The Gaming Den

My group's thinking about doing a Magical Tea Party strategy game in a fantasy setting, where the players try to empire build amidst a civil war. I'm ripping off ideas from Dominions and Endless Legend, but the power level of magic probably stops short of the really crazy stuff in dominions.

I'm having some difficulty with the issue of communication lag. For most provinces, information travels the speed of a horse. The lucky ones have smoke signals, flag codes, and carrier pigeons. Once player-controlled empires extend beyond their personal zone of control, they'll be unable to quickly react to stuff outside it. Having trusted lieutenants recruited from heroes in other provinces will help, but there's still a possibility that they'll only hear about an invasion months after it crosses their borders.

Are there any games that do something like this well? I like how Dominions lets you give commanders battle orders, but you're not sure if they'll be followed perfectly. It might possible to try just vaguely tracking what's going on and guessing when leaders get to react, but I get the feeling that will turn pretty complex.

So you're not doing a scrying network?

You could always have a threat chart that counts down turn by turn and is only revealed to the players after the counter hits zero. If you want to model unrest in the outskirts, each downtick can have an event happen in a certain province, but that might be too much to keep track of.

There was a Traveller boardgame where you played out the Fifth Frontier War. In the Traveller universe, though it's a space opera, speed of communication = speed of travel so it had a relevant mechanic: the very best fleet commanders could move their fleets in real time, worse ones had to declare their moves 1 or more turns in advance.

You could have strategic/logistic skill for your lieutenants which works that way, and a separate tactical skill for how effective your armies are when they are in the right place if you don't want to describe the lieutenants with a single number.

How does GoT use Ravens?

Game On,
fbmf

Ravens are either crazy intelligent in GoT or there is a significant raven trading network.

I assume it works like carrier pigeon: the pigeon has a home it knows and wants to go to, you take the pigeon away from home, when you let it go it goes home.

So if it works the way pigeons worked, then the rookery is basically where you raise ravens and then you send them to whoever might want to send you a message.

Otherwise ravens understand "go to King's Landing" type of instructions, which yeah I get that they're pretty intelligent, but that's taking it to a new level.

Since we mentioned Traveler, we can mention the RPG. Jumping takes one week, period. Jump drives can jump 1-5 sectors. X boats are pretty much the only thing that gets a jump 5 rating. They are basically jump engines with a cockpit and a data repository for mail and that's it. So the absolute fastest that any communication can go out of sector is 5 sectors in a week. But if you're 4 sectors away the odds of finding a 4-sector boat to carry your mail is slim. Odds are you'll x-boat it 5 sectors away, and then pay a far trader to jump it back to the target sector, for a round trip of 2 weeks. Or if a fat trader is going to that sector, 2 weeks at jump 2 which is probably cheaper. Or the cheapest is 4 jump 1 jumps for a month of delay.

Fat traders have a jump 2 drive, and anything more than that is generally considered military. So figure jump 1 or jump 2 for standard communications, and x-boats for pony-express style long distance.

Even in Antiquities news could get from one end of the roman empire to the other in a couple months. Good maintained roads and a dedicated post and military/government messaging network of fresh horses/riders every so often make that actually kind of trivial.

Even during the Napoleonic Wars overland messengers could make it from Continental Europe to say Java in a few months. So main corridors of travel will be very quick even considering the technologies. It's when you branch off of those main corridors that communication can severely slow down.

I meant how do they work in the GoT RPG?

Game On,
fbmf

Oh gotcha.

I have A Song of Ice & Fire RPG and if memory serves... they... don't particularly address that actually.

Thanks for the feedback so far! I've been thinking about my options, and what really appeals to me right now is using a multi-layered game board. If I've got player avatars represented with tokens on a GIMP layer over the map, and their holdings plus NPC forces represented with others, then it would be really easy to simply make stuff the players don't know about transparent. The master map lets you keep track of everything as MC and easily generate the known world for players each strategic turn.

You couldn't do this with a normal board game, but emailing people pictures showing the map with unit tokens they know about could go pretty easily. With ripped sprites, you can even show a fair range of stuff without needing much artistic talent.

TheFlatline wrote:Ravens are either crazy intelligent in GoT or there is a significant raven trading network.

For what it is worth, there are many references to ravens that imply they are way smarter than ravens in our world in ASoIaF.

My personal theory is that Ravens are TWICE AS SMART as Pigeons, and just have two locations, and they fly back and forth between them. So people in Lannisport have like 5-7 Casterly Rock ravens, and Casterly Rock has 5-7 Lannisport ravens, and those are like, the same 12 ravens, and it just depends on how often you need to communicate with them.

And then Lannisport also has like a few ravens for surrounding areas, and The Red Keep, and SeaWatch, and whatever.