I dare say the best answer to this is FFH NES II.
If you haven't checked that NES, you really should.
Immac asked some players to play for a limited amount of time. This ment that each of these players knew he would eventually 'die'. This opened the way for Mighty screw-ups. It was easier to do in a fantasy setting than it would be in an alt-hist, but still. You could consider Napoleon a player that has 5 updates to cause as much fuss as possible before being eventually taken out.
In this NES, I planned a character to eventually die, cursing his killer. That failed because noone managed to kill me, but I managed to actually turn the whole continent into more of a mess than it already was. all for the sake of role-playing.
I didn't need stats, prestige or legacy (as called in EQ's NES). I don't think assigning prestige to someone who roleplays is much of an incentive. If I play to write stories, I don't play to "win", so telling mee I "won" is meaningless. You need something different from prestige to get people to screw up. They either want to, or you task specific players/nations to have a short life in which they should try to do as much as they can. It can be something like I described from FFH NES II, orsomething like "You're Mongolia, you're united under a single khan. For as long as he lives, you're a powerhouse, but know that on his death in 3 or 4 updates, your empire will split and other players will take over parts of it. Now go and make yourself remembered".
I don't really like that solution for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it involves me basically telling certain players what to do, and that is
prima facie bad. If a mod's going to be writing the story of the NES to that extent, the player might as well join an EQ NES and be sure of an research team-approved update every week like clockwork.
Another problem is that your example doesn't actually, um, mean much of anything. I know players have gone off and roleplayed incompetence and/or a deliberate attempt to go out in a blaze of glory or whatnot, just to make the story interesting in a given NES without any incentives. I gave an example of it myself. Hell, I've
done it myself, as the various incarnations of the Hurrians in JalNES II, which were pre-Satar Satar minus the angst. So I know that people do that sort of thing without any stat or reward incentive at all, believe me. But the rarity of doing things like that has to be noted. You just don't get people doing things badly
for the purpose of creating an interesting world very often.
Now, you do get a lot of people who are incompetent because they just don't know any better or just don't care. Sometimes you can identify them and separate them from the people who are trying to create an interesting story, and sometimes you can't. Ideally, we want to encourage bad play for the sake of worldbuilding and discourage bad play because one doesn't know any better. (And good play for the sake of worldbuilding, of course. But some people are always automatically going to strive for that.)
What if the rewards were both fairly substantial and rare? Not like something that would take the place of dasian random events (which, if I remember correctly, is the switch you did) but something that would come to one or maybe two players every third or fourth turn. Acting suboptimal would then be more like entering a lottery. Think something like- 'Will I last long enough to get my extra troops and maybe just maybe complete the conquest of the three natural enemies I declared war on all at the same time?' Obviously, players don't have to do things so extreme, but with acting deliberately suboptimal, there always would be a good chance that a player would lose more stat-wise than they would gain. Still, the chance of any reward at all would shift good but conservative player's expected values, which might help with what you're trying to accomplish for your new stat. Without linkages, any player who's more interested in seeing virtue rise more than army size or economy would have to be a fairly chaotic player to begin with-but with even a tentative association between virtue and something more practical, the calculus would get screwed up. I get the feeling that you're looking for a mechanism a little bit less obvious, but in this specific case, I'm fairly sure less obvious would mean less effective. Would you want only some roleplayers to care about virtue, or everyone?
This was like reading one of Swissempire's posts from last fall.
I honestly don't think that making all players who want to play badly, but in-character, and for the purpose of creating an interesting story play Random Event Roulette to potentially get a sizable bonus that will completely change their play style makes sense from an incentivizing point of view. I don't want
everybody to deliberately play badly, because a NES that is composed entirely of a comedy of errors isn't interesting. I thought this whole question was relatively simple: what sort of things should I be looking at for this 'best actor' type stat, and how. I guess it's impossible to get people to actually comment on the thing I wanted to talk about.
Imago said:
Not quite the same idea, but maybe the forum should have a game where players took countries and tried to run them into the ground for one or two turns, then switched to their actual preferred country, and tried to fix things.
I don't think we have the player base for anything like that.
I think the best way to implement an idea like Dachs was suggesting would require some kind of leaders with traits that affect your nation. The resolution of otherwise bad situations would cause the development of very strong characters. The only problem with this is that it requires a certain kind of timescale to work, with each turn probably being a maximum of 15 years long. Which would be too short for many NESes I suppose.
Um, how would that change anything? As things are, the NESers play as leaders who have traits - not explicitly defined in terms of stats, or anything, but I don't see how that's necessary or even desirable - and make decisions that affect their states.
One thing that could be interesting in a way would be for players not to play a single country, but to regularly switch nations after a small number of turns. Without having an attatchment to a specific country many players would be more prepared to play suboptimally to create interesting events.
I actually do want to see this tried. Preferably carefully.
Players already don't have enough attachment to their specific countries. In general, players are much too willing to gamble and stake the existence of their country - something that would be extraordinarily rare historically - on perceived slights or affronts to honor. We get stupid
Highlander wars all the time. Honestly, I think encouraging
more attachment to one's country is what we need to aim for, not less.
The idea of having separate players play different rulers of a given state is a good one for different reasons, and it's one that would be great to pull off, but the player base is simply too small to support such an undertaking except in NESes with a ridiculously small number of potential players.
