Medieval & Fantasy Minecraft Roleplaying

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Interest in restarting a NationStates project

What time period would you participate in for a NationStates game? Choose any that apply.


  • Total voters
    33

Cap

Lord of Altera
Legend
I've admined for 2-3 different iterations of this before, I can run the equivalent of the League of Nations & be the DM for battle results.

Actually, I've got a Big Book of Faction Warfare I can adjust to roughly WW2 levels easily enough. There's 3 categories of faction strength: Force, Wealth, Cunning, with each category having a range of assets which can be used for local effects or PvP effects. Each asset also has a set home, e.g. a battlefront or a factory city.

If folks are interested I can share it and we can adapt it for the period.
I'd be interested in hearing out a more detailed explanation before asking you to DM
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
I'd be interested in hearing out a more detailed explanation before asking you to DM
Stars Without Number: Revised comes with a detailed system describing how competing factions can interact with each other, and provides a range of assets fitting into 3 categories.

During warfare, people would send messages to the DM stating what they're doing with their assets on their battlefields, and the DM returns the results based on the rules of faction warfare.

Each turn, all factions in the game gain some amount of money/production based on existing assets. They can also save those resources for a rank-up in some power category (of force, wealth, cunning), which gives them greater capacity for future production and makes them more generally powerful. Factions can't lose these ranks normally because they represent its national capacity to do something. An industrial nation bombed to the Stone age can repair itself much faster than a pre-industrial nation can become industrial, after all.

Factions are knocked out when they have no more territory or assets, and no ability to make more.
 

Jak

Magus of Nothing
Legend
I've finished up my section of the map (pending suggestions from everyone as to what they'd like to see on it/changes made).

The actual region we're planning on using is that bounded by the black and yellow box in the bottom right. I merely added the rest as I was a tad bored (and me and Cap have been planning to connect all the regions eventually).

The massive region shown is just a desert - I've got a version where it is also split up, albeit into larger provinces.

Also keep in mind, these provinces by no means have to stay as they are. If you make a claim then I'm sure both me and Cap can edit the map's provinces so that it fits the desired area.

 

Cap

Lord of Altera
Legend
I've finished up my section of the map (pending suggestions from everyone as to what they'd like to see on it/changes made).

The actual region we're planning on using is that bounded by the black and yellow box in the bottom right. I merely added the rest as I was a tad bored (and me and Cap have been planning to connect all the regions eventually).

The massive region shown is just a desert - I've got a version where it is also split up, albeit into larger provinces.

Also keep in mind, these provinces by no means have to stay as they are. If you make a claim then I'm sure both me and Cap can edit the map's provinces so that it fits the desired area.
Was intending to let people draw their own borders after claiming provinces, with anything cut off just getting attached to the closest territory. I'm fulfilling the role of "master of the maps" and it's very easy to edit them in GIMP.
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
Wall inbound: rules of faction war in Stars Without Number. There's more in the PDF.

Note: Though designed with a sci-fi theme, all rules in SWN are freely adaptable to many other systems.


Factions, Assets, and Turns


A faction is any group that you intend to use as an important actor in the sector. In theory, any organization could qualify as a faction; every planetary government, business, religion, or club could be described with the rules given here. Still, that kind of exhaustive cataloging is neither practical nor profitable. Faction status should be reserved for those organizations that will do things important to the PCs or the background world. You should not bother creating more factions for your game than you are actually using at that moment. Save your effort for the groups that count. It may be necessary to turn an organization into a faction in the course of play. If the PCs suddenly take a deep interest in a eugenic cult they recently faced on the jungle moon of Perihelion, it might be useful for the GM to turn the group into a formal faction, the better to understand how the PCs might injure it and what resources the cult might have to fight back. Or it might be that the PC group’s interstellar trading cartel faction tries to topple a world’s tyrannical government, thus making it worthwhile to define the tyrant’s resources. As a general rule, you shouldn’t have more than five or six factions at the start of your campaign, and fewer is quite possible. Fewer than three tend to make for too much stability, however, and might not generate enough activity to make for interesting news reports and adventure hooks. Possible factions in a campaign might include criminal groups, local religions, planetary governments, political movements, terrorist organizations, noble houses, or any other band that might conceivably be someone the players care about or some group that might possibly hire or oppose the PCs.

Defining a Faction

Factions have attributes consisting of six statistics, a homeworld, and one or more tags.

Hit points measure a faction’s cohesion, morale, and group unity. The higher a faction’s hit points, the harder it is to break it up. A faction that loses hit points has lost cohesion somehow, either through the death of leadership, the demoralization of members, or the rise of fractious power blocs inside its structure. A faction needs time to recover from hit point damage. A faction’s maximum hit points are based on its Force, Cunning, and Wealth, as given later in the chapter.

Force rating is the faction’s general aptitude at applying physical violence, measured on a scale ranging from 1 to 8. A rating of 1 implies an organization with little or no aptitude for physical coercion, while a rating of 8 might be appropriate for a regional hegemon with a powerful, expansionist military. A high Force rating doesn’t necessarily mean that the faction has much in the way of a standing army, but it does mean that the faction can think clearly about the use of force and is accustomed to military reasoning. Governments tend to have high Force ratings to represent police forces and military structures. Terrorist groups, mercenary bands, and other organizations that rely on brute violence also tend to have high Force ratings.

Cunning rating reflects the faction’s skills at espionage, infiltration, internal security, and covert manipulation of other groups. A rating of 1 implies a completely visible faction with no resources for resisting infiltration, while a rating of 8 implies a faction of Illuminati unknown to all but a handful of paranoid conspiracy-mongers with tendrils of influence reaching to the farthest star in the sector. Eugenics cults, terrorist groups, spy agencies, and some religious groups tend to favor a good Cunning score.

Wealth rating indicates the faction’s commercial, scientific, and industrial resources. A Wealth score of 1 means that the faction has little in the way of income or investments, no dedicated manufacturing facilities, and no laboratories or researchers available. A Wealth score of 8 is appropriate for some system-spanning merchant empire or the combine that runs the pretech manufactories of an untouched factory world.

FacCreds are a measure of the faction’s general wealth and resources, spent to purchase and maintain assets or carry out faction operations. A FacCred doesn’t necessarily represent a certain sum of credits so much as it represents logistics capability, available resources, and managerial focus. A faction on a primitive world may not have a single credit to its name, but its command of a legion of laborers and the food supplies necessary to feed them are a vast store of FacCreds all the same. All the credits in a sector do no good if they can’t be effectively translated into a useful asset.

Factions also accumulate experience points. They gain these points from accomplishing goals, with the larger goals earning them correspondingly more experience points. Once enough experience is accumulated the faction can spend it to improve a rating. The higher the rating, the more experience is necessary to raise it. It’s vastly more difficult to go from Force 7 to 8 than from Force 1 to 2.

The faction’s homeworld represents the location of its core leadership and support. Factions can always purchase assets and take actions on their homeworld, even if they lack any other assets there. By the same token, an enemy can always launch attacks against the faction on their homeworld if the enemy is able to move in its own assets.

Tags are special traits that relate to the faction’s nature or special aptitudes. A cabal of rebel conspirators might have the Secretive tag, which gives a bonus to resisting certain attacks, or Deep Roots, which gives them a bonus to operations on their homeworld. Most factions have one or two tags.

Faction Assets

Aside from the six statistics, faction also possess assets. Assets are facilities, contacts, trained units of specialists, or other specific objects, places, or groups of value. A regiment of postech infantry is an asset, as is a pretech manufactory, a master assassin, or an interstellar shipping company.

Assets require certain ratings to support. A fleet of capital warships isn’t going to be useful to a faction with Force 3 no matter how much wealth the faction has. It just doesn’t have the infrastructure and institutional mindset to use such an asset effectively.

Assets have hit points much like factions do. An asset reduced to zero hit points by an attack is destroyed; either physically ruined, hopelessly scattered, totally demoralized, or lost to a rival buyer. Asset hit points can be regained with time for repair, reorganization, or culling members suborned by other powers.

Assets have a purchase cost and sometimes a maintenance cost, paid in FacCreds. The first turn that a faction fails to pay the maintenance cost of an asset, it becomes unavailable for use. If the maintenance cost isn’t paid the next turn, the asset is lost.

Assets often have an Attack. When an asset is used to strike at another faction, the attack entry is used to determine what rating is attacked and the amount of hit point damage that is done by a successful hit. An asset without an Attack entry can’t be used to initiate a strike at an enemy faction.

A Counterattack line indicates the damage an asset does to an unsuccessful attacker. If an attacking asset misses its strike against the target, the target’s Counterattack entry damage is done. An asset without a Counterattack entry does no damage to a failed attacker. It’s quite possible to have an asset with no Attack but a powerful Counterattack, making it useless at offense but very dangerous to assault.

Assets have a type, such as “Special Forces”, “Military Unit”, “Facility”, “Starship” or the like. This type is mostly relevant when factions wish to upgrade an asset, or some special tag applies only to assets of a certain type.

Assets have a location, usually the planet on which they were purchased, though it might also be a deepspace habitat, a particular moon, or some other general geographical location. Assets cannot be used against different locations unless they are first transported there, usually by means of a logistical asset. Most assets also require a particular tech level to purchase. They can be transported to worlds with lower tech levels, but they must be purchased on a planet with a sufficient level of technology.

A faction may own no more assets of a particular type than they have points in the relevant rating. Thus, a faction with Force 3 can own three Force assets. In a pinch, a faction can exceed this total, but each asset over the maximum costs an additional FacCred in maintenance each turn.

Acting During A Turn

Factions can take several different types of actions, though generally only one action per turn.
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
The rules would put everyone, regardless of NationStates own stats, on equal ground to begin with wherein they can later expand to customized and unique nations based on these rules.
 

Tomato150

Lord of Altera
I like them.

I think the faction system would tie in nicely with the ideologies of the time (Monarchies, Democracies, Fascists, and Communists), but on that note, would it be easy enough to tie in multiple players/countries into the same faction? I kinda felt like the rules were geared up more at one entity, rather than a wide array of countries? Or on the flipside, would these rules be applied to individual countries, and a more freeform system for groups of countries implemented?
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
I like them.

I think the faction system would tie in nicely with the ideologies of the time (Monarchies, Democracies, Fascists, and Communists), but on that note, would it be easy enough to tie in multiple players/countries into the same faction? I kinda felt like the rules were geared up more at one entity, rather than a wide array of countries? Or on the flipside, would these rules be applied to individual countries, and a more freeform system for groups of countries implemented?
These are faction specific but there's nothing saying 2 3s can't share their resources like a 6 (with a power cap of 3, since there's stuff that you can't support below certain tiers)
 

Cap

Lord of Altera
Legend
answer me this children

How are we doing territory claims? Suggest whatever you want to me and we'll discuss it as a community.
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
answer me this children

How are we doing territory claims? Suggest whatever you want to me and we'll discuss it as a community.
Territory claims are handled in the SWN faction rules believe it or not. You can expand to another region as a turn action.
 

Baron

Sovereign
Retired Staff
What is a turn?
Every round of the game, every faction in play gets a turn to do one of several things, such as develop an asset, attack a competitor by some means (there's a lot, from spies to fleet attacks to bribes), or attempt to expand territory.
 

Cap

Lord of Altera
Legend
Every round of the game, every faction in play gets a turn to do one of several things, such as develop an asset, attack a competitor by some means (there's a lot, from spies to fleet attacks to bribes), or attempt to expand territory.
yea but how long is it
 

Cap

Lord of Altera
Legend
However long you agree to make it
As great at it is to have a willing DM for this kind of stuff, I'm worried that having such an in depth system might take away from some of the freeform RP appeal of past NationStates projects. Is there a stripped down version of what you're proposing?
 
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