As mentioned in a prior thread on villages, we have been seriously considering a dramatic change to the way villages revolt.

In order to have a wider spread of cities/communes control villages, I propose the following change: villages always revolt in pairs. (We would drop the current system of hostilities between villages.) Thus, cities and communes would always have to compete over two villages at the same time, making it less likely (though not impossible) for a city to take both villages. It would also give more of a chance to the less developed cities or communes.

However, this would leave a large hole in the political system as governing style and political structure would become meaningless. They currently modify the length of time that a village is held, making it would be unfair that one village would hold another village back if they revolted in pairs. Instead, I propose a new system of village feelings. How the village is governed reflects how difficult the village is to influence the next time. Also, we can also have killing villagers and doing commodity quests slightly adjust the village feelings towards a certain commune/city.

There has been some disagreement between Roark and I regarding how to pair villages and the IC reasons why the villages would revolt simultaneously. My thought was to have villages under certain astrological signs and have them revolt during some transit during those signs. Roark thinks that is contrived and argues for more political reasons or variations (such as a dark alliance between angkrag and acknor so they always revolt at the same time). I would prefer keeping the pairs together based on their commodity quest polarity, which is:

Estelbar and Acknor
Stewartsville and Delport
Rockholm and Southgard
Angkrag and Dairuchi
Paavik and Shanthmark

Let us know your thoughts, opinions and alternate ideas!

Could be interesting change.

what about making it so that they don't go in the same pairs each time, but it's semi-random which one will happen? if you give me a while i bet i can come up with a system that would allow two villages to revolt at the same time (i can't think of a way of making it only two, but i can think of a way for atleast two at a time) and it would be sort of random.

What would be the rock-solid IC reason that this would happen. It can't be just, "Oh well, its random because it makes life more interesting."

Can you flesh this one out a bit? As it stands, village raids don't affect revolts (or don't affect it enough to actually push it beyond the already random range). I'd really like it if we had a significant way to push a village to either be more friendly to our commune or less friendly towards the people holding it.

I don't see raids as being something to build trust in the organization raiding, but could it drop the respect they have for both the raiders and the defenders?

As far as commodity quests go...the effect of the widely available quests (chickens, cows, sheep, rockeaters) should probably be minor, but the ones with permanent effect (farmers, miners, spiders) would be a nice way to create a more significant goodwill (and maybe negative feelings from the village that loses villagers for it?)

It's pretty self-explanatory. If you kill mobs in a village, the village will not like your city or commune. If you do commodity quests, the village will look more favorably upon your city or commune.

That pretty much will guarantee that Magnagora would have no chance to influence one of the other two mining villages if they want to have miners for Angkrag (this is of course if anyone ever actually tried to take Angkrag from Magnagora).

Why?

It makes sense of course that if we want to get a village during next revolt, we should refrain from raiding there and instead try to make a good impression.
Except... Magnagora's influencing skills base on intimidation.

This is a little too "meta" for my liking. I completely agree with the OOC reasons to make the change, but I feel like it really would hurt my immersion due to the transparency of those OOC reasons. I would side with Roark here, I think the only way to make a change like this reasonable would be to have an absolutely rock solid IC reason.

Astrological signs could make sense, but only if there was a really good reason that villages with the same sign would revolt at the same time.

Dark alliances or some such mechanic would better achieve the goal I think. A good test would be this I think: If someone who didn't read these forums didn't immediately assume it was a meta-mechanic with an IC justification but rather an IC event with an OOC effect, then the administration has done an excellent job.

Please suggest IC reasons that they would revolt in pairs!

The primary reason I am against this idea is that it seems like it would decrease conflict. If, say, Acknor and Estelbar revolted, I would see Serenwilde fighting Glomdoring over Estelbar and Magnagora fighting Celest over Acknor, or some such. I don't really see an org trying for both villages, so, in my eyes, the cool three/four way battles would go away. If people who held Angkrag still couldn't get the mining villages (not saying they couldn't, I'm not sure what you meant by getting rid of competing villages entirely), that would mean Seren would sit in Rockholm and Celest in Southgard. Glomdoring would go for one of them, and the other would be boring.

I'm all for ways to introduce more negative feedback into the revolt thing, but one that decreases the fun of the revolts, or at least the frequency in which one could participate in them, isn't one I'm really enthusiastic about.

Also, it seems like if one org had a lot of members online, and the other three really didn't, they could easily take two villages with little contest. Currently, when that happens, it's just one, and with ten revolts instead of five, this occurance is more likely to be evenly distributed, rather than especially favouring Serenwilde and Magnagora, the 'larger' orgs.

Sorry if these thoughts are rambling and more complicated than you're looking for.

One possibility is that every village has factors that would contribute to revolting. These would include things such as time of current influence and overall village satisfaction with current holder (based on governing style, quests, and what other villages are held by this commune/city). This would give a certain revolt score. When another village revolts it would add another factor to that score based on the village's feelings towards the revolting village. For example if Acknor is closely allied with Angkrag, and Angkrag revolts, it would add a 10 to Acknor's overall revolt score. Whereas if Delport hates Stewartsville and Stewartsville revolts, it wouldn't add anything.

The reason they would revolt in pairs at all would just be that if a village was thinking about revolting anyway and had good reasons for doing so, another village revolting would just start a sort of chain reaction. "Hey, you know, I think we should revolt too. See them doing it over there?"

So then which village revolts in tandem with the initial revoltee would be whichever village has the highest revolting score. And I suppose the initial village would automatically revolt if its revolting score got high enough. So it would look something like:

Things that add to revolting score:

Time of current influence
Village raids
Quests against the village
Demanding governing style
Ruling over an enemy village

Alliance or friendship with a currently revolting village

Things that take away:

Benevolent governing style
Beneficial quests
Ruling over an allied village

A village will revolt under two conditions:

- Their revolt score has passed a certain threshold (a random chance of revolting every day that it's above that threshold)
- They have the next highest revolt score when another village revolts

The possibility of having three villages revolt at the same time under certain astological conditions would be kind of fun too.

Then in terms of village influencing itself, each organization would have a score for that as well. If an organization regularly kills, does quests harmful to the village, or ruled it harshly before (this portion of the score would slowly decay over time so that an organization wouldn't suffer penalties forever if they ruled with an iron fist in the past), then their score with the village would be lower and it would harder to influence.

The opposite would be true for those organizations that ruled benevolently, and did quests to help the village. If an organization didn't help or hinder the village, they'd be at a neutral score.

Other factors could also be a consideration such as treatement of allied villages, treatment of enemied villages ("Well, they haven't hurt us persay but they're helping our enemies!"), how many villages the organization already has, etc.

If you are introducing very strong negative feedback into the equation, I personally do not see the need to include the double revolts as well. What purpose would they serve in this situation except to enforce an equal sharing of villages?

That would be the purpose they serve. It could be something where sometimes one village revolts, sometimes two, sometimes three. Players would need to pick and choose which village they would actually go for if more than one revolts - or even if one revolts if it will negatively affect the villages they truly value, they might refrain from influencing in order to not hurt the relationship with those villages. So sometimes there would be those mass three or fourway battles, sometimes it would only be a couple of organizations. Who knows, maybe once in awhile only one organization would even want a village. It would change the dynamics and make it more interesting than the current situation where you have: village revolts, every organization converges, strongest at that moment of time wins.

The mechanics could try to take into account how many players are around from the various organizations to attempt to prevent one organization just taking three villages in the middle of the night because no one else is on.

I love everything except the actually revolting in pairs. It just seems too contrived. Also, it would reduce neat four way conflicts (although I'm not sure how much of that goes on. Haven't been keeping up on things, but it's always been alliances, usually.). However, if you can make it work, go for it!

The key thing I think with Magnagora, is that intimidation is nothing like actually following through on the threats. You can't clear Rockholm of miners, then expect them to follow you next revolt. There's a point where "We'll hurt you if you don't follow us!" becomes "We hurt you anyway, so us promising not to if you follow us, that's all just BS."

I'm going to reproduce the idea I had in that other thread:

Each city/commune has ten 'administrators'. The actual denizen changes from city to commune; Magnagora has slave drivers, for example. Celest has preachers, Glomdoring has villagemasters, Serenwilde has ecologists, Hallifax has bureaucrats, and so on.
City leaders can assign administrators to villages, but they have different effects, all beneficial; villages without administrators, or villages with only one, will lose some productivity and revolt faster; having a single administrator stops them from revolting faster, but still impairs production. Possible effects:

Serenwilde Ecologists increase production of leather, wood and food commodities.
Celestian preachers increase the Power output of a village.
Magnagoran slave drivers make revolts more frequent, but increase the output of metals.
Glomdoring village masters increase production of silk and wood, making the village revolt more slowly. Production of a few random commodities is reduced slightly, though, as the villagers turn into zombies.

That way, the less villages you have the more they produce. Capturing too many villages means their production is low. Village's overall Power and commodity output would be reduced to reflect this change.

Administration effects don't stack very well: 2 administrators have 100% effect each, 3 have 90%, 4 have 80%, and so on. 10 is a nice round number, but it could be five.

Killing administrators would be possible, but they would have a couple of burly bodiguards with them at all times. They'd wander through the village. Administrators would cost gold and Power to recover once they're killed.

Also, empowering an administrator would increase his efficiency for one month, slightly; making him paranoid would decrease it. Administrators would take an unusually long time to become laidback again (After all, they're bureaucrats with slow minds).

Adding to this, administrators can either get killed or kicked out during a revolt. Which one happens is semi-random, depending on how angry and violent the village is; Acknor and Angkrag always kill administrators, Estelbar and Delport never kill them. Magnagoran administrators would have a higher chance of being killed, Celestian ones a lower chance.

Another possibility:
The longer a village revolts, the more likely a nearby village will revolt as well - If you take more than thirty minutes to take Estelbar, Angkrag revolts. This forms a cascading effect; if a whole hour goes without Acknor being taken over, Angkrag revolts. If Angkrag stays up for more than one hour and a half, Rockholm goes up, and so on. This makes sense ICly, as seeing a nearby village revolt will inspire other villages to join in. Occasionally you'd have a simultaneous revolt, in which two villages that were going to revolt almost at the same time conspire to revolt together; villages that are enemies (Rockholm and Southgard, for example) never revolt together. Of course, if a village revolt happens at a very low-traffic time, we could have four or five villages revolting together - but that would be fun, interesting, and even realistic.

Without wishing to sound completely unhelpful.. I'm not convinced by this idea. I like the current system of village hostilities.. I feel that it adds depth to the RP fabric of the Basin, and I wouldn't want it to go. I -also- like the governing style and political structure ideas. To stop the same City/Commune monopolising villages, I'd much prefer the negative feedback idea.



so.. we'd keep the old governing style ideas... but they'd have a different function?

The immediate problems I see with the killing villagers/comms quests thing are...

1) Village Guards and statues. I may not be enemied to Estelbar, but I sure as hell am enemied to Serenwilde. I've got much less chance of making Estelbar more Magnagora-friendly for as long as it's full of guards. Indeed, I'd be far better off trying to poach a village off Glomdoring where the guards won't attack, and my presence there won't be questioned.

2) This is likely to lead to a situation in which we'd all have to watch our villages like hawks and stop -every- novice or player who tries to do the comms quest or village quest. Which will be a -massive- pain for demesning guilds... and will just make life harder for all of us.



I don't think that the astrological idea need necessarily seem contrived. As a Chaucer-ist, I rather like it... but.. I dunno.. Too much astrological influence interfers with my sense of free-will... and if you were going to use this as a revolt excuse, I'd like to see new skills in the astrology skillset that allow users to perceive when alignment of the celestial bodies stimulates unrest and increases a propensity to rebel.. and I think that a -wholly- astrological reason would be contrived. Perhaps if at a certain alignment of the darker bodies, the probability of a rebellion were increased. But rebellion was by no means assured. You could also argue that certain celestial configurations affect different races more or less.. thus it would make sense for Rockholm and Southgard to rebel at the same time. It would make sense for Stewartsville and Delport to revolt simultaneously. Because of a common tainting, Acknor and Angkrag could also suffer the same planetary effects and revolt at the same time.. but I don't see it working so much for the others.



That makes a huge amount of OOC sense.. but is it going to make finding RP reasons harder?

If we raid you continually, the perspective of making it stop by pledging to us should seem really good. Otherwise, you already know what happens.
On the other hand, if we leave you in peace and bring you candies from time to time, would you even believe the threats? More like think 'Eww, get lost. I don't recognize you".

I like the idea of villages revolting in pairs based on quest polarity