Campaign Frame Thoughts

Currently the campaign ends when the stability of either the Stronghold or the Empire drops down to zero. There's also a way for the Stronghold to end the campaign by assassinating the Autarch. I had in mind that there would be some sort of attack by the Autarch afterward.

Ultimately, what I'm interested in is a session that feels like a true finale. Thus, basing the whole campaign around stability may not be the best approach. It makes stability very important in terms of winning, but if it directly impacts how easy it is to win a mission, then the win condition and the resource needed for success are tied together, which isn't a great design choice.

Thinking about the mission types and how they might function in winning, there are:

Stronghold Victory Paths

Warfare - Attacking the Empire's capital wins the game for the Stronghold. This seems like a suitable finale for the campaign. It's really hard to do (capitals can be defended with more units, and the Autarch has a castle there). It will probably happen suitably far in, so the Autarch would be featured in the defense of the capital.

Infiltration - Assassinating the Autarch is another way to win. This is a difficult mission as well. It doesn't feel quite as nice of a resolution, because the Autarch wouldn't be able to defend directly as easily. However, it's so difficult, that it would be something that also would tend to happen far into the campaign.

Autarch Victory Paths

Warfare - Similar to the Stronghold, the Empire can win by attacking the Stronghold's capital. For all the reasons it's difficult for the Stronghold, it's difficult for the Empire.

Skirmish? - The Empire uses Skirmish instead of Infiltration to assassinate heroes. Unlike for the Autarch, though, a hero could get assassinated and the campaign could continue on. Of course, if enough heroes get assassinated, it's functionally over.

Wrath of the Autarch - Alternatively, maybe, at some particularly late stage of the campaign, the Autarch player could force the issue, and start a mission for all of the marbles. If the heroes fail, the Stronghold gets nuked by some sort of powerful magic. This is basically the "Arkham Horror" way to end the campaign.

Support Paths

Diplomacy - In this case, diplomacy doesn't become a primary strategy. It's still very useful, basically essential, in terms of trading goods and building developments, but it's not a primary way to victory.

Skirmish - Skirmish is important, as it's a way to get neutral regions, and many quests use Skirmish. It also would be important for defense if there is some sort of Wrath of the Autarch mission that ends the campaign. In that case, building toward that end point could be a way to win for the Stronghold.

Uses for Stability

If stability is no longer the primary mode for victory, it could play a bigger role in terms of impact on missions. It would also be okay if it swung around more.

Thematically, it also felt a little weird - both the Autarch and the Stronghold basically lose stability over the course of the campaign. It seems like the support of the people should be independent of victory.

I'm not sure what role stability should have, then? It seems like making missions easier or harder is probably a good place for it.

Some options:

• Starting Fate Points - Starting fate points might be an option. If it's lower/higher each side starts with more or less fate points.
• Resources - I'm hesitant to have stability affect resource dice. If it does, it can cause a downward spiral that is impossible to recover from. It also would hit the Stronghold far more than the Autarch, because the Autarch doesn't use resources.
• Campaign Aspects - It's always an option to make new aspects in relation to stability swings.
• Mission Difficulty - If a mission takes place at a faction, the difficulty could be modified by the stability of the faction. This is a really powerful

Summary

I'll have to think about how stability would be used, but I do like having the campaign end in only one of these few ways. I also do like a "Wrath of the Autarch" timer, which basically can trigger if the campaign goes on to long. It's a for good or worse, this is the end, sort of event, which could be good to have.

Streamlining Mission Types and Factions

Even though I've been conscious of trying to minimize complexity while designing Wrath of the Autarch, I haven't really hesitated to throw in everything and the kitchen sink in order to get it to work.

I'm currently in a contraction phase, brought about by seeing trends during playtesting. I've thought of a number of areas which could be streamlined without losing much, if anything, in terms of strategy or interesting choices.

• Trade Missions / Trade Tracking
• Setting up particular trades (X ore for Y timber, etc) and then tracking them is pretty fiddly and not all that interesting
• Instead, Trade Missions (which may need to be renamed Gain Support or something like that) should just increase disposition with the target faction
• Each season, trade is optionally done with factions based on what their disposition to the Stronghold is
• This is a little more fiddly than what I currently have, since the Stronghold players have to decide if they want to trade. Usually the answer will be yes, so hopefully it's not that fiddly
• Because of this, only the disposition with the factions would need to be tracked, not specific trades
• It also makes the Gain Support (previously Trade) missions make more sense. All the fiddliness of setting up a trade, and determining difficulty is gone. It also will make more narrative sense, putting the focus squarely on gaining support for the Stronghold, with most of the issues revolving around the conflict between the Autarch and the Stronghold
• Factions and Developments
• I constructed most of the factions similarly to the Stronghold, with regions, developments, units, stability, population, etc
• I don't think the factions really need development listings
• Instead, they should just have stats based on how difficulty various types of conflicts are
• Ex. Skirmish 4, Infiltration 3, Warfare 6, Diplomacy 5
• Infiltration Missions
• There are three infiltration missions: Espionage, Sabotage, and Assassination
• Each of these mission types has various options for them
• Many of these options relate to the developments each faction has
• These should probably be streamlined, to focus their intention
• Sabotage: Lower the target faction's stability (that's it)
• Espionage: Make it easier to build a development (each one of the five factions will have one of the five tech trees they're good at)
• Assassination: Kill a leader (that includes the Autarch)
• All of the other various options are scrapped (and worse, the need to not only know what mission type to do, but figure out if faction X has development Y)
• Assassination missions aren't all the useful right now, so the leaders for each faction need to have decent role in what makes the faction good at tasks - killing a leader nerfs the faction's effectiveness
• Resources

• At some point, I need to go through the neutral regions that can be found with exploration, and really make them specialized (as in, good at providing a particular type of resource)
• Right now, many of them are sort of a mush
• I also need to go through, and make sure all the resource numbers are as low as possible
• Some resource amounts were sort of arbitrarily inflated (like timber) in order to create various trade charts. Not sure what I was thinking there - but all the numbers should really be as low as possible to keep the math simpler and make it easier to form strategies

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).