Embracing the Fate Fractal: Building a Fantasy Kingdom

After about ten or so really solid playtests of the Wrath of the Autarch, I feel like much of the play experience has come together.  However, the area that still might need some work comes from how to represent the factions, regions, and resources which form the backbone of the long term strategy in the game.  To this point, I haven't really embraced the Fate fractal for those elements - that is, the idea that everything can be represented as a character, with aspects, skills, stunts, stress, and consequences.

It's probably time to revisit how well the Fate fractal works with the strategic elements in Wrath of the Autarch (factions, regions, and resources).  I'll start with the most important part of a kingdom building game: the kingdoms themselves (also called factions in the rules, since they might not literally be fiefdoms).  For WotA, the two most important factions are the Autarch and the Stronghold (the faction the players will control).  Although, there are five other minor factions constructed in identical fashion.

Factions have aspects, which can be used in play as per normal - essentially functioning to help flesh out the society and give a global pool of aspects all the characters can access.  Fate fractal in full effect.  Other than aspects, they also have developments, which are very similar to stunts.  The provide benefits for all of the characters attached to that faction, in more or less concrete ways.  Sometimes they make getting other developments easier, or help in defense.  But, the parallel is definitely there - and I like the idea, so I'm not interested in changing that around right now.  That said - only the Stronghold really gains new developments over time, the other factions are basically static in terms of developments.

However, the last two key attributes for a faction are stability and population - and these aren't very Fate friendly.  Stability is very important - functioning as the lifeblood of a society.  If it drops down to zero, the faction collapses.  If such an event happens for the Stronghold or the Autarch, the game is over - one side is victorious.  This is represented as a number from 0-40.  Population is also represented on the same sliding scale, from 0-40.  It's pretty unlikely population will ever drop down to 0, but it would have the same effect of ending the game if it happens to the Autarch or the Stronghold.

These are the only two values tracked for all the different factions.  For the Stronghold, they function to determine how easy it is to build developments, and fluctuate somewhat independently.  Population can increase in response to a higher stability, and stability goes up and down in response to wars, threats, as well as successes in building certain developments and dealing with threats.  Besides these areas, population and stability determine how many units the Stronghold has available during military missions - or when using the military to deal with threats.  For the other factions, these attributes mostly inform units raised in warfare, and can be affected by the Stronghold.

So, taking a more Fate approach, stability and population could be modeled as stress tracks or skills.  Initially, I did take a skill-centric approach, and each faction had a number of skills (security, military, diplomacy, etc).  However, they slowly became obsolete, because of the mission based nature of WotA.  It didn't really matter what a faction's diplomacy was - because if you wanted to set up a deal with them, then that was a mission onto itself, not a roll.  So, I moved away from using skills.  Legends of Anglerre is a fantasy fate game which takes that approach, and it might work for a more abstract treatment of factions.  It may even work in a more limited fashion here, but I haven't fully embraced it - it doesn't quite create the effect I'm going for.

Another option is the stress track approach.  In some ways, this seems like a better fit.  After all, if losing your stability means the kingdom has collapsed, that does fit the stress track/consequences idea very well.  Maybe population and stability could be rolled up into one stat for all the other factions (just track stability).  After all, it's really stability that matters, not population.  That also allows the creation of consequences - always a fun way to narratively detail just how a kingdom is going into decline.

There are a few details, though, that get tricky:

• Taking Stability Stress: It seems like stability stress would only come in small amounts, for the most part.  It also isn't really variable - it's a byproduct of threats or war, and the way it's calculated is fixed.  Small, fixed amounts of stress don't seem to fit the stress track idea as well.  Warfare could feasibly cause a chunk of stability losses, though.
• Building Developments: Currently the stability score feeds into "build points" for the Stronghold to create developments.  By making it a stress track, I don't know how to keep that idea.  It functions more as a skill in that case - as in, rolling to make progress building a development.  Maybe population could be a skill for the Stronghold, and stress consequences can be freely invoked to lower the rolls somehow?
• Funding War: Finally, stability factors into how many troops are available for factions (including the Stronghold).  This again, feels more like a skill than a stress track.  I guess I could re-introduce a skill like Warfare for attacking with troops, and like in the building developments case, the stability stress would somehow impact it.

Anyway, I would like to really embrace the fate fractal as much as possible, but when I set about doing that, it seems like I might end up with something even more fiddly, which certainly isn't what I want.