New NESes, ideas, development, etc

[Anonymoose]

Well I wanted to let this wait, but I guess I can let it out. I was planning on the virus/bacteria/parasite/minirobot giving those immune special abilities. Not abilities that would make them superheroes or anything, but some that could really diversify the story lines. Such abilities would include elevated stamina, body efficiency, elevated fitness, like that of an olympic athlete or better, emphatic bond with an animal, heightened reflexes, pseudo- spider sense. Of course, the player could opt out of such abilities, and wouldn't receive their downside. This idea is being a little troublesome, but I'm pretty sure I want the animals immune.
Edit: I reread all the posts, and I missed Ventinari's last paragraph, I thought it was part of his signature or something. Are you thinking like the zombies from I am Legend? They were pretty badass.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Hypothetical question. Assuming the use of an "Initiative point" system to represent the varying flexibility of different governments, who should have more of those: a bureaucratic absolute monarchy, with great power and a cumbersome system for implementing it, or a tribal kingship, with much more limited (de facto if not de jure) power but theoretically more immediate methods for its execution? Likewise for various more complicated government forms like those encountered in the poleis of different stages of ancient Greek history, the English parliamentary monarchy in the various stages of its existence and so on. I need your opinions here, with some exhausting and consistent justification if possible.

To begin, you need to know how you want to use IP and what the effect of having more or less is on game play. Second, you need to know how complicated you want the "calculation" to be and what items you want to track over time. To be effective in game play, IP must demand that players make hard choices. They should constrain most players and if they don't, then there is no reason to have them.

In BirdNES 3 I used a complicated formula based on two categories of items: resources and factions. I treated initiative points as a combination. A ruler with lots of resources and little internal opposition would have more initiative than one with lots of internal opposition. A ruler of a poor nation with lots of opposition would have little or no initiative capability.

Resources: prestige, cash, economic strength, loyal factions and government institutions all add to the IP value. Factional opposition or disloyalty to the ruler subtracts from it. The stronger the opposition, the more constraints on the leaders and therefore he gets fewer IP. The idea is that the resources create the ability to act and the "fear" of ones enemies holds you back. for me the idea works for whatever type of government or ruling situation you have. The opposition could a be person of power, a family, a parliament or general etc.

The games setting (and progress through time) would determine what a nation's resources are and whatever model was being used to track loyalty/disloyalty would round out the components. More complex governments would require a more complex model.

A very simple model might look like this:

IP = EP + gov't bureaucracy score - opposition level

Now such a calculation would probably need to be modified to keep control over the scores and make sure that average IP scores stayed at appropriate level to not be game breakers. Perhaps you have set "3" as the desired average. Given that EP and bureaucracy scores will grow over time and opposition scores will have some sort of max that will not usually be reached, you might set the formula up like so:

IP = (EP/2) + (GB/3) - opposition and the result rounded up or down. The divisors would be dependent upon the allowed ranges of EP and bureaucracy scores.

 

[Vertinari118]

Edit: I reread all the posts, and I missed Ventinari's last paragraph, I thought it was part of his signature or something. Are you thinking like the zombies from I am Legend? They were pretty badass.

Never seen it though I want to. No I was thinking along the lines of what a real disease can do. A disease could, in theory, modify the human body or stimulate brain activity to 'reanimate' a dead body but it has not and never will happen in nature because there is no point to it. It is far more likely that the pathogen will in some way damage the brain, causing heightened aggression, confusion, irrational behaviour and possible 'increases' in strength, speed, reflexes as it forces the body to its maximum potential, like a kind of super rabies. The press and panicking civilians would end up branding the ill as supernatural zombies in their fear.

 

[Milarqui]

"I am Legend" zombies aren't zombies. A more accurate description would be vampires.

 

[Anonymoose]

They're all zombies, because that classification is easy. I was going to have those afflicted by the pathogen go into a coma-like state while their nervous system was ravaged by the disease or parasite or microbots, w/e. I never liked the idea of reanimating corpses because it's just not reasonable.

 

[Vertinari118]

I assume by that you mean the brain. A general attack on the nervous system would cause paralysis as the peripheral nervous system dies. I would recommend having a disease which is spread by bodily fluids, such as saliva, or parasites or whichever thing you choose, which spreads through the nervous system causing aches and pains, loss of mobility but nothing dire. Once it reaches the spinal cord and the central nervous system it becomes more serious and starts severely limiting movement and causing crippling pains down one side of the body. This passes as the whatever begins to affect the brain and a gradual descent into madness and zombieitis begins. At this point it is impossible to treat and highly infectious, not a good combination.

If you want to go down the coma route I would suggest an auto-immune disease with a virus as the underlying cause. The virus attacks the regulatory T cells responsible for guarding the brain against auto-immune responses and other auto-immune T cells order the immune system to attack the brain. The brain shuts down all non-essential functions to protect itself, a coma. The virus is subdued and the T-reg population rises again. The brain comes out of its coma in a highly altered state, aggressive etc. The scientists cannot contain the outbreak because they do not realise a virus is causing it and it spreads like wildfire. Sound like what your after to me.

 

[Bil]

"I am Legend" zombies aren't zombies. A more accurate description would be vampires.

Based on their general description from the book, and their portrayal in 'Last Man On Earth', with a slight addition of their portrayal in 'I Am Legend', my friends and I have taken to calling them zompires. Vampires, if vampires were slow (even though they aren't in the movie adaptation titled 'I Am Legend') and slightly dumb, and liked standing outside of a house moaning for the guy inside to come out and be eaten.

 

[Anonymoose]

Well when I first wrote it up, I considered a virus, (only because I'm familiar with them) but I'm seriously considering the microbots. Michael Crichton used the concept pretty effectively, and it would be something different.. not to mention something that I don't spend days of my life studying. I really do appreciate all the feedback. As I continue working on this idea, I may ask for more assistance, and if any of you have additional ideas, I would like to hear them. The effort that you all have put into typing up the ideas will make the ZombieNES even better when I publish it on the forums. I don't know how to moderate a NES, but that is a problem for another day.

Based on their general description from the book, and their portrayal in 'Last Man On Earth', with a slight addition of their portrayal in 'I Am Legend', my friends and I have taken to calling them zompires. Vampires, if vampires were slow (even though they aren't in the movie adaptation titled 'I Am Legend') and slightly dumb, and liked standing outside of a house moaning for the guy inside to come out and be eaten.

Those zombi(r)es were pretty savage in the movie, and they scared the hell out of me in the book. The sprinters and jumpers that I mentioned before are based almost entirely on the savagery displayed in the film.

 

[das]

In the example you used, the tribal kingship would have a higher number of initiative points, but it's real ability for 'getting things done' would be comparatively lower.

Are you sure it won't be the opposite? The whole point of having a bureaucracy is to be capable of doing more things all at once. The main problem that could be observed in any advanced bureaucratic state is that lots of things get started, but few actually "get done"; in other words, the central government can only control its bureaucracy so much, and the bigger it is, the more factors emerge to complicate control and obscure observation.

My question is, taking this paradox common to all bureaucratic states into account, should a large bureaucratic monarchy have more initiative points or less? As far as answering that question goes, you seem to be saying that it should have less, but that they should count for more. Right?

In the Hundred Days Reform, the Guangxu Emperor attempts to spend more initiative points than he has, and as a result conservative forces take him out of power. If he had focused on simple military reform, or simple land reform, it would have been accomplished far more effectively than a more mobile, less organized Maratha state, for example, with less bureaucracy for implementation of reform.

a) You can't spend more initiative points than you have, but you can stretch them as much as you'd like (within reason), though that will obviously dilute them accordingly; b) I'm not sure if the failure of the Hundred Days Reform had anything to do with Initiative Points - it seems to have much more to do with various preexisting factors of internal politics; c) land reforms are never "simple", and I'm sure that a land reform alone would've been enough to piss lots of people off; d) even more irrelevant than c, but it's established tradition (Russian, Chinese, whatever), and probably with good reason, to do several reforms all at once, because usually, a society's problems are all interconnected and solving any one of them requires addressing the others at least partly.

Consider an initiative point as being useful for anything

That is how I understand it as well.

In general, a tribal kingship will have an army suited to that government philosophy: Fast and small. An absolute monarchy will have an army that is (comparatively) large and slow.

No, not quite. Tribal kingships tend to have a small and mobile elite (professional) force, or retinue, but it is always the nucleus of a much larger fyrd or what have you. Absolute monarchies tend to have a relatively small, but disciplined, professional, regular army (Louis XIV is atypical in this regard, due to both his ambitions and his resources; likewise the Hohenzollerns).

For another example, early revolutionary Bolshevik Russia suffered heavy territory losses to White forces due to its' low-power nature. As it stabilized and increased its' power, decreasing its initiative, the military effort improved.

As I understand it, Bolsheviks never had much of a lead in initiative as compared to the Whites; and their one key advantage from the outset was in what you call power. If anything it was a bit diluted in the early stages of the war due to rapid expansion, then was painfully consolidated again. Whites never had much "power" (due to constant suicidal squabbling and whatnot), but generally had the advantage in initiative (though ofcourse that was many different White factions fighting at once).

This was because of the resources at hand, not their government systems.

Certainly so, but I'm sure you will agree that war and history do not depend on available resources and luck alone; which is why I felt the need to try and single out Initiative.

They should constrain most players and if they don't, then there is no reason to have them.

What about making them assign clear priorities? This seems the best way to achieve that, all things considered.

 

[Dachs]

Certainly so, but I'm sure you will agree that war and history do not depend on available resources and luck alone; which is why I felt the need to try and single out Initiative.

Yeah, but initiative in war dependent on government system? The only limiting factor in terms of initiative that I can think of linking to a government more than to the resources available would be having sufficient leaders one can trust - more a function of temporary political conditions, not really a systemic thing.

I'm absolute garbage at making rules, all I seem to be able to do is find some exceptions...

 

[das]

I was talking more about things like logistics, organisation and maybe grand strategy. The main idea is that the government has to divide its attention between many different things, including the political and organisational side of waging war.

 

[Thlayli]

I'm not sure about the power/initiative dichotomy in times of war.

We agree that the bureaucratic absolutist state would have more power than the tribal kingship, but would it really have more initiative? If so, what's the advantage of having a less organized state?

Let's take the example of the Anglo-Boer or Anglo-Zulu Wars. I'd argue that the British enemies had more of an advantage in initiative due to their mobility, but less of a real ability to win victories due to their lower power, power as defined by army quality and quantity.

 

[das]

We agree that the bureaucratic absolutist state would have more power than the tribal kingship,

See, I'm not so sure. You defined power as the ability to "get things done"; but past a certain threshold of bureaucratic development, it actually becomes more and more difficult to carry out any plans reliably, as can be observed on many, many examples (see just about any ambitious reform project in China; some succeed, but the effect is still delayed and diluted by bureaucratic anarchy; Petrine to early 19th century Russia is a pretty nice example of how bureaucratic development can get well and truly out of hand after some early benign successes).

 

[Thlayli]

That's true. To a certain extent, internal dissent/resistance to absolute power like the royal/parliament squabbles of 15th-17th century England are so rarely modeled well in NESes.

To a lesser extent, opposition parties in modern democratic governments.

 

[das]

Ah, that's a different problem from what I've been talking about, though it certainly is also worth taking into account. Still, political opposition goes under political factors that would affect the course and outcome of actions; initiative is responsible for their initiation, or so I would think.

 

[Thlayli]

So, the only question I have remaining is, what exactly is the advantage of having a decentralized state? More raw power?

 

[Dachs]

Decentralization, among other things, is a good way for grievances/ideas of the lower orders to become issues. Faceless, bureaucratic states tend not to notice those sorts of things?

I was talking more about things like logistics, organisation and maybe grand strategy. The main idea is that the government has to divide its attention between many different things, including the political and organisational side of waging war.

That sort of thing doesn't tend to actually affect the conduct of the war or operations - if I understand what you're trying to say, and how you're differentiating it from resources available. Can you think of some examples?

 

[Birdjaguar]

a) You can't spend more initiative points than you have, but you can stretch them as much as you'd like (within reason), though that will obviously dilute them accordingly;

What about making them assign clear priorities? This seems the best way to achieve that, all things considered.

To understand initiative in game terms, we need a clear expression of what it is supposed to do in the game. To represent constraint on a player/government, it has to limit what a player can do in a turn. As I see it, IP should not have a direct effect on the result of an action. They should influence whether or not the action gets started and, perhaps, the probability of success, just not the nature of the success or failure. This kind of approach necessitates identifying what actions need IP and what is the optimum number required for a specific action's success. If IP requirements and allocations are more flexible, the system will get more complicated to administer.

Why not just have players tell you how they want them spent? If a player knows he has 3 IP and has a list of what he can do for how many, then he could just say how to spend them, or do you envision something different? Now if actions are also tagged with a date/year that would act as a sequencing agent.

Ah, that's a different problem from what I've been talking about, though it certainly is also worth taking into account. Still, political opposition goes under political factors that would affect the course and outcome of actions; initiative is responsible for their initiation, or so I would think.

I think that it is easier to have the available IP already account for political opposition so players do not have to try and figure out the impact of political opposition.

 

[das]

So, the only question I have remaining is, what exactly is the advantage of having a decentralized state? More raw power?

Less maintenance.

Also, what Dachs said.

That sort of thing doesn't tend to actually affect the conduct of the war or operations - if I understand what you're trying to say, and how you're differentiating it from resources available.

What I am saying is that Initiative Points will be used for all government actions, and that includes launching and sustaining military campaigns, with all the preparatory and logistical work that involves.

Why not just have players tell you how they want them spent? If a player knows he has 3 IP and has a list of what he can do for how many, then he could just say how to spend them, or do you envision something different?

I am simply not in favour of a hard limit on how much a player can do in a turn, regardless of Initiative, since, well, that just doesn't make any sense to me historically or practically. The idea is that people would assign relatively less Initiative to less important/difficult actions, which would decrease the chances of success/delays progress/makes the outcome less benign or at least less predictable, thus also encouraging people to focus on fewer actions.

I think that it is easier to have the available IP already account for political opposition so players do not have to try and figure out the impact of political opposition.

I do not think so, because political circumstances are unpredictable and ever-shifting, and usually quite subtle. Besides, it is your government's initiative; why should things like country size or political opposition limit it? They affect the process and the outcome, like I already said; they can not directly influence the initiation, except possibly in a parliamentary setup.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I do not think so, because political circumstances are unpredictable and ever-shifting, and usually quite subtle. Besides, it is your government's initiative; why should things like country size or political opposition limit it? They affect the process and the outcome, like I already said; they can not directly influence the initiation, except possibly in a parliamentary setup.

I guess then our differences hinge upon what it means too "initiate". Does it merely mean to say "let's do this" or more of "to implement", to start and carry through on the process. Declaring war is not the same as to initiate a war by sending troops into battle. That seems to be where we differ.

Under the second definition, there are lots of ways to derail government initiatives that don't involve a parliamentary set up: court intrigues, bribes, murder, bureaucratic "failure to act", etc.