Re: (TFT) Rough and Ready Campaigns 3

["John J Hyland" <johnnyboytmm@juno.com>]

------ "Jay Carlisle" wrote:--------------------------------------
Let me come at this from the other side.
I am building gameworlds that allow things like Building, and War, and this means designing to some level of detail from the start.
[snip]
Many Player actions at this scale will actually appear on the Map and, with hexes functioning as city squares in Civ, Players have a strong intrest in defending territory.
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I am reminded once more of the Ray/John vs Jay dichotomy between fiat and data.  My players can engage in building and war too, it just happens "in play", rather than "in map" or in map rules as it were.  The guys currently own most of 1000 acres and have tenant farmers setting up on them to generate the stream of rents needed to cover their tax obligations.  They also own a small tower, a wharehouse, smithy and dock, and a riverboat - which are currently being administered by their factoring agent.  All of this is part of the hex marked "manorhaven" on the map.  I did not have tables of data for all of those things up front, but when they became part of the game, I made (hopefully reasonable) fiat decisions about them, and recorded those decisions, so now, for this part of this world, I know what the economic output of 1000 acres is.

There may also be a scale thing, since other than contributing to the establishment and growth of manorhaven, the PCs are unlikely to affect the map too much.  Also, they each play 1 character, so there is no generational change in my games.

Also, the map owned by the PCs is paper, it is not dynamic.  It does not change unless they write on it.  

Let me explain.  They have been adventuring in the mountain wilderness for the last few months, totally disconnected from any civilization, so if their fledgling estates were overrun by kobalds and burned to the ground, they would not be aware of it yet, so their map would still show the town of manorhaven, rather than the burnt out crater where manorhaven used to be, until they learn of it and change their map, or rebuild, making their map accurate once again, totally their call on which direction to go.

Oh, and I agree, a series of arena fights is not an RPG, it is a series of arena fights.  An RPG where everyone starts as a recently captured slave working as a gladiator in an arena in a far off land is very different from a series of arena fights (and is how my character started in at least one game - interesting but dangerous way to start).

OK, now I am babbling. Anyway, all that background (arena implies coliseum, implies city, implies world with farmers) is just that, implied, in my games, rather than all documented up front.  In large part because who has the time to document every little thing about the world, or for that matter, who knows that much about the real world, certainly not me, and in a less wired gameworld like my TFT game, no one at all.

On the other hand, if you define everything, and run a multigenerational world-spanning game, having Civ run the world and its armies in the background may be a great idea for your campaign. I run much smaller scale games - though I read your ideas with interest nonetheless.


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