Tani actually brings up a fair suggestion by having players choose their governments and have that determine how much the 'people' make their wishes known. It still makes the GM the arbitrary voice on what those citizens want, and when that arbitrary voice can by itself discourage a player from doing something, it can also discourage a player from playing the IOT if that action is what they play the game to do; in this case war.
If the goal of the game isn't war, and the ruleset is designed to discouraged war, then why would you join it in the first place?
I may also point out that wars of aggression, historically, are usually not necessarily looked down upon. Sure, coalitions are formed against aggressors such as Napoleon, but domestic revolt because of wars of aggression should not be as common as we seem to be trying to make them. There time period the game is set in is rather important here. And even if it is set in a modern time period, I believe that at the beginning if the player decides to make his nation full of tough resilient people that don't mind taking casualties, he should be able to do that, and not be at the mercy of GMs like Tani who say "Oh your a first world country? Any casualties that exceed 10 will make your people hate you." While that may be true for america and other self aware democracies today, unfortunate as that is, I'm fairly sure Russia or China would not see that kind of open dissent; in IOT terms their RP would be that any dissenters from the party line are crushed, while America allows its citizens to be heard and therefore suffers from it. Do you see what I am saying here?
First of all, most games take place between 1830 and X, with X being an indeterminate number of years into the future, often still using modern day as a base.
Secondly, domestic revolts are common when
hundreds of thousands of your own soldiers are dying every year for a war started on rather shaky grounds.
Thirdly, "if a player decides to make his nation full of tough people" is code for "if a player powergames their way to better CBs" they shouldn't be penalized.
And yes, if Russia or China started massive wars where
hundreds of thousands of their own people are dying or being turned into refugees yearly, there would be counter-war movements. The question is never "would there be" but "how would the player respond to them" and if the player decides to crush them, then fine, but that's still an action.
Ailed, perhaps immersive was the wrong word to use, although I maintain that if you want to play a fully immersive story focused on RP and soft mechanics, you should play a NES and that IOTs should focus hard mechanics as they increasingly have.
ATEN, RoR, ATF.
Otherwise we might as well merge the two forums anyway. Why not keep the forums separate for two different styles of games? But back to my point, I am essentially saying I dislike how it gives the opportunity for GM bias to leak into the game. I realize a lot of work done by the GMs is arbitrary as Son has said, but in this specific case I am of the opinion that if the player of a country says his people are fine with taking casualties and fine with invading neighbors, then they should be fine, and if the player says the opposite, then he can deal with that RP wise. It should not come into the game mechanics.
When a player signed up for a game, they signed up and accepted any form of economic, political, or social bias the GM may have. They may protest, and they may leave the game, but the GM isn't required to change his or her biased way of running a game because there are other games to play.
If I said, "my people are okay with taking more bullets than usual", would that be fine? Or, "my people enjoy being slaves"?
The IOT Dev thread, like Thor pointed out, was created to
cut down on powergaming like this.
I myself would prefer to see a Victoria II-style system for CBs. What I mean is that all CBs are theoretically equal, with the only variable being how many Diplomatic Points(?) put into the war justification (or, in the case of "conquer territory", how many territories the aggressor plans to take over, with the possibility being lower for every territory wanted). "War Score" would be determined by how much of the defenders' territory is occupied by the aggressor (and vice versa), which is represented by a lighter version of that country's colour on the map. Once the war score is of a certain amount (say, around - or +40), they can sue for peace, where the aggressor can either force their cause onto the defender, or some sort of negotiation can be gained between the two parties. Maybe throw in some sort of prestige system, as well.
My problem with a war score system is that it only exists in Paradox games to give the player a general idea on how likely an AI will accept a deal. Since most wars in IOT are player-on-player, the players can decide the score, judged it accordingly with their own biases, and work from there.
Requiring that war score is +/- 40% is railroading a war to a strict outcome.
For all the things IOT steals from Paradox, one thing most players, and GMs, never really want a return of is the hard CBs of older IOTs and of Paradox games. Any CB system should be soft in nature.
.
