Naturally, this is what I assume would happen as well. But what do they do? I'm a newbie GM in this example, and I am not really sure how they'd deal with this situation. I've run D&D before, and I know basic aggro mechanics from computer rpgs, so I usually just have people focus on the biggest and most dangerous looking PC. As you say in your post, I don't have any political knowledge and I'm not sure how they'll mitigate the blockade or hurt the organization doing the blockading.
Let's assume I do have a system in this example! Looking at the stats, I know that the blockaded nation is weak and poor, with a lot of unexploited resources and a smaller population. There really isn't much they can do to respond with military force, and without PCs giving them bonuses they're not going to accomplish much of anything with their dice pools.
Whelp, I'm still stuck. Hopefully my players can think of something when I describe the scenario to them.
So maybe they surrender and barter away resource rights to get the blockade to back off. I mean, it would be a bad system if it didn't provide for that option, that someone might just not fight a bigger, meaner opponent, just like the Exalted 3E combat system would be a bad system if there was no way for a combatant to run away when they crest the ridge and see that there's 100 angry Dragonbloods here because you made someone really mad. Like what you're saying is that this person has no idea how war and conflict works which is possible but also means you have a GM who is running a game they don't understand
at all-at which point failure is not only expected but the usual course of things.
This scenario is where you probably should go "okay I don't like this focus, let's play something else." Or have a Storytelling chapter to point out that 'yes, conquering people who can't fight back is an important part of running an empire, but is generally not something that generates many gudfites-so this is why you
have 10,000 goons to deal with these problems.'
And then what? Just roll for the Tiger Warriors and Harmonious academics off screen and see if they win or lose? If my player isn't interested enough to intervene in a situation directly, why would I want to bore him in the first place? So yes, if the situation is small enough or trivial enough, I can just have it dealt with off-screen, or else balloon into something much bigger that the group might find more interesting.
Well, maybe the player wants this as part of the plan, and it should have a chance of failure, but you really don't want to just wing it because that might make them mad at you rather than the dice if they fail, and if they succeed you'll feel like you just granted them a freebie? The other benefit of a system is the perception of
fairness. The GM going "you drop your sword because that guy parries you super-well" is bullshit if they do it out of the blue, if the system says "you drop your sword" when you roll no successes and a dozen 1s on your attack, it feels a lot less bullshit. I would think that even if the system is not
great, having that illusion of fairness is a huge benefit sometimes.
There's a lot of boring but risky stuff that's involved in nation building-things which might fail, and create more plot, but also might go off without a hitch. A system to specifically deal with this isn't a
bad thing. Yes, you can wing it. However the entire point of a RPG is to create a structure for your make-believe. And when an important part of your make-believe is 'just wing it' it feels kind of incomplete somehow. And this might just be my experience, but I find sometimes giving the players a chance to solve a huge problem pretty trivially because of the things
they've built up tends to actually make them more, not less, happy. You'll obviously want challenges but sometimes the players might just want to take over Town X because it's important to a long-term plan but they're god-kings with hundreds of XP, they don't need to show up like Harbinger and go "I WILL SEE TO THIS PERSONALLY." Well, until their empire botches their 'conquer tiny village' roll and that means they probably need to do something because obviously that village was more than just a tiny village of no import.
Or maybe you don't even want this. You could very well set up the large-scale system as a method of determining what small-scale actions are taken to get to that point, and then suggesting potential complications. Simply because it's a system doesn't mean it has to be a minigame unto itself like the Company rules are-it could very well be more tightly integrated with the personal-scale rules, much like how Exalted 3E handles mass combat compared to Exalted 2E. Would that be more complex?
Probably! Instead of resolving everything with one dice roll it'd probably require a session or more to resolve a single action because it gets split down into more and more parts because of being less abstract. But that's not inherently a bad thing. The Company rules are supposed to add context then largely get out of the way, if you want to have Exalted: A Game of God-Kings you might not want the king part of 'god-king' to get out of the way as often.
How so? What are the consequences of a successful Raid aside from increasing my Treasure and/or decreasing my enemy's? What happens in a territory that I annex? How do I handle a scenario that the game doesn't explicitly cover, like blackmailing someone with state secrets, or setting up a trade deal with a foreign power? And while the system tells me what the mechanical changes are from the codified actions, I still need to know how to reflect this in the narrative.
I'm not sure how this is an objection. You need some
basic idea of how organizations work (like "deposing a ruler will probably cause their loyalists, if any, to turn against you" or "raiding another guy and stealing their money will probably put you on their shit-list somewhere") to use the system, but I think you need a basic idea of how combat works to run a combat system-it's just that people have that basic idea from well... the media world is pretty hugely violence-saturated. What you're asking is 'where do I go to
learn a system' rather than 'how does the system work.' And the answer to that is "well obviously you'd probably want a Storytelling chapter on running large-scale games."
I don't want an AI script. I want to know if a system like REIGN's can actually help someone who is otherwise clueless (and god only knows why this person wants to play REIGN or Exalted or whatever specifically) map together an internally consistent scenario instead of just concluding it's too much effort and leaving it at that.
When you're asking "I want a system which will tell me what X party will do" when a system which gives you a set of options isn't enough, something that gives you what you ask is going to be Storytelling advice or a flowchart/AI script, neither of which are what people are talking about-and both of which are orthogonal to having a system for large-scale actions. There is nothing which prevents you from having a chapter on premodern societies and
also a system to govern their interactions.
