So this is what you've been doing instead of making a social system. Jerk.
General Exalted Thread
So this is what you've been doing instead of making a social system. Jerk.
- Location
- Wörms, the half continent
He shifted the social system off to our lord and squishier, don'tcha remember?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
no squishy just did that of his own, i told mj12 that if he wanted a social system i was eventually incapable of making him one and then he said "damn then i'll have to make one myself instead of complaining you haven't done it" and now we're here
Working on a 2.5 Martial Arts style, but it's still very messy and in the early stages of development. I'd love to get some extra eyes on it, maybe some feedback or help refining charm ideas, setting appropriate activation costs and durations and such, that sort of thing. If there's another thread where this sort of homebrew goes, please let me know!
Thanks in advance!
docs.google.com
Thanks in advance!
Lightning Forge Illumination Style
Lightning Forge Illumination Style Celestial Martial Art Major themes: lightning, crafting, creation, evasiveness, flow/transformation of energy Emulating the larger ideas that lightning represents, such as illuminating the dark, the direction and flow of raw energy, the ability to forge new thi...
docs.google.com
Yeah the essay is just there to explain stuff, to be clear. And even it, as a fairly long essay, will mostly be summarizing because even if you gave me hundreds of thousands of words trying to explain the full nature of a pre-modern state for the purposes of an elfgame would arguably be a bit of a waste of time and probably also impossible.
I do have a system for rulership that I occasionally update and test out, but that is more of a loose framework if you get me? It's effectively something that could be summarized into a flowchart of ranks and some rolls. The intent with that system isn't to simulate the state, which I believe is impossible for a single human mind to do, no matter the amount of funny numbers and paper used for it, the intent is to fix... actually let me tell you a story:
States have always fascinated me, or rather empires have. My very first roleplaying game that I ever ran was set in an extremely thinly disguised Kingdom of Denmark-Norway. Of course, back then I barely knew how Denmark-Norway worked and relied on extremely basic resources so in retrospect it was probably very bad, but the idea of stories set around the backdrop of organization and state-systems has always fascinated me, but the precise nature of how states work is often extremely opaque to people simply because states often don't really work as much as they are simply in varying states of functional or non-functional tire fire, which is really part of the charm with them on some level. But during my long course of studying and having interest in states, something I have grown to detest is how fake many organizations in roleplaying games feel; White Wolf* games especially are guilty here. What I'm talking about here is obviously the standard fivefold organizational splits with easy delineations in between, clear splits between responsibilities and functions and obvious niches delineated for each and every suborganization. It feels like an organization that was put together from the first principles to be optimal, created yesterday with its entire history intact all to lead up neatly to this moment.
... So essentially, a state that actually works the way it was designed/put down on paper is in fact a work of Majesty, and we step back from there with decreasing amounts of applied magic?
I mean, I knew that, but... phrasing it that way, it explains a lot ... >.>
Manus Domini said:
Huh. Personally (as someone with, granted, a sociology/history education limited to 'high school' and 'one course in college'), I've usually found modeling states as their own actors to be easier/more accurate relative to modeling them as meaningfully composed of people -- or like, the things that organizations do, by and large make more sense if you think of them as composite entities with their own goals and their own incentives, but make rather less sense if I try to empathize with any of the people inside them, whether it's their leaders or the average constituent. It's part of the reason I've been curious for a long time how much intelligence can exist 'between' people, if you model a society as a meta-neural net with each person in it as a neuron.
Or like, there's that great quote from The Grapes of Wrath:
John Steinbeck said:
Tolkein has always been my gold standard for quality of worldbuilding. Or like... you never actually know what bits people will eventually see, so take the time to excel at every step you make, on its own principle of nothing else, you know?Manus Domini said:
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- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
It's something I've been thinking about a lot. Institutions usually evolve to face pressure in an almost Darwinian way, but unlike living creatures, an institution isn't really a concrete thing; it's guidelines, it's rules, it's a way of doing something, it's what exists between a number of people. And therefore it can be restructured and remodeled at will. But in the immediate context of an outside-context problem, an institution will most likely just have a meeting and set down a commission of guys to solve something, or expand the remit of another institution to handle it. Rome for example, constantly got these commissions of people to solve problems for it, such as Decemviri (commissions of ten men), which were deployed to handle writing a new legal code, aiding interpretation of an older one or assist with sacrifices. In the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, the way they dealt with the massive emigration to allied Cossack lands which threatened to bankrupt many lords whose serfs constantly fled was by building a giant fuck-off border wall to keep people in called the Belgorod Line, and inadverdently ended up creating what has been called the world's first modern border, with customs checks, ID checks and similar, cutting the emigration down to a trickle.
These are both fairly reasonable extrapolations of the current state, but what I didn't mention is that the only reason Muscovy had to deal with that emigration problem is because the Tsar had previously agreed to safeguard and defend the Cossack liberty, because they formed a vital border against the Ottoman Empire in the south but he couldn't say that publically because the plausible deniability of the Cossacks launching raids on the Ottomans and the Tsar going "not my problem bro they're all criminals anyways" was too vital. So they basically built a giant wall with attendant institutions and massive garrisons to uh, solve a problem they'd created themselves.
It's definitely easier to model a state as a single actor but in many ways I'm not sure if it's more accurate. Personally I'm trying for a bit of a middle ground, but one that's ultimately focused on the people rather than the state. On one hand it is indisputable that the state is absolutely a product of the people that comprise it and nothing else, but when you look at how states interact with each other it becomes fairly clear that they act within a structure that concerns states alone and that the way states behave to each other is, when compared to how people act with each other, best described as sociopathic. Ultimately, the reason I go for a middle ground is because I've always found systems that require you to "zoom out" and now play a little RTS in the middle of the session. It's a bit jarring to me at least, but I understand what you mean, especially in the context of states it can be a bit hard to see where everything comes together and forms the "State" as a distinct entity from the people and in many ways there isn't really a specific point, but I think it's ultimately a way that will do what I want better.
(EDIT: Also I gotta say, it's downright pleasant how relaxed this conversation about states is lol. On Discord this would have escalated like three times already between the two of us)
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- Pronouns
- They/Them
'Be nicer to the serfs' never ocurred to them?
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I'll explain why that wasn't ever really an opportunity when I am back off work later today.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Ah yes, I did promise to provide an explanation for this, but essentially as a context, Russia was previously the target for nomadic Tatar raids that could strike at any moment and would abduct people to hold hostage either for a ransom or simply to sell into slavery. As neither nobility or clergy could be taxed, serfs and city-dwellers were heavily taxed and especially agrarian serfs were exploited to ensure surplus production that the nobility could profit off by selling. There was a long tradition, especially emphasized during the Petrine period of Russian Tsars basically seeing their people as a "resource" that could be spent, such as Peter the Great moving around thousands of serfs as basically "supporting infrastructure" for the construction of new cities and ports and the heavy burden created by the Tatar raids made the heavy exploitation of the serfs necessary. Later on when important fortifications such as the Belgorod Line were completed and a standing army was founded, serfdom persisted due to petitions by the nobility who frequently owned massive estates with hundreds or thousands of attendant serfs to work for them. It was not economically effective for Russia, strictly speaking but it was very economically effective if you were a Russian nobleman.
Of course, the Cossack lands themselves originated as border communities of escaped serfs, Turks, Tatars, nomads and similar who fled from state oppression and melded with each other to create a unique almost pirate-like culture of (male) liberty and raiding and their existence was sponsored by the Russian state in secret to ensure a buffer that could act as a check on the Ottomans, Crimeans and Tatars. So in many ways, the oppression of the serfs was an advantage to the Russian Tsars because the repression ensured a constant flow of thousands of new Cossacks yearly, but after the great Tatar raids, the construction of the Belgorod Line was deemed more important to protect Russian heartlands, and the tightening of the vast stream of would-be-Cossacks was an important first step in the "closening" of Cossack communities into becoming an ascribed ethnic group rather than a voluntary open group based on association.
- Location
- Earth Prime
Honestly, this sounds like a long way to answer the question, "Being nice to the serfs never occured to them?" with a resounding, "Nope."
- Location
- Ottawa
Treating the state as an intelligent being unto itself certainly makes it easier to explain its past actions. I don't know whether it makes it easier to predict its future actions, or whether the explanation being easier has anything to do with it being more accurate.
In any case it's a moot point because this game is called Exalted and I want to use my twenty-three-die Intelligence + Bureacracy pool. And no doubt the other uberbeings in my organization have their own ideas. We need to model the leaders.
...
Well, it looks like Manus said the same thing. Serves me right for writing as I read, I guess.
I think that's one of those questions which contains its own answer.
If you mean one thing by "intelligence", obviously quite a bit; if you mean another, obviously none at all.
And no, I don't know which meaning is the more useful one. The right answer is probably a lot easier than the right question, here.
Chatrooms are frankly horrible for any kind of in-depth or emotionally charged discussion. Forums might be slow but they definitely improve the quality of the conversations in them.
- Location
- Denmark
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Yeah sure, let's say there was an opportunity if everyone involved was a different person, constant raids didn't force the tax burden to be high, the Cossacks weren't necessary for the southern border and the inherent power disparity of serfdom wasn't the case. In that sense, there was an opportunity. But the stuff that serfs fled from - and which people in Creation will flee from - was stuff like taxation, household registries and state power, not wanton cruelty but economic conditions. It was an inherent part of Cossack liberty (volia) that they were free from registering their names or similar attempts at establishing state power over them so of course people would flee to those lands where they could be free from repressive taxation or landowner micromanagement to create agricultural surplus production. There was strictly speaking an opportunity to treat them "nicely" but only in the sense that there is always an opportunity to make another choice.
Of course, after the construction of the Belgorod Line, serf mistreatment intensified significantly and at that point the system was mostly kept alive by nobility who wanted the production bonus and strict control over their serfs, as well as occasional attempts to expand into Cossack lands which almost always ended up terribly for them (why they kept doing this I will not comprehend) so at that point, a sufficiently willful Tsar could probably have attempted it, but given that the 16th and 17th centuries are where serfdom only really intensifies and takes the form that we would recognizably identify as Russia's almost slavery-like system I wouldn't count on it.
I mean, small organizations can. But -- even completely 100% aside from political will and whatnot -- if you wanted to seriously change how the entire United States worked at every level, that would absolutely be a major working that would take millions of dollars of restructuring, rehiring and redefining responsibilities (and other things I can't find synonyms for that start with 'r'
). I almost want to start making comparisons to surgery -- you can do it, but boy is it a cure not always better than the disease.In that regard, large organizations do start taking on a certain 'existence' of their own.
Hmm...
I wouldn't say that it's indisputable it's purely a product of the people that comprise it; it's also a product of how precisely it's organized, which to some extent can be separated from the people themselves. Or like, it's often arguable that anyone in the same position, would tend to do roughly the same things -- the most famous examples being the classic "power corrupts"/"bad incentives" narrative about powerful executives -- and like, to me that sounds like there being a second factor beyond the precise identities currently occupying those seats?
I think, like, the middle ground I'd personally go after is ... well, take people as an example. By and large, psychology keeps teaching us that we're very much composite beings, and the illusion of a single identity is by and large precisely that, an illusion. But even so, there's something of a "causal bottleneck" -- things happen to you the person, and then the various shards of your mind all react to that; and then those competing impulses add up to a single action that you-the-person do, so that even though it's a lot more complicated than a single coherent self, the notion of a single identity is still an important part of the model. Sort of like, the difference between an RP where every person is explicitly a separate character, and a quest where even though there's a number of participants that have different priorities and goals and react in different ways, all that diversity has to be "filtered" through a single PC?
States seem to me like they work in similar ways -- by and large things happen to "the state as a whole", incentives apply to "the state as a whole" -- like you said, states end up as existences that we'd consider sociopathic in individual people, react to overall incentive gradients as a vaguely coherent entity. They have more ability to actually do more than one thing at a time than people do, but they still tend to be treated by other entities as a single coherent existence, which means even if it isn't true it's still relevant.
Anyway, all this is really just saying "there's probably value in a mixed model that treats states like Primordials, where there's a single overarching entity you can potentially interact with and component people that can interfere with the overaching entity indirectly."
Nah you're prolly not wrong lol. The advantage of doing all this in a web forum is that it encourages long thoughtful effortposts instead of short back-and-forth, so it's a lot easier to interact on the level of overall intentions/worldviews (in which I don't think we differ all that much) rather than on the level of individual points (which by their nature have a lot more variance even aside from differing backgrounds/beliefs/education/etc.)
There's two things I'm really interested in here, I think. First, to what extent can the goals of a state differ from the amalgamated goals of its constituents; second, to what extent can the "skills"/competence of a state exceed the total or average skill of its constituents?
Yep. Having run an Exalted game where @Aleph has taken over something that's state-like (it's technically a massive sprawling crime family / pirate organisation / ethnic mob, but it operates at a scale and a level of violence-over-people-under-its-authority that it's functionally a nation-state), you can't treat such things as unitary. She's the godmother of the Hui Cha, but she has her power because she has support from the five fleetmasters who head the trading/raiding fleets and among the women who control the banking and white-collar crime aspects of the Hui Cha.
(there used to be six fleetmasters, but when she took over she killed one of them as a demonstration to the others, then split his assets among the other five as a reward for them swearing loyalty to her and a reminder of what she'd do if they forgot the oaths of loyalty they swore)
And that's not just because of any concerns of "realism" or whatever. It's simply true at a gameability level, too. When a "state" is composed of multiple power bases who all have a "face" that represents how they want different things, there's a lot more potential for gameplay and plot interest. Players get pushback because their decisions infringe on the interests of their subordinates; players can target elements of other organisations. Civilisation-style "I am the unquestioned god-king of my faction which exists as an extension of my will, unless Happiness falls below an arbitrary rating" might be fine for videogames, but when a human is running the gameworld, GMs are much better at assigning wants and needs to the major factions in a state and resolving things fuzzily.
It's a great source of plot hooks, for one.
- Location
- Earth Prime
I'm trying to tread very carefully here to make this point, and I apologize if I step over a line and am ready and willing to scrub wording if it crosses any rules. I certainly don't want to start a real-world argument.
The reason I say that "if everyone was a different person" is not a valid defense, even to the not-quite-a-defense level you probably mean it, is that you could say the same thing about why antebellum USA Southern slavery was impossible to solve ("the plantation owners didn't want to lose the power over their labor force, and they'd have to be different people to consider it"), or that death camps in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Pol Pot's Vietnam, etc., were impossible to avoid and that "they couldn't have thought of treating the victims as human beings" because "there wasn't an opportunity" is some sort of defense.
There was opportunity. They could have. The greed and tyranical cruelty of the nobility may have made them refuse to consider "treating the serfs nicer," but it didn't make it impossible. It just meant that evil actions by people willing to commit evil prevented it. Choices, in the end, were made, and "treating the serfs nicer" was not the choice made.
All of the factors that you name and list are true! I am not disputing nor even disagreeing with most of your analysis. Just with the notion that there wasn't opportunity. The system could have engaged reforms to entice the serfs to be more invested in their lives where they were, rather than to cater to the nobility's desire to bleed the nation dry of its productivity and wealth for their own dwindling oppulence.
You could argue that, for a single given Tsar, there might have been little opportunity, but that denies Tsars being actual leaders. It would have been HARD, but incrementalism and leadership in the form of inspiration, including demonstrating success by enacting it in his own personal lands, would have been one way.
And here, we get into how you'd play it as a game! Exalted has those abstracted rules for rulership, but a lot of managing such a reform over your dominion as a Solar God-King would actually be using the existing social rules: persuade key figures in the existing infrastructure to give your methods a try. Inspire people to have consciences. Make them care about their serfs as people, and then work to demonstrate how that makes the whole system increase in prosperity.
But that's not enough, either, because you still need to model the actual impact. And unless you're going to model individual serfs and then project that to masses, you're going to need SOME means of modeling the system of "workers" and their productivity...which brings us back, too, to how people "at the top" view human resources as resources that happen to be humanoid more than as humans who happen to also be resources.
It's a fun problem! A good system for it would be beautiful!
One of the biggest problems with it, though, is that philosophy and - yes - politics (real world political ideology) get in the way.
I have seen a lot of "rule your own country" games that are very simplified abstracted systems where you have to answer "tough questions" as a ruler, and are giving multiple choices. It is always interesting to me to see how the choices are worded, because you can tell when the designer thought he had a "good" and "evil" choice, and how he made it a "quandary" by making the "evil" choice more profitable while the "good" choice is going to cost the State in some measure of money, power, or stability.
You can also see when there is just a flat-out bias for certain socio-economic models. If the writer is a Keynsian, you'll see tax-and-spend welfare promote booming economies; if he's a Reaganite, you'll instead see cutting taxes and deregulating leading to economic booms.
And you can't even really avoid this, because you're always making assumptions about how groups behave. Me, I'd try my best to model it off my experience with swarm intelligence, and treating the atomic entities as "humans" who are all self-maximizing with observation of what others are doing to try to better themselves. Even this is an imperfect model, at least without more detail than the atomic agents having a greedy single-metric maximization going on. And frankly, actively modeling it as a swarm intelligence is too complex for any tabletop game modeling!
So immediately, I have to make assumptions about what this kind of optimization assumption would do under various circumstances, and this starts to get my own socio-economic/political biases injected into the model, because I believe I know how people and groups thereof will work under certain conditions.
I think the BEST model we can hope for would be one that models organizational choices and stats, and abstracts their meaning just enough that we let the ST and his players stunt them into tying to philosophical molds regarding real-world procedure. In that way, we hopefully have something that will satisfy both, say, a Keynsian and a Reaganite in terms of what kinds of policies they say they're enacting, but which plays the same at both tables since they're just equating the same "moves" in the gameified system with different real-world parallels.
Edit to add: On the subject of games with moral quandary choices, there's Fable 3 which has some hillarity in it that I don't think was intentional:
The second half of Fable 3 has you taking over the kingdom as ruler, having overthrown your tyrannical brother. However, you learn that at least part of the reason he was such a tyrant is that he's got a ticking clock until a massive invasion by a demonic army of overwhelming numbers hits, and he's saving money to buy the biggest and best defenses for his kingdom that he can.
If you don't have a sufficient war chest by the time the clock runs out, your kingdom is wiped out, and there's a grading effect where the larger your war chest, the fewer people die.
As Fable 3's second half progresses, you get a number of propositions and petitions from The People, always with two major spokesmen offering two options. Usually, these are along the lines of the greedy monster wanting to flood the slums to turn the neighboring area into high-class property that will bring in lots of tax money - represented by simply giving you a flat boost in the hundreds of thousands for accepting his offer - and the good but simple peasant folk pleading not to be drowned or driven out of their homes and made homeless.
In fact, the vast majority of these "choices" amount to destroying some property somewhere to make somebody else rich, and they'll essentially share the wealth with you.
However, in both the first and second half of the game, one of the mini-games is property ownership. You can buy houses all over the kingdom, and then rent them out. I think you can even invest in them to improve their quality and get more rent.
The in-game clock by which rent is paid is actually separate from the narrative-based clock related to the "moral choices" and the endgame timer, which means that you can dawdle around playing side-quests while you rack up enormous fortunes, especially if you literally own every house in the kingdom because you bought them all and now every commoner, rather than paying taxes, pays the King rent. Nice rent, for nice houses, too, since you've upgraded them to the max.
And so, taking the "evil, but profitable" offer actually costs you money in a relatively short time, losing massive profits from land YOU OWN being wiped out, and only getting the ironically small one-off bribe.
And yes, the royal treasury and the King-as-protagonist's personal wealth are considered one and the same, so you earning rent does, in fact, let you build your war chest.
Which means that, intentionally or not, if you play the game as a real estate magnate, Fable 3 rewards you with greater money for never, ever accepting the "Evil, but profitable" option. It's actually less profitable than taking the "good, but won't get you money" option...because you DO get money, just not directly, from the second choice.
If you don't have a sufficient war chest by the time the clock runs out, your kingdom is wiped out, and there's a grading effect where the larger your war chest, the fewer people die.
As Fable 3's second half progresses, you get a number of propositions and petitions from The People, always with two major spokesmen offering two options. Usually, these are along the lines of the greedy monster wanting to flood the slums to turn the neighboring area into high-class property that will bring in lots of tax money - represented by simply giving you a flat boost in the hundreds of thousands for accepting his offer - and the good but simple peasant folk pleading not to be drowned or driven out of their homes and made homeless.
In fact, the vast majority of these "choices" amount to destroying some property somewhere to make somebody else rich, and they'll essentially share the wealth with you.
However, in both the first and second half of the game, one of the mini-games is property ownership. You can buy houses all over the kingdom, and then rent them out. I think you can even invest in them to improve their quality and get more rent.
The in-game clock by which rent is paid is actually separate from the narrative-based clock related to the "moral choices" and the endgame timer, which means that you can dawdle around playing side-quests while you rack up enormous fortunes, especially if you literally own every house in the kingdom because you bought them all and now every commoner, rather than paying taxes, pays the King rent. Nice rent, for nice houses, too, since you've upgraded them to the max.
And so, taking the "evil, but profitable" offer actually costs you money in a relatively short time, losing massive profits from land YOU OWN being wiped out, and only getting the ironically small one-off bribe.
And yes, the royal treasury and the King-as-protagonist's personal wealth are considered one and the same, so you earning rent does, in fact, let you build your war chest.
Which means that, intentionally or not, if you play the game as a real estate magnate, Fable 3 rewards you with greater money for never, ever accepting the "Evil, but profitable" option. It's actually less profitable than taking the "good, but won't get you money" option...because you DO get money, just not directly, from the second choice.
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This is a pretty common sort of political analysis where people try to understand policy actions as a reflection of some sort of ideal preferences, rather than acknowledging the practical limitations-political, technological, societal-that exist and narrow the spectrum of choice and force people to choose from that narrowed spectrum. Commonly, the result of this is what you're doing right here-immediately throwing down a moral judgment of the actions even when that moral judgment isn't actually useful in making decisions.
Because everyone acknowledges that the system in question was not 'nice.' The thing is, we can either understand the pressures and surroundings which led the system to 'not be nice,' which is useful for understanding how to avoid these sorts of outcomes in the real world or in this case, tied to Exalted, why these systems come about and why you can't just fix them all of a sudden by going "I'm a Solar who hates inequality, I'm going to introduce 21st century ideals to these premodern states and fix them by flexing on people."
"Because the people responsible were evil" isn't actually a very helpful answer to "why does a bad situation exist" because it gives literally no productive advice. Especially when you combine it with this sort of hardcore moral realism, where trying to understand the pressures and constraints which resulted in an inhumane system somehow dilutes the moral purity of your condemnation of the system. In real life, it does not help you achieve good outcomes, and often does the exact opposite because you inadvertently increase the pressures on the actors in question to double down on the bad acts you believe are cruel and want to prevent. In the context of talking about Exalted, it's not useful because it provides no understanding as to how you can fix a bad situation, it provides no illustration of why a bad situation might come about, and it just makes a lot of the intended playspace for Exalted-nation building, diplomacy, political intrigue-less useful or interesting because it forces a sort of black-and-white worldview.
Except you know, this is Exalted, there are no kindly kings and utopian kingdoms, so finding that 'white' is going to be really really hard.
Imrix
Periodically Malevolent QM
Notably, "... incrementalism and leadership in the form of inspiration, including demonstrating success by enacting it in his own personal lands..." was kind of... What the Tsars did. And the result was they abolished serfdom in the late 1800's.
- Location
- Earth Prime
Sure. All I ask is for consistency. If this is the argument you wish to take, then you need to do two things:
1) Apply it equally to all problematic regimes and societies and social constructs, and
2) keep in mind that people can be judged for whether they act to improve, perpetuate, or further corrupt a given system.
I'm all for judging somebody in context of their time; the guy who would be a blatant racist now for how he talks about "the negros" might have, in his time, been very progressive, and deserves not to be skewered for his racist attitudes that were common at the time, but to be lauded for his efforts to see beyond them, to view mistreatment of others as bad, and striving to change attitudes.
I am probably guilty of conflation, here, because I was comparing the seemingly-excuse being given to Tsarist Russia for not "thinking of treating serfs better" as a solution while so frequently I see other societies which I believe were genuinely better and working harder to improve themselves dismissed as so corrupt they must be historically unpersoned. And the double-standard annoyed me. Which is unfair of me, since the poster in question was only talking about the Tsars and didn't bring up any other historical society, so the double-standard is not necessarily theirs. So I apologize if I over-reacted.
And yes, in Exalted, we have a very strong tendency to apply 21st-century morals to a setting not just steeped in bronze-age ideologies, but deliberately designed to have societal ills that 20th-century westerners would find ... unacceptable. This is a bit by design, as the whole fantasy being enabled is to be The One who will fix the problem with his magical sun-king enlightenment.
TenfoldShields
Lounging on a Hoard of Words
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Yeah the essay is just there to explain stuff, to be clear. And even it, as a fairly long essay, will mostly be summarizing because even if you gave me hundreds of thousands of words trying to explain the full nature of a pre-modern state for the purposes of an elfgame would arguably be a bit of a waste of time and probably also impossible.
I do have a system for rulership that I occasionally update and test out, but that is more of a loose framework if you get me? It's effectively something that could be summarized into a flowchart of ranks and some rolls. The intent with that system isn't to simulate the state, which I believe is impossible for a single human mind to do, no matter the amount of funny numbers and paper used for it, the intent is to fix... actually let me tell you a story:
States have always fascinated me, or rather empires have. My very first roleplaying game that I ever ran was set in an extremely thinly disguised Kingdom of Denmark-Norway. Of course, back then I barely knew how Denmark-Norway worked and relied on extremely basic resources so in retrospect it was probably very bad, but the idea of stories set around the backdrop of organization and state-systems has always fascinated me, but the precise nature of how states work is often extremely opaque to people simply because states often don't really work as much as they are simply in varying states of functional or non-functional tire fire, which is really part of the charm with them on some level. But during my long course of studying and having interest in states, something I have grown to detest is how fake many organizations in roleplaying games feel; White Wolf* games especially are guilty here. What I'm talking about here is obviously the standard fivefold organizational splits with easy delineations in between, clear splits between responsibilities and functions and obvious niches delineated for each and every suborganization. It feels like an organization that was put together from the first principles to be optimal, created yesterday with its entire history intact all to lead up neatly to this moment.
Why organizations end up like this in RPGs is obvious, because the nature of how organiztions actually form and structure themselves is incredibly opaque and real organizations, especially states, are messy and the product of often centuries of ad hoc construction in response to new situations. What I would aim to create with a system is basically a guide to make a state feel a bit more naturalistic and more fun to play around in. And perhaps to impart people with some of the joy I find in history and the study of premodern states, one might as well hold true to Exalted's maxim of being an authentic iron age-esque world and actually writing a system that gives the player a feel for how states in the premodern period go about doing their business. I'm not really interested in writing a big zoomed-out RTS-esque system for states, in terms of how an Exalted system should handle this, I lean far more Mount & Blade than I lean Europa Universalis IV. If that makes sense? Basically a state as a collection of people and the institutions between them, rather than the state as a collection of institutions with people attached.
*But by no means uniquely so. A lot of pop culture stuff such as Game of Thrones and some of the live action Lord of the Rings movies absolutely have not helped. Bizarrely, Tolkien's actual written works are very good in terms of how states work and having it all feel authentic, which probably makes sense given they were inspired by actual sagas and Tolkein himself had a degree, too much time to burn and several separate naturalistic languages he made up because he thought it was fun.
Quoting this to expand on after I had SOME THOUGHTS (and collating those thoughts in a way that isn't just "Manus, hey Manus hey, Manus hey Damnation City is pretty great right Manus?") but I think-
I mean honestly I 100% agree with the idea that "playing in the contrary clusterfuck of trying to manage a large faction/nation is hugely appealing from a narrative/RP perspective". I love GSRP's on SV even though they're usually incredible drama reactors and whenever there's an option for it that wouldn't make my DM smack me with the book my characters have a noted Tendency to end up running stuff (Harrower is Harrower and I am itchin' to get to the "I want to make necrotech monsters" bit and the Lunar I played in @mothematics 's game was a New Moon scientist who was really into the whole "Jin-Roh but with snakes" theme). So I'm super invested in this from the get go and genuinely excited.
A big problem, in my experience, with how Exalted has historically approached nation-states and large organizations is that they have a feeling of being...slippery almost, unreal. Exalted as a gameline prides itself on asking "okay, but how would this actually work" but the explanations are often incomplete, not especially evocative, just articulated poorly, or concerned more with minutiae and (an often pretty unfortunately Orientalist) aesthetic (a lot of the Realm setting stuff is really guilty of this). The nation is a unitary thing, with few if any real internal divisions and tensions. There's no sense of the inner power struggles and pretty commonly a quick list of, like, imports/exports is used in lieu of actually discussing "what keeps this whole mess afloat". Resources and riches and power and politics are rendered down to maybe a few sentences and a kind of inelegant abstraction. Which is a shame you know! It's all depersonalized and dehumanized, as if policy was the guiding force and law the hand when in reality (and better for the health of the whole set up honestly) there was an intense, constant personal element.
And that's the main thing to overcome I think. That distance and dissociation from the This Is Your Stuff I Guess. Something Damnation City does really well in this regard is grounding it all in terms of tangible, concrete places. You control a hospital, that means you have doctors at your disposal. You have pull at police headquarters, that means there's cops sitting behind desks who answer to you and your lieutenants. The manager of this art gallery is one of your ghouls, you use the location to host prestigious parties. There's a very clear throughline from "what this place is like" to "who this place is managed by" to "what this place gives you". And I think you can expand that to conceptual places too, to religious and social organizations. Closing the gap between a fairly anonymous Resources 5 on your sheet and how your character owns a few merchant concerns which are represented in interactions via a captain character who has his own interests, dislikes, wants and needs. Giving the various moving cogs within a nation or large organization (not all of them obviously, but the handful of most important/evocative/relevant ones) a face and a clear distinct style and hooks to establish why-you-want-this (or don't want this! If you're a ruler honestly, it's likely that you have some lands that are just terrible, filled with bandits or monsters or some fresh new hellfuck and it's genuinely not worth it trying to subjugate them) and why people would want to take it from you.
It makes the conflict more organic and more intuitive I think, makes the tensions more prominent and the challenges facing you more obvious ("The leader of this powerful aristocratic clique dislikes you and uses methods short of outright rebellion to hinder your agenda", "The soldier-class of beastmen in your city are agitating for more power and influence", "A Greater Dead has emerged from a nearby shadowland and wants to establish diplomatic relations"). It makes people possessive of the Things That Belong To Their Character, makes their unique rainsoaked capital port-city feel as special and as relevant as a daiklaive.
It gives meat and muscle and viscerality to something that has, honestly, been executed with a kind of detachment.
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- Location
- my house
So, I'll do a full write up when I get home, but I have always had the best results treating nations as a series of characters the players can interact with, with each character acting as the "face" of a group or organization within that state.
At the same time, how many "faces" there are will depend on how both the players and the GM want to interact with that nation. And that itself will likely change as the scope of the game shifts, growing and shrinking as needed.
Like, if you're players are interacting with a state on the national level, it's okay to treat the king as the state for the purposes of most interactions. You can safely assume that if the king orders a war there's a war, that the desires of the nation reflect his, etc. But if the players, or the gm, want to interact with the state with more nuance, then you can zoom in to various levels of fidelity.
As an example, maybe your players are besieging an enemy city. For the purposes of their play, they can treat everyone in the city as a unified group roughly in line with the beliefs of the ruler there. But maybe you, as the dm, want to look in a little further. So you have someone sneak out from the city, promising to open the gates if they and their friends get to keep their riches. Now the players have the choice of interacting with the city as a series of power blocs, each of which is represented by a character who acts as the face of that power bloc. Or maybe the players drove this change, by asking about the rough political structure, or choosing to spare the peasantry in order to provoke a revolt.
The idea is to give the players a system of intractable characters that they can use to effect the world at any scale, without unduly overwhelming anyone by having to model the entire nation or city or whatever.
A word of warning though. for this system to work you need to have players who are okay taking the initiative, and so it helps to be very clear that this is how the system works AND that it is an abstraction. At the nation level we assume everyone in the nation is in agreement, but it must be made clear that PCs can find or create power blocs at any level they choose if they put the work in. Just because you, the gm, didn't call out that the nobles are plotting against the king doesn't mean their isnt one or that the players can't create one. It just means that you see playing at a level of abstraction where that doesn't matter.
Edit: what is damnation city? It sounds cool
At the same time, how many "faces" there are will depend on how both the players and the GM want to interact with that nation. And that itself will likely change as the scope of the game shifts, growing and shrinking as needed.
Like, if you're players are interacting with a state on the national level, it's okay to treat the king as the state for the purposes of most interactions. You can safely assume that if the king orders a war there's a war, that the desires of the nation reflect his, etc. But if the players, or the gm, want to interact with the state with more nuance, then you can zoom in to various levels of fidelity.
As an example, maybe your players are besieging an enemy city. For the purposes of their play, they can treat everyone in the city as a unified group roughly in line with the beliefs of the ruler there. But maybe you, as the dm, want to look in a little further. So you have someone sneak out from the city, promising to open the gates if they and their friends get to keep their riches. Now the players have the choice of interacting with the city as a series of power blocs, each of which is represented by a character who acts as the face of that power bloc. Or maybe the players drove this change, by asking about the rough political structure, or choosing to spare the peasantry in order to provoke a revolt.
The idea is to give the players a system of intractable characters that they can use to effect the world at any scale, without unduly overwhelming anyone by having to model the entire nation or city or whatever.
A word of warning though. for this system to work you need to have players who are okay taking the initiative, and so it helps to be very clear that this is how the system works AND that it is an abstraction. At the nation level we assume everyone in the nation is in agreement, but it must be made clear that PCs can find or create power blocs at any level they choose if they put the work in. Just because you, the gm, didn't call out that the nobles are plotting against the king doesn't mean their isnt one or that the players can't create one. It just means that you see playing at a level of abstraction where that doesn't matter.
Edit: what is damnation city? It sounds cool
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- Location
- Earth Prime
One other thing to consider: Titans - Primordials, Yozis, etc. - sort-of ARE nation-states with a unified consciousness at the top.
It might be interesting to try to develop Exalted mechanics for nation-states and organizations using similar frameworks to how Yozis are currently designed, with sub-groups representing Third Circle "souls," and heads of sub-sub groups as Second Circle, etc.
It might be interesting to try to develop Exalted mechanics for nation-states and organizations using similar frameworks to how Yozis are currently designed, with sub-groups representing Third Circle "souls," and heads of sub-sub groups as Second Circle, etc.
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Damnation City is the book on power interactions, city-level play, and GMs designing cities for Vampire: the Requiem.
It is probably one of the most generally useful RPG books I've ever read, even if you're not using a modern setting (though it's most useful for modern settings).