LIVE ROLEPLAYING IN A TIME OF MYTHS AND LEGENDS

Design Blog and News - Playing as a nation

One of the little features of Odyssey that I'm proudest of is the model for national leadership. UK fest LRP has been kicking this around for a while.

Back in the day, the Lorien Trust's choice of stance was NPC faction leaders, and I've always argued that that was a Good Thing because it meant someone was specifically responsible for the Fun of a group of players. Someone in the field, with, at least notionally, the game's best interests at heart. As I recall, Matt and others would argue that players should be in control. I still think I was right with respect to the LT's model, and CP's as well come to that - if only because when a large amount of the Fun on offer over the weekend is participation in mass combat, that has logistics involved which to my mind need NPC management. I've heard that the LT has experimented with PC-run factions recently - must find out more.

In systems where large-scale combat isn't core, I'm sure player leadership is the ideal way forward. As long as the method of choosing the leader is clear. Otherwise, I worry that the internal leadership struggle will overshadow other elements of the game. In particular if that struggle involves a sub-set of the players small enough to mean not everyone is involved, but large enough to cripple the faction's effectiveness to such a degree that those for whom that's important have a rubbish time. Of course, Maelstrom has a Status mechanic to decide who runs which allegiance. At least it's clear who the home culture thinks is most worth listening to...

Odyssey offers 5 different ways of working out who is in charge, 2 of which have NPC leadership. I'm hoping, perhaps optimistically, that they'll influence choice of nation. I'm certain some players simply don't want to do what they're told by another player, but they're happy to follow an NPC - I hope they'll at least consider Egypt and Persia and to a much lesser extent Carthage. Even there the NPC presence won't be permanently on the field as it is at the LT and CP events. I'm equally certain some players want to chance to fight political battles with others for leadership - I hope they'll look at Rome, Greece and, to some degree, Persia.

Some nations will gel into awesome political forces, coordinated to create the perfect diplomatic and fighting machine. Some won't - probably because of internal discord, possibly because of treachery, possibly because of fraternisation. Given what I've said about clarity of choice of leadership - I'm looking forward to seeing what happens in Greece. It's up to each nation's players to define it - influenced to a greater or lesser extent by the actions of NPCs. Luck...

H.

One of the things that I dislike about modern LRP is its reliance on "race" as a defining factor. Cat people and dog people, or blue people and green people, are used as shorthand to analogue very different cultures. Maelstrom and its immediate predecessors tried to make a move away from that by introducing culture as well as race, with varying success - but for Odyssey, I was very keen that we actually use the historical cultures as the defining factors rather than including overtly fantastic races - aside from anything else, while there are no shortage of candidate races from Greek mythology, we started coming up short for Persia and Egypt, and scarce indeed for Rome and Carthage. Hence the emphasis on providing detailed briefings for the five nations, and going into a lot of detail for things like costume, style, the "five things you should know" and so on. We wanted people to look at a group of characters at Odyssey and be able to tell from their style of dress "they're Persian" the way at the Lorien Trust you could look at a group with white hair and black skin and say "they're Tarantulas".

At the same time, we didn't want to exclude or bar people based on ability to phys-rep, hence the effort we've gone to for things like the £30 kit challenge and so forth.

For Odyssey, nation is the overarching, defining and overriding loyalty. Like a race in Maelstrom, it cannot be changed, if presupposes a set of advantages and disadvantages, and it automatically creates a set of likely reactions from members of other cultures.

Ian A

Oddly enough I battled away as player under H's stint as NPC Rulerdom in the LT and then became one of the first test subjects of the Maelstrom faction lead by players approach. Small world really. I spent most of my time in either finding fault with it. On the one hand leadership by nominated non-players can lead to accusations of pre-determinism (doesn't matter if we win or lose, command/plot have already descided X) and elitism (I'll never get into command/be a special because I'm not an NPC) whilst the other has been be criticised for promoting incompetents that ruin the rest of a faction's game or encouraging favouritism (of course he'll give his own group Y rather than anyone other Z culture). Both have the perenial charge levelled at them that not enough plot, action or whatever else is meant to keep individual players busy filters down from on top.

With hindsight some of those accusations are true, but a good proportion are not so much something wrong with the individuals or the methods used to work the systems - but limits imposed on the hobby outside the realm of an organiser to mitigate. Taking the criticism aimed at both - in a story orientated game how much can be generated to spread across the player base is ultimately a function of how many writers you have in comparison and how much time they can develve to it, and hard limits exist on how many are available to you. In a game like Maelstrom, it's more about how complex the supporting system is - the more complex it is the more opportunities for interaction there are. You're again limited by how many people developing and maintaining the system you have.

So where does this leave Odyssey? What's interesting from my point of view is that the different strengths and weaknesses of various system will be on show in a controlled environment. If you don't like being dictated to from an off screen NPC, you can literally right then and there retire your character and vote with your feet and move to a different culture. I'm not sure that's ever been an option in a game of this scale before. The usual option is simply not to attend an event again, but that can be lost amongst any number of different reasons. If over several games we see everyone gravitating towards a certain flavour of leadership, and feedback supporting it, then we might at least get close to the answer as to which system the majority of players prefer to play under.

Vince