Designing Tabletop Strategy RPGs

Wrath of the Autarch is, for lack of any better terms, a tabletop strategy role-playing game.  Or, alternatively, maybe a tabletop 4X RPG is a good descriptor.  Designing such an uncommon beast has proven very difficult, and I'm now aware of why I couldn't find many such games in the first place.  The difficulty comes from merging competition with long time scales.

When initially designing WotA, I looked at many kingdom building RPGs, like Birthright.  However, I quickly realized those games weren't as useful to me as a designer, because they largely don't address long term strategy.  Rather, the kingdom is more of a framing mechanic for the narrative.

The most useful game that I've read is Houses of the Blooded, since it has competition and long term strategy.  Sadly (to me), competitive RPGs are rare enough (Contenders being one of my favorites), but competitive strategy RPGs are basically non-existent, with Houses of the Blooded being the only one I know of.  If you're reading this and know of another one, please let me know!  The big difference between Houses of the Blooded and Wrath of the Autarch is that, instead of the many vs. many PvP as in Houses, WotA has many vs. one (the Autarch) PvP.

The Incompatibility of GM Fiat and Competition

The first, and most immediate way, in which competition makes RPG design very difficult is it necessitates a certain rules framework in which all the players can operate within.  Rather than the traditional RPG design, where the GM is a facilitator to a story, the GM is instead another competitor.  This is easier at a local tactical level - after all, D&D combat in virtually every edition is a competition between the players and the GM, but it gets much harder when that competition is featured at the strategic level.  Put another way, the biggest tool in the RPG toolbox, GM fiat, is now verboten.

I handled this by providing a mission currency for the players (see the previous post), as well as a threat investment structure for the Autarch player (which I'll discuss some other time).  But, the key point is that strategy RPGs can't have a global GM fiat.  This may seem obvious, but the point is certainly worth mentioning, as it becomes readily apparent just how difficult design becomes when that is removed.

Uncertainty of Victory / Winning From Behind

Other design difficulties come from the mixture of strategy and competition, such as maintaining a level of uncertainty (or not) until the completion of the game.  That is, in a long-term strategy RPG, it's best to try to avoid the derivative state where one side or the other knows the game is over, yet it is quite some time before it actually becomes so.

One way to avoid this in games is to decouple the victory condition from the power source.  Otherwise, as you get further behind - you lose any ability to catch up.  I think another method is perhaps to have a few different options for victory, some of them being more unlikely (but perhaps more final) options.  The Hail Mary play as it were.  Note that many computer strategy games don't do this - but it's a little easier to say "Good Game" and move on earlier than it would be in an RPG, where there are narrative considerations as well.

My strategic playtests have revealed that I was guilty of this problem.  In this first place, stability - the measure of stability in your Stronghold, was both a way to build developments (and hence get power) and was also a win condition.  I decided that population is the way to build developments, with stability being a win condition.  All factions (the Stronghold, the Autarch, the five minor factions) are measured by these two metrics.

I'm still working out some Hail Mary victory conditions.  One of which might be assassinating the Autarch, which is no small feat.  I don't have a good option for the GM, but it might be the alternative: showing up with the Autarch somewhere, and trying to force the issue.  This has to be done with care, though, because a grand strategic advantage shouldn't be easily trumped by a long shot move.  Rather, such missions will at least serve to formally end the campaign when one side realizes it's most likely over.  It's more narratively interesting to go out in a blaze of glory than slowly die a thousand cuts over another four or five sessions of play.

Time Scales

Another difficulty of the genre is handling the time scales that a strategy game needs.  The important people from the kingdom are the lens through which the narrative is told, but this must necessarily be abstract in some measure, otherwise too much time is spent on narrowly focused concerns without moving the narrative forward.

In this, there are some good examples in existing RPGs.  The classic Pendragon accomplishes this by only focusing on the very important considerations for the year, not dealing with adventuring minutae.  This is also the tactic that HotB employs.  Birthright is slightly different, and uses both long term moves (kingdom level actions) as well as 2nd Edition D&D style adventures, intermixed.

I chose to employ actions at the level of the season (like HotB), such that each season the narrative progresses.  However, something like this must be done so that the kingdom itself grows.  It's possible to become even more abstract, where players don't role-play characters anymore, but rather narrate the actions of empires.

Winning!

I could write a great deal more about this topic, but I wanted to try to impress upon any other designers of tabletop RPGs the unique challenges present when competition is part of an RPG at the strategic level.  It turns out there is much to learn from boardgames (naturally - since Civilization was first a boardgame) and videogames, although there are challenges in adapting the form into a game where players assume the roles of important characters in the narrative (most notably time scale becomes an issue).  As well, there are difficulties when looking at kingdom building RPGs and making them strategic (most notably the limiting of GM fiat).