What is Wrath of the Autarch?

Bandits are stealing your grain, a border dispute has ignited with Crescent Hold, and the peasants are uprising ever since your guard accidentally murdered an innocent. Amidst all of this, the Autarch's spies are everywhere... it is only a matter of time before they launch a full scale assault. There aren't enough resources to deal with all of these threats, but what gets ignored?

Wrath of the Autarch is a kingdom building role-playing game. The beta rules are complete and freely available here: Beta Rules

I'd love to hear from you! Please post your thoughts in the WotA G+ community: G+ Community or the WotA rpggeek community: WotA on RPGGeek

Wrath of the Autarch features:

• Domain Management
• WotA owes its inspiration from 4X video games, and role-playing games like Birthright, Houses of the Blooded, and Pendragon
• The main character in WotA is the Stronghold, a society the players grow over a number of seasons
• The Stronghold controls regions, large areas of land that can be used to gain valuable resources
• Troupe Style Play
• There are a limited number of available heroes for the Stronghold. These heroes are leaders and skilled characters capable of accomplishing important missions
• Each session of play highlights one season of time, focusing on one important mission for the Stronghold
• The players choose which heroes to play based on the type of mission they elect to undertake
• GMless
• WotA is a set of rules written for a specific campaign included with the game
• The Empire of the Autarch is a powerful kingdom bent on the Stronghold's destruction
• One player takes on the responsibilities for managing the Autarch, while the other players all manage the Stronghold
• The Autarch player allocates points to various threat pools over the course of the campaign, which lets them inflict miseries upon the Stronghold
• There is a strategic interaction between the missions the Stronghold takes as seasons go by and the threats the Autarch wields against them
• Campaign Frame
• There are five different minor factions present in the world, each with different goods and services they're willing to trade for, as well as different capabilities they possess
• Allying with compatible factions is a key part of the strategy for the Stronghold
• The Autarch may sabotage relationships with minor factions using threats
• The factions and the world they inhabit is not fleshed out in detail, giving players a framework to use, but plenty of mechanisms to make it personal and unique
• Structured Missions
• Each season the heroes from the Stronghold go on one mission
• The mission choices are alliance, conquest, assassination, sabotage, or dealing with a looming threat
• Missions consist of a challenge phase and a conflict phase
• Challenge Phase
• The challenge phase is open and flowing, with all the players contributing to the unfolding narrative
• There is a constant time pressure to succeed at the challenges for the Stronghold players
• The Deck of Fate is used to help spur creativity and create challenge scenes
• Conflict Phase
• WotA employs four types of conflicts: diplomacy, infiltration, skirmish, and warfare
• The type of conflict used depends on the mission
• Conflicts use similar action types, but each have their own flavor and tactical options
• Based on Fate Core
• WotA is based on the Fate Core rules, and uses the same four core actions, as well as the familiar skill ladder, stunts, and aspects
• Instead of one type of aspect, there are three, based on their duration: minor advantages, mission aspects, and campaign aspects
• The longer the duration of the aspect, the more important it is, and the harder it is to create
• WotA heavily uses the Deck of Fate (although Fate Dice may be used instead)
• Stunts, developments, and other effects modify how the cards are used
• Stress for success is an option to succeed with cost for any action type: allowing a player to increase their result by drawing cards and applying the suns as physical stress and the moons as mental stress
• A unique relationship mechanic is used that rewards both helpful and hindering relationships
• There is a special system called "aspect burning" which lets players convert free invokes on campaign aspects into other in game effects (units, familiars, allies, advantages in conflicts)

I've tried to provide an overview of the key features that distinguish Wrath of the Autarch from other role-playing games. If it sounds interesting to you, feel free to look over the rules and comment!

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).

Sieges and Blockades

One of the iconic scenes in fantasy literature (and medieval battle) is the siege of a castle.  In history (possibly less so in literature), a siege involved a blockade, with the intention of starving out those within the stronghold.

Representing this in an RPG is tricky.  It seems that most RPGs don't really touch it, even those which feature some measure of large scale battles.  Birthright did have the concept, although it involved tracking where units were on the map, and recording how long they remained in a zone with a fortification.  This method involves a little more book keeping than I was hoping for, as well as not fitting the season based structure of WotA.

It's fine to ignore the concept of blockade, and just focus on battles.  This would presume that any structures attacked must be taken during the same session, or the attack is thwarted.

I see two different scales in terms of warfare, a strategic zoomed out view and a tactical zoomed in view.  In the first, units wouldn't move much, as zones on the map might represent large distances.  When groups of units met, they would do battle according to some sort of rules (missile first, etc, etc).  This is a little like Birthright did it.

The second view is more Diaspora, where the zones on the map are smaller (yards, not miles), and time scales are shorter, representing a battle.

I prefer the second zoomed in view for fighting out battles, but the zoomed out view has the advantage that it provides a better framework for a logistics game - where you spend resources to starve out another faction. So, what would be a good way to allow for that aspect in the zoomed in view?

One possibility: if all the defenders are in a strongpoint of some sort, capable of providing defense, the attackers may use a special "siege" action, which effectively zooms out the time scale, costing both sides resources.  This could be done until one side cracks?

It's a little fiddly, but it may work to capture the idea without having lots of extra information to track.

Coming up with a rule that captures when that situation can occur might be tricky.  For instance, one unit could be on the map, but not really engaging the opponent?  It could be a "all defending units are outside the strongpoing, or unable to affect the attacking units" sort of rule.  That would give the defender some motivation to harry the attackers.  Otherwise, they are effectively giving up.

Then, when the scale zooms out to involve siege, it is assumed that much larger units of time pass by (weeks or months), as the people holed up whether the storm.  Eventually, one side or the other will crack, either the attackers assaulting the strongpoint, or the defenders exiting.