Hello, all. Recently, or really off and on for the past few months, I have thought of trying my hand at GMing a NES. I have bounced around perhaps half a dozen ideas, but recently one has stuck, and I more or less have a clumsy ruleset that just needs refining and balancing. The concept is simple, taking Reapolitik (an interactive AAR style) and adjusting it to run on a world administered by a GM instead of running on a game like civ. An example of the most successful Realpolitik game to date can be found here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=362995
It was immensely successful as an 'Interactive AAR' more so I may argue than a great many forum games, IOTs, and NESes have been among themselves. What a Realpolitik is in terms of a game is that players become politicians, and run a single country. In this case, it will probably be the United States in a modern day setting, or near enough to modern day. The politicians will form parties, and parties can form coalitions to get elected. Traditionally, once elected, the president has all the power and say on running the nation, but that was for simplicity and because of the need for centralized orders for the game is was based on, Civ. But with this, power would also be in the Senate and the House in Congress, etc.
I have hit a couple of snags and decisions however, and I have decided to post here for advice. The first snag is that I don't have a map, and am incapable of making one (and I don't know how to edit one of your fancy NES style maps either), although that may be solved from what I skimmed at of the above discussion, which apparently is about creating maps and how to of it. But if anybody has a suitable modern day world map that I could use for this, that would be wonderful.
The other is a decision. I have considered double hosting this game. What that means for me and for this, is that maybe the NESers will play the senate, and I will open another thread either on Paradox or in the IOT forum and people in that forum can sign up and play as members of the house of representatives, the other congressional chamber. Or I can just centralize it here. Which way do you think will work best, or more importantly, be more interesting?
I also want to know what you think of letting players, instead of being politicians, take over the role of one of the leading generals or admirals of the military with their character, and interact with the game that way. After all, the military can wield its own political power in a way.
One other thing. Traditionally in RPs (that is, Realpolitiks) players would have 2 votes to vote for a party of their choice, and in some RPs an NPC popular vote will also be called based upon the speeches of the candidates in the thread. Would you prefer something like that, with a little tweaking to make it suitable for this game, or would you prefer each election gets decided by NPC voters in its entirety?
Thank you for your help!
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