Paper Empires: Stability

The Roman Empire fell because of internal squabbling and invaders from the outside. The British Empire, once spanning the whole globe in some capacity, was hugely diminished as their colonies rose up against them. The stability of your own empire is of critical importance in Paper Empires. Each province, from the start, begins to generate Unrest, and you must also keep building your Dynasty's strength up.

Paper Empires: Assets

Assets are the last thing which floats around in Paper Empires 2.0, being a little less powerful and a little less tied down than Provinces. Although they're not quite a core of your empire, they're the tools which you use to take various actions. Every action works through an appropriate Asset, and you'll gain a great advantage by having the right Asset.

Paper Empires: the Revival!

Here it is, folks! Like I mentioned last week, I've had a bit of an RPG-tinkering idea. This time, I'm revisiting the game Paper Empires, a sort of "Civilization meets RPGs" combo that, while an interesting concept, had some real problems. I'd sort of left it by the wayside, but now I think I've stumbled across the perfect way to reboot it. It's a system that's flexible, has a lot of moving parts to tinker with, and it's a system with a strong narrative focus...

Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you to Cortex+, the game powering the Smallville, Leverage, and (most recently) Marvel Heroic roleplaying games.

Paper Empires Alpha Release!

Download From Here
Licensed under the Open Gaming License

Well, folks, it's here! I've finally gotten together the Alpha of Dangerous Tides, the initial setting for Paper Empires. You'll notice that it went through some changes since the other posts I've made about it.

Paper Empires: A Sample Dynasty

All right, folks! Time to throw something out there which your own perusal might light upon with some sense of glee. In other words, here's a dynasty for you, in rough alpha form, for you to pick apart and enjoy! And, well, I guess I don't need much more to say than that.

The Dun Crow Donnoleys
The Dun Crow Donnoleys are a terrifying lot of seafaring scallywags, who've sworn to lay claim to the lands of the Ivory Ring Islands. They live to spread their reign of terror far and wide, burning and pillaging, keeping small settlements under duress. They've decided that they're going to do some settling now, making port towns for their own, to rake in more loot and become a major power in the Islands.

Signature Trait: Ruthless (one province per turn gains a +2 military bonus)
Signature Ability: No Quarter--when you use this ability, all provinces gain a +3 military bonus. Each province attacked by you this turn loses 1 population (limit once per province).
The Donnoleys are feared, because they are not known for mercy. It's a miracle, some say, if you survive, though maybe less so depending on your fate afterwards. Slavery under the Donnoleys is not always a pleasant manner, and neither is being held for ransom by them.

Cultural Trait: Clans (all provinces with 2 culture or more gain +1 happiness)
Donnoley blood sticks together, and where the Donnoleys have spread, there is also loyalty to the standard of the Dun Crow. Spread the offspring of the Donnoleys far and wide, and your empire will be much-pleased.

Unique Landmark: The Pale Banshee (all military dice rolled by this province reroll if the result is a 1)
The Pale Banshee is a rumor, some say, a tale to frighten off sailors who stray too near to the bounds of the Donnoley's islands. Others put much faith in its existence: a ship with a wailing crew, whose very sight calls death down upon visiting ships.


You'll notice a couple things about this. First off, there's a "Unique Landmark". This is a major building, legacy, cultural idea, or otherwise noteworthy but somewhat tangible thing which an empire makes. While landmarks can be made by every empire, each dynasty also has its own unique landmark, exclusive to it. The full game will include options and rules for constructing your own dynasty's personal Unique Landmark from scratch, and all settings will include sample Unique Landmarks. Second, of course, there's a major pirate theming to this. That's because this comes from *drumroll* one of the three settings that I'm planning on putting in Paper Empires...

• Dangerous Tides, inspired by the popular Pirates of the Caribbean series, mashing together make-believe pirate lore and swashbuckling action, along with a dose of the somewhat "unnerving and highly...unnatural-like".


• Mithril Muskets, a colonial fantasy world...because let's face it--RPG geeks always gotta stick fantasy in there somewhere.


• Imperialism, a somewhat historical recreation of Europe and its encounters with the New World, heavily inspired by the game Sid Meier's Colonization.

So, hang along for the ride! It oughta be fun.

Paper Empires: The Art of Succession

First, an update on my goals. I've run into a roadblock regarding the computer...my Windows partition went down, and I can't figure out how to install Scribus onto my Linux partition. I'll try some stuff, and if we're in luck, I do have an idea of what I can give to all of you. I realize that making a full, 200-page (or so, I don't exactly know) core rulebook in a month is hardly a very achievable goal for something I'm doing on my spare time. However, it's entirely possible to write up a "Quickstart" for the system.

Basically, that'll include empires to play in one specific setting, along with simplified rules for playing the game. From there, we can make sure that the game works, and then expand the rules into the full version, which I'm still releasing for free. So, then....time to talk a bit more about Paper Empires!

Like My Father Before Me...
It doesn't exactly make sense for you to have a single character who spans centuries of play. In Civilization, that's an abstraction at most. I also think that it's a bit rough to track different characters over that time period, when that's only part of the game. Such paperwork is better-suited to Blood Royale and similar games. Besides, so far the empire, not its ruler, has been the primary character. In keeping with that, the main unit of "characterization" is a dynasty.

The dynasty is the "character" of an empire. Whereas the provinces (and associated mechanics) are the fuel of the empire, and its power, the dynasty is the lifeblood of that same empire. It directs your relationships to other empires, gives a distinctive trait to your empire, and also influences the spread of your Culture.

Main Components
A dynasty is described by traits: simple descriptions of its aspects that give it bonuses or penalties. The traits of a dynasty are limited into two categories. You have one signature trait and multiple cultural traits. The cultural traits each give you some sort of small bonus, such as additional population or more dice per province. They also determine how easily your culture spreads to new provinces. Every cultural trait has an opposing cultural trait. If that trait is present in a province, attempts to spread culture to that province are penalized. Obviously, you can't have two opposing traits in the same province. A matching trait, on the other hand, gives a bonus to culture-spreading.

The signature trait, on the other hand, gives every empire their distinct flavor. It's a cultural trait, but it has a special ability attached to it as well. Once per game, you may expend that ability: your empire spends its resources to achieve a wondrous goal. You gain a temporary but powerful benefit. This is the moment where your empire shines; it's what your empire is known for, after all.

Traits, of course, are the backbone of the roleplaying in this game, and they figure heavily into the Diplomacy portion.

Paper Empires: A Little Chit-Chat

Diplomacy can be a funny thing. It's a very important part of empire-building, too. How you get along with your neighbors isn't just important for your international survival. It also shapes the character of your country. This is the other half of the RPG, and it's every bit as important as the empire-management half.

Diplomacy: Yeah, It's Like That (brief mild language)

Why Can't We Just Get Along?
I'm actually looking for some feedback on one part of the diplomacy system. Namely, I'm trying to decide just how much rules space to devote to it. I'm of two minds on this one. One mind says that there's enough rules already in the game. That I don't need to make it so complicated, that I should keep it nice and simple, with roleplaying something that the players are expected to naturally insert in. Another part of me, though, takes a look at games like Fiasco, and sees an interesting model to follow: a game mechanic that builds and fleshes out an elaborate tangled mess of relationships. There's not necessarily anything wrong with an involved, crunchier ruleset. To top it off, if the empire-management is streamlined, that leaves room for the diplomacy half to blossom.

The rules that I'm considering using would mimic Fiasco in part: you roll a pool of dice, and then swap your dice with other players to create relationships. In other words, treaties, hostilities, enmities, bad history, and so forth. After the stage is set, those relationship dice become a currency of sorts. I don't have it all mapped out, but the idea is that you can "cash in" on a relationship in order to get something good, or something of that nature.

Achievement Unlocked!
There is a part of the diplomacy half that I will be using for sure. It has to do with the agreements between countries, and the benefits and penalties therein. It also has to do with my philosophy on roleplaying, on how to encourage it and how to ground it in the rules. Of course, this can take on two forms: enforcement and the "carrot on a stick" method. I'm looking at using a little bit of both, actually. The enforcement method is the simplest: making unpopular diplomatic agreements (treaties with a sworn enemy, for instance) or breaking popular agreements will cost you Happiness in your provinces. That could lead to revolts, which are Bad News. There's another facet to this system, though, which I like even better.

It's inspired by "achievements", which are found in a number of multiplayer games, and also by the experience point system of World of Darkness, which doles out XP based on actions by the players that enhance the storytelling. (Character roleplaying, encounters with the supernatural, etc.) So, here goes. Every agreement between a country is an "achievement", so to speak, waiting to be "unlocked". It stipulates conditions and rewards on each side. When an empire fulfills its half of the bargain, they gain Progress, which can be used like experience points in other systems. You can buy up permanent boosts for your Dynasty, or you can cause world-changing events to happen, such as a research breakthrough or a cultural rebirth in a major province.

There will be rules for how much Progress you can gain, according to an agreement. It's a nice way to get benefits in-game, and to hold your fellow countries to that pact by dangling a nice juicy benefit in front of them. Whether they'll honor it...well, therein lies the turn of history, and of this game.

Delay and Paper Empires

Hello, folks! Don't worry, Paper Empires is still on schedule, because I've finally finished with finals...so now comes Christmas break! I'm gonna be making it my project for that time span. I won't promise a Christmas release, but I'm hoping I can get at least an initial version out by the first week of January. Then I'll be taking a break.

However, I've got a bit of info that you folk may find interesting, and I'll run through and explain it. Long story short, I've decided that I want to limit the game very narrowly in its scope. Paper Empires will be about players who control vast colonial empires in the 16th-19th centuries.

Wait, What?
It's kinda funny how the inspiration for this came about. It was a totally accidental choice. I made a parchment texture, and I grabbed an old-looking font, and I put the one on the other to mock up my PDF. And I realized something funny. It looked exactly like those old broadsides that you associate with the American Revolution. And I thought, "That doesn't seem to quite fit the idea of an age-spanning epic empire-building game."

Well, then I wondered..."Why not?" Here's the idea I had. Why couldn't I just release a base game with a much narrower setting than "The rise and fall of nations in history"? It would make things easier, it would make things more thematic, and it would allow for a lot of nice period touches as well.

It Makes More Sense
There was the logic thing too. It seemed kinda odd that you would be accepting the fact that there's a single immortal individual behind the workings of a millenia-old realm. The idea of a dynasty was a lot easier to swallow, but not even dynasties tend to last that long. On the other hand, from the 1500's to the 1800's there wasn't a whole lot of dynasty change. Not until the end, anyway.

It also made for a more interesting game in some respects when you started with an existing empire and then branched out to settle outlying lands. This removed the problem of adjacency, too. Colonies are by nature distant from the motherland. Any action against another country's main provinces is much more of a major action.

Plus, it means that it's a snap to run a Pirates of the Caribbean-themed game of Paper Empires. By the way, that is a setting that I will be telling you how to replicate in the core rulebook. I'll hold myself to that.

My Plan
Somewhat like how White Wolf has all of its different lines (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, etc.), I'm planning to eventually do the same thing. Eventually. The same core rules will be at the base of each game, but they'll change according to "eras", somewhat taking a cue from Civilization. However, I'll make sure that there are distinctions between each era. I'm also figuring that each era should be compatible, stretching into a massive, epic campaign. Perhaps. We'll see. That's way in the future, though.

If this does well, I promise you that the core Paper Empires (including the Colonial setting) will remain free. Always. I may charge for expansions (say, a handful of dollars for an expansion...far less expensive than most out there), but that core book will always be free.

Possible Expansions
Don't take this as any concrete promising here, but here's some of the versions of Paper Empires that might eventually come into being, if it does well enough.

• Medieval
• Feudal
• Modern
• Classical

Enjoy the tidbits of information!

Paper Empires: The Lowdown and Basics

Well, here it is: a big post with some big answers about the game. Sorry, folks, I was going to put together a rough PDF preview of part of the book, but I left my computer over at a friend's house when I went to play Mahjong. So, no PDF for now. But I'll still talk very extensively about some of the most essential bits of the game, and answer questions as well. Without any further ado, I'll jump into the crux of the game, which is "where do all these stats go?"

A Question of Scale
When envisioning the game, I was immediately faced with the question of scale. I'd considered that I wanted each empire to be composed of different cities. They'd choose what to build in each city, and they'd choose what to do with each city. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of additional rules-related questions, such as "what cities are adjacent to one another?" and "how do you track everything you're doing in all those cities?" Again, these sorts of problems are solved in Civilization by having the computer automatically take care of the record-keeping. In an RPG, though, record-keeping tends to drastically slow things down.

An easy solution presented itself, possibly inspired by Medieval: Total War and the rest of the game series. It's a little thing I call "provinces". Instead of focusing your empire around a large number of cities, you have a small but manageable amount of provinces, groups of land that house cities. It takes the management level up a notch, and makes it easier to roleplay being an empire, instead of being an empire's accountant.

How a Province Works
A province has one major stat: Culture. This represents how much the province holds together, and how much influence the province has on the rest of the world. High-Culture provinces are very, very valuable, because they encourage research in your empire, help famous people to rise to prestige (conferring benefits on your empire), and make it easier for other provinces to come under your control. (Although I won't be implementing direct "culture flip" as in the Civilization games, cultural control of areas will be important to protect them. It's also required to colonize new lands.)

Implicitly contained in a province is its Population stat. Population naturally grows over time, with an end-of-turn roll based on your current population, with penalties for health issues. A province's Population is spread out among its population centers, which is a long term I coined, because I don't have a better one at the moment. Feel free to suggest one. Population centers are the true meat of this system, because they provide the means by which you can do things. Every population center has a size, and every population center provides an extra die with which you can accomplish Military or Trade goals.

That's the crux of the system. A province will make tests with a pool made up of its dice, which can be devoted to Military or Trade (or both), adding in bonus dice from its Dynasty (something I'll get into in a later post).

How Population Centers Work
A population center comes in three sizes: small, medium and large. In game terms, it can be a settlement, town, or city. The rules allow you to customize the spread of population in your province. Essentially, you can have more population centers with lower population, or you can have fewer population centers with higher population.

Population centers can be devoted to the spheres of Military or Trade, when you decide to take actions with them. Military dice wind up adding to your province's Defense at the end of the turn, and Trade dice add to your province's Income at the end of the turn. Before then, you can take actions with your Military and Trade dice pools in a province, such as conquering new lands, putting down a rebellion with your army, or even infiltrating an enemy via your merchant routes.

Answering Questions
So, to answer a couple questions that were posed by Adonies in a comment on my previous post...

Research is a major part of civilization, will you include it in Culture?

Also, food-production (which leads to population growth) is not quite the same as manufactured production.

Research is indeed a part of Culture. At the end of your turn, Culture provides the basis for a Research roll you can make to try and discover the major technology you're pursuing. Or at least to contribute more research towards it. Paper Empires is about discovering major technologies within a specific historical era, so the tech tree will be much simpler. This also means that technologies are much more important and "big" when you discover them.

Food-production isn't so much handled here, except in the terms of bonuses provided by technology and the Traits of a province. As well as by Landmarks, which you'll find about later. Manufactured production is covered by the same things, but it's also simulated by some rules regarding population centers. When you have towns and cities, you get explicit bonuses to either Military or Trade, depending on the center's specializations. The rest of it comes down to how you wish to spread your empire.

Questions?
I'm sure you all have plenty of questions. For my Tuesday post, I'd like to answer them. I'll be taking any questions you have in the comments, and picking ten to answer. The rest will go into the "question bank", to be plucked out for the next Q/A post I do. And so on and so forth.

Hopefully you enjoyed this look at Paper Empires!

Paper Empires: How it Started

Well, folks, here begins what could be the craziest endeavor that I've undertaken. My mission, and I have accepted it, is to deliver to all of you a free RPG called Paper Empires, a game which puts you at the helm of a massive realm that spans nations. It also puts you in the same world as a number of other realms, too. Are they neighbors, pests, or blood enemies? Well, that's up to the players to decide and figure out. Enough about the premise. Let's delve into the history...

Sid Meier: The RPG
I can't exactly say why I decided that Civilization's mechanics lent themselves to an RPG. It possibly had something to do with the fact that I'd been playing the game for such extended amounts of time. The mechanics...well...those were really streamlined and cool...and it was a really different area. Part of it, probably, was the fact that nobody's really touched on this story area in RPGs before, because there aren't generally any stories which feature countries as the main characters. Barring satirical Japanese cartoons, of course.

Somewhere along the line, though (possibly after seeing the Facebook game "City of Wonder", and plans for a social network version of Civ), it struck me that this would be a really, really cool thing to do. From there, I started jotting down ideas on paper (well, more accurately, Google Docs...so, digital paper...) and things began to spiral out. This is what I would call the "dump" stage. A few things immediately bled over, and eventually began to morph into the basic concepts of the game. These were the "core attributes" of your empire.

Back to Basics
Taking very directly from Civilization, I decided that there were four main stats that you could assign to any, well...I called it a "civilization" early on, but "empire" quickly emerged as a far catchier and more distinct term. These four attributes were: Military, Trade, Culture, and Production. Those match up pretty closely to the principal activities of Civilization: conquest, trade (to get money for conquest, and to keep research high), expansion (culture flip!!), and making stuff (armies, buildings, wonders...) So far, so good, except that we're ridiculously close to knockoff territory here.

But then came some mulling-about of the concepts. Production...well...production didn't seem nearly as important as the others. It was more something that...happened. To top it off, it seemed to invite a heavy level of micromanagement. I didn't want micromanagement. (For the short version of this...I think that micromanagement can be one of the biggest enemies to roleplaying. If you're too busy figuring out what all of your minions are doing, or what the repair status of your power armor's different nodes are, it takes you out of the moment. Computers can handle a lot of these things, but when it's in person, that changes.) So, if there was a way to limit and streamline the production aspect...

Well, I had an epiphany there, too. Same thing goes for Culture. I realized some things about culture and its role in a civilization. That let me find a rather easy analogue in traditional RPG terms, and away we went! I'll discuss my approaches to Production and Culture later, when I really go over the attributes. Suffice it to say, Production and Culture have been rather transformed into very core stats, but they've also somewhat dropped out of the picture in terms of being "evaluation stats" like Military and Trade.

But that's okay. In Paper Empires, it's the Military and Trade stats which let you take care of problems and flex your power across the world. Well, it only makes sense. Conquest and money have been two of the strongest influences in the history of the world, and it's no different in this game.

One More Turn...The Importance of Goals

Civilization is a very addictive game, in a sense. The "One More Turn Syndrome" is a commonly reported phenomenon among players. Civ is one of those games that manages to keep you hooked, coming back again and again and again and again...

How?

A Very Common Technique
Cliffhangers. Humans can't stand them. Whenever a piece of plot is left over, unresolved, unended, we dislike it. We don't want there to be loose threads. So we read on, to go further. We "have to" find out what happens to the hero in the next chapter, how the mortally-wounded sidekick will fare, if the villain has truly escaped for good, if the Doomsday Device will go off...

It works.

Most people do keep on reading, as long as they know there will be a conclusion, and as long as the story has engaged them so far. So how does Civ do it?

Plot, Plot, Plot...
Personal investment. The reason that I come back to the game again and again is that I have plans. I can mouse over a city, and see how many turns it will take for me to complete the smashing wonder that will let me start a campaign of massive war against my foe, how many turns it will take for a Great Person to emerge from the shadows of obscurity, how many turns it will take for my country's influence to spread over the map, stifling my rival. As I come closer to these milestones, I set up more plans.

All of those plans can be seen on their way to completion. I know how long it will take for me to research a critical piece of technology, or how many turns it will take for me to gain access to a valuable natural resource. My plans hinge on it. And I like to see my plans complete. My personal investment is literally playing out in front of my eyes, and it's not easy to leave it for later.

One More Session!
These tips can easily be applied to running an RPG campaign, because the point is to keep the players wanting to know what will happen next, to want to play the next session. Cliffhangers are a given, but this more subtle method that Civ uses is worth noting. Make character advancement transparent, and block out player plans in a visible way.

Are they mustering up support in political spheres for their cause? Use a chart to track their progress, and let them know a rough timeline for when success will happen. Or, if not success, maybe track effort spent towards a special check, which determines how they're swayed. Are they raising an army? Add tokens to a counter of military forces, increasing it at a regular interval. Make it predictable, and they'll get the sense that they can depend on it showing up.

And they'll come back for it.

Conquering of the World!!

Well, then. I got Civilization IV: Complete Collection for a pretty good price. It would seem that it has been consuming far too much of my time as well, but...that seems to be the nature of Civilization in any incarnation. "One More Turn Syndrome", I think it's called. Ever since I got started with Civilization II, I've been an apt witness to that. Still, there's some things which I'd never quite been able to shake about the game, which somewhat kept me from the higher tiers of play. The game was still a bit hard to get into, and the magic of running your own empire was, well...a little lost when I had to keep track of so many details.

Along Came a Civ IV...
Well, it's not Civ V, but Civ IV represents a massive leap forward, at least to me. I'd played the original Colonization, Civilization II (including the Test of Time variants), Civilization III, and Civilization IV: Colonization. The last one, particularly, did a little bit of prep, as far as Civ IV went, but I was in no way ready to experience just how awesome Civ IV was for my experience. Mainly, this was because I had very little experience of Colonization to compare with, and because the Civ IV way of doing things is more like the original Civ/Colonization model, anyhow.

That aside. Civ IV breathed new life into the series for me, and the reason I'm posting it here is because it holds a lot of lessons for RPG design, and for playing RPGs. Civ IV made the game far more transparent to me, and it streamlined the mechanics of the game in a way that made it interesting, fluid, and less artificial.

Transparency
Something which bothered me as early as Civilization II was that the game required so much reference to the manual and Civilopedia, at least until you had it committed to memory. To me, that didn't help the fun of the game, or the strategy. It just made things a bit trickier to get around. By Civ IV, that's changed. Not only are important effects of buildings and military units summarized in mouse-over boxes, but a simple right-click is all that you need for instant information access.

The game also makes frequent use of icons and pictures, which act as visual cues and provide more information at a quick glance. Whenever an icon can be used, it is. This, in particular, is the most helpful sort of transparency: it gives a lot of information in a very simple symbol, and it also helps the player connect better. The icon of a sickly green face besides one of your cities says "unhealthy" a lot better than a text notifier.

The other thing is, it's very simple to see what everything does. The icons combine with the transparency here, showing you exactly what your decisions will result in. This makes it simpler to decide on strategy, and how strategy will be implemented. This is possibly the most valuable bit to be learned: the players need to know what impact their decisions will have. They don't have to have all of the information, but they should have some sort of idea.

Streamlining
The other nice thing that Civ IV did? Streamlining. Oddly enough, I consider the streamlining to take two forms: removing mechanics and adding mechanics. Both of them contribute to the flow of the ruleset, bringing it closer into focus. From clear-cut unit promotions to the city health mechanic (something which replaced pollution, and tied it into feeding cities), the game is filled with interesting mechanics that encourage multiple strategies.

One thing which all of the rule changes began to dispose of was artificial restrictions placed in the past. Veterans of the earlier Civs may recall having to build an Aqueduct before a city could expand past a certain size. No more. Instead, large cities naturally become more unhealthy, and an Aqueduct helps keep a city healthy. It does the same thing, but in a much more natural way.

This last bit, especially, is not always something which a GM can change in a game; rules are rules, after all. However, there are many places in which the rules can be applied in a simple way or a complex way. The simple way is generally better, as long as it makes player choices meaningful. Civ IV shows that when you move away from direct simulation, and abstract things a bit, it can lead to a much funner game.

In Short
Apologies to those of you who don't exactly follow games like Civ; the main point I want to get to in this post follows now. The best RPG experiences come when you're not tied up in rules. You need just enough rules to make the game interesting, without having rules that are so complicated they require frequent reference to use. Any time spent looking up rules is time taken away from story, and tension diffused.

Is this something that can be done from the player's side? Not exactly, though you can always write out shortcuts to yourself. Don't rely so much on your character sheet's numbers, and make visual cues for yourself. On the GM's side, take the "I really don't care" attitude with some rules, if they needlessly complicate things. Of course, this means that the players should have a similar attitude. The less rules-lawyering and advantage-squeezing you have going on, the more you can do this.

Now, back to one more turn....