Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
Welcome to Grand Strategy Roleplay
What is this new thing on my front page?
Grand Strategy Roleplay is a new forum that has been created after discussion by the staff. We felt that with the migration of the Nation Games Community from AH.com, and the high traffic that they brought with them, that it was finally time to create a forum explicitly for larger-scale games. Think of Grand Strategy as a lovechild of Story Debates and Nation Games.
I don't know what either of those two things are.
Story Debates was a subforum on Spacebattles that originally was a general forum for grand strategy games and large scale roleplaying. Due to lack of activity as well as traffic being absorbed by the BROB forum (imagine quests and roleplays in one forum) it faded away. It has very little activity now. Nation Games was a subforum of a subforum called Shared Worlds at Alternatehistory.com. Originally part of the catch-all "sandbox" in the larger conglomerate of the Grand Strategy Roleplay Forum, they were eventually moved to their own subforum, still in Shared Worlds. However, mounting frustration due to the fact that it was behind a registry wall (meaning non-users could not see the forum and it would not show up google searches of the term "nation games") that restricted new players and a lack of moderator interest encouraged the forum to make a wholesale transition to Sufficientvelocity in March of 2015.
So what's the point of Grand Strategy Roleplay, then?
Grand Strategy Rolaplay, roughly, is a forum for grand-scale roleplaying. This doesn't have as much to do with the stakes of a given game so much as it does the mechanics and who each individual player is playing. Roughly, where each player is not roleplaying as a character, but a group of them, an organization, a nation, or some other larger entity, the game is a Grand Strategy roleplay. If your DnD Campaign roleplay is about a group of individuals in a quest to save the world, that's not a grand-scale roleplay even if the stakes are grand. However, if your roleplay is about several clans or guilds that are doing that much, that's a different thing altogether. In the end, having hard and fast rules about this sort of thing is impossible; it's about knowing it when you see it. Here are some examples of games that would belong in Grand Strategy Roleplay:
Grand Strategy Roleplay is a new forum that has been created after discussion by the staff. We felt that with the migration of the Nation Games Community from AH.com, and the high traffic that they brought with them, that it was finally time to create a forum explicitly for larger-scale games. Think of Grand Strategy as a lovechild of Story Debates and Nation Games.
I don't know what either of those two things are.
Story Debates was a subforum on Spacebattles that originally was a general forum for grand strategy games and large scale roleplaying. Due to lack of activity as well as traffic being absorbed by the BROB forum (imagine quests and roleplays in one forum) it faded away. It has very little activity now. Nation Games was a subforum of a subforum called Shared Worlds at Alternatehistory.com. Originally part of the catch-all "sandbox" in the larger conglomerate of the Grand Strategy Roleplay Forum, they were eventually moved to their own subforum, still in Shared Worlds. However, mounting frustration due to the fact that it was behind a registry wall (meaning non-users could not see the forum and it would not show up google searches of the term "nation games") that restricted new players and a lack of moderator interest encouraged the forum to make a wholesale transition to Sufficientvelocity in March of 2015.
So what's the point of Grand Strategy Roleplay, then?
Grand Strategy Rolaplay, roughly, is a forum for grand-scale roleplaying. This doesn't have as much to do with the stakes of a given game so much as it does the mechanics and who each individual player is playing. Roughly, where each player is not roleplaying as a character, but a group of them, an organization, a nation, or some other larger entity, the game is a Grand Strategy roleplay. If your DnD Campaign roleplay is about a group of individuals in a quest to save the world, that's not a grand-scale roleplay even if the stakes are grand. However, if your roleplay is about several clans or guilds that are doing that much, that's a different thing altogether. In the end, having hard and fast rules about this sort of thing is impossible; it's about knowing it when you see it. Here are some examples of games that would belong in Grand Strategy Roleplay:
- Nation Games: Nation Games are competitive games where each player controls a nation state, a corporation, or some other large entity and is explicitly in competition with other players. Created on AH.com, there are other examples of nation games across the web as the concept grew out of emulating Paradox Interactive Games like Europa Universalis III in text form. The settings have traditionally been historical, but games set in a fantasy universe or a sci-fi one are also popular. Games vary from having complex spreadsheets simulating economics to having very few explicit mechanics.
- Map Games: Another AH.com creation that has been emulated elsewhere, Map Games are the map equivalent to the children's game where each person takes turns building a story by adding one word to it. Although the results are less ridiculous, the mechanics are the same; each participant takes a turn and then edits the map. Settings can be everything from historical to fantasy to completely ludicrous, but all map games have the basic premise of an MS paint map being collaboratively added to in turns.
- Council Games: Although tried on AH.com, these are more of an SV/SB fare but are not unique on the internet; some of the earliest were on Let's Plays for strategy games where readers would roleplay as ministers when giving their comments. In a council game you are generally an individual controlling interests, whether it's a ministry, a corporation, or some other internal organization to gain more influence and power. The main difference between council games and nation games is that you are part of a "council"- that is, while you're all jockeying for power, you all have a common goal towards benefiting the overarching organization that you are a part of. A good example of a council game might be one set in a third world country where you play a minister. Although you want to expand the power of your ministry, it is in your interests to work towards the common goal of keeping your nation afloat because your position relies on it being intact. By comparison, in a nation game all players are working at cross-purposes and don't generally have an overarching goal; they are innately competitive, even if they have a large degree of cooperation, whereas council games are innately cooperative, even if they have a large degree of competition.
- Election Games: Popular on AH.com. In an election game, everyone involved creates a candidate for an election campaign; your ultimate goal is to win the election. You create a platform, you try to make statements that curry votes, you try to undercut the competition. Some games are more party-based than candidate based, where a few players create parties and everyone else joins them, and some don't bother creating fictional campaigns and instead have the users themselves compete. Vote Cetashwayo, leader of the Toucan Velocity Party, for Autocrat! That sort of thing; they can vary from lighthearted to heavily realistic. It's really up to you.
What about Civilization Quests/empire builders?
Civilization Quests are a bit weird because they are explicitly large-scale games where the focus of the game isn't individuals. However, they are very different from the games listed above in that almost all actions are based on the GM interacting with the player. Player-to-player interaction isn't the main focus of the game, it's GM-to-player. They still use the same basic mechanics of all quests (voting for choices, no formalized player positions within the quest) and therefore it is up to a user discretion whether they feel their thread belongs in one or the other.
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