Development/Preview of RNES11: as 'story' as I go

[RoddyVR]

Between Canuck runing a game with an edited version of my Election game rules, and the real life elections being over, i have been thinking about making another ruleset with the elections as the theme...

I think in this game i will actualy encourage stories quite a bit, and give tangible bonuses for them (well maybe not for oneline crapy ones, but you get the idea)

here's the basic background.
The current government has devolved into a one party system and has an approval rating of about 2%, and its clear that in the coming elections, any incumbant that is challenged by anything resembling a real candidate will be easily unseated. In addition a law mandating that EVERYONE vote has been passed, and every elected seat in the federal government is up for grabs.
In the comming election a President, 100 Senators and 535 Congressmen will be elected, and most of them will be from newly formed political parties.

You the player are not a simple candidate, you are the head of a Political Party, your job is to lead your party to win as much power as possible. It'll be nice to have your president(maybe you even take that candidacy for yourself) but, having 66 senators be from your party would be almost if not more powerful.

There will be a few key issues, on which your party will have to take a firm position. (i'm hoping the players will provide the issues, anything from a war to defining marriage as a union between two naturalborn humans to changing the color of the flag, it makes no difference what the specific issues are).
The populace will be semy randomly devided between being For, Against, or Not care each issue. So there will be people who will only vote for someone that is "for" every single issue, and there will be others who will vote for anyone as long as he's "agains" issue #1.

A candidate of your party can win by being For or Against teh right issues (ie most people in the state/nation agree with his views) or by just being a realy appealing candidate to those people who dont care for the issues (they vote for him because they like his face, or cause his last name starts with a H, or some other useless reason like that). These Issueless people are in a large majority at the start of the game (they're the ones that used to not vote), but during the game the players can do things to make specific issues more important to more of the population.
So at the start you dont realy know if making your candidate more popular with the dumbasses is more or less important then promoting the issues that he stands for.

 

[RoddyVR]

you can buy/get:
Polls.
Private Opinion Poll - Finance a poll to find out public opinion on an issue. You get results in a PM.
Open Opinion Poll - Finance a poll to find out public opinion on an issue, and sell the results to the media, costs you much less, but results are posted in update for everyone to see.
Rigged Opinion Poll - Finance a poll to find out public opinion on an issue, but rig the results, then sell it to the media. Publicly cheap, but realy very expensive (comes from hidden funds) to make the poll look legitimate. Results you want are posted in Update among the Open Poll results.
Race Projection Poll - Finance a poll to find out who is leading in a specific race.

Advertizements. Costs 1x per Ad. 10x for ad targeting a Presedential Candidate (Promo or Smear ads)
Issue Ad (Increase issue importance) - Buy an ad to convincing the populace to pick one side of an issue over the other.
Promo Ad (Increase Candidate's appeal) - Buy an ad promoting your candidate in a specific race.
Smear Ad (decrease rival's appeal) - Buy an ad attacking a rival candidate.
Voter Ad (Increase all Isues proportionaly) - Buy an ad advocating responsible voting. Popular Issues win more from this then unpopular ones.


Candidates.
President - Your party nominates a candidate for the presidency. Costs 20X per turn. Does two "Presedential Appearances" a turn. Each of which does a nation wide Issue Ad, a Promo Ad (promoting any of your candidates, including himself), and One ad of your choice: State Issue ad, another Promo Ad, or a Smear Ad (target any candidate you want, presedential or not).
Senator - Nominate a candidate for one of 2 Senate seats in a state. Costs 2x per turn. Does a "Senator Appearance" every turn. Which is one Issue Ad in the state, and Two other ads of your choice: Issue ad in this state, Promo ad for himself, or Smear anyone else in the state
Congresman - Nominate a cadidate for a House seat in a state. Costs 1X per turn. Does one Ad per turn. Your choice of: an Issue ad in this state, Promo ad for himself, or Smear anyone else in the state.

 

[RoddyVR]

i still need to figure out how to do fundraising in the game.
and should i add Scandals and Coverups to the list of things you can do, so that there's something else to do with your "hidden" money (proly just a starting figure, cause how would you fundraise for this?), or should it just be for rigged polls?

Also need a map, initialy i was planning to use a USA map, but i'm afraid 50 states is just a bit too much... so i may end up either combining some of the states (think "new england state") or just using a different country.

another thing that i need to figure out/develop is this:
right now, there's no way to get voters LESS interested in important issues. so if someone decided that their strategy was going to center around making realy popular candidates and ignores issues altogether, then in the beggining that person's candidates will be winning, but as the game progresses, the issues will become more important, and his candidates will start losing ground.
the problem is that this person's win or loss depends mostly on how long the game goes. so i need some way to make issues less important... i was thinking maybe do like a "filler" issue that would do the oposite of what a Voter Ad does, just lowers the number of people who use one of the real issues to decide who they vote for.

 

[RoddyVR]

how i'm hoping the game turns out is that there will be a few crossing but not directly connected battles.

the most obveous of some players paying to get people to vote "for the war" while others are paying to get people to vote "against the war".
there should be a battle like that for every issue.

at the same time, there's the "popularity" issue for each candidate race... so the presidential candidates would be trying to be more popular with teh nonissue voters at the same time as trying to make their sides of each issue more popular.

if there's more then 2 players (which there should be), then you'll have players that agree on one issue but disagree on another,
so
player one would have the positions of For #1, For #2
player two would have the positions of For #1, Against #2
and player three would be Against #1 and Against #2

which means that players one and two would cooperate to make Issue one's "for" side more popular across the country, but would fight it out on issue 2.

With 2 senators, and a bunch of Congressmen from each state, there could be alliences between players who's Issues match somewhat. like in the above example, if player one and two agreed to have 1 Senate candidate each in california, they could both put the majority of their efforts into making the "for" position on issue 1 the dominant one in the state, thereby basicaly killing player 3's senate candidate in the state. Player 3, realizing that he cant win in california would give up on it, and at that point, players 1 and 2 would start fighting in callifornia on the other issue, because each would want his presedential candidate to win the state and its issue 2 that would determine it (since they're on the same side of issue 1)


at the same time there's the Promo/Smear wars in each race, in a fight to win the "nonissue" voters.
do you use your money to promote your own candidate, or do you use it to smear one of the competition. if a few players gang up on one in a smearing campaign, he will quickly lose the popularity vote.

Then there's the fight between the player who's clearly won the issue thing, and the one who's clearly won the popularity thing... one wants to promote the issues more, so there are less clueless voters, the other wants to distract voters from the issues so that more of them vote based on his charm and personality. (disclaimer: i gotta figure out a way to add this last part to the game, or decide on a time line)

 

[North King]

This was one of my ideas for a future NES, but perhaps it is for the best if you are modding it.

I would play. Would it be for one election, or many?

 

[Swissempire]

Looks very interesting, i actually have a party idea. You should add "random scandals" which can be as minor as you said something bad when you were 21 or as major as you had sex with a little kiddie.

For fundraising, you should have stuff like:

Phone Banking-1x
Letter Writing Campaing- 1x
Public Appearence-1x(could also help your prestige or something of the sort)
Media Apperance-3x
Rally- 2x
Telethon- 3x
Special Interests Donations-2x(But tarnishes your image a little, and these interests start to have pull over your candidates desciions, so its risky)
Dinner Plate Fundraiser-5x

and you could go progressivly higher

The x's are what you must pay to do it, and the amount you get back is up to the Mod.