[DGD] Feudalism

[Raymond Jennings]

On Sun, Nov 13, 2016 at 9:57 PM, Schmidt, Stephen <schmidsj at union.edu>
wrote:

> 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?


My assumption was that the role was mostly bluebooked with some
administrative buttons in OOC land.

Interestingly enough though ICO just posted a public message on their forum
about having a problem with patrons going poof for extended periods of
time, but still having the characters mop up favor points even without
being logged in.

Their solution was having patronage relations between characters dropped if
one of them went offline for more than a month or so...maybe something
similir would apply here.

Basically, make the relation between lord and vassal a real one, but keep
it mostly bluebooked unless RPed, give both sides some relevant buttons to
push, and have an arrangement to have the relationship broken if one side
goes awol for too long...or maybe have the vacant role "eschated" (snicker)
to game staff?

you do make a point about maybe having noble roles be interchangeable masks
that different players could occupy.

Some RPs have this sort of thing with the concept of a "canon" character, a
position that can be occupied by any trustworthy player, with guidelines
and supervision.  I think this sort of thing also came up once before on
this very list.

Is that what you were suggesting?


> 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.


Would this be an NPC puppetmastered by a rotating player base, or a
rotating pack of characters occupying a single role?



> 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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