Generational Downtime

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:33 pm

I've been toying around with the idea of Lineages for a while. It's mostly pretty straightforward in that you just structure your classes around passing the important bits on to the next generation, but there's one big issue I can't figure out how to resolve. How do you make downtime that lasts twenty years interesting and interactive, without MTPing it all or getting bogged down in a bunch of uninteresting die rolls?

To make the design goals of this hypothetical sub-system clear, I want something which will:

-Cover anything from ten years to a century in no more than twenty minutes of playing time, and probably about three rounds of play.

-Have the non-heroic members of your Lineage act as pawns or tokens of some kind during the generational downtime. Preferably you'll have about a dozen of these (maybe more), who will all be "cousin #6" and what-not, and once you've reached the end of the downtime you pick one of the tokens to be your new hero. It should not make a significant difference to the hero's stats or capabilities what he was doing during the generational downtime. A farmboy should be able to become a Fighter or a Wizard or whatever regardless of the fact that his upbringing has prepared him for nothing but farming, even though everyone else in the party might be trained from birth by a clan of ninjas or whatever.

-Have a steady ascension of the Lineage's power, such that a player who prefers big picture to individual triumphs could be invested in the success of the Lineage and be just as satisfied as being invested in the success of a regular TTRPG character. This will include stuff like acquiring new land, driving monsters out of the current land, establishing new trading partners (either as a nation or as a merchant's guild or whatever, it's all basically the same), building up a vast hoard of wealth that cannot be used to purchase magic items but looks awesome in your treasure vaults, acquiring specific treasures which are also not mechanically useful but could be thematically interesting like special tomes or historical artifacts (and yes, some of these will be used as plot hooks for the actual heroes of the Lineage, but some of them will also just be "we have like a billion gold so we went to the guy who found it first and just bought it from him"), improving your reputation throughout the land, and increasing the number of people in your Lineage to make up for the fact that some of them are hitting max age and dying (preferably this is the same whether your Lineage is a literal family that has new kids or a wizard school that teaches new students). All of this needs to be something which could be opposed by a rival Lineage using the same rules, to create villain Lineages (like an ancient demon cult that is your family's sworn enemy or whatever).

-Continue to function properly even if there aren't any mid- or high-level heroes kicking around the Lineage at the time, but which still benefit from having a retired god-wizard around leading things. So you get a pretty significant boost to your capabilities for as long as your old hero is around, but the Lineage does not completely collapse after he dies.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:37 pm

Chamomile wrote:How do you make downtime that lasts twenty years interesting and interactive, without MTPing it all or getting bogged down in a bunch of uninteresting die rolls?

Before you even worry at all about passing down traits, you need to come up with a minigame that describes what's happening to the world at large during the intervening period. Unless heroes have the lifespans of fruit flies, it's incredibly lame for countries to have the same population and borders for the passage of a generation, let alone avoiding being involved in any wars or political coups in the interim period.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 8:47 pm

I'd suggest doing something like confining the scope of a campaign setting to the landmass of a continent and dividing it up into 5 - 12 sovereign nations. Each of the sovereignties have at least these following scores:\

Population, Military Strength, Economic Strength, Political Stability, Atrocity, Citizen Happiness, etc..

Every 3 years you do random rolls to see how the scores change. They need to be arranged in such an order so that the changes make sense (military strength should be capped at a certain population size, population is extremely hard to increase with enough economic strength, Citizen Happiness is negatively affected by atrocity and political stability ratings, etc.). Then you can roll on random event charts for things like 'attempted political coup -- political stability -1' or 'banking system gets incorporated -- economic strength + 1' and so on.

You'll also need to have a separate War minigame, where nations roll for the outcome of battles, form and break alliances, and nations that are in war form truces or surrender or get aid from allies or whatever.

Once you get that task done then you can start worrying about passing down traits and the like. This isn't necessary if you want to restrict the campaign setting to an extremely small area, but once you start worrying about landmasses larger and more diverse than the province of pre-Henry VIII England the MTP load for the GM is just going to be way too heavy for him or her to create a satisfyingly alive setting.

kzt · Post by **kzt** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 9:51 pm

The approach of Pendragon, where you had one adventure per year seemed to work. This has the advantage that you don't have 20 years of downtime, just stuff between adventures.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 10:08 pm

@Lago, that's a perfectly good start for someone who isn't a huge history buff who plans on structuring 90% of their plot around the shifting politics, borders, and resources of the nations involved, but since I happen to be exactly that kind of person what you're saying is basically equivalent to saying that someone GMing a regular game shouldn't even start trying to figure out how their players might go about raising an army until he's written up a way to randomly generate what sort of mooks the villain staffs each of his dungeons with.

EDIT: Now, it is true that there needs to be some kind of mechanical representation of nations, simply so that players have the mechanical teeth they need to overthrow or otherwise take them over using their Lineages, which is exactly the sort of thing I want them to do. There's no reason to be making a dozen rolls just to see what NPC nations that player Lineages aren't even close to are getting up to during the twenty years between generations. That's just cruft. They're getting up to the same things they were in the twenty years before we started playing in the first place, specifically, whatever I as GM decide makes the most interesting setting for a story.

@Kzt, well and good for Pendragon. I want to have 300+ year stories where society visibly changes every time you retire one hero and bring in another, and the effects of your successes or failures are thus obvious without having to give the PCs the ability to completely rewrite every government on the face of the earth within, at most, a few decades of game time.

Vebyast · Post by **Vebyast** » Sat Jun 02, 2012 11:52 pm

Can we hijack a completely separate game system for history progression? Settlers of Catan or Carcassonne might work with the right mapping to Lineages history. I can also imagine things going back in the other direction, with adventure results having effects in the history game's mechanics.

Chamomile · Post by **Chamomile** » Wed Jun 06, 2012 3:54 am

I like the idea of cutting out 90% of the actual work. I'm not sure how well Settlers would work, though. It's 90% a game of resource acquisition and management, with a theme of settling an untamed land. That works for carving out a new territory from monster-infested lands. Particularly if you make a new set of those little number chips, you could have the different numbers represent levels of stability in the region. Totally monster-free is 8 or 6, "are you crazy why would you build a town next to the Balor's fortress" would be a 12 or 2. Problem is, it doesn't have any real mechanics for taking over cities and the scope is pretty limited. Not to mention either all the players collectively control one color, or they each control one color, which means that, like, 75% of the colors are taken up by players from the word go. I only have the base game and Cities and Knights, though, not sure how Seafarers or Traders and Barbarians would change things. I didn't even know Traders and Barbarians existed until I looked it up on Wikipedia.

Now Carcassone seems like an extremely interesting way of going about this if you happen to have a bunch of its expansions. Unfortunately, I don't and have never played it, but it seems like it would play nice with this kind of idea, what with its emphasis on specific features like inns, abbeys, cloisters, cathedrals, castles, towers, etc. etc. (presuming, once again, that you're drowning in expansions). This also suffers from the drawback of only really working for expanding into fresh territory and not jockeying for control of existing nations, however, and it also lacks the mechanic from Settlers that determines how easy it is to get resources from an area, something which can easily be ad-hocced into a representation of how many monsters are in the area, something which heroes can change up.

Of the two, I think Settlers makes a pretty solid foundation, but it needs a few additions:

1) Specific members of the lineage need to somehow be kept track of, likely as a method of interacting with new game mechanics added to solve the remaining problems.

2) There needs to be some way to go to war with other factions and capture their settlements and cities.

3) Low-level Lineages need to be supported. There needs to be a phase where you've just retired your level 4 (or equivalent) adventurer, and most of your resources are dedicated to gaining control of your faction at all, and less on gathering resources and expanding territory (even though these things still need to happen, but possibly at GM discretion instead). Gaining control of a faction could somehow be tied to the city upgrades from Cities and Knights, which provide as much a look at the inner workings of your faction as Catan ever offers, but I'm not sure how. You could tie it to Carcassone, and just say that the settlements in Catan are actually just an abstraction for a collection of multiple towns and villages spread throughout the area, and similarly the cities are representative of not only a major city, but also dozens of nearby towns. Tie the number of points you gain in Carcassone to the amount of starting material you end up with at the start of the Catan phase, maybe. If I actually had Carcassone, this would be easier.

4) High-level Lineages need to be supported. Even if we assume we aren't going quite so gonzo as level 20 D&D (assuming it worked right), and so things like rewriting territory types aren't on the table, there still going to come a time when trading blows with the same five factions (tops) that you've been going at since you first got control of your own faction ten levels ago will seem like it should be beneath you by now. Unfortunately, I can't think of a good game for modeling conflicts between continental or transplanar empires, except maybe Risk, which sucks for a number of reasons (starting with "the map is clearly Earth").