them to where the villain is or where a lost item of power is at.
But never have they had a giant map they could push counters across like it was a Risk board or one of those battle maps you see generals and world leaders standing over in movies, documentaries, and photos. I have so many silly old games no one plays anymore... the version of risk I have still uses the old three pointed and five pointed counters for the armies and not the molded figures you see today. So nicely generic. Lord of the Rings Monopoly... odd christmas gift because they thought since I liked fantasy... but it still has money in the original rubber bands BUT it did have tiny forts and castles instead of houses and hotels. Shogun? Hundreds of tiny color coded samurai and two stage castles.
I got nearly everything I need honestly to do something up for my players. I just need to pick up a couple medieval or civil war standard bearers to represent major generals in the world and get to painting them up with the major house banners and I am set.
It is odd though how the moment a massive game board comes out, people's perceptions change. I am currently using the back of my never used World of Warcraft: The Board Game map as the future backing of the board... something that had only given me an infinite supply of cheap D8s to pretty much throw about or use as the cores of dice buildings and tons of cheap monster stand ins in the years since I wasted money on it. Glad to see it get one more use out of it. Now, if I can get a use of the cards, I will have scavanged it for everything it is worth.
Well... I'll try to post updates as I go on this... going to have to start marking out the province borders properly of the surface and the two major underdark regions.
There I was, standing there, looking at a blank game board. Nothing of note there when my room mate spoke up and said I should draw my game world map on it. I kind of blinked a few times and asked, "Which one? There are two."
"The one we are currently in. It would help us out in our mass scheming."
Then it sank it. He was right. I have drawn hundreds of maps over the years. Each time redefining the political borders of the world as time has advanced and changed or where the predominate language and dialect is spoken. I've even redrawn them to show the environmental effects of massive cataclysms that the players failed to stop or were responsible for themselves. Ruined and lost cities, ancient relic locations that have long been lost to time. In fact, it is odd pulling out a bit of parchment from folder and tossing a stack of unlabled maps that I know what they are that only show a year... sometimes two or three hundred years out of date and watch players pour over those maps for clues or a fragment of information that might lead them to where the villain is or where a lost item of power is at.
But never have they had a giant map they could push counters across like it was a Risk board or one of those battle maps you see generals and world leaders standing over in movies, documentaries, and photos. I have so many silly old games no one plays anymore... the version of risk I have still uses the old three pointed and five pointed counters for the armies and not the molded figures you see today. So nicely generic. Lord of the Rings Monopoly... odd christmas gift because they thought since I liked fantasy... but it still has money in the original rubber bands BUT it did have tiny forts and castles instead of houses and hotels. Shogun? Hundreds of tiny color coded samurai and two stage castles.
I got nearly everything I need honestly to do something up for my players. I just need to pick up a couple medieval or civil war standard bearers to represent major generals in the world and get to painting them up with the major house banners and I am set.
It is odd though how the moment a massive game board comes out, people's perceptions change. I am currently using the back of my never used World of Warcraft: The Board Game map as the future backing of the board... something that had only given me an infinite supply of cheap D8s to pretty much throw about or use as the cores of dice buildings and tons of cheap monster stand ins in the years since I wasted money on it. Glad to see it get one more use out of it. Now, if I can get a use of the cards, I will have scavanged it for everything it is worth.
Well... I'll try to post updates as I go on this... going to have to start marking out the province borders properly of the surface and the two major underdark regions.
Monday, August 1, 2011
The Inevitable Age of Wonders
It doesn't matter what the game, what the setting but there is always an age of wonders. It is the ancient age where the artifacts came from. Legendary god kings and dragons the size of cities. Where demons and giants walked the earth. An age of myth. The stuff of bards And the one big thing is that... it has come to an end.
Be it in fire, by the breaking of the world, barbarians, corruption from the inside, or just the slow atrophy of time... it has ended.
How does it end? How does it go from a period of time where something like the Staff of the Magi or the Rod of Seven Parts was made and known to a period where there is only a few enchanters left that still know how to wrought steel and meld it with magic? Where magic is now the purview of only the most rarest of wizards still control the powers of the old days while the rest wallow in the dirt or dig through the ruins for what came before.
So in almost everyone of my games, the great debate always comes forward... some who want to advance... to 'modernize', to bring on the age of reason and the enlightenment. Others want to remain in an age of kings and lords... they require nothing more than strength to rule. The rarest seem to want to return to the age of the god kings.
But still, how did we get here? How did it happen in your games? How fast did it happen? Is it three millennium ago and lives on in legend? Did it just happen and the players are living in the ashes of the collapse?
For me, I went for the popular breaking of the world and slow degradation of the world as it moved towards it nadir and then slowly up towards the age of enlightenment. It is the benefit of running a world that across the many campaigns has crawled across 1,300 years of history... actually mapping out the evolution of cultures... but I never addressed how it reached the original nadir point. All the other disasters, they were story driven or player driven... but I never addressed the original breaking of the world... it never came up.
Till now. Now, it is like the players are the archeologists, digging through the dirt of three millenium to search for the titans of greek mythology... completely Indian Jones stuff... trying to uncover what happened because one of those titans decided to wake up. Now, I need to do the work.
Be it in fire, by the breaking of the world, barbarians, corruption from the inside, or just the slow atrophy of time... it has ended.
How does it end? How does it go from a period of time where something like the Staff of the Magi or the Rod of Seven Parts was made and known to a period where there is only a few enchanters left that still know how to wrought steel and meld it with magic? Where magic is now the purview of only the most rarest of wizards still control the powers of the old days while the rest wallow in the dirt or dig through the ruins for what came before.
So in almost everyone of my games, the great debate always comes forward... some who want to advance... to 'modernize', to bring on the age of reason and the enlightenment. Others want to remain in an age of kings and lords... they require nothing more than strength to rule. The rarest seem to want to return to the age of the god kings.
But still, how did we get here? How did it happen in your games? How fast did it happen? Is it three millennium ago and lives on in legend? Did it just happen and the players are living in the ashes of the collapse?
For me, I went for the popular breaking of the world and slow degradation of the world as it moved towards it nadir and then slowly up towards the age of enlightenment. It is the benefit of running a world that across the many campaigns has crawled across 1,300 years of history... actually mapping out the evolution of cultures... but I never addressed how it reached the original nadir point. All the other disasters, they were story driven or player driven... but I never addressed the original breaking of the world... it never came up.
Till now. Now, it is like the players are the archeologists, digging through the dirt of three millenium to search for the titans of greek mythology... completely Indian Jones stuff... trying to uncover what happened because one of those titans decided to wake up. Now, I need to do the work.
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