This may surprise you, but a GM deciding who the bad guy decides to wack with the club is way, way more intuitive than considering how a nation will respond to having their ports blockaded.
Is it? Is target discrimination so easy, or is it easy because you don't want to focus on the problem, therefore it's easy? It's 'intuitive' in the sense that nobody really cares, which is valid. Nobody wants to memorize a threat priority listing and use that. But similarly, 'how will a nation respond to being blockaded' is entirely intuitive if you deal with it on the same level. "They do something to mitigate that blockade or to hurt the organization doing the blockade until they relent." And what they do can now be determined by the relative strengths of that nation, and...
Whereas if you don't even have a system, you aren't even sure of what the relative strengths of the nation
are in a way that's mechanically rigorous enough to be useful. Because we're assuming that
you don't have any political knowledge. What does it mean that a nation has rich natural resources or an elite army? What does it mean that their citizens support the White Man's Burden and how does that affect their actions? I dunno, because if I did, I wouldn't be the person you're concerned about. Which is the funniest part, really. If their argument was "the majority of our players won't know enough to play high stakes politics outside of repeating Game of Thrones plot points" sure, that's fine. Make that largely window dressing and focus on like, saving the world through high adventure and kung fu. But apparently we have it both ways. When asked why there isn't a system people are too stupid to deal with a system, but then when asked what you're supposed to do to play a god-king they go "you'll figure it out, you're a smart guy."
Oh yeah, that's totally the point I'm trying to make!
The thing is, in the no-doubt heavily abstracted system that Exalted's setting will demand, you're still starting in a vacuum. Masters of Jade had a well received rulership system, but it was still all stuff like "grow asset" or "attack asset" or damage enemy projects, and because it is so abstracted places the same large burden on a GM.
"What are the effects of the leadership taking an action" is
actually at least as complex in society than "what action will I take," so your argument is effectively that if you don't care about something, it's not a large burden. This is somewhat tautological-you dismiss that something is complex simply because most systems boil down the complexity into something much, much simpler
as they ought to do.
And if a PC decides to act outside the scope of these discrete actions, it's likely to get a GM to shoot it down because it's just not covered in the rules.
It is helpful, but really only in modeling inter-organizational conflict. This goes out the window, when again, the PCs act on an in character level outside the system's scope.
They give you approximate numerical stat values to a nation's tangible and intangible resources. Not something especially useful, in my opinion, except to get players more invested in acquisition or further expansion of these resources.
So what you're saying is that an Exalted rulership system might not look like REIGN's company system because the PCs have a higher power-level, and thus wouldn't basically be "just grounding the PCs in the game world plus a random plot generator" but would require somewhat more depth? This is probably why people want a Exalted
system and consider adapting REIGN to it a second choice.
Or you could just have PC actions being sufficient to drastically change the balance of power between organizations so Realm Legion versus Random Town is a trivial victory for the Legion until the PCs get involved and suddenly the equations get much more difficult. Alternatively, the system is about
delegation, and what happens as a result of your delegation, and thus is not a replacement for PC action, because it's explicitly a system for "I don't want to deal with this plot point, send my legions of Tiger Warriors/Harmonious Academics to make it fuck off for me." And why is that not a valid role for a system? It certainly won't do
some things, but it will do
others-it might not simulate political intrigue, but it
will simulate the advantages of having an organization backing you, which will encourage people to have their own empires so they can focus on some things and not others.
REIGN's system is designed to fulfill several roles. The first is, surprisingly, telling you what factions
are doing because core to every single Company is their motivation. You can't have a Company without one, in fact. So it might not be perfect, but at least it tells you to write down the Empire of N'vwls'hr's motivation. It gives you a set of traits representing a faction's economic, military, political, and natural resources, which give you ideas as to what a faction might do to achieve that motivation. It gives you a bunch of
personal-scale actions you can take to temporarily raise these traits-but permanent raises require either spending XP, merging with another faction, or taking it from another faction, thus creating an in-game incentive for Companies to attack each other, whether literally or figuratively, to get more resources. Because large factions are made up of smaller Companies and these Companies don't generally share the same motivation, it also encourages internal strife.
It's not designed to be an AI tree that tells you what a faction will do in response, although it gives you plenty of resources to figure that out in the form of explaining actions and their consequences. It's designed to be a plot generator as well as a system that ensures continuity when some random motherfucker rolls 4x10s and decapitates your character in an unlucky hit. Probably because the assumption REIGN makes is that the players who are playing a game about leadership will have some basic ideas about what the leaders and people will be doing, much like Exalted makes the assumption that the players will have an idea of what being a god-king entails.
In fact,
@Quantumboost's comparison to Civilization is actually pretty great, because what you seem to want isn't a
system. It's an
AI script-and those aren't impossible either. That's something that can actually be written in flowchart form and game designers
have. It just doesn't exist in REIGN or Godbound because, well, they expect you'll be playing on that level and GMing on that level, rather than wanting AI bots to fight against.
But...
