- a light weight resolution system that spares a DM bookkeeping is probably a mercy
- structuring how you accept moves/turn orders/etc. so that it reins in players natural urge to leverage the whole realm they have access to is also probably a good idea
- some kind of shared forum, discord or other text based arena for players to negotiate and snarl and posture at one another is good because it makes visible all the activity to those who might otherwise miss it. Without that everything has to route through the DM and is another burden they need to shoulder.
- games like this are the ultimate 'split party' - everything a DM can do to spare their energies for juggling all the parallel threads is a good idea - light book keeping, light resolution, players directly and publicly interacting, etc.
This was started by conversation on discord prompted by the 'Cataphracts' game. I had the privilege to play in a couple of big domain games - two of Mike Rastons recent ones- Empyrean Dynasty and Sagadarium and two different ones back in my college days - and the common point of stress/failure was the processing load mid-late game puts on the DM as things get complex.
- The League (Mar-03 - Mar-04) - epic space nation game run by emails, forums, whatever channel possible. Life devouring. Awesome. Played a swarming nation of hammerhead-velociraptors, mid-tier tech, with a similar 'for glory!' attitude as was later seen in Fury Roads Warboys.
The first and most memorable was The League - the pitch was 'we're doing Babylon 5, bring your own alien nation' - and that got us going. There were easily a dozen players and it ran on forums and messages to the DM. There was no formal turn notification, the DM turned the handle and issued updates as and when it worked for them.
A lot of things got hashed out in the forums in more or less real time and then every now and then the DM dropped a dollop of plot on us and we all ran around like startled cats. Lots of the 'moves' were by forum post declaring activity, debating galactic rules or making accusations of conspiracy.
My player-nations news corp
I believe the ending got streamlined from the DMs initial plan because a representative from the villains - a group known as the Cruel - offered "first among vassals" status and jump-tech to whomever swung in behind them. The game to that point had been a red-clawed scramble for jump technology and so the finale was a handful of the mid-tier powers (myself included) swinging in behind the villains and tipping the galaxy over into blood, fire and a thousand years of darkness. Because, as it was memorably said at the time, "they aren't called The Cruel because they are just as cruel as everyone else."From a systems point of view, I believe it was some pre-written plot 'mines' that got tripped as people did things, some adjudication of player actions on the basis of DM fiat and some noting of where things were simply landslides one way or another.
- Birthright (Jun-06 - Oct-06) - played goblin revolutionaries in a nation-on-nation game with the local college game society in new city
The second of those domain games nominally used Birthright as a framework... I recall getting a huge spreadsheet and there being very obvious economy building no-regrets activities. Jogging my memory with the old files there was a word doc with all the court and standard actions, administration checks, reactions and spend of cash. Ten players plus DM were involved.
This was the super-heavy, using the Birthright system to manage domains and then the players acting through a cast of major representatives - heroes of significance. We all started off with six provinces you cooked up according to the campaign houserules that were three pages of mods to the Birthright campaign playtest doc from Birthright.net (at the time). These structures were all tried and tested from a previous game that DM had run so it worked well enough that they decided to do it again, unchanged, which is an endorsement of sorts.
The excel had crunch for your provinces, your minions, your regent, your cashflow - you sent that in each round with your various actions - my turn sheet was three pages and I was one of the small johnny-come-latelies. The DM published a page worth of the continental news each turn. We got through six turns in three months before I believe it ground to a halt. Ten players times three pages each of turn notices, plus whatever additional arguing went into the order appendices, plus the excel files and all that number crunching. I found it toothy and fun, it must have been a brutal job for the poor DM.
So, in short, I would not counsel using Birthright as your system for this type of thing unless you deeply love crunching numbers.
- Empyrean Dynasty (Dec-21 - Jan-23) - played bio-engineer, spice-snorting space-priests attempting to spread peace and love, eventually going 'Culture-style' on our mega-ships because assholes kept turning our planetary biospheres to goop.
This third, after a long gap, was Empyrean Dynasty which used Mike Rastons own system - player orders delivered as Goal, Means to achieve it and Resources support that resolved using d6s in the back ground. This also ran with the clever twist of shortening turns - from 10,000 years in early game down through decades to years at endgame.
The simple resolution system was a touchy swingy - a d6 and high was good basically - which meant that big efforts could just fail or succeed wildly. The ratcheting timeline also meant (we later realised) that scrambling for resources early was especially important because, for instance, the amount of expansion to new planetary systems that can get done in 10,000 years is a lot more than in a 1000 year turn.
One thing that we became aware of that seemed to slow things down a bit was that a number of the various players developed intelligence networks, prescient AIs, seers and other ways to see what was going to happen - which meant that orders would go in, some folk would have a chance to react, and it seemed in later turns that things slowed way the hell down with people waiting on responses from others and the DM poking us with a stick to get our orders in... when most of us thought we had...?
In short, running a second loop within the orders cycle seemed to slow things down *a lot* and if you can avoid that to just keep to a nice clean orders in and action them, that will simplify your life as a DM.
- Sagadariium (Jan-24 - May-25) - played goose-hydras, effectively dragons, goal was to sit on mountains, be territorial and die to heroes in the age of man - but people took against us from the get go and we ended up having to invade the after life to break out our dead, while trying to support our unhinged creator spirit
This fourth was Sagadarium where I joined as a fantasy faction in the 'mythic' age after there had been some rounds of worldbuilding during the 'spirit' age. Here the resolution system was a word limit and also kept the telescoping time.
The reducing word limit I think was a good innovation - it kept things focussed and punchy, probably restricted the wildly complex and caveated orders that no doubt had been going in during Empyrean Dynasty and the 'reading your cards' aspect of things seemed to have been tamped down, I think by the DM putting harder deadlines on people to react and get final orders in.
The turn updates for Sagadarium, in common with Empyrean Dynasty, were a hell of a lot of writing and reconciling peoples actions and them dropping the updates in a sequence where things unfolded in a comprehensible way. This one eventually ground to a halt also; we have not gotten a post-mortem but I can well imagine that complexity heaped upon complexity as people accrued resources and divine doomsday artefacts increasingly littered the landscape just made things tricky to resolve.
Take aways
I put them at the top but I will repeat them here and you can probably see how I arrived at them given the above:
- a light weight resolution system that spares a DM bookkeeping is probably a mercy
- structuring how you accept moves/turn orders/etc. so that it reigns in players natural urge to leverage the whole realm they have access to is also probably a good idea
- some kind of shared forum, discord or other text based arena for players to negotiate and snarl and posture at one another is good because it makes visible all the activity to those who might otherwise miss it. Without that everything has to route through the DM and is another burden they need to shoulder.
- games like this are the ultimate 'split party' - everything you can do to spare your energies for juggling all the parallel threads is a good idea.
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