Concordia Thread

[Tributary]

@Cobalt said in Concordia Thread:

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

I am guilty of using it for character desc’s because I hate character descs.

I suppose that’s more reliable than making me write your character descs because I’m prone to forgetting if I’m busy when you ask me.

[Evilgrayson]

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

[dvoraen]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

A bit of a peanut gallery comment on my part, but there is (at least?) one OC character that was ennobled by marriage that was approved, so. There’s that.

[Aria]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

I’m of two minds on this. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a little bit more variety in social rank for the sake of variation, especially if it were balanced out by other things…

“Well, yes, that House is a Duchy, but their power is all in the past. The real powers in the south are Count JohnDoe, who has more money than half the continent combined and Marquessa SallySmith, whose has the largest army we’ve seen in a generation and holds our border against the biggest rift we’ve seen since the Genesis Rift.”

That said, I’m also someone who spent actual literal real life years slowly grinding my way from “County that has stats that don’t technicaly qualify as a County” to “March that’s closer to Duchy than not in everything except Area” on Arx. And not just because this seemed like the goal everyone was supposed to want, but specifically so I wouldn’t have to deal with a single intolerable asshole of a player that was in my fealty chain and who took advantage of that while bullying me and a few other people.

Not having whatever luck of the draw rando that apps into a roster decide they’re my boss and that they want to be a jerk about it, no matter how may theme files said “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this is supposed to work”, is kind of… nice?

[Polk]

@Aria The model you want, in my opinion, is the Holy Roman Empire. A bunch of Kingdoms, Principalities, Archbishoprics, Bishoprics… and lots of other things that all had representation in the Reichstag.

Kings were more important than Princes, but a King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality.

[SpaceKhomeini]

In terms of “What can we do with fantastic feudalism:”

Something that would evoke a twinge of familiarity while being “new and novel” to probably the majority of players would be something that was modelled after, say, the Parthian (or Sassanid but they kinda became a bit more dickish after endless beef with Rome) empires.

Frank Herbert toyed with this a little bit in Dune but mainly (IMO, I am happily proven wrong) limited such dabbling to terminology and flavor text.

[Polk]

@SpaceKhomeini Oooh yeah Dune’s was interesting. Sort of a post-Magna Carta-ish Feudal system. The Emperor was sovereign, but the Houses of the Landsraad had rights.

[mietze]

@Evilgrayson that’s nice in thought, but it’s rare that staff attention can fully flesh out to support a huge scope of classes. my experience playing a non-noble was that nobles pushed themselves into everything, or when they couldn’t they made it so unpleasant with complaints or just straight up being oocly rude that it was offputting, and there weren’t enough non-nobles to not have to engage with those folks. that’s been the case with pretty much EVERY feudal style game I’ve played (so like…5 or 6. Not a huge amount spread out over 20+ years). And on the last feudal game i played it was a real downer every time someone got promoted to the next rank to hear all the stupid ass catty comments and complaints ooc (including ye olde standard well they just fucked the right person and i didn’t see them do anything even though I don’t RP outside my circle so obviously it didn’t happen.

People are still going to be rude assholes no matter what. But I’m actually kind of excited to see the class tension storylines already in motion might actually get to play out instead of being nerfed like they have been on several other places. I think that’s easier to do when you aren’t trying to support a wide scope of PCs where you are going to run into PvP conflict between different classes of pcs where there is a huge power differential.

[somasatori]

coughs Fading Suns coughs

[Aria]

@Polk said in Concordia Thread:

@Aria The model you want, in my opinion, is the Holy Roman Empire. A bunch of Kingdoms, Principalities, Archbishoprics, Bishoprics… and lots of other things that all had representation in the Reichstag.

Kings were more important than Princes, but a King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality.

I mean, I guess so, but not specifically? What I actually want is the ability to opt in to conflict that I enjoy and that all the players are on board with and find fun, not have it dropped on my head by some rando who has anger issues and confused “I picked this character off a roster” with “I have proven myself as a leader and earned this position”.

If setting adjustments can fix or even alleviate that, cool! Great! I fully support that or even just attempts at reducing that! I’m pretty sure that’s what they are attempting to do with the relatively flat structures and titles on Concordia.

More likely the only way to guarantee people won’t get away with behaving that way is the people who are actually in charge (by which I mean staff) going, “Hey, fuckface. Would you knock it off?”, though that isn’t particularly pleasant for anyone, either.

[Pavel]

@Polk said in Concordia Thread:

King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality

Of course, in the HRE there was only one king, the King of the Romans. And Bohemia but they weren’t even German so they hardly counted except for the times they were the Emperor.

[mietze]

@somasatori yep. No matter the intention on a game that allows everything the guilds never fill out well and neither does the church though you will def have a handful of Amaltheans and Brother Battle.

I think its better to pick your focus on a stratified world game and you’ll get more actual real meat of storylines about that conflict than you do with players feeling competitive for storytelling attention focused on their class, because on a broad scope game with players allowed to choose anything with lip service (even if intended to be true at first) that they will get some focus it just really hasn’t been sustainable long term that I’ve seen. And then that leads to player jealousy and frustration that they take out on each other.

And even on a specific class focused game you can then run in to the 2,872 Houses with 2,805 of those with 1 person in them after their friends bailed that still get pissed they can’t move up the tiers faster because they are convinced that being higher will gain them the attention they perceive others have because they are “more important.”

I get that people love creating many things to call their own, but i am interested and glad to see if sticking to established smaller number of houses and not trying to support pcs who aren’t ennobled will lead to less player sniping at each other especially in combination with excessively squeaky wheels maybe being just taken off rather than given a lot of personal time and extra special grease.

Will it be perfect, no. I am interested to see what happens though.

[somasatori]

@mietze I’ve come to agree wholeheartedly with this perspective. One or two spheres for WoD is a more effective experience than playing everything under the sun (moon?). If I were to run a Fading Suns game it would be only one group (probably Guilds, I’m a Charioteer whenever I play). It seems like that would create a stronger story experience since everyone is focused on the same general pathway vs. five semi-opposed player orgs working on their own unique agendas.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Polk

Yeah, to be honest the setting felt more Byzantine/Ottoman but it’s thousands of years in the future and clearly designed to be a mash-up.

Also I just took advantage of this thread to talk about the Dune universe, how on-brand.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

@somasatori yep. No matter the intention on a game that allows everything the guilds never fill out well and neither does the church though you will def have a handful of Amaltheans and Brother Battle.

I think its better to pick your focus on a stratified world game and you’ll get more actual real meat of storylines about that conflict than you do with players feeling competitive for storytelling attention focused on their class, because on a broad scope game with players allowed to choose anything with lip service (even if intended to be true at first) that they will get some focus it just really hasn’t been sustainable long term that I’ve seen. And then that leads to player jealousy and frustration that they take out on each other.

And even on a specific class focused game you can then run in to the 2,872 Houses with 2,805 of those with 1 person in them after their friends bailed that still get pissed they can’t move up the tiers faster because they are convinced that being higher will gain them the attention they perceive others have because they are “more important.”

I get that people love creating many things to call their own, but i am interested and glad to see if sticking to established smaller number of houses and not trying to support pcs who aren’t ennobled will lead to less player sniping at each other especially in combination with excessively squeaky wheels maybe being just taken off rather than given a lot of personal time and extra special grease.

Will it be perfect, no. I am interested to see what happens though.

What I’ve found with a lot of sprawling political game settings is that people tend to make a cardinal mistake from the very start.

By “People” I specifically mean “me.” I like to throw in believable scale and toss out this giant, overbuilt world that is frankly too large to handle any reasonable-sized playerbase and unless you’re running a huge game with concurrent players in the triple-digits, good luck filling out those houses/factions or whatever in any meaningful way. You (and by “you” I still mean “me”) run the risk of just sprawling the playerbase out with nothing to do.

[somasatori]

@SpaceKhomeini said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

@somasatori yep. No matter the intention on a game that allows everything the guilds never fill out well and neither does the church though you will def have a handful of Amaltheans and Brother Battle.

I think its better to pick your focus on a stratified world game and you’ll get more actual real meat of storylines about that conflict than you do with players feeling competitive for storytelling attention focused on their class, because on a broad scope game with players allowed to choose anything with lip service (even if intended to be true at first) that they will get some focus it just really hasn’t been sustainable long term that I’ve seen. And then that leads to player jealousy and frustration that they take out on each other.

And even on a specific class focused game you can then run in to the 2,872 Houses with 2,805 of those with 1 person in them after their friends bailed that still get pissed they can’t move up the tiers faster because they are convinced that being higher will gain them the attention they perceive others have because they are “more important.”

I get that people love creating many things to call their own, but i am interested and glad to see if sticking to established smaller number of houses and not trying to support pcs who aren’t ennobled will lead to less player sniping at each other especially in combination with excessively squeaky wheels maybe being just taken off rather than given a lot of personal time and extra special grease.

Will it be perfect, no. I am interested to see what happens though.
… unless you’re running a huge game with concurrent players in the triple-digits, good luck filling out those houses/factions or whatever in any meaningful way.

On TR we had pretty good player factions during my tenure (we were also new, so there was a lot of post-opening excitement). When I came back as a player a couple years later, it did feel sprawling and disconnected despite having triple digit player numbers. I think there’s a level of enthusiasm that needs to be shared and is difficult to quantify.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@somasatori

Yeah, for that sort of thing, you really need actively engaged staffers to nudge things along.

[Polk]

@SpaceKhomeini Gotta admit I don’t really know how the late Byzantine and Ottoman empires worked. You’re making me curious.

[SpaceKhomeini]

@Polk

The Persian Satraps were a bunch of regional/provincial governors and bankers who were nominally in place to look over the shoulders of the Satraps.

The Byzantine/Ottoman courts were so fucking dense I barely have an idea, it seems to me to be a mix of social prestige and economic leverage but I’m out of my element here.

[Pavel]

@SpaceKhomeini said in Concordia Thread:

The Byzantine/Ottoman courts were so fucking dense I barely have an idea

That’s why we describe incredibly complicated (usually needlessly complicated) systems as Byzantine. I can practically guarantee that even the folks in the middle of said systems didn’t know exactly how they worked… which was probably by design.

I have no views on the game being discussed, but hardcore history talk? I’m here for it.