The Future of RP

Ludwig von Mises Eugene V. Debs Shrimant Peshwa Madhavrao Bhat Darth Nihilus Eugene V. Debs John Marston Gerd von Rundstedt General Kenobi Captain Theron of Acragas Don Quixote de la Mancha Josip Broz Tito and anyone else who sees this, what do you think?

A wise man once said that you should try everything once, except murder and incest.

I fear that'll become too...trenchy

Whichever we choose I'd suggest the time frame to be a year earlier (so 1938 or 1913) to give a bit room for diplomacy and perhaps a more fun and unexpected course of events in the war.

For alliances, I think players should be given as much freedom as possible to choose their side, but there should be some kind of incentive to not change alliances so people don't just bandwagon on a stronger side.

Maybe there could be a penalty where your army has to take time to adjust to the new alliance before you can launch any attacks, or players in the same alliance could store troops within each other's borders, so if anyone defects they'll have to deal with some internal strife. There also has to be some kind of team balancing mechanic, which could probably just be done by making sure that the total population of each side is roughly equal.


For armies, the ability to recruit new troops has been a deciding factor in almost any war, so I think it should be possible. But, I think new recruits should naturally be a lot less competent than troops that are already within your ranks, and it should take time to train them. If rules are set for that, it could be possible for a player to recruit almost their entire population, but of course most of their troops would just be cannon fodder that doesn't deal any damage and takes a ton of supplies to even maintain, which would certainly de-incentivize a total mobilization.

And also, if take dices, there should certainly be a quality factor besides quantity imo.

Okay, I have a rough idea what the dice system could be like.

Since the boards use classic 6 number dices the players would roll 2 dices like in older RPs. So the min score would be 2 and the max 12.

The attacker always rolls. Before the engagement there would be a value that will result in a draw/tie which would depend on factors like manpower, terrain, defencive positions, morale etc. If the attacker rolls higher than this value they win the battle and vice versa.

If the attacker and defender would have the same morale, numbers and no positional advantage, the tie value would 6, for the attacker has the intiative and element of surprise. But let's imagine the defender has dug trenches and prepared to defend so the value would rise to 7.

Now the attacker would roll. If he got 7 the battle would result in neither side winning, they'd both take the same casualties and neither would advance or retreat.

If the attacker rolled 8 they would get a narrow victory with the defender suffering slightly more casualties, but now being forced to retreat. If the attacker rolls 6 the same will happen but vice versa.

Then if the result was 9 the defenders would take even more casualties, lose more morale and they'd be forced to retreat.

This would go up to 12 and on the other side down to 2 which would result in total annihilation for the losing side. There would be 5 levels of victory and defeat each. Some of them would become impossible when the tie value increases or decreases. (You can't roll 4 lower than the tie value if the tie value is 4, for example)

The biggest and smallest values are if course much less common than 6, 7 and 8.

I'm not sure, but there should perhaps be a change to the values needed for different victories when the "tie value" becomes bigger or smaller. (For example if the value was 3, the attacker would annihilate the enemy with all rolls above 8) It could maybe be based on percentages or maybe not.