Generalized Politics – Domain Management

Quite some time ago, I released a commissioned GURPS work: the Orphans of the Stars (If you’re a patron, check it out. If you’re not, feel free to join us! Of course, this post should tackle most things without you needing that document to follow along, but it’s a handy worked-example). The intent behind the design was to create a space opera political system in a rather specific, Dune-inspired setting, with extensive bio-tech and where genetically engineered nobles ruled planets.

Since then, I’ve had several people ask me for a more generalized version of the political system, especially in regards to lower-tech settings, such as fantasy worlds, so I offered it as a General Topic Patreon Poll option for January, and it won quite handily!

Before I dive too deeply into this post, I want to highlight what it is and what it isn’t. First, “politics” can have many meanings. People sometimes use it to mean the manipulation of mass populations to persuade them to your course (covered by the GURPS skill of Propaganda); some people use it to mean drama and the accumulation or destruction of influence in a courtly/governmental setting (covered by the GURPS skill of Politics); and sometimes, we mean the management of a population or a domain (covered by the GURPS skill of Administration). This post is primarily about the last, about administrating a domain. Politics as manipulation of courtly settings is mostly handled by GURPS SocialEngineering, and perhaps I’ll go into it more at a later date. It’s also more of a “player vs player,” social-combat sort of situation, which is fine, but Orphans of the Star was designed for cooperative play, where characters controlled different aspects of the government, sort of like playing Civilization except you each control one arm of the domain, instead of the whole of the domain yourself.

How to Write GURPS 101

Before I dive into the topic, I want to clarify how I write GURPS articles and how I think all GURPS authors write (or, frankly, most RPG authors). I want to do this to peel back a bit of the mystique and show you that you too can write GURPS material. I want to do this because, at the end of the day, I can’t give you a complete Politics system for your specific setting, all I can do is give you the tools to build your own and discuss generalities. In the end, you need to make it yours, and I think it helps to understand how I made it mine.

In my opinion, GURPS writers always do some mixture of three things when writing:

• Construct pre-made material by the rules
• Compile existing rules
• Make stuff up

The first, constructing pre-made material, is the most obvious of the three, and you regularly see GURPS fans doing this sort of thing. In this case, the author puts something together “by the rules,” such as building his own templates, building his own powers or abilities, or building his own spaceships. Anyone can do this because GURPS provides such clear guidelines. This is not to say that authors who do this are “bad” or operating on “easy mode,” because they often bring a great deal of creativity to their work. A good example of this is Christopher Rice: much of his work is doing things like compiling together interesting or innovative powers “by the book.”

The second is a little more obscure and not everyone seems to realize it’s going on. A lot of rules are just restatements of existing rules for your convenience. This is more of an academic exercise and requires knowledge of numerous works across the whole spectrum of GURPS material. The best examples of this are the frameworks of GURPS, such as Dungeon Fantasy or GURPS Action. These books don’t generally introduce new rules so much as pare down the existing rules. For example, GURPS Pulling Rank is “just”an expansion of the Pulling Rank system from GURPS Action which is, itself, an expansion on concepts from GURPS Social Engineering, which are themselves musings on how Rank and the Patron trait interact.

The last is where the writer simply assigns statistics as he sees fit. This oftenfollows guidelines, but at the end of the day, the writer has to make his own judgment calls. Most of your tech catalogs are built this way, so the works of Dan Howard, Hans-Christian Vortisch and David Pulver all fit here. Most of these systems have some sort of underlying guidelines, such as HP/ST of a vehicle being derived from its mass, or the damage of a gun coming down to how many inches of solid steel it can penetrate, but many stats have no clear and precise rules determining their value. Handling and stability are good example of that, as bonuses just come down to “it handles well” and penalties come down to “it handles badly.” What these mean and how they should be expressed is ultimately subjective. Similarly, the exact DR values of low-tech armor is likely a very fuzzy thing (especially since there aren’t standards for armor: real-world plate armor varies very much from era to era, and from armor-smith to armor-smith). When we get into completely fanciful things like force swords or mana-engines, there are no guidelines at all, no real-world research you can do to tell yourself what they should actually be. In the end, I think most such writers have an intuitive sense of the game, from years of experience, and rely on that and the demands of the game itself. They try to make their arbitrary rules fun and game-able, so they feel like they fit seamlessly into the game. I will note that when you really dive into these sorts of rules, you sometimes find places where the author has fudged or ignored a guideline to make something more gameable. That’s fine too!

I think the greatest tension for the average GURPS would-be writer is knowing where the second approach ends and the third begins. If you’re actually writing a supplement, you should be careful about rewriting existing rules because those are the foundation upon which other books are written and you risk creating inconsistencies. It’s only when no hard rules exist that you can safely make an arbitrary decision. When creating home-rules for your own campaigns (which is GURPS writing as much as creating a publishable supplement!), your hands are tied less and you’re free to write away existing rules and introduce your own arbitrary decisions, though you should be aware that you can still create inconsistencies, but they’re easier to hand-wave away with your smaller group and your greater authority over the rules.

I bring this up because if you want to bring the political rules into your game, you’re going to have to make stuff up. For Orphans of the Stars, especially when it came to task difficulty or the cost of political actions, I definitely “made things up” primarily with an eye towards interesting gaming choices (Propaganda is often very cheap, wealth investment is often very expensive, so I did some balancing of costs and effects there to make them more compatible with one another). I’m going to do the “research” part for the compilation of rules for you, here, in this post. Once you’ve gone through them, you should have a good sense for how they work, and where things become unclear, just insert your own subjective opinions or insights. Especially if you’re just doing this for your own campaign, it’s not going to matter if, according to the GURPS “Rules as Written” you’re wrong, because it’s your campaign, and it needs to work for you and your group.

GURPS Domain Management: Existing Rules

It should come as no surprise to you, then, that most of my political material ultimately derived from existing rules. What’s especially interesting is that they’re especially well-suited to fantasy-level play: I actually had to do a lot of work to scale them up to planetary scales.

The core book you’ll want to handle domain management is GURPS City Stats and the core book for organizational management is GURPS Boardroom and Curia. Which you’ll want will depend on what you’re managing. If it’s a physical place, City Stats is probably better for you, while an organization, such as a church, corporation or criminal enterprise, you’ll want Boardroom and Curia. Both have some insights to offer to the other, however.

Shared traits

Tech Level: Both books want to know what TL your domain is at, which is generally pretty straight forward and generally a setting constraint (though perhaps some cities or organizations have access to radically different technologies).

Population/Members: Both books want to know how many peopleare under your domain.

Wealth: Both books want to know how wealthy the organization is. This value, multiplied by the population/membership of the domain determines how much total wealth is available in the domain.

Control Rating: This determines how oppressive the domain is. This applies to both organization and city, and use the same values.

City Traits

Search Bonuses: Derived from population, it might be an interesting value to add to an organization, though typically in an organization, you just ask for a particular asset or sort of person: if you need an assassin, you just pull rank and if your organization has an assassin, you’ve got it.

Terrain: The sort of land your city is built on; not terribly pertinent to organizations.

Appearance: How attractive your city is. Not especially pertinent to organizations though organizations do have “notable resources” and reputation. The latter serves a similar role, and the former might matter for attractiveness (a church might have “beautiful” temples).

Hygiene: Covers how clean the city is. Only really useful if you want to track disease, certain forms of magic, or bio-tech attack vectors.

Magical Environment: Like terrain, but focuses on the magical side of it. Not pertinent to organizations, though again, they might have notable resources (“The Wizard’s Guild has access to secret Very High Mana enclaves where they cast their most powerful spells.”)

Culture: This is more descriptive, and while organizations don’t explicitly get into culture, this affects them too. In Orphans of the Stars, I melded this with Member Traits to create ethnic minorities. For example, if you have a human city (who are literate and speak Common), there might also be Elves (who are literate and speak Elvish) and Orcs (who are not literate and speak the Black Tongue). A good way to handle these for a city is to alter the search modifiers based on the population of each: if 10,000 out of a 100,000 city are elves, then finding a human doctor is at +3, while an elven doctor is +1.

Status: This covers the range of statuses available in the city and is more descriptive of the state of the city, taking a similar role to rank in organizations. In principle, status might matter to organizations too (rank and status have a synergistic relationship).

Political Environment: This is mostly descriptive, again, and sets base constraints on your domain management (managing a democracy will be different than managing a monarchy, at least if you need to persuade someone to get your agenda agreed to). This is roughly analogous to organization type.

Corruption: An interesting trait that primarily measures how easily one can get past the rules, it might also cover how much crime a city has, or how dangerous the population is to the authorities. This might be an interesting trait to pull over to organizations, and the closest analogous trait here is Loyalty.

Military Budget: This is your hard-and-fast governmental income. They callit a military budget, but I think that’s because if you call it a booze-and-hookers budget, the people would rebel. More accurately, I think we could call it a discretionarybudget that tackles things that fall beyond the scope of the game to worry about. Presumably the king has taxes that handle the maintenance of his roads or the basic bureaucracy he maintains, but if we care about things like throwing a grand parade to impress the people, building a great engineering project, or raising more troops, all of it comes out of this budget. Organizations do not have a corresponding trait because they deal with wealth differently.

Defense Bonus: How defensible the city is. Organizations don’t have this, but Notable Resources might.

Organizational Resources

Contacts and Member Traits: These represent the sortsof people one might find in an organization and a rubber-meets-the-road sort of interaction with an organization (“I know what the Thief’s Guild is like, but what is a single thief from the Thief’s Guild like?”). The closest analogous trait here is the Search Modifier from City Stats (that is, what are your chances of finding a particular sort of person in a city) and Culture (the sorts of people in your city). It may well be worth using this sort of trait in a city, but primarily to represent ethnic minorities found therein.

Notable Resources: Organizations are abstractions of a pooling of individual talent and goals, and thus are more of a collection of people than a physical place. But organizations can havephysical places associated with them, like the sacred mountain of a nature-worshipping cult, or the skyscraper HQ of a major corporation. These notable resourcesmight have many city-like traits, such as an Appearance, a physical environment, a magical environment and a defense bonus.

Reaction Time Modifier: This is a fairly interesting trait. It mostly exists to determine how long from when a player character starts interacting with an organization (making a Pulling Rank request, or making attacks against their resources) that the organization acts (fulfills the pulling rank request, or sending kill squads to deal with this pest). A city won’t have this, but the government running it might, but it’s also an open question if it matters to your political game. If you’re playing in “slowed down” political time, reaction time just doesn’t matter.

Startup Cost and Resource Value: This is an abstraction of what it takes to start up such a group, and how much of a budget they have to throw at things. Resource Value is roughly analogous to Military Budget, and in practice, if discussing a city’s government as an organization, these two values should match.

Patron, Enemy, Ally and Dependent Value: These are concerns for player characters, and aren’t especially important to determining political gameplay rules.

Type: Descriptive of the organization, and roughly analogous to the political environment of a city.

Loyalty: A very interesting trait and one I highly recommend borrowing for City Stats. It discusses how well the members of an organization will work together, and how committed they are to the cause. A city might also have loyalty to its government, with a rebellious city having a low value, and a zealous city with a high value. This can be useful if trying to sway a population or undermine loyalty to create rebellions.

Rank and Income Range: More a description of the sort of people in the organization and how they organize themselves; similar to Status and Wealth ranges in a city.

Reputation: This is to an organization what appearance is to a city: how well liked it is.

It’s a City! It’s an Organization! No, it’s…

Sometimes, you need to merge your domain together, depending on what you’re looking for. For example, street gangs are probably best considered organizations, but they’re organizations who definitely have “turf” and a strong connection to it. A gang that allows its neighborhood to be beautified or to improve the overall wealth of the area also profit, as they can charge more for their “services,” but at the same time, they have to be careful of the sort of activities they do (an uptown gang can certainly handle escorts, illicit gambling casinos hidden away in a mansion basement and make sure the rich college kids get their drugs, but the moment firefights start breaking out, property values will plummet and people start moving away…). So, they operate similarlyto how a city government does, in that they “tax” the locals, and thus care about the state of the locals (at least, they do if they’re wise).

When it comes to being tied to a geographical location that’s not a city, we have a few options. GURPS Spacediscusses planetary scale economics in the “Social Parameters” section starting on page 84. This includes (see if any of this sounds familiar): Tech Level, Population, Society Type, Control Rating and Economics (Wealth). You can bring in a few additional traits from cities and organizations (hygiene, loyalty) which is exactly what I did for Orphans of the Stars. The primary difference here is a matter of scale, as planets don’t generally get smaller than 100,000 people, and search modifiers don’t care about things larger than 100,000, so you might have to make up some numbers of your own.

GURPS Space also includes bases and installations. Personally, I find these more interesting than base stats. For example, if you try to improve a city by improving its hygiene, what preciselyare you doing? Improved sewer lines? Better hospitals? Harsh laws that demand hand-washing? 4X games like Civilization, from which you’ll probably draw inspiration, certainly use concrete assets to define abstract demographic improvements (How do you improve the literacy of a population? You build a library!). This has several benefits, as it makes it easier for the player to understand, and it also presents a concrete location for players to visit (“We need to research Cthulhu. Wait, didn’t you build a library in your city?”) or defend.

For more rural areas, especially in fantasy settings, I direct you to Lord of the Manner in Pyramid#3/52 by Matt Rigsby (you’ll note that I often cite Matt; he wrote Boardroom and Curia as well; Bill Stoddard is your other author of choice, having written Social Engineering and City Stats). This tackles income from primarily agricultural sources from TL 1-4; if you combine this with GURPS Fantasy (Bill Stoddard, again), in Chapter 5 “Localities” which discusses how rural domains tend to be constructed, you can get a pretty good sense as to how various subdomains build up into a greater domain.

Taking Action!

It’s not enough to have a domain, your actions need to affect your domain. Specifically, we’d want to spend some money and time and roll against our skill to improve some aspect of our domain. For organizations, see “Running an Organization” starting on page 19 of Boardroom and Curia. For cities, see Pyramid #3/54 Social Engineering article “City Management” (by Matt Rigsby, again).

Really, between these two, you’ve got everything you need for whatever sort of domain, or combined domain, that you want to run. You have the base stats, you have actions you can take to improve them, and you even have time-scales, budget levels, required skills, and consequences.

If you want to handle something bigger, like a planet, just scale time and budget up. If you want to handle something small, like a village, just scale the time and budget down. If you want to see the effects of magic, I direct you to the previously mentioned Lord of the Manner article.

Taking Mass Action!

Mass Combat is the crunchy peanut-butter to the smooth chocolate of domain administration: they go very well together. While there’s more to politics than war and administration, it’s a verygood start. A well-run domain can supply the logistical needs of a well-run military, and a well-run campaign can defeat an enemy and perhaps even provide the resources necessary to improve your own domain. But at the same time, focusing too much on war means your domain will suffer, and focusing too much on domain can leave you undefended if another, more militaristic power declares war. The budgets and time-scales involved tend to be similar to one another, by design. Thus, mass combat creates interesting choices for anyone running a domain, offers both a strategic and tactical layer to the game, and gives players much needed action, as well as integrating well.

Spicing it Up

Oprhans of the Stars used all of the above as its base framework, but I worked at “spicing things up” to keep it as interesting as possible. So, let me offer some suggestions and ideas to keep fun. A good working example of all of these can be found in Orphans of the Stars, so I won’t repeat them here (I’m also double my allotted word-count…)

Consolidate

Chances are, you’ll find interesting bits and baubles in the various systems I outlined above. Feel free to bring them in together. Some examples from Orphans includes adding population Loyalty to “cities” and corruption to organizations. I’ve already mentioned how well Mass Combat goes with Boardroom and Curia or City Stats, and nothing prevents you from bringing concepts like Loyalty and Hygiene into military forces. Perhaps a reward for massive propaganda efforts is undermining the loyalty (creating “Disloyal” units) of your enemy or improving the loyalty of your own forces (creating “Fanatical” units). Perhaps plague is a major concern, and whenever a military force enters an area, they need to make an HT roll with a bonus or penalty equal to the area’s hygiene to keep from catching plague.

Note that you don’t need everything. If health is not an issue, don’t include Hygiene.  If we’re talking management of robots that will never betray their organization, don’t bother with Loyalty.  If you don’t have magic, obviously you don’t have a magical environment.  Pick the things that matter to your game, and focus your attention on those, and leave out or simplify everything that doesn’t matter.

I generally suggest doing a quick sketch of all the bits you’d like to cobble together and see how you might make them compatible, which tends to be fairly obvious once you have them all side by side.

Simplify

Once you have all your pieces assembled, smooth them out and make the mechanics more approachable. In general, you want your various actions to be as self-same as possible. You want to avoid a load of little exceptions that requires players (and GM!) to have their book open to look up something every step of the game. If actions take a particular amount of time, try to adjust them so they’re generally the same (“About a month” or “About a year”) is good, depending on the scale of the game. Similarly, try to keep price values about the same, so you can’t do one action for $10 and another for a $million. The ideal is actuallythe same, so players begin to see their budgets in chunks (“Huh, I have $3,000,000. That’s three upgrades, which ones do I want?”). You may have to fudge to get values to match, but making stuff upis fine, fudging is fine, as long as it gives you the gameplay you’re looking for.

Crisis! And Failing Forward

I find few things as frustrating in a slow-motion game like domain management to build up to my once-a-month roll, and then blow the roll, so “nothing happens.” I prefer to have some means to let my players ensure that their agenda is successful, even if it comes at a cost.

One such cost I introduced in Orphans of the Stars was the concept of a crisis, which came in values (1, 3 and 5-point crises). Players could “buy” success by accepting crises. This, incidentally, does a good job of illustrating how real-world policies actually work. When someone tries to implement a program to improve literacy, a “failure” doesn’t look like nothing happened. Instead, it might be that people gain literacy, but parents begin rioting over their kids being taken away to re-education camps, or the increased literacy results in less adherence to traditional ideals and perhaps more crime, or perhaps, rather than push for the extreme changes the project turns out to demand, the politician just lets it drop, but that’s a choice. And that choice, makes it critical. If a player rolls badly, rather than suffer the disappointment, they’re faced with a choice between a deeply flawed success, or a straight-forward failure, and that makes the game more interesting, in my opinion.

You can also just chuck these crises at your players. Plagues just happen, crime just happens, the domain slowly falls apart and the players will need to be the ones that fix it. This can keep the game from being a stale set of steady improvements on a domain over time.

Magic!

One of the appeals of magic in fantasy systems is that they offer alternative ways to achieve success, with alternative costs. For example, rather than carefully manage the land to improve its fertility, you can have wizards cast spells to keep the land fertile. This comes at the cost of critical failures summoning demons, and the land becoming dependent on mana levels, which means a crisis like a mana storm or something might really cause problems for the world. With its addition, players have another layer of choices as to how they solve their problems, with a new layer of consequences and requirements.

“Magic” is a common, default example of this sort of alternative problem solving. We could add divine favor (Pray to (the) God(s) for fertile lands, at the cost that God will abandon your domain if you sin), technology (use radiomutagenic bio-tech to improve crop-fertility. I’m sure it’ll be fine. We tested it, right?) or psychic powers.

Exactly how to implement this varies. Some obvious utility will leap out at you if you look over available powers or effects. The Lord of the Manor article explicitly covers magic and land fertility. As a good rule of thumb, you can also use powers and abilities as “complimentary rolls” typically offering +2 instead of +1, or +4 if it offers “miraculous” utility (such as precognition and strategy rolls).

Bring it to the Players

The actions and stats in the systems I describe are abstractand nebulous. If you improve the city’s Hygiene, what does that mean? What does the player character, walking the streets, see? What about a sudden increase in corruption? What does that look like? How does it affect their adventures? I’m sure you can already think of some answers, but you should think of those answers.

Consider replacing generic stat-improvement actions with specific asset construction. Improving the beauty of the city requires building gardens or monuments or temples. Instead of improving or reducing control rating, consider passing specific laws with specific consequences. Low control ratings might look like bills of rights, explicitly protecting some freedom “for the people/members” while high control ratings might look like increasingly tyrannical laws.

We can use these concrete examples to create new interesting choices. We could have a list of laws that the domain can pass with additional, associated consequences. Building gardens might improve local mana, monuments might make the city more martial, and temples might introduce new gods. Likewise, passing oppressive laws might also improve hygiene, alienate certain populations (“The Elven Purity Act”), or drive out religions (“The State Theocracy Act”) while liberties might make the population harder to control in specific ways.

Furthermore, try to find ways to bring this to the players. Ask yourself how a person on the street might interact with these. For your crises, if you have them, introduce some obvious element that the players can interact with or affect directly to gain a bonus to dealing with the problem. For example, a rise of corruption might be tied to the introduction of organized crime, which means that you see more thefts, more murder, the bribing of officials, and there may be a specific face to the corruption, a mafia boss that the players could assassinate or arrest to reduce crime in the city again. When improving a stat through some construction, make at least one aspect of that construction something players can interact with. For example, beautifying the city with religion likely means multiple shrines, temples and even traditions or holidays throughout the city, but perhaps there is a main, central temple which, in addition to boosting the city’s beauty, offers specific miracles and benefits on a player-character scale, such as blessed weapons or a specific blessing depending on the nature of the God.

The key thing to remember here is that you’re not running a domain management game. You are not playing civilization or Masters of Orion. You are running an RPG where each player controls a single character, and that character needs to interact with his world. If you keep this perspective, all sorts of interesting options starts to open up and, frankly, you begin to understand history better. One reason kings and politicians make the choices that they do is to benefit themselves personally, not to maximize some abstract stats that their domain has. For example, the Corruption Action in City Management rules makes no sense if you’re trying to make the best city you can, but it makes a ton of sense if you really need an expensive enchanted sword to rescue your girlfriend from a dragon, or you need to pay off a mafia boss so he doesn’t blackmail you and cost you your cushy position.

On the Demise of Star Wars

“You were the chosen one”? Or maybe “Strike me down and I shall only become stronger.”

Forgive the provocative title.  My part of the internet bubble churns with much rage at the current incarnation of Star Wars, and especially at Kathleen Kennedy, at whose feet the perceived “Ruined Forever!” has been laid.  There is much angst and schadenfreude over the failure of Solo, but Solo is the crux of what inspired me to write this, as it’s the first Star Wars movie in a long time that wasn’t an instant “yes,” though not the first Star Wars product in a long time that I had looked forward to, and then changed my mind about.

Then I put this post on ice, because I hesitate to post anything that sounds remotely political in this day and age as discourse is getting extremely divisive and it’s hard to please both sides (and there are sides here) when you say anything, and because I have better things I should be putting my attention towards (the next post is almost done, I promise!). But as news continues to evolve and the corporate narrative of “a few disgruntled trolls vs the Last Jedi” explodes to reveal that the Star Wars franchise is Not Okay, I wanted to get my two cents in, especially given how my blog seems to eat, drink and breath Star Wars.

I hope you forgive this opinion piece.

Star Wars: Ruined Forever

Solo has not done well, and Grace Randolph of Beyond the Trailer sums up most of the arguments pretty succinctly in her video, (she has further news on Kathleen Kennedy; she’s a great one, Ms. Randolph) so I won’t repeat it here.  What I find interesting, and likely true, is her comparison to Batman V Superman/Justice League and the Last Jedi/Solo, in that the backlash of the first resulted in the failure of the second, regardless of the second’s merits.  I’ve been watching this backlash build up for awhile, and not a day goes by where I don’t see a video popping up claiming that Star Wars is dead, or that the Last Jedi is a terrible movie, which clashes strongly with the perception I get from the news or from sites like Wikipedia to the point where I wonder how much of it is real and how much is manufactured, though more on that later.

I feel like the only fandom that hates their fandom more than Star Wars is, perhaps, Doctor Who, which is something I talked about all the way back in the inaugural post about Psi-Wars.  This is, perhaps, just more of the same, but I wanted to tackle some of the arguments that I tend to see, to try to sift out some wheat from chaffe.

The New Star Wars Movies Suck!  Unlike True Star Wars Films!

This is the general thrust of most arguments that I see floating around the internet: once upon a time, the Good King George Lucas reigned over a Golden Age of Star Wars, in which all the films were good, and then the wicked stepmother Kathleen Kennedy took over and ruined it forever.  However, I must say, I find this black and white dichotomy more than a little weird, especially the calls for George Lucas to “come back” and fix his creation.

First off, most Star Wars movies suck, straight up.  Look, here’s all the Star Wars movies I can find, in order of release, with opinions based on what seems to be the general perception of those who dislike the new franchise:

• Star Wars (A New Hope): Good
• The Star Wars Holiday Special: Not Good
• The Empire Strikes Back: Good
• Return of the Jedi: Good (though a lot of people at the time really hated the Ewoks)
• Caravan of Courage: an Ewok Adventure: Not Good
• Ewoks: Battle for Endor: Not Good
• The Phantom Menace: Not Good
• Attack of the Clones: Not Good (Saaaaand)
• Revenge of the Sith: Not Good
• Clone Wars: Not Good (Though I must confess I enjoyed the series)
• The Force Awakens: Good (but unoriginal)
• Rogue One: Good
• The Last Jedi: Not Good
• Solo: Not Good

Mileage may vary (I personally liked the Phantom Menace the most of the original trilogy; a lot of people like Revenge of the Sith, I think Clone Wars is underrated; a lot of people might toss everything new into the “bad” bin, while I think people forget the early negative opinions of RotJ, etc), but this seems to be the current internet consensus, and I count 5 good films and 9 bad films.  Of the new films, half of them are “good,” and even if you press the most ardent Disney Star Wars hater, he’ll grudgingly admit that Rogue One “was sorta alright.” So the new stuff hasn’t been all bad, but this idea that Star Wars was good until Disney came along, is just absurd, as is the idea that Lucas “would fix it.”  Lucas has an even worse hit/miss ratio than Kathleen Kennedy, and she’s his hand-picked successor, so no, I don’t think Lucas will “save Star Wars.”

Kathleen Kennedy Ruined Star Wars with Politics

The first woke robot of Star Wars

The argument goes that Kathleen Kennedy, unlike George Lucas, has used Star Wars as a platform for injecting her own left-wing screed into Star Wars.  To this, I say: Have you seen Star Wars?

George Lucas compared the Ewoks to the Vietnamese, heroically defying a technologically superior enemy.  The US would be the Evil Empire in this analogy.  And before you think he cooled down with age, he tossed in a “You’re with us or you’re against us” swipe at George W. Bush in Revenge of the Sith, which in the context doesn’t even make sense (“Only the Sith see in black and white!” oh really, Obi-Wan “The force has a light side and a dark side” Kenobi?).

Star Wars has always been the fever dream of a 1960s activist, only two things changed.  First, George Lucas and Lucasfilms went from ardent hippy activist to more limousine liberal, which is one reason why Kathleen Kennedy is more worried about “representation” than rebellion.  The other, I think, is a cultural shift: Hollywood’s Overton window has moved a lot more than most of the populace.  I don’t think anyone minds the presence of “Strong Women” in Star Wars; Leia has been the prototypical “Strong Woman” of fiction for a long time, but now there’s a much stronger push for far, far more female representation in Star Wars, perhaps to the detriment of the male leads (Finn, at least, seems to suffer at the hands of the writer for no good reason that I can discern other than, perhaps, that the writers don’t actually understand comedy).

But I also want to come out and say that I don’t think it’s the politics that’s ruining Star Wars.  I think it’s a manufactured excuse to justify bad films, and I’ll get more into that later.  How much outcry do you remember about the Jedi Council being lead by a black man (Mace Windu)?  He has his own comic book series, numerous books, features in video games and in the Clone Wars series, and there were some people arguing he should get his own film.  What about female representation in Star Wars? Asoka Tano, a female character, was the break-out character of Clone Wars and nobody called her a Mary Sue, even when she became the Super Special Awesome Character of Awesome in Star Wars: Rebels.  Who was your favorite character in Rogue One? Those of you who aren’t voting for a robot are probably voting for Chirrut Imwe (Donnie Yen!), who is Chinese.  So this idea that “fans” are opposed to “inclusiveness” is nonsense.

It’s not the politics that’s ruining Star Wars.

Kathleen Kennedy hates the fans

 I don’t feel that I have a responsibility to cater in some way [to those particular fans]… I would never just seize on saying, ‘Well, this is a franchise that’s appealed primarily to men for many, many years, and therefore I owe men something.'” – Kathleen Kennedy

This one I think is true, especially given that Kathleen Kennedy is on the record as disparaging a certain segment of the Star Wars fanbase (as well as other writers and directors).  I find her defense, her attitude that she doesn’t “owe” fans something to be disingenuous.  Of course, she doesn’t “owe” people something, she offers a product and you can pay for it or not: that’s business.  But what she calls “fans,” I call her core market, and what she’s really saying is something along the lines of “I don’t feel the need to cater to my core market,” which is a daft thing to say in business.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to try to branch out, but it’s generally not well advised to so do at the expense of your core supporters.  For example, there’s nothing wrong with SJGames pushing a simplified version of GURPS that focuses on the dungeon crawling crowd: that’s SJGames branching out.  But if they were to drop all support for GURPS to focus entirely on a new d20 clone, that would be a risky move at best.  Star Wars has a core audience that is remarkably faithful, despite their complaints and criticisms, to the brand, and I don’t think it’s wise to antagonize that core audience just because they happen to be white and male.  

That said, I don’t think that’s actually what’s going on.  I think all the “politics” and fan-bashing and such is a smoke screen for poor management, and Kathleen Kennedy isn’t the only one doing it.

Rent Seeking and Circling the Wagons 

“I know there’s a lot of controversy around this game, but c’mon, it’s Star Wars, I was never not going to buy it.” – Tech Deals

I first noticed this sort of behavior not with Disney, but with EA, especially the release of Battlefront 2 (If I’m honest, I find everything surrounding the business decisions that led up to the release of Battlefront 2 fascinating).  First, EA gains sole access to the Star Wars IP when it comes to games, which is typical for EA: find something that people love, and monopolize it.  So, if you want a Star Wars game, you must go through them.  Second, create a game that looks good: appearance is the most important, because it helps with the hype train.  Third, find a way to monetize the hell out of it, because you’ve got a Star Wars game, people have no choice but to pay, and then brag about it to your investors, to get more sweet investment capital.  When the fans inevitably complain, divert them with empty promises that you’re “listening,” and then wrap yourself in a cloak of some form of morality.  For example, they had a female lead character, and the actress acted as their spokesperson, which gave them the cover of “we’re supporting feminism;” to suggest that they’ve listened to the fans, they employed John Boyega, the actor who plays Finn, to talk about how much he liked the new Battlefront 2.  When criticism arose, they painted it as the rantings of an unreasonable, entitled minority, and fended off criticism of lootboxes and such by wrapping themselves under the mantle of “Free market!” and “Innovation!” But in the end, everything circles around extracting cash from people, nothing else remained.

I think the same can be safely said of Disney’s handling of Star Wars.  If Kathleen Kennedy were really such a feminist, then why has she hired only white, male directors?  If she’s so racially tolerant, then why do black characters get such poor treatment in her films?  If she hates the fans so much, why does she pepper so many of the Star Wars films with so much fan service?  If she hates Star Wars, why are all the films coming out right now such slavish remakes of the original trilogy, or direct references to the original films? Why has she not yet branched out into something truly new?

I think the truth is that making really good fan-based franchises is hard.  Of all the cinematic universes, only one has really been a success: Marvel, under Kevin Feige.  All the rest have failed.  There may be numerous reasons for this, but one take-away must be that it’s difficult, and Star Wars is going to be no different, because even the stuff most people currently agree is “good,” like Dave Filoni’s Rebels, or Rogue One, are still somewhat controversial (and largely seem to be considered good more in contrast with the things fans consider “Bad”), and the stuff most people agree is “bad,” like the prequels or even the Last Jedi, are equally contentious.  If you’ll pardon the electoral analogy, it’s not really red vs blue but a sea of shades of purple and general discontent, and that’s hard for the best people to navigate, and Kathleen Kennedy seems to not be the best of people.

So instead, we get the easy outs.  Ms. Kennedy just grabs directors and makes films, and when they become too different, she fires the directors and makes them “safer.”  When people criticize her work, she falls back and hides under the mantle of morality: if you hate her movies, you’re part of an “the toxic fandom” and you’re a bigot and a bully.  For me, this is a bridge too far, and really the core of this rant: you will never improve if you cannot take criticism.

I get criticized all the time, sometimes unreasonably in my opinion.  There are people who want Psi-Wars to be something that, in my opinion, it was never intended to be.  I see people who argue that it’s too like Star Wars, and that it’s not like Star Wars enough.  I get people who say they would do things completely differently.  But for me, these are not attacks, but valuable feedback.  Some I can use, some I cannot.  They give me a sign of where things are going, how audiences are shifting, and what I could do better.  Where are things too complicated? Where are they confusing?  What could I be doing better?  You have to pick and choose your criticism, and you cannot bow to what each and every person says, but feedback that is honest is feedback that is valuable.  You cannot learn without it.  Those who attack their critics will never improve.

This seems to be a trend, especially with poorly received films with strong female leads (Lady Ghostbusters, Oceans 8, the Star Wars franchise), but this is a mistake.  For an example of a franchise that took criticism to heart, see the Thor: Ragnarok.

Making a Better Star Wars

It seems like there’s a shake-up already in the works, though not before we get Episode IX.  What will happen? I don’t know, but weaker franchises than this have survived terrible treatment.  Star Wars itself is probably predated only by Star Trek for a franchise beloved by fans but abandoned or mishandled by the entertainment industry.  Star Wars endured all the years of neglect from RotJ to the prequels through books, comics and games, and it survived the prequels, and it will survive now: even if you don’t like the films, check out the new TV series or the animated series.  While there are precious few video games (because EA has seemingly forgotten how to make video games, and killed the lonely one Star Wars video game that was set to release), there’s still RPGs, books and comics being made, and some, I hear, are quite good.

Were it up to me, I’d encourage them to set aside this “Legends/Canon” split, or at least weaken it.  The Marvel films drank deep of their comic weirdness and embraced their legacy; they didn’t precisely copy everything, but they understood they had a huge well to draw on and did, and as a result, each film, while formulaic, has something interesting enough to offer that audiences flock to theaters.  By contrast, Star Wars fans feel like they’ve seen the films already (“The Force Awakens was just a New Hope reskinned; the Last Jedi was just the Empire Strikes Back reskinned, and Solo was so predictable that Red Letter Media released a Solo Trailer reaction video before the trailer released, and then edited in the actual trailer afterwords, and got it spot on”), and while I’m not sure that’s entirely fair, that perception makes going to the theater less of a priority, and that’s not what you want from your audiences.  Imagine if Lucasfilm released a KOTOR Star Wars film, or one featuring Thrawn, Mara Jade, the Yuhzon Vong, the Hutt Cartel, Darth Nihilus (or really any Sith from the past), or worlds like Corriban, Ryloth, or Tython?

But what makes me saddest about watching and listening to people talk about Star Wars is that they seem to have forgotten what came before it.  I’ve talked about how much Star Wars has borrowed from, for example, Dune, Flash Gordon, Foundation, samurai films and many more.  If you’re desperate for inspiration, why not draw from those films?  Why not borrow from history and instead of using the First Order as a way of replacing the Empire, why not look at the fracturing of the Empire and its internal wars and its warlords and the efforts of the Republic to reconquer the galaxy with the struggle between their ideals and the hard realities of war.  Want to be inclusive? Have General Leia in charge of everyone and put Gwendoline Christie in a role that doesn’t completely waste her talents.  Bring in Thrawn as one of said warlords, and Mara Jade as your dark and terrible menace, the Emperor’s Hand that the Republic fears.  Give a callout to the Jedi Academy series, with some of Luke’s students trying to help the Republic.  Give us a Dune-like world with a warrior-people who follow a jedi-like creed (the Guardians of the Whills?) who must be talked into fighting back against the nearby warlords or against the sweeping pirate menace. You might even draw from Seven Samurai, by having seven heroic characters gathered to defend that one world. There’s such a rich tradition you can draw from, and it’s such a waste to see it lie fallow.  People are forgetting their history.

What is killing Star Wars isn’t female leads, it’s not politics, it’s not toxic fandom, it’s just bad films and an inability to listen to criticism.  It’s an institutional problem, one that seems fairly ingrained into Lucas Film at this point, so I don’t see it changing soon.  But Star Wars is too beloved to die.  It’ll just do what it did through the 90s and go quiescent for a time, at worst.

On the Demise of Psi-Wars

So given the rancor and frustration around Star Wars, do I fear for Psi-Wars?

No.

I’m honestly more worried about my time and flagging interest in the series, though my backers still seem firmly committed to the cause, and I’m rounding a corner on a particularly sticky issue.  But even if Star Wars dies, which it won’t, I still wouldn’t worry about Psi-Wars because, despite much nudging and winking, it isn’t Star Wars.  That rich tradition I mentioned above is something I definitely draw on for my work, and other works besides, and those works still live on. 40k continues to churn forward, Dune has a new movie in the making, the Metabarons has a new series focused on the Metabaron, a new season of Killjoys is on the horizon, we can expect to see a Guardians of the Galaxy 3 (assuming they survive the turmoil of the Infinity War!) and people still love pulpy Space Opera, even if they sometimes forget it’s more than just Star Wars.

So I’m still here, and I’ll still be here when all the turmoil has died down and this Star Wars mess has sorted itself out one way or another.

Orphans of the Stars: Political Conflict

This will be my last “design notes” post for Orphans of the Stars.  I’m going to post the actual draft next week at this time and place, giving me a little extra time to work on Psi-Wars (the Alliance is coming along nicely, though it’ll be a very different beast than what we see in Star Wars.  Stay tuned, my Psi-Wars faithful!).  It’ll be available on Patreon for $5, as stated before.

Today, I look into the most important element of political gameplay, conflict, which allows you to defeat your opponents through war, espionage, subversion and economic sanction, which is just what everyone seems to really want when they talk about “political gameplay.”  Most of this made it into the final cut, and more!  And even if you don’t want sweeping, interstellar political contests, the ideas presented herein might still prove useful inspiration for your own political games.

Political Conflict

All the material I’ve created thus far has focused exclusively on management of domain. That, in and of itself, is potentially interesting. For many empires, the most consistent threats were internal, and in response to proposed reforms instigated by the master of that domain. The system I’ve designed could certainly keep players busy and entertained for an entire campaign. However, it plays a bit like Sim City and other city builders: all problems come from the players’ own decisions, rather than external pressure. If we want an opponent to directly impact the players, or to represent an outlet for player aggression, then we need political conflict.

Political conflict also represents the heart of why civilizations have armies and spies. To some extent, it’s also why they have law enforcement, but law enforcement is more for dealing with crises, which I’d like to get into a little deeper. Political conflict allows us to exploit our enemies’ weaknesses, or to defend ourselves from their depredations.

Political conflict also gives us a new approach and a new set of tactics for building our empire. The advantage of focusing internally on your empire is that your stuff gets better. The advantage of focusing outwards would seem to be that your opponents get weaker, but I would argue that attacking enemies can also make you stronger. Spies can steal secrets from your rivals and deliver them to you; soldiers can raid the enemy and recover valuable booty and slaves.

Just how much political conflict can hurt someone, though, is a point worth carefully considering. In reality, war can destroy an empire that took centuries to build. War can also result in a change of leadership almost instantly. But how will players feel if their hard work is undone by a few bad rolls made against a bully who picked on them? We’ll need to strike a balance between the speed of war, and the rewards players have carefully built up, and what they can expect to gain if they win. We’ll also need to decide if offense beats defense, all things being equal, or the other way around, and to what extent.

It behooves a wise warmonger to choose his targets carefully, because he doesn’t want to make enemies of the wrong people. No matter how powerful we are, enough opponents can gather together to kick our butt. If diplomacy is war by other means, then we’ll need to understand alliances, treaties, casus belli and how those interact with loyalty and ideology (ie, what do you risk if you break an agreement?). Success in political conflict goes beyond just winning battles; it goes into picking your battles, and successfully avoiding conflicts that you know you cannot win.

Agendas for a Political Conflict

First, I must highlight the difference between a war and a battle. In our previous discussions of political gameplay, I noted the difference between a large-scale agenda, and organizational agendas meant to support that action. A war can be fought in the same way: the lord declares war against an opponent, and the players support this action by fighting and winning smaller battles. These grant the lord a bonus when we finally look at how the war played out, and who, ultimately, won.

But what sorts of political conflicts can a lord instigate. Well, previously we defined 6 major institutions, though I would argue that we can boil their actions down to four forms of conflict:

Military conflict

Economic conflict

Political (Legitimacy) conflict

Espionage and subversion

Military Conflict

This seems the most straight forward of the political conflicts. The lord instigates a war, and then the players fight battles to support it, using Mass Combat. But what should a war do? If you win, what do you get?

The first answer would be a reverse of what a political agenda grants you, which is instead of gaining a bonus, you apply a penalty to your opponent. However, this makes wars tediously slow (You’d need years to deplete a population!) and runs against how wars work: We attack our enemies holdings because we want them. The ultimate goal of a war is always to force your opponent to give you terms or, possibly, to claim his entire planet.

Thus, I propose that at the end of a political conflict, both opposing lords roll a quick contest of Strategy, using bonuses gained from respective battle wins. The winner “wins the war” and can negotiate for a benefit (see below). This works similar to bonuses and crises from the standard model, in that the players can almost always get what they want, but at a price, either something they have to give up, or a damaged public image. Part of what players can gain, just like with a political agenda, can benefit their organizations (thus, players might push for war not because they think it’s in the benefit of their domain, but because it will benefit them personally).

Battle!

Players, naturally, fight battles over strategically important points using their military organizations, and players can support their organizations by playing out personal fights, acquiring vital intelligence, or slipping behind enemy lines to sabotage the enemy.

Battles grant a direct bonus to the overall war effort (typically a +2). All battles are fought over strategic points, and those points can either be natural terrain or over a key improvement. If the player wins, he may opt to take or destroy the key improvement. Taking the improvement adds half of its benefits to the lord that now rules it and denies its benefits to the lord who previously ruled it, until such time that it is returned to the lord; destroying the improvement grants the organization that committed the destruction some bonus to improve their own traits (typically wealth) and denies it to the lord until he can repair it. This typically requires a single month action with a Construction organization and an expenditure of 1/10th of the original cost (all improvements represent much more than a single building. Thus, you can raid a planet and destroy their signature hospital and that will temporarily disrupt health all across the planet, but it won’t destroy all hygiene improvements associated with that improvement, as those are extensive and all across the planet; the repair of the symbolic building that stood at the center of that improvement will restore the full use of that improvement). Any loss at this scale also triggers a political crisis: a fraction of the population dies, or there’s morale is lost, or there’s a riot, disease sets in, etc.

Espionage in War

Spies can also assist with the war effort, assassinating or turning key personnel, sabotaging structures, or simply gathering useful intel. These might be a mass combat against law enforcement organizations, or straight up mass combat like the above, or it can simply be a quick contest of skills like Intelligence Analysis, Poison or Intimidation. The players can directly assist with infiltration, investigation or combat scenes, or all of the above. Victory here grants +1 to the overall war effort, and +2 to a single battle (granting a +2 to all Strategy rolls for the commander of that battle for the duration of that battle): you can win a war with nothing but spies and assassins, but it’s much more difficult to do than with an army, and both together can be more effective than an army alone); it can also add additional benefits, but never triggers a political crisis (espionage is more precisely targeted than overall war).

Assassination: Remove one organizational subordinate

Betrayal: Turn an organizational subordinate to your side (provided he fails his Loyalty roll)

Sabotage: the destruction of a key improvement

Bio-Terror: Inflict a political crisis based on plague (provided hygiene fails to protect the populace)

Intel-Gathering: the players learn some key information about the overall plans of the enemy, or gain critical blackmail material

Non-Military Conflict: Economic and Political Conflict and Subversion

Unlike military conflict, waging economic or political war are very slow. One should expect to see very little from year to year. Each targets some specific aspect of the opposing planets stats

Economic conflict targets Wealth

Political Conflict targets Loyalty

Subversion targets Corruption

Each impacts the planets statistics at a negative rate equal to twice the rate of improving the trait. However, just as with warfare, this requires a quick contest. Success inflicts the intended penalty and triggers a political crisis appropriate to the conflict. Thus, successful economic sanctions and trade war upon your opponent damages the economy twice as fast as his rival can improve it and can trigger riots, food shortages or mass exodus of the people.

As usual, organizations can assist. Administrative and finance organizations can both attack and defend in an Economic conflict. They can create propaganda campaigns (“Support Caladan! Buy Caladan!”), negotiate new trade agreements or trim budgetary fight, while their opponent also wage propaganda campaigns (“Do you want to support child labor of Caladan? Demand better! For the children!”), woo trading partners away and find ways to reroute their own shipping lanes.

Propaganda organizations can damage the legitimacy of a regime. They can investigate to find scandals, broadcast damaging stories and news (whether true or fabricated), and simply find ways to make the opposing party look bad (“Can you believe his wife wore that to the imperial ball? Scandalous!”)

A subversion campaign offers interesting possibilities. Espionage organizations can support such an effort directly, via smuggling and generally supporting criminal enterprise, or it can use more aggressive methods to destabilize the regime, using the same actions it would during a war. They allow for very damaging actions, like destroying improvements or unleashing disease. This sort of subversion is sometimes called a “Shadow war” or a “War of Assassins.” Espionage organizations can also oppose espionage organizations, by assassinating opposing spies or finding vital intel, etc. Law Enforcement, however, is your prime candidate. They’ll root out criminal gangs, seditious activity, arrest traitors and uncover conspiracies.

In general, a conflict like this doesn’t allow the player to accept a crisis to ensure victory, as both sides pursue victory; the defender would presumably happily trade a political crisis for a political crisis and a loss of a stat, and the attacker gaining a political crisis to inflict a political crisis seems counter intuitive. Instead, organizations that act to support the war gain, in addition to granting a +1 to the general effort, grant some small benefit to the organization: an administrative organization that succeeds at a hostile takeover during a trade war grants +1 to the overall trade war, but might also gain a +1 to improve their wealth.

Political Crises, in Depth

A political crisis can occur in one of three ways. First, the lord and his organizations can so mismanage their improvements of their world that they trigger such a crisis, which usually occurs via a failed or (worse) a critically failed roll when trying to improve a planetary stat. Second, an opponent can trigger a political crisis through a successful battle or a successful waging of a long-term subversive campaign. Finally, the GM can declare a political crisis by fiat.

In all cases, we need to understand some basic things about a crisis.

Severity

Effect (both short term and long term)

What a player might do to resolve it.

Severity has a scale of 1, 3 or 5. For a crisis created by management, this represents the bonus granted to a roll to turn a success to a failure. The GM can construct any combination necessary to achieve the value desired by the player (that is, if a player fails by 3 and wants to succeed by two, the GM can choose a 5-point crisis, or a 3-point crisis and two 1-point crises, or five 1-point crises). The GM can choose to offer some choices to the player, but that’s strictly optional. For a political crisis caused by enemy action, the GM may choose a political crisis up to the margin of success. That is, if a player succeeds by 4, the GM may choose a 1-point crisis or a 3-point crisis, but not a 5-point crisis. Again, the GM can offer the player choices, but this is strictly optional.

All crises offer penalties typical to a daily administration failure (Pyramid #3-54, page 33). They also trigger crises for the player’s organizations (see below).

Severity 1 crises inflict an appropriate penalty from the chart found in the City Management article, but it’s temporary and will naturally resolve itself if unresolved at the end of the year. It also inflicts organizational crises which, when combined, inflict no more than (the number of PC organizations) x 1 in severity.

Severity 3 crises inflict an appropriate penalty from the chart found in the City Management article, but if not resolved by the end of the year, becomes permanently reflected in the stats of the planetary society. Furthermore, it also inflicts organizational crises which, when combined, inflict no more than (the number of PC organizations) x 3.

Severity 5 crises inflict two appropriate penalties from the chart found in the City Management article, but if not resolved by the end of the year, both become permanent, but even if it is resolve, one will always remain permanently. Furthermore, it also inflicts organizational crises which, when combined, inflict no more than (the number of PC organizations) x 5.

Organizational Crises

Organizational crises work just as political crises, but tend to be more immediate; they affect the organization, and typically the player himself. In general, an organizational crisis can affect the group’s reputation (how the world perceives them), their loyalty (how the perceive the organization or your leadership), the membership (who might desert or even betray the organization), resources or their contact skill (in the sense of a penalty that applies to their attempts to act as an organization). They might also affect the player’s reputation, his personal wealth, or the loyalty of his personal subordinates. In any crisis where membership might leave or betray the organization, or any crisis where the player faces a personal loss, the organization makes a loyalty roll (as per “the Limits of Power”). Success means the group closes ranks around their leader and any penalty is either diminished or removed entirely.

As with political crises, they come in a severity of 1, 3 and 5, with 1-point crises representing temporary irritation, 3-point crises representing something potentially permanent, and a 5-point crisis as something that is automatically permanent, but can be mitigated.

Dealing with Crises

Any crisis can be “resolved” by some means: damage can be repaired, riots can be tamped down, political enemies can be dealt with, and so on. These require action at one step “removed” from the level of the crisis: a political crisis requires an organizational action to resolve, and an organizational crisis requires personal action to resolve. The nature of a political crisis (in that it tends to impact organizations as well) means that when a crisis hits, most organizations will need some time to recover, or some heroic action from their leaders, before they can really respond to the larger political crisis. Furthermore, because these require organizational action, that costs the organizations actions they could be using for self-improvement or advancing a lordly agenda. Players will have to choose how they act.

The precise nature of how the crisis can be resolved varies, but as a rule, Construction and Law Enforcement organizations either resolve a crisis, or they prevent them from getting worse.

Rivalry, Diplomacy, Surrender, Alliances and Casus Belli

The existence of a political conflict necessitates additional political figures in the game, usually a variety. Dune features not just Baron Harkonnen, but the Padishah Emperor and house Corrino, not to mention the interests of the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild. Part of creating a political game involves creating the “political board” in which the players play, including the varied powers they face. Note that these powers do not have to be rivals, or even from other houses: a noble might have other nobles he serves with, beneath a greater noble. Arguably, all that holds a feudal society, like Dune, together is a series of agreements and alliances: a baron of one world beneath the duke of another only remains that duke’s vassal so long as he doesn’t betray the duke.

An agreement between two parties is called an Accord (though in the game they might refer to it by any number of terms). The substance of the Accord is what the precise agreement is. This can be:

An agreement not to go to war with one another, while maintaining open trade agreements (thus, no military or economic conflict).

An agreement to come to the aid of the other if he’s in a time of crisis

An agreement to accept the commands of another and to offer up yearly tribute

An agreement to allow free passage of an organizations agents into your territory, to freely cooperate them, and to never defy them.

An Accord also has legitimacy. This describes how people see the the agreement. Legitimacy has a value between -4 and +4, with a +1 or +2 as the most common values. This value represents how the general population sees the agreement, but there might be additional values for specific demographics (Everyone but the Fremen might like the peace forged between Atreides and Harkonen). When the agreement is maintained, any loyalty checks generated by the acts necessary to maintain the agreement gain a modifier equal to the legitimacy rating, and any extreme actions taken by the character in pursuit of the accord can generate a modifier equal to the legitimacy rating on reaction rolls (that is, if the legitimacy rating is -2, maintaining the accord applies a -2 to Loyalty rolls and reaction rolls if they should come up in the context of maintaining the accord). If the character undertakes actions that undermine or violate the accord, he applies the reverse of the modifier (that is, -1x the modifier) of the legitimacy value to his loyalty values and reaction modifiers.

(The legitimacy of the accord might be based on a reaction roll, based on how well it benefits or harms the parties involved. Legitimacy should depend on the group. For example, the French really liked the Treaty of Versailles, but the Germans weren’t so keen on it; the Americans didn’t really care one way or the other).

Any time the player violates an accord in a way that generates a reaction modifier of any kind, the GM can declare that the accord is effectively dissolved (this is especially appropriate if the character gains a positive reaction from violating the accords), though this is ultimately up to the GM. A dissolved accord generates a political crisis. The severity of the crisis is up to the GM, but I suggest that the GM notify the player that he’s in danger of violating an accord, and what the severity of the political crisis will be if he continues. As a general rule, the more parties that are involved in accord, the greater the severity. Players (or organizations) may roll Law to determine what, precisely, would violate an accord.

Negotiating an Accord is a political agenda that requires a quick contest of Politics vs the opponent’s Will. It can be supported by both Administrative and Propagana organizational actions (and, with some creativity, Military and Espionage actions!). Success means the terms are agreed to (the opposing party can waive their Will roll if the terms are particularly agreeable).

Organizations can undermine or support an existing accord. Increasing or Decreasing the legitimacy of an Accord is an organizational Propaganda agenda. Characters may attempt to find or close “loopholes” within an accord is an Administrative organizational agenda and requires a quick contest of Law against the other parties involved in the accord. Success means that the player can add an minor amendment to the Accord that was “always there,” or is a careful reinterpretation or clarification of language to the faction’s benefit. This can diminish or undermine an accord, but it can also quietly cause “accord creep” where one faction finds his obligations becoming more and more onerous…

Casus Belli

Characters who wish to go to war must have a casus belli, a right to engage in open warfare. This is only necessary for military conflicts, given their extremely destructive nature. A casus belli is a form of one-sided Accord: It takes a year to generate one, and it can be supported by Administrative or Propaganda organizational agendas. It represents the justifications for war, and has a legitimacy and terms that can be supported or undermined, just like a normal accord. The legitimacy of a casus belli determines how others will react to that war, and how loyal your troops will be throughout the war (that is, how motivated they are to fight their enemy).

Any violated accord can be turned into a casus belli. Usually, such an accord contains a clause noting that violation is casus belli (for example, violating a treaty is almost always casus belli, but violating a trade agreeement might not be). “Accord Creep” can create casus belli where none was originally agreed upon!

If a faction goes to war with no casus belli, they gain a casus belli “Unjust War” with a legitimacy of -4. They may attempt to amend the casus belli or improve support for it, just like any accord, representing rewriting the narrative, drumming up support by spinning the truth, and hunting up legal justifications after the fact.

Orphans of the Stars: Organizational Gameplay

We know what the overall themes of gameplay are now, but we need to know what the PCs, themselves, do with it.  The ruling noble might decree that the planet is to wage war upon a rival while also changing the ideology of the people, but what organizations wage war? Who changes the ideology of the people?  And how and when do the PCs improve their organizations?  How does all of this translate into, you know, something fun like an action scene or a dramatic seduction or a cunning infiltration?

Eventually, less of this material made it into the final draft because it turned out to be more complicated than necessary, but I present the whole thing for your consideration.

Organizational Game Design

In the previous article, I established the core gameplay of our political system at its highest level: the character’s lord sets agendas for a year, and the players attempt to support that agenda with their organization, and can receive profits as a result. This gameplay occurs on a month-by-month basis.

Next, I want to climb down a step in our fractal and take a look at what supporting an agenda with an organization looks like, and the simple answer is this: Once a month, players can set the agenda for their organization, and then attempt to support it with personal action. That is, gameplay works exactly like it does for high-level play, only on a more immediate time-scale.

So what do players do with their organizations?

They set a monthly agenda for them, just as lord sets a yearly agenda for his world

They use their organizations as tools to advance the lord’s overall agenda

They se their organizations as weapons to stall the agendas of others.

Organizational Agendas

So, just as a lord sets the agenda for his domain, so too should a player be allowed to set an agenda for his organization. But we have a couple of differences here. First, this belongs to the player, therefore, there’s no “loss of control” in the sense of the player being unable to control his organization. A player who does not want to fail his organizational rolls can simply invest more character points into the appropriate skills!

However, just a with lordly agendas, I suggest we use a similar model for gameplay at this level:

We can gain a +1 bonus to an agenda by performing some immediate action to support it

Our reforms almost always succeed, but failure might create a crisis (“Fail forward”)

We can send out subordinates to assist us.

Subordinates?

The first two are relatively self-explanatory, but let me dive deeper into the third option. A lord sets an agenda and then sends his minions out to do his bidding. But those minions, the players, themselves rule organizations, therefore, they do the same thing: they set an agenda and then send their minions out to do their bidding! Now, we can treat this generically, and we should definitely do that: If you want your soldiers to do something they do that, en masse. We don’t need to stop and think about individual personalities in that bunch. That said, a commander will have direct subordinates: your armies may seem a mass, but you don’t command your armies, you command your colonels, and they command their subordinates, and so on. That’s how organizations actually work.

Thus, I propose that every player get 2-3 detailed characters that assist them. We detail them to a degree somewhere between allies and contacts. That is, they have a few pertinent skills set to some standard levels based on the organization’s training level (that is, if your standard contacts are skill 12, so are your officers! If your standard contacts are skill 21, so are your officers!) and a few traits that give them specific personality (disadvantages based on the culture of the organization, plus their own particular talents and foibles).

These represent the faces of the organization beneath the PC. The player might know that he has an army of mixed Fremen and Space Knights, but having an actual Fremen with an actual name and actual goals and agendas makes the Fremen side of his organization more concrete and specific. It also gives the player someone he can argue with, someone whose betrayal feels more personal, and someone whose loss feels tragic.

They also represent tools in themselves. The player character can dispatch them to serve him and gain a +1. Given that sending NPCs off to have amazing adventures might detract a little from the centrality of the players, so I recommend that you can send off your NPCs to support no more than 1 agenda; whereupon the player rolls their subordinate’s pertinent contact skill as a complementary skill for their own roll to advance their agenda. That’s it! A subordinate represents a useful way to improve your agendas (making them good tools for administrating your organization) and people you can foist the less interesting elements onto (“Here, subordinate, do this paperwork while I race off to assassinate my enemies!”)

Example Agendas

The agendas for improving your organization should be exactly the agendas given in Boardroom And Curia. In our previous step, we needed to work out why this mattered to the players, but here we know exactly why it does. A player wants to improve, say, his organization’s resources so that his organization as more resources. There’s no need to make it more complicated than that!

That said, we do need to integrate it with our ideology rules and our resource rules. In addition to improving wealth, we can also use use the same rules to gain access to specific, high-value resources. It might also be worthwhile to look into improving specific aspects of resources (constructing buildings and such), but I’m leery of that, as I’d rather handle that on the higher level (build improvements on the City Stat level, then exploit them with organizations). For recruiting members, we need to choose from which demographics we recruit, and it would be worthwhile to note which demographics we have in our organization and what their cultures are, just like planets have detailed demographics. When we apply traits to our groups, we can also apply ideological precepts as we work to change the culture of our organization.

Supporting Overarching Agendas

As an organizational agenda, you can send your organization out to act on the behalf of the lord, fulfilling his needs and granting him a bonus to his final roll. But what precisely can organizations do? Well, in my Boardroom and Curia post, I offered 6 things:

War

Construction

Propaganda

Administration

Law Enforcement

Espionage

Naturally, an organization only has so many resources, the lord will need to decide where to send what resources. The final difficulty (for things other than straight-up mass combat) should be based on how many resources are applied to a job vs how many are necessary. If we take the required resources and compare them to the resources applied and use the ratio table from Mass Combat, we might get a good idea of the bonuses and penalties to a PC’s final roll.

Each organizational approach should have their own themes and guidelines. Briefly: Military and Espionage organizations attack other agendas; Law Enforcement protects the land, mitigates crises, and enforces the will of the master; Construction organizations build improvements and represent industrial capacity (they build everything!); Propaganda organizations both persuade and understand the people (they also act as something of an espionage group, though less aggressively); Administration and Finance organizations handle the paperwork, bureaucracy and management of larger actions, and sort of represent the legal side of law enforcement. Construction, Administration and Propaganda will generally directly impact agendas the most.

Population and Search Modifiers

Improving your population requires a propaganda campaign, so propaganda organizations can do research to assist the lord in how best to tailor his message, or they can run carefully targeted propaganda campaigns of their own. New populations explicitly need housing (City Management has specific rules). Construction can either add a bonus, or be seen as a prerequisite for improving population. New immigrants need paperwork, visas and the like; Administrative organizations can begin setting up legal frameworks for the new influx of people, including discussing the new budgets for welfare, the logistics of their entry, and what their legal status will be.

Wealth

Construction is probably best seen building improvements, but we can also treat it as industrial capacity. This means that we focus on building sellable products, increasing general production (“Everyone works overtime!”), or temporarily employing more people.

Propaganda can shift how people spend; it might encourage them to save, or to invest in particular things that the lord believes will boost the economy and so on.

However, improving Wealth is where administration and finance really shines. They can reduce budgetary excess, investigate markets and secure beneficial deals.

Appearance, Hygiene and Defense

Here, Construction comes to the fore. It literally builds the improvements! An improvement is much more than a single building, but a whole network of buildings and infrastructure. By directly building a portion of this, the construction organization can add a +1 to the overall roll.

Administration matters a great deal here too. The new infrastructure needs to be zoned and planned and new laws need to be put into place to secure them (especially for Hygiene!). Construction contracts also need to be assigned, if construction organizations can’t handle the entire load.

Military organizations can contribute to the construction of defense, either by directly manning said defenses, or by offering their advice on the tactical usefulness of a particular defense.

Literacy and Search Modifiers

The education of a people is handled, according to City Management, by an Administration roll, so an Administration organization can directly do their part by tackling some aspect of the overall program. They can hire teachers, arrange for lessons, set up education funds, etc.

Propaganda campaigns can also interest people in education and specific ideas. For example, if you want to push a particular form of combat training, a propaganda organization can disparange “namby-pamby” pacifism and show endless programs about how “totally cool” a particular combat system is, encouraging impressionable youths everywhere to sign up and learn to become badasses!

Any organization that already has the pertinent traits can contribute by sending its own skilled members out at advisors and instructors.

Control Rating and Corruption

Passing laws represents a central, core activity of an Administrative organization. They can draft the new laws, advocate them in the local legislative body, ensure that bureaucratic organs exist to handle the new legislation and so on.

Propaganda can push the people to accept the new law, or even to persuade them that it was their idea in the first place. This makes public acceptance of the law much easier.

Law enforcement will have to actually enact the law. They’ll need to audit affected organizations, put more patrols out to ensure that nobody is violating it, and so on. Ultimately, they ensure that corruption stays down. Removing corruption by rounding up known criminals is definitely the sort of thing they do. Consider having a “Mass Combat” scenario where law enforcement tackles a specific gang!

Loyalty

Loyalty comes down to belief and legitimacy, which a propaganda organization can absolutely support. They can check the pulse of the population and then drum up campaigns and photo-ops that make dear leader seem heroic and worth supporting.

Espionage and Law Enforcement can also work together on this. Espionage can spy on the population to check to see if they can find any sedition and, if they do, inform Law Enforcement, who can move to arrest them. Again, this can be a Mass Combat scenario where the organization cracks down on “terrorists” or “seditionists.”

Supporting your Organization

So, you’ve chosen your agendas, whether you’re trying to improve it, or you’re trying to advance the agenda of your master. What can you do to personally support your organization? The point here is to have an adventure. Everything from a lordly agenda to an organizational agenda is necessarily abstract. We are, in effect, playing a board game, which is fine, but ultimately, it should translate into something personal, something the player deals with directly. The point of a roleplaying game is that we might be playing a wargame, but we play it from the perspective of a single individual. How do these agendas impact the player character directly?

We can look at this from one of to angles. We can, first of all, ask what the players do? This is a question best answered by the “Orphans of the Stars Characters as Action Heroes” portion of the design phase, which is out of the scope of this document. But we can also look at what organizations are doing, and for that, we can look at our organizational types.

War

Mass Combat already has plenty of places for individual action, but if we zoom even closer, the obvious thing that a player character can do is kill bad guys and take their stuff! If the PC has instituted an agenda attacking an opponent (more on that later), he can directly participate via the sort of fight scenes that we love out of action scenarios. He can take the fight to the enemy, defeat key points, take on harrowing and dangerous missions behind enemy lines, and so on.

While veering into administrative and propaganda concerns, military organizations also constantly struggle with morale and logistical problems. The player can break up fights, arrange for games/entertainment, and make impassioned speeches to bolster his troops.

If our subordinates do this, the key skill is either Tactics (if leading their own raid), or a pertinent combat skill (if fighting directly). They (or the PC himself) can use Strategy to come up with a perfect battle plan, Administration for logistical concerns, and Leadership for handling morale.

Construction

Boring! Who wants to build things all day long? Oh, gadgeteers of course! The typical heroic action supporting construction organization should draw inspiration from heroic inventors like Tony Stark. Let the character conceive of an invention, search for unique parts of resources necessary for it, design the prototype, test it (at great personal risk!) and then release the prototype to assist his organization.

Maintaining machinery also matters. If something, say, were to suddenly break down, our hero could fly to the rescue, hunting down some obscure part and then wading into a dangerous part of the machinery to dramatically fix it just in the nick of time!

More mundane support might come from design work (Engineering), handling the logistics of construction (Administration), or keeping machinery in repair (Mechanics). Subordinates could also do this.

Propaganda

Propaganda adventures tend to depend on two things: information and persuasion. The first requires investigation: How do people feel about things? What’s the man-on-the-street worried about? What’s really going on here? Propaganda-assisting PCs get a chance to listen to people, to hunt into the heart of a problem and come back with interesting answers.

But more importantly, they persuade people, and they can do this with key individuals rather than trying to persuade the masses. The character might debate a hardliner, or find a troubled character on the fence and talk him down to his own ideology. Scenes like this can represent a single moment in a larger picture. If, for example, the character’s organization is trying to promote tolerance between two demographics, the player character might stumble across a fight between two members of that demographic, break it up, shout about how they’re tearing this society apart, and then more quietly persuade them of the folly of their ways. This certainly won’t change the minds of everyone, but it represents a single moment in a larger movement, much like a single fight scene represents a moment in a war. That’s definitely worth +1!

This sort of approach should definitely apply when trying to boost the loyalty of your own organization, or recruiting new members.

More mundane support might come from creating beautiful works (Artist), doing some political research (Sociology or Expert Skill (Political Science), giving a series of speeches (Public Speaking), writing op-eds or show scripts (Writing). Subordinates could also do this.

Administration

Heroic paperwork is out of the question, but not politics. A great deal of administration involves talking people into acting on your behalf, whether its gaining the support of an influential power-broker, pushing for change against a recalcitrant bureaucrat, or arguing your stance before a judge. Social engineering discusses these sorts of scenes in greater detail, but the heart is always the same: Identify a key power-broker and talk them into joining your side. Thus, administration “action scenes” involve socializing. You need to know what your target wants, you need to use that to leverage his compliance, and you need the social graces to pull it off. These sorts of scenes always involve things like wine, women, parties, and possibly even scandal and blackmail.

More mundane support might come from drafting or reviewing specific laws (Law), analyzing budgets (Accounting) or what’s hot on the marker (Finance, Market Analysis, Current Affairs). Palling around with politicians might be Politic or Savoir-Faire, while arguing with Bureaucrats is Administration. Subordinates could also do this.

Law Enforcement

Law Enforcement action scenes write themselves: perps need to be arrested, gangs need to be fought, crimes need to be solved. Any one of these things can serve as a benefit for an overall agenda cleaning out corruption or hunting down those who would subvert the local order.

More mundane support might come from basic detective work (Criminology), making sure your organization stays within the bounds of the law (Law) and knowing how to motivate your fellow officers (Leadership, Savoir-Faire (Police)). Knowing the streets (Current Affairs or Streetwise) doesn’t hurt. Subordinates can also do this.

Espionage

Like military and law enforcement scenes, these are the bread and butter of action scenarios. The players can infiltrate enemy organizations, ferret out traitors, moles and conspiracies and then defeat them, or they can uncover dangerous plots and rush to protect the targets of those plots from assassionation.

More mundane support might come from intelligence Analysis (Intelligence Analysis), forensic accounting (Accounting), pestering the man on the street (Streetwise) or other contacts, and simply being in the know (Area Knowledge, Current Affairs) Subordinates can also do this.

Organizational Crisis

So an agenda fails, but the PC really wants it to succeed. We could include the same rules for “failing forward” with an organization that we do for larger political gameplay. This offers us a few interesting possibilities.

The first is that your action might interfere with some other larger agenda. That is, if you fail your roll, your agenda might succeed, but only by applying a penalty to one of the lord’s higher agendas. Thus, you can unintentionally sabotage your master’s plans for the private benefit of your organization. This works best when you set your organization’s advancement against your lords’ desires, but it could also represent harming one of your lord’s agendas while helping another.

The second possibility is that we harm the organization in some meaningful way. Rather than fuss with small-scale stuff like we did last time, we can simply apply a penalty directly: Your organization loses loyalty, or loses wealth, or loses members, etc. This works best when supporting your masters’ agendas, as you run your organization into the ground to make sure he gets what he wants.

Finally, a crisis could affect you personally. Perhaps a subordinate revolts against you, trying to depose you. Perhaps you gain a negative reputation. Perhaps you need to cover up some wrong-doing and gain a Secret. This represents the leader suffering for the sake of his organization.

These create interesting choices, where the player needs to weight his master’s agenda and the overall health of the world, or even his own health, against the needs of his organization. How much do you want to succeed?

Orphan of the Stars: the Gameplay of Politics

After I had laid out my plans for the pieces of the game, I found it necessary to think my whow the game would play.  This turned into a three-part discussion, starting with high level politics, and I hoped to turn the game from a look at a bunch of stats and into a dynamic series of interesting choices that impacted the players and was impacted by them in turn (you know, gameplay).

Gameplay Philosophy

Of the Politics of Orphans of the Stars

What do players do?

I’ve laid out the core research and the basic ideas of Orphans of the Stars. All we have left to do is consolidate everything and expand it until the players have enough options to play around with and you, as GM, have enough options to build a campaign. But before we can do that, we should stop and think about how it will play, a step I feel too many writers skip (GURPS writers can be especially guilty of this).

Your players sit down at your table. They’ve built their characters, they have their organizations and their lord and their ideology. Okay. Now what? How do you open the session? What crisis do they face? What choices do they have?

Gameplay amounts to a series of interesting choices. You present your players with a crisis, some problem, and then they react and make choices. These choices impact the problem, perhaps even solving it, but that only reveals a deeper layer, and their own choices have consequences that contribute to this new problem. Gameplay should flow from these choices. That’s not to say that the GM shouldn’t be allowed to create a plot (he certainly should!) but the gameplay we design should be sufficiently interesting that it can play out with a minimum of direct GM intervention (that is, I presume the GM would rather “play the game” than make up rules along the way). A good D&D fight has players arguing over ideal builds, the best choices to make, and pondering what interesting encounters might be like. A good game of Orphans of the Stars should be equally compelling.

The highest level: the Grand Strategy

The Rolls of the Lord

In our current model, the players do not rule their domain directly; instead, they serve someone who rules their domain. I happen to approve of this approach, because it prevent the game from turning into a competitive one. The players all work together to support their master, instead of fighting a turf war with one another, which means that they all share a common goal, even if each has their own specialization and their own concerns.

But what do the do? Most of the mechanics for improving upon one’s domain amounts to rolls made to some skill on the part of the lord, and the players have no interaction with this. You once suggested that players could offer complementary bonuses, and I objected, and I’d like to reiterate that: this doesn’t really involve the players “doing” anything other than rolling dice. They don’t need to make plans or make choices, they simply roll their dice and apply their bonus, and if the lord fails or succeeds, they had only a minimum impact on this. The whole process of this would take 5 minutes of work at the beginning of a session and then would be done. But even so, they should have some sort of impact on what the lord does and whether he succeeds. After all that’s their purpose.

The first and most obvious point of choice would be to either support their lord or support their organization or, if multiple possible noble agendas exist, they would need to choose which one to support. That is, if the lord is trying to improve the economy and entice some Navigators to move into his territory and building defenses, while one player is dealing with a traitor in his midst, and another player is trying to recover after a major military defeat, then then need to decide where their time and resources will go (naturally, the lord can order them to do something, but servants always find a way to drag their feet on something they don’t want to do, and find ways to advance something they do want to do). This already creates a sense of choice.

But what happens if you focus your efforts somewhere and fail your roll? What’s happened? Nothing. No bonus, no penalty, no lost resources, no benefits gained (unless the lord succeeds, in which case it had nothing to do with them). Even if they make their choice, they have little sense of control or investment. How does it feel to play this way?

You also cite Monster Hunters as inspiration, and that may well offer us a solution. Instead of offering complementary rolls, or offering only complementary rolls, players can go on adventures, even short ones, and return with a flat bonus. For example, if you decide to support the lord’s attempt to improve the economy, you could go and engage in a military campaign to gain control of some valued resource, or black mail some bureaucrats in the banking system to leverage superior rates for your master, or you could forge a pact with a corporation to open a headquarters on your world. If everyone does something like that, the lord suddenly gains a huge boon to his attempt to improve the economy, the players had an interesting experience, and everyone feels like they contributed. It also makes adventures fractal: individual player actions, moment to moment, exist to support their organization which move month to month, which support the lord, who moves year to year.

But why roll for the lord at all? Imagine the players do everything they can to support their master, and he rolls a critical failure! Then all their effort is lost. The players might do something like spend an impulse buy point or trigger luck, but given that this is one roll per in-game year, it seems cheap that all of their efforts become outshone by the fact that someone in their party has a spare character point or took Luck.

One option might be to not roll at all. Set a difficulty and “take 11.” If the lord has skill 15 and is currently suffering a -8 penalty to his roll, the players need to work out a total of +4. If they get that, he succeeds; if not, he fails. This makes the players directly responsible for the lord’s failure or success, who acts more as a receptacle for their choices than a direct agent himself (other than that he decides what course of action he wants).

If we want to retain a sense of risk, it’s worth having our efforts matter. “Degree of success” will help here: If a lord has skill 15 and has -0 to for his action, what’s the point of helping him? Well, if he rolls a 10, he succeeds by 5. But if you increased his effective skill to 20 and he rolls a 10, he succeeded by 10. What if that was worth more than a success by 5? Failure could be mitigated in a similar way. Fate allows players to succeed on a failure provided they accept a cost. For example, if you’re trying to escape from an opponent during a foot chase, the die roll is not necessarily a pass/fail binary result, but success might mean you get away, while failure means you either don’t get away or you do but at some great cost. If we combine both of these ideas, then every bonus the players bring counts because the consequences of a bad roll can be mitigated, and the benefits of a good roll can be improved. This can even be combined with the “no roll” optional rule above.

Who gives a sh*t? The rewards of service

So, the players help their lord and their lord gets some bonus. That’s… great. So what? Players might feel nebulously good the way a patriot feels good as he bleeds out in a trench somewhere, but I expect players might enjoy it a bit more if their success earned them some reward, especially if their actions supporting their lord cost them resources. Thus, the players invest and get something in return. This makes sense too: as your lord’s star rises, so too does yours.

But what can the players earn? Well, let’s look at what a lord can improve.

Population and Search Modifiers

Population can obviously offer a larger pool for recruitment. If a huge influx of immigrants come into their domain, then generals have more people the can recruit from and spies have more people to milk for information and so on. Thus, this can grant a flat bonus to players who want to recruit for their organization.

If we want more refinement (and why wouldn’t we?) we have to sources. First comes in the form of Search Modifiers. Each major increase improves your chances of finding anything, but we can make that more specific. If you want to find doctors or geisha specifically, we could have a smaller sub-bonus where a particular group, profession, faction or culture becomes easier to find. This leads us to our last possible option for a sub-bonus: ideology. Immigration can bring in new cultures and new ideas, which the players can exploit in their effort to shape the ideaology of their organizations.

Wealth

The next, truly obvious thing the players might want improved would be increased wealth. Like with population, this has an obvious knock-on effect for associated organizations. If everyone suddenly has more money, then you can buy better toys, offer bigger paychecks, and so on. A rising tide lifts all boats. Of course, it doesn’t have to. Like with population, this doesn’t have to be universally spread. We could offer a handful of bonuses to organizations to improve their own wealth.

If we want additional refinement, the obvious advantage players could gain would be access to specific resources. If suddenly, player coffers overflow with spice or adamantium or space-gasoline or whatever, then their options begin to shift in a new direction. Indeed, pushing for improved wealth might primarily be about improving access to unique resources necessary to advance your agenda.

Appearance, Hygiene and Defenses

All three of these of these stats require some building skill (Architecture and Engineering (Civil or Combat) to improve and represent building structures. While I find it unlikely that a player might specifically benefit from improved defenses, appearance or hygiene, he might push for the building of specific structures that benefit him and advance his agenda. For example, we might have numerous possible buildings that improve one of these three traits, but offer some additional, local benefit as well. For example, a research hospital might improve hygiene while also allowing access to new genetic engineering techniques and a temple might improve the beauty of the city while bolstering a certain ideology.

These three forms of structures even break down along particular lines:

Architecture likely offers cultural and economic structures

Hygiene likely offers biotech advantages and medical facilities

Defense obviously offers military improvements, but also likely logistical ones (roads, harbors, repair facilities, etc).

Literacy and Search Modifiers

Literacy in City Stats is drearily boring, telling us whether or not people can read. But if we understand what literacy really represents, which is education level of the populace, then it suddenly takes on a new and interesting dynamic. A more well-educated populace offers better professionals and better masters of esoteric arts! We might represent this benefit, in a more finely grained way, but allow improved search modifiers to find a certain class of character, or by adding new cultural traits to our population. Improved search modifiers make it easier to find elite agents of a particular sort (Swordsmasters, strategists, psionicists, biotechnical inventors, philosophers) or, if specific enough, allow the recruitment of superior generic workers. In fact, we could even expand this to grant bonuses to skills that allow organizations to improve contact skill levels.

Control Rating and Corruption

Control Rating and Corruption abstract away law and people’s evasion of said law. If we need more specific, concrete benefits, we could create specific laws that the lord enacts, even if the law doesn’t explicitly increase or decrease the control rating. These laws could provide benefits to an organization in numerous ways, since the lord can, by fiat, declare things to be true. Increase the CR while mandating a draft: suddenly, your military organizations have a bonus to recruit. Increase the CR and impose a mandatory tithing and membership to a particular church. Suddenly, that faith gets huge bonuses both for improving its assets and population. Decrease the CR (or increase corruption) and create legal loopholes for corporations who have the right connections, and improve both the local economy and line your own pockets while gaining access to resources.

CR and Corruption already present one of the most interesting sets of choices in the game as they represent a double edged sword: high CR give greater control and higher taxes bring larger revenues, but greater control breeds discontent and higher taxes lead to stagnating and then collapsing economies. I’d like to maintain that concept, and expand it to other avenues, with manipulation of the legal system acting as a sort of swiss army knife that can offer nearly any bonus by fiat… but at a cost, since you’re not really improving underlying resources so much as redistributing them.

Loyalty

This isn’t a trait that exists in City Stats, though there are some possible disasters that can result in a loss of Loyalty, thus I suggest codifying it. Just as organizations have control ratings and loyalty ratings, so too should planets. But again, we can break this down by demographic: certain peoples might be innately more loyal to the regime than others, and others might be more likely to revolt and rebel. This matters keenly for recruitment, as recruiting from a particular group might give you a more loyal organization.

Oh sh*t! The hidden dangers of improvements

So, the lord wants to institute some changes. Alright! The players are likely salivating over the possible rewards they can reap after the reform has come through. But what if the reform fails? Well, in most cases (Wealth being the exception), nothing happens. The project fails, the CR remains the same, etc. But if we want to “fail foward” and allow all player actions to have some sort of impact, then I recommend allowing the reform to always succeed (except on a critical failure) but that increased failure results in increased problems. For example, you might get your beautiful skyscraper, but costs and gentrification have damaged the economy, your changes brought in workers and customers that don’t fit your cultural vision, and your badly designed contracts have resulted in criminal activity and outright corruption, increasing the overall corruption. Good job, hero!

This rather matches real-world politics, where politicians continue to pursue doomed projects that run their locality into the ground because it benefits them. As a result, I suggest that most such failures don’t directly impact the players organizations, at least not immediately (they don’t see penalties as a result of their failure), but that they instead damage the underlying world, its infrastructure, its culture and its institutions. Roundly incompetent and selfish players can drive their world into the ground while still improving their organizations, but eventually, the toll will begin to tell. This means, critically, that on some level organizations need to be grounded in the world around them. Patient players can carefully grow their populace and fore-go personal benefits and reap long-term benefits, while impatient players can seize political advantage now, but at a cost down the road. For this to work, we need to clarify what each element does for an organization in the long-term.

Note that a problem does not necessarily need to stem from an attempt to change a thing. That is, if you try to improve your wealth, the price of failure doesn’t have to be a loss of wealth. After all, that would defeat the purpose of “failing forward.” Instead, you could drive away populations or increase lawlessness, or create stifling regulations.

Existing Disasters

Pyramid #3-54 on page 33 has a list of 6 “temporary” disasters that might serve our purposes. We can reduce: Appearance, Revenue, Population, Hygiene, DB, or increase Corruption. All of these last “until the ruler makes a successful administration roll,” but in our case, we’d want to dispatch one of the PCs to deal with it directly, and using more than just a roll! They become a story, and for several (“Crime Wave,” Public Health Crisis”, “Security Breach”), the actions the hero needs to undertake practically write themselves.

Population and Search Modifiers

The obvious penalty is to drop the overall population, which both decreases the long-term revenue you can gain, and reduces the overall search modifiers, which means players will have a harder time recruiting.

If we want to cut it finer, we can allow the population to reduce in pieces. Given that search modifiers increase at a logarithmic sale compared to the population, a population of 9 million can lose 8 million before the players start to notice a drop in their search modifiers, though they’ll certainly notice a drop in overall income.

We can also reduce specific search modifiers or shift culture as certain desired population begins to migrate away. That is, if we see our population as chunks and pieces rather than a great, unruly mass, we can become more specific in what the players lose through mismanagement.

Wealth

City Stats offers an interesting insight into Wealth, which is that it differs for different levels of society. What matters for revenue is the average. That means the poor can get poorer (much poorer) without creating a serious problem for the overall average. So, our penalty could be a loss of wealth, but it could represent a demographic-specific loss: certain groups could lose money while others remain stable. This might reduce the overall average wealth of the planet.

Does this matter from the perspective of an organization? Well, currently, there is no impact on the organization’s wealth. You just make a Finance roll and move on. I propose that a wealthier worlds naturally make for wealthier organizations, and the easiest way to handle that would be to say that you get a bonus to raise it up to the average level of your surroundings, and a penalty to raise it above the average. However, I would also argue that many organizations receive direct support from their lord. That is, the lord doesn’t expect his military to be self-funding. Instead, he’s going to fund them. Thus, an organizations’ resources needs some direct tie to the taxation of their world, which means that reduced tax revenues means someone has to make cuts somewhere and, of course, it can’t be to your organization, no sir!

Appearance, Hygiene and Defenses

Interestingly, the disasters in Pyramid #3-54 directly reference all three of these. In a sense, they represent a decay of order: urban blight, public health crisis and security breach, respectively. If we want to break them down further, we can even send buildings associated with these things into disrepair, but I think this violates the theme of creating problems that players can ignore. I would propose, instead, a sort of “anti-improvement,” an entity in the game that causes a problem. For example, if an improvement on hygiene might be a hospital, an anti-improvement might be a cess-pit that’s breaking disease, or a vermin nest. If a temple or skyscraper beautifies a city, a sprawling slum uglifies it, and so on. These “anti-improvements” can have a variety of effects associated with them, and can represent weaknesses that their enemies can exploit, and interesting (read “Dangerous!”) locations that the players can visit.

Literacy and Search Modifiers

Education might begin to slip, though this seems a difficult one. I think I’d more likely pair it with population stuff, because it’s not like people forget stuff on a year-to-year basis, but we do lose knowledge (for example, the US hasn’t built nuclear power plants in such a long time that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find competent nuclear engineers!). I think the same ideas that we find in the population change can apply here: demographic groups begin to lose cultural traits or we begin to lose bonuses to find particular sorts of characters. The former interests me more because, again, players can ignore it at least for a time. You can also introduce new and undesired cultural traits as memes and movements take off that threaten the eventual stability of your empire (like, for example, one group might begin to become intolerant of another!)

CR and Corruption

I don’t think it’s possible for CR to “accidentally” rise or fall, but Corruption definitely matters. Increasing corruption can harm revenues and undermine laws that you want to enforce. Corruption is also a pretty large, blanket thing, so I don’t see a way to slice it too finely, but perhaps we don’t need to. Perhaps a corruption increase is, itself, simply a large thing!

Alternatively, we could associate new organizations with increases in corruption: Criminal cartels, conspiracies of corrupt officials, unruly rebels undermining the regime, etc. The power of these groups could vary. A “weak” corruption increase means that some punks moved in and started selling some drugs. Go in, crush them, and you’re problem is solved. A “strong” corruption increase might mean that the mafia itself moves in, and suddenly you have a pernicious and persistent problem that you might have to learn to live with.

I don’t see a way for corruption to directly impact organizations, but it might make passing laws harder (which would hurt everyone in the long run) and it will certainly result in dropping revenues, which hurts all organizations eventually.

Loyalty

People losing faith in their leadership means fading legitimacy. I think an overall loyalty number could affect the loyalty of your recruits, and perhaps even the ease with which we can pass laws. Disloyal and corrupt people could prove exceptionally difficult to administrate properly! I’d go further an argue that too much disloyalty could trigger revolts themselves as a possible draw-back of a failed reform!

Once again, I’d treat loyalty changes by demographic. Perhaps the aristocracy is on your side, but the Fremen are not. Or perhaps the Fremen worship you as a god, the common man is fine with you, but the aristocracy wants you dead.

Summary: So What do Players Do, Anyway?

When it comes to grand-scale strategic action, you roll (or “Take 11”) once per year. At the beginning of the year, the lord sets out his agenda, and the players can take action to advance those agendas (some sort of adventure or major organizational action), and each successful action they undertake grants a flat +1 to the lord’s final roll. That “taking action” is the core of a players’ activity, as well as arguing with the lord for what the agenda should be. At the end of the year, the lord makes his roll. Then the GM (perhaps with the input of the players) decides on the results. Each “Crisis” grants a post-facto bonus, and each “Benefit” grants a post-facto penalty. Thus, if the lord failed by 3, he could have crises worth +4, and a benefit worth -1, and still get what he ultimately wanted. The benefits should directly help organizations, while a crisis should indirectly harm organizations. That is, it should be possible to disregard the health of your overall world in the short term, but not in the long term, and clever play will balance immediate needs with long term concerns.

What we need for this system

First, we need to define what we mean by “the people” or “the planet.” I suggest a “character sheet” for each world. This contains:

The overall “City stats” for the world, specifically the overarching elements, including, most critically

Total Population

Default revenue

Control Rating

Corruption

Major points of interest (say, up to 4)

(We might divide some of the above values among them)

Resources and improvements located in each point of interest

Demographic groups strongly present in each location

Major demographic groups (say, up to 4)

Their population level

Their Wealth

Their cultural values (and their unique traits?)

Their Loyalty

For further mechanics, I need to:

Break down the difficulties of the various reform attempts

Offer some concrete ideas as to what an organization or player can do to benefit one of these broad actions

Determine the “price” and “benefit” of bonus and crisis

Determine a series of interesting crises

Determine a series of interesting cultural values (both positive, negative and some with a bit of both)

Determine a series of interesting resources and improvements

Determine a series of interesting anti-improvements (as part of a crisis)

For the actual actions, we also need:

To understand how the larger world impacts the running of an organization

To undersand how we can use the organization to impact the larger world (our actions above).

For that, I’ll need to dive into organizations.

This entire approach is also introspective. It assumes that the lord worries only about managing his domain. Naturally, politics also involves dealing with others’ domains, as they attempt to conquer yours, or you attempt to conquer theirs. Thus, we need mechanics that will allow us to interfere with the agendas of our rivals, and to undermine our rivals directly, and then ultimately even oust them and replace them. For that, I’ll need to dive into political conflict.

Orphans of the Stars: Meditations on Politics

The first thing we chose to focus on, and what this series will devote all of its attention to, is politics.  I wrote the following post as a way of explaining the directions we could go, and how I saw politics. Eventually, it should be noted, that my client chose for extreme political systems, which means politics-as-wargame, which is what the final document looks at.

Matters of State: Roleplaying and Politics

For the first part of Orphans of the Stars, I was asked to take a look at politics, because of course we want politics. I often find that many GURPS fans find themselves inexorably drawn to the drama represented by politics, whether its from an interest of history paired with the uniquely simulative aspects of GURPS, or it’s the desire for a more intense drama brought about by the high stakes games played in politics (and, of course, the sense of importance gained by having all that power in your hands). I, myself, am not immune to the siren call, as I’ve run quite some political games myself over the years, so this is a topic I can happily say I have some experience with.

But before we go further, we need to define what we mean by politics, and what we want out of our politics. When we add a new element of gameplay to a game, we must demand justification for it and we must have a sense of how it will play out. Ideally, we should have a vision of what a game looks like, how it plays with our new mechanics, and why the players care about them.

So, first, I want to look at what we want out of our politics, and then I want to look at what pieces I intend to put into place for politics.

The Purpose of Politics

Definition of politics

1a : the art or science of government b : the art or science concerned with guiding or influencing governmental policy c : the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government

5a : the total complex of relations between people living in society

For some people “Politics” means a careful analysis of how governments function and how one gains power over a governmental institution (or, more broadly, any powerful organization). For others, though, politics means drama, as when someone uses the term “politics” to describe the complex interactions between, for example, an extended group of fractious friends in high school.

Almost certainly, most fans of political gameplay will dismiss the latter, but I would suggest giving it a second look. First, both gameplay and drama turn on giving your players interesting choices and seeing what consequences arise from those choices. Second, all but the driest political games mix heavy doses of personal drama into them, and for good reason, because high power politics often turn on personal failings. Consider the potentially great politician laid low by a marital affair, or how an Emperor’s paternal love might blind him to the failings of his heir.

So, what do we intend for our political play? Let me offer a few scenarios?

Politics as Drama Engine: For some people, the purpose of “politics” is nothing other than driving personal drama. This was certainly the case in my own Cherry Blossom Rain, where I had a thin veneer of politics meant only to drive characters into intense moments of choice between duty and passion. This also arises in the typical “Vampire: the Tea Party” sort of LARP, where the GM might inject suddenly political changes just to stir the pot and get people back to infighting.

This sort of game tends to emphasize duty to a larger group (such as a house or family) and uses the backdrop of politics to bring greater pressure on the characters to make their personal interactions more intense. Do you want to marry the prince or the knight? What if your kingdom is under attack and you desperately need the Knight’s assistance? But what if your father already promised your hand to the Prince? And the King is on the verge of death and you’d inherit the kingdom as queen? Politics, if you will, turns the screws.

Politics as Wargame: Roleplaying games descend from wargames and board games, and few board games better capture the spirit of political gameplay than Diplomacy. Why not make a political game a deep simulation of how politics actually works? Let the players hassle over money, over constituents that they need to keep happy, over shifting popular opinion, over sudden rumors of ill-health and the panic of key members of your cabinet as other power-brokers, sensing blood on the wind, move in for the kill?

If D&D can be a deep, board-game-like simulation of killing monsters and taking their stuff, why can’t a political RPG turn into Axis and Allies, Diplomacy or Civilization? Such a game presents challenges, but it actually presents politic as politics. The difficult choices the players face naturally flow out of their political situation. The power they wield is not a farce or an illusion meant to drum up personal drama, but something built directly into the fabric of gameplay.

Personal is Political: Ultimately, I believe the answer lies somewhere in the middle. A pure wargame threatens to become tedious, and if we wanted a wargame, why not just play a wargame? But at the same time, while a drama better fits the personal nature of a roleplaying game, a political roleplaying game is a different beast from a soap opera. After all, if our primary focus was players fussing over love interests, we could as easily set our game in a high school or a hospital. We set it in a political setting because we’re interested in politic.

The two can play off of one another, as is often the case in role-playing games. Dramatic, personal choice can interfere with “optimal wargame play,” but the wargame itself can feed drama. Perhaps forging an alliance is vital to your success and the obvious way to forge an alliance is to marry, but you’re in love with someone else! Oh no, drama! And also, political gameplay! Perhaps you’re better off making a political deal with someone else so that you can preserve your chances of marrying your love. Oh no! Political play driven by drama!

I think one can overstate how much one needs deep and intense political rules to get decent political gameplay. After all, I got plenty of “deep” roleplaying and interesting political choices with only the thinnest sketch of politic in Cherry Blossom Rain, but I also have a feel for how these things flow. A well-designed political system can provide natural hooks as its engine churns, forcing heroes into undesired situations as they struggle to balance their personal lives with their political ambitions. Furthermore, it’s much easier to subtract from a detailed system than it is to add to a simple one, provided the places to cut and trim are made obvious.

Thus, I propose for our first outing to dive deep in and see what we come up with. We can trim and simplify later down the line. I will almost certainly produce “more than you need,” but better to have mechanics you can skip than to lack mechanics when you really need them.

The Riddle of Politics

Three great men sit in a room, a king, a priest and the rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives? Who dies?

–Varys, A Game of Thrones

So, what sorts of systems do we need for politics? Well, to understand that, we need to break politics down into pieces. For that, I believe I have three sources that all say the same thing: A Game of Thrones, Conan, and Dune itself.

In Conan, the titular hero claims he must know the answer to the Riddle of Steel. Where does real power come from? The first answer is steel itself, that ones tools matter. The second, deeper answer is that power comes from flesh, that without bone and sinew, one cannot wield the sword. But the deepest answer is that will exceeds both, for without the willingness to kill, the strongest flesh and sharpest steel come to naught.

The first and most obvious source of power are the tools of power, or Capital. This is the power of the rich man and the power of steel. We see this sort of power often in video games, where we spend industry and money to build great buildings and factories and engines of war to defeat our enemies with. We marvel at this sort of power when we see skyscrapers, monuments and great tanks passing by. Dune has this too, as Dune ultimately boils down to access to resources, with Dune thirsting for water, and the galaxy hungering for spice, with the Sarduakar having access to the greatest weapons, and the Fremen having nothing but drive.

For Capital, the best tool we have is GURPS City Stats and City Management from Pyramid #3-54. While a planet in Orphans of the Stars isn’t, perse, a city, we can treat them as such (and treating a city as the center of one’s planetary power isn’t far off the mark. A surprising amount of American politics is driven by Chicago, New York and Los Angeles). For individual characters, this amounts to Wealth, and we’ll largely deal with it in those terms.

But as the ruins of great civilizations show, all of this comes to naught without people to build, maintain and wield them. For this, we need not just people, but organized people, and thus Organizations. We need armies, we need bureaus, we need workers, we need soldiers. This represents the King, and it represents Flesh, and in Dune, it represents the way in which Atreides fought and built vs the way Harkonnen fought and built.

For Organization, I suggest GURPS Boardroom and Curia paired with Social Engineering. Pulling Rank may well be useful, but what matters here is less “What does my organization do for me,” and more “How do I shape, master and control my organization.” This is about sitting atop an organization and directing it, while possibly subverting other organizations. For individual characters, this amounts to Rank.

The last comes from a more ephemeral truth, one which might be hard for us to quantify, and that is Vision. In the end, power is not about the engines that back it, but the vision of the world that drives it. People fight wars with almost religious fervor, or work in the mines to support their family, to impress their friends, or to lift up their state. People must offer their blood, sweat and tears up to something, they must have will, and this represents the Priest in Varys’ riddle. Dune ultimately boils down to this, a great struggle between philosophies and cultures, about what is right and what is wrong.

To represent Vision will be difficult, but again, GURPS Social Engineering will probably be our best choice, paired with some ideas that have been bubbling around in Psi-Wars for awhile. We’ll tackle it more clearly when we get there. For characters, this will likely amount to Philosophy and perhaps Code of Honor and maybe even Will, but it will be expressed to the people via Propaganda and Leadership.

Both Conan and Game of Thrones largely ignore an element that features strongly in modern thrillers and in Dune itself (albeit in such a complete way that it almost overrides the narrative completely), and that is the power of Information. Even with the best equipment, the most organized minions, and the greatest drive to achieve great things, we must know where to apply our strength, and what to avoid, if we want to achieve greatness. Given the extreme costs of information at low tech levels, I hardly find it surprising that Varys leaves it out of his riddle, but in Dune, the knowledge of precisely what he must do and when represents the prime source of Paul Atreides’ power. This is the domain of the spy and likely its own complex gameplay.

The Roadmap to Power

So what next? I’d like to tackle each step in turn, starting with Capital and physical power. I don’t want to dive too deeply into the actual technology of infrastructure, so much as note it in general terms, discuss what niches need to be filled, and create a loose design for how one builds, maintains and exploits capital.

With that in place, the next step is to dive into what sorts of groups use what sorts of infrastructure, and how politics plays out in those particular arenas, as well as what sorts of organizations we need.

The third step will be to look at how ideology shapes the loyalty of people and organizations, and how heroes can draw strength from their ideologies while defeating their opponents with their own ideas.

Finally, if we have time, we might delve into conspiracies and what they represent.