Manual Government Change - Terran

[Vellos]

The only thing you haven't replaced is the beaucracy, which needs more than some fancy titles xolors and elections to change how it works.

No, I have replaced the bureaucracy. The ducal offices were all purged with Quintus' fall. New people were brought in from other theocracies.

You lost the nobles and territory for unrelated reasons.

LOL. Wow. You're funny. I think you don't get what's going on.

[Vellos]

Same as banner changes, although you've yet to even change that.

Banner changes to a newly uploaded banner require Gm approval before updating.

[Stabbity]

No, I have replaced the bureaucracy. The ducal offices were all purged with Quintus' fall. New people were brought in from other theocracies.

LOL. Wow. You're funny. I think you don't get what's going on.

So you're rping a game mechanic function and wondering why the game hasn't bent to it yet is what I'm getting.

[Perth]

Banner changes to a newly uploaded banner require Gm approval before updating.

Sad. That Terran banner is freaking awesome. Though it doesn't come across as such on the icon level.

[Chenier]

No a theocracy has more in common with a monarchy than a republic.

No, more with a tyranny than any other. Monarchs can't appoint themselves, theocrats and tyrants can.

[Vellos]

Sad. That Terran banner is freaking awesome. Though it doesn't come across as such on the icon level.

Oh, I'm not discarding the banner. I'm... Bloodstarifying it.

[Velax]

Indirik, as has been said, manual Government changes by Devs do happen. It happened with Arcachon. So if it can happen, then perhaps it would be valuable to know the specific requirements that must be met before it can happen. "Years of RP" is not very specific.

[Tom]

Indirik, as has been said, manual Government changes by Devs do happen. It happened with Arcachon. So if it can happen, then perhaps it would be valuable to know the specific requirements that must be met before it can happen. "Years of RP" is not very specific.

There is no pre-determined checklist of specific requirements. We decide on a case-by-case basis.

[Scarlett]

Sounds to me like Vellos' "demands" are "we would like consistency between everything the game has enabled us to do up to this point and what the game is now telling us."

It isn't accurate to dismiss this kind of thing as 'some RPed event should trump game mechanics.' Most of the "RPed events" here, just like Saffalore's formation, were done via game mechanics. If this were a bunch of pithy RPers posting pages and pages about their little BM world that nobody else understood that would be different. This is Vellos. He ain't like that. If he got here, it's because BM let him get here.

Obviously this happens from time to time and plenty of people get by without being upset, but ask yourself why people would care about this sort of thing in the first place.

The best thing about a game like BM is the intangible atmosphere of the story or the narrative. It isn't that the "game board" is the most awesome thing ever, or that the political hierarchy by itself is the most awesome thing ever; it's more than the sum of the parts. That's the very reason why people are usually happy to put up with broken individual systems - there are enough other things that work that the game can overcome some temporary inconveniences. It's like a broken set piece in a play. It detracts but it doesn't ruin the show.

Cases like this, though, are like leaving Faust at intermission and coming back to see the second act of King Lear. What you've seen up until now does not connect correctly with what you're seeing today. The resistance to doing anything about it seems to be rooted in "well, the game mechanics say this and the game mechanics are there for a reason, so QED." There are a lot of game mechanics in place to prevent characters from making significant changes in realms, but by now it has been shown repeatedly that there are a lot of use cases where small groups or even individual characters ought to be able to make precisely those changes. The discussion of whether a manual intervention is warranted is a red herring: I didn't ask for one with the Saffalore/Terran Chateau problem because that's just a band-aid when you need systemic repair.

The take-away here is that there are cases where small groups of characters ought to be able to do things to their very small realm, and the argument that "all of the government bureaucrats think otherwise" is very weak. There were not a lot of what wew would think of as government bureaucrats in Medieval Western Europe (compared to Rome or Byzantium) and even if there had been, a monarch or even a Duke with total political or military control would roll over them without batting an eyelash. Most of the "bureaucrats" would be minor nobility and minor nobility did not dictate what happened. So if you don't want to consider code changes, that's fine, it's certainly your prerogative - but don't pretend that this kind of thing "makes sense" because some bean-counters say it does.

[Indirik]

In the future, there will probably be a way for realms to modify their government systems, and possibly even a complete removal of the strict types. But that's for the future.

Right now, we have what we have. It's a functional system that Terran can use to change it themselves. Yes, it involves some risk. But in that way it gives other people in the realm the opportunity to participate and advance plans and schemes of their own, rather than have one player unilaterally, and without risk, make that decision for the realm.

For some reason the players in Terran (or the only one we've heard from so far) don't want to use it. Instead we hear "we've already RPd that it happened, so please change it for us".

You've got a system. Use it.

[Vellos]

For some reason the players in Terran (or the only one we've heard from so far) don't want to use it. Instead we hear "we've already RPd that it happened, so please change it for us".

There's only 4 or 5 of us (and 2 too new and low H/P to hold any offices), and I'm the only one who's very active on the forum. That's why you've only heard from me. Players shouldn't have to be active on the forum to demonstrate suitability for something like this.

I think Scarlett's assessment of it is fair: the game has let us make ourselves into a theocracy in every functional sense except one. It should let us do the last step too. I understand that current coding doesn't, hence the request for a manual change.

I understand that there is a way I can abuse game mechanics to get what I'm asking for, as you've explained. And as you mentioned in our private messages, there's a way I can structure that abuse so that nobody else can participate. If worst comes to worst, I'll consider taking that (abusive) route.

But it'd be way simpler if the devs just made the change I can unilaterally make anyway, and din't make me set an abusive precedent for government changes.

And it totally is abuse to have centrally planned anarchy.

[Indirik]

I disagree. I don't see any abuse of the system by doing it that way. If I did, I wouldn't have suggested it.

Also, if the players in the realm don't come here to make their desires and opinions known, then there's no way their opinions can be taken into account, or for them to "demonstrate suitability". Speak up, or you're not going to get heard.

[Kwanstein]

a monarch or even a Duke with total political or military control would roll over them without batting an eyelash.

Maybe, but why would a ruler with absolute power risk destabilising the establishment and tradition that supports him in the first place.

Also, for all the power afforded to the ruler by institution, he is still reliant on others co-operating with him. A ruler who works himself into bad graces with the lower rungs of the power ladder could find himself poisoned one day, being vulnerable as he is to his servants... not a possibility in BM, but it still speaks of the need for prerequisites and possible consequences to government change. Otherwise it lacks the weight that it should in reality, creating a strong dissonance.

[Scarlett]

Maybe, but why would a ruler with absolute power risk destabilising the establishment and tradition that supports him in the first place.

Also, for all the power afforded to the ruler by institution, he is still reliant on others co-operating with him.

The establishment in this scenario is the nobility as represented by player characters.  Your fictional "every other person in Terran" is a game design lever that can and should serve specific, intentional purposes, but it is not a catch-all to dispel criticism. Otherwise you end up in a scenario where in realms with, say, 20 people, you are comfortable anointing a majority of those twenty with the power to pull every lever in the game, but in realms with five people they are suddenly at the mercy of ... the butler?

You are trying to ascribe to in-character functionaries non-existent power to explain away limitations of the current game mechanics. It's bad history and irrelevant game design. Servants' capacity to poison somebody has got nothing to do with political systems in the real universe or the BM universe.

The only thing that can be achieved here is for the developers to consider scenarios like this the next time they revisit the relevant systems.  There isn't a quick fix here.

Speak up, or you're not going to get heard.

This is a convenient dodge. You're a developer. You need players right now more than players need you, or else so many of them would not have voted with their feet. You can rely on accounts from those of us who have reason to know what at least a couple dozen people here or there think, or you can plug your ears. I certainly don't have a stake in which you choose, but BM would be better served if the developers treated criticism in the same way you'd treat a customer criticizing your company's product (i.e. you have a connection to it but it's not like they're insulting your family) rather than adopting the defensive stance that is all over these forums and was all over the d-list before that. You are obviously doing your constituents a favor by investing your time into a volunteer role, but they are doing you a favor by investing their time into talking about it. If they didn't very much approve of the job you were doing on the whole, they wouldn't bother to do those things. Yes it's an unfair double standard. If everybody thinks I'm a jerk, nothing happens. If they think you're a jerk, your product suffers. No two ways about it.

[Gustav Kuriga]

The establishment in this scenario is the nobility as represented by player characters.  Your fictional "every other person in Terran" is a game design lever that can and should serve specific, intentional purposes, but it is not a catch-all to dispel criticism. Otherwise you end up in a scenario where in realms with, say, 20 people, you are comfortable anointing a majority of those twenty with the power to pull every lever in the game, but in realms with five people they are suddenly at the mercy of ... the butler?

You are trying to ascribe to in-character functionaries non-existent power to explain away limitations of the current game mechanics. It's bad history and irrelevant game design. Servants' capacity to poison somebody has got nothing to do with political systems in the real universe or the BM universe.

The only thing that can be achieved here is for the developers to consider scenarios like this the next time they revisit the relevant systems.  There isn't a quick fix here.

This is a convenient dodge. You're a developer. You need players right now more than players need you, or else so many of them would not have voted with their feet. You can rely on accounts from those of us who have reason to know what at least a couple dozen people here or there think, or you can plug your ears. I certainly don't have a stake in which you choose, but BM would be better served if the developers treated criticism in the same way you'd treat a customer criticizing your company's product (i.e. you have a connection to it but it's not like they're insulting your family) rather than adopting the defensive stance that is all over these forums and was all over the d-list before that. You are obviously doing your constituents a favor by investing your time into a volunteer role, but they are doing you a favor by investing their time into talking about it. If they didn't very much approve of the job you were doing on the whole, they wouldn't bother to do those things. Yes it's an unfair double standard. If everybody thinks I'm a jerk, nothing happens. If they think you're a jerk, your product suffers. No two ways about it.

He's not the one being defensive Scarlett. You and Vellos are the ONLY ones in this entire thread that have suggested that the devs should change Terran's government manually. Everyone else has repeatedly said that if he wants to change government, let it go into anarchy first.

Personally I think the only reason I believe Vellos is fighting so hard for it is that if he does get it changed to Theocracy by the devs he'll be able to call the entire church to protect his 1 region 7 noble realm.