[DGD] Feudalism

[Schmidt, Stephen]

been toying with a version of this for many years myself... but got
sidetracked into wargames  :)

The problem I ran across was that players are not active 24x7. If players
are lord-vassal relations to one another, then what happens when your lord
is logged out? Or if there's a high position - duke, or something like that
- is it empty most of the time, when the duke is not logged on? Or can any
player who happens to be logged on take the job of the duke, if he's the
highest-ranking player currently logged in?

A feudal system requires long-term relationships between players. That may
be hard to model in a traditional MUD environment where new players are
created frequently, old ones disappear without warning.

I came to the conclusion that it would have to be the other way around - a
player could take any role in the feudal hierarchy that happened to be
vacant at a given time. So someone would always be Duke of Bananaland, one
player replacing another in the role as people logged in and out of the
game. That raises some continuity problems of its own, though - the person
to whom a vassal owes loyalty may change frequently.

I didn't get very far through that thought process before I gave up and did
wargames instead.

Steve


On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 12:43 AM, Raymond Jennings <shentino at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hey, would it be feasible to use a feudalism hierarchy to organize
> characters?
>
> Maybe a vassalage system, where each noble PC can have an optional lord and
> zero or more vassals, and then they can be given buttons to push about the
> land they have.
>
> There could well be PCs or NPCs as serfs at the bottom.
>
> I've been bouncing this idea around in my head for awhile, why not ask the
> dgd list about it?
>
> I'm thinking of a game world geographically as large as England, possibly
> with some constraints to discourage the "players go spread out as much
> wilderness as they can, but then spread too thinly to socialize" problem
> cited in one of shannon's skotos articles.
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