Too large realms (possibility of penalizing bigger realms more?)

[vonGenf]

One of the problem with secession is the complete cut it makes with other realms. Even with religious or guild message groups, people don't go back and forth between realms.

If you look at the middle ages, drafting people who lived in other realms but had the right connections/bloodlines/ideas to become leader of a realm was almost the norm rather than the exception. I would really like to see, for example, the ruler of a vassal "realm" resigning because he has been offered the position of Duke of the capital of the mother "realm", or the general of a frontier realm getting called back home to become marshal of the Imperial Guard, or the Imperial Judge being delegated to bring back order into a frontier march.

Not only do I never see that in federation of small realms, I am pretty sure a lot of these transfers are actually forbidden by game mechanics.

If there were decentralized bigger realms, rather separated small realms, this is the kind of thing that I would like to see.

(And at some point pigs will fly, I know. It's nice to dream.)

[Kain]

I personally despise the idea of duchies warring against duchies in the same realm. It would essentially destroys the last vestiges of team play in BattleMaster.

I agree with that. I like the realm vs realm fighting, it is fun. I just wish the realms were smaller and secessions stayed alive more often (which would accomplish the very same thing).

[Indirik]

You are still part of a team, just a much smaller team, IE your Duchy. From time to time your team might ally with other teams in the realm, or not. Its not like we don't have intrigues and arguments between duchies now, just they can't be resolved in a military fashion without one or other succeeding.

That's not team play. Realm v. Realm warfare is team play. Duchy V. Duchy warfare is a political intrigue game.

Team play is "Us vs. Them". It's not "Us vs. them them for today, with us allying against them tomorrow, and then backstabbing them the day after, all while paying lip service to our supposed ream ruler, who no one really listens to anyway because we're too busy fighting among ourselves."

You don't have teams when the team you're on changes every week. You need stability and constancy in the power structures that make up realms in order to have the background against which to play as a team. This does not mean that the same people need to be holding the positions in that structure. But the structures themselves have to have just enough stability and continuity to keep the game itself stable, but enough change and fluidity to keep the game from totally stagnating. Too much fluidity results in chaos and confusion, and lack of fun for the players. Especially the newer players who don't understand the background and political landscape.

[Indirik]

I beg to differ, and say the opposite would happen. Take a look at Ibladesh: 90+ nobles. Ask the players there about the team spirit, and I bet about 30 characters will just say that they are following orders but don't really feel involved in a realm, or have no specific individual character line that they are currently pursuing. The realm is huge and so crowded that not everyone can be involved because that would just turn everything into one very slow and inefficient war machine (or whatnot - I'm thinking of Melhed here). Some people just follow orders and rice prestige & honour, which is always nice later. There are a lot of nobles that actually get a promotion (this would contradict the idea that new nobles don't have a chance in large realms - totally untrue) but even then the "domains" are so split up, also due to the fear of spies, that even a simple region Lord has absolutely no clue about the greater military strategy.

I understand completely about large realms, and realms with lots of players. You "90+ nobles" is only half of what we had in Perdan back in 2006. And Abington peaked at over 200. So, yeah, I know how things work in big realms. You're right, not everyone can participate in every decision. But then again, not everyone *wants* to participate in every decision. There are plenty of people that are quite content to mach along and follow orders. And to tell the truth, you *need* this. If everyone tries to be involved in everything you get chaos. You need the sheeple to do the things that the leaders determine needs to be done. Sometimes you play the leaders, and sometimes you play the sheeple.

However, what I find most important about this is our misinterpreted concept of a "realm" in Battlemaster. Taking a look at the Middle Ages, it doesn't take you a lot of understanding to see that we have to drop our ideas of nationalism. We, as players, are heavily influenced by several ideological/philosophical concepts of the past two to three centuries. Freedom of speech, emancipation, antisemitism, racism, ... These are a few examples of an endless lists of things that are well settled in our mind (for good reasons), but are completely absent to most of the Middle Ages - there will always be an exception to find, but even then, you cannot name those medieval conditions with an enlightened term. Getting back to the point of this paragraph, nationalism is another idea that simply didn't exist like it does now.

You're not ever going to be able to get rid of the sense of nationalism in BattleMaster. You have too wide of a player base, and too much of a continuous influx of new players. Trying to force everyone to get rid of their nationalistic tendencies is like trying to hold back the incoming tide with a sieve. You just can't do it. Continually fighting it is fighting a losing battle.

To summarize: I don't think that the team spirit will be destroyed, but I believe the opposite. Smaller realms will enable more possibilities and create a more coherent group. I'm thinking of Thalmarkin here - they're a wonder, attracting so many players for a one-duchy realm. It would not only reinforce that true bond that is so recognizable in medieval history - the one between the knight and his liege - but also allow a greater role for religion, as it becomes the glue or the "common ground" (also very medieval). 

Smaller realms? Sure. They could increase the sense of team play among players. But fighting among your own team-mates? No. That doesn't build a team, it destroys it. It contradicts the entire sense of being on a team, if you're fighting what are supposed to be your own team mates. And this all results from the fact that the game itself defines the "your team" as "your realm".

Let's face it, "realm as team" is ingrained in the deepest structures of the game. And it is also ingrained in the habits of the players. I'm not an "Ohioan", I'm an "American". And other players are Canadians, Germans, Australians, etc. So when we all start characters, we don't join "Krimml", we join "Fontan". We aren't taxed by our lord or by our duchy, we're taxed by our realm. We don't fight based on what our duke or lord tells us to do, we fight based on what our ruler says. The game provides us an easy communications channel to reach a decent number of players: The "everyone in your realm" channel. And if we're honest, the "everyone in your duchy" channels reach a minuscule number of players, and are mostly dead anyway. We have so many duchies, and so few players, that restricting communications to within your duchy would isolate us to an extreme degree. All but the largest duchies would have few players at all.

Just for comparison, my characters would have access to, not including myself:
Fontan: Krimml duchy: 15 nobles (tbh, this will get bigger, I hope, when Fontan is reduced to a single duchy)
Darka: Siver Duchy: 10 nobles
Ohnar West: Akanos duchy: 6 nobles
Astrum: Libidizedd duchy: 12 nobles

So if we swapped to Duchy-based communications, I'd be stuck with the largest pool of players as 15 people. Wee...  I pity the new player who would end up in a duchy of 5 or 6 people.

So that leaves us with realm-based communications. And since BattleMaster is heavily based on communications, people will tend to identify with the natural borders of their communications, which is the realm. You can fight it all you wan,t but you won't break the habit without substantially altering the underlying framework of the game.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

What exactly is so wrong about being nationalistic anyway? Sure, maybe it's not that realistic, but seriously, who actually thinks it detracts in such a way that BM can't be a low-fantasy Medieval-period game?

Haven't any of us watched those period dramas? I know there are a bunch of ancient Chinese period dramas where people seriously did not dress like that, did not talk like that, and did not act like that (incidentally, no matter how good their kung fu, no one could fly back then). But why is it that way? For one thing, the real thing is kind of boring. As Indirik said, a duchy-focused group is really small. Sometimes, it fosters community. more often than not you'd feel like you're the only living person in the entire place. Heck, even some realms feel dead, and not all of them single duchy either.

[Fleugs]

What exactly is so wrong about being nationalistic anyway? Sure, maybe it's not that realistic, but seriously, who actually thinks it detracts in such a way that BM can't be a low-fantasy Medieval-period game?

Haven't any of us watched those period dramas? I know there are a bunch of ancient Chinese period dramas where people seriously did not dress like that, did not talk like that, and did not act like that (incidentally, no matter how good their kung fu, no one could fly back then). But why is it that way? For one thing, the real thing is kind of boring. As Indirik said, a duchy-focused group is really small. Sometimes, it fosters community. more often than not you'd feel like you're the only living person in the entire place. Heck, even some realms feel dead, and not all of them single duchy either.

Then I'll just rename my idea to the United Nations and get on with it!

[songqu88@gmail.com]

Well, sure go ahead, but choose a better name. What exactly do you think CE/Tara is?

[Fleugs]

The point I was trying to make is that I don't take tv-series as a representative of Battlemaster. You want your all-is-cool-and-awesome medieval setting of the television? Go watch Game of Thrones. The real setting is not boring whatsoever. The name "middle ages", "dark ages", or "medieval" is about the most horrible name that could be given to the period. The Middle Ages were a period in which new empires rose, new techniques came to light, society evolved, intercultural contacts were established, ... It's not dark. At all.

Besides the game mechanics already try to be more accurate. As mentioned above you can message to everyone in your duchy, but nobody does. It seems the game just needs a helping hand.

[songqu88@gmail.com]

A good game never tries to force players into doing something just for the sake of realism if the players demonstrate that they will not want to do it. Forcing it will only make people begrudgingly go along, but who knows, maybe some people might see it as the only reality in this game, thus have no problems with it.

Right now there are a lot of players who understand that such is by far not the only system, and most of them probably believe that it is not the system they would like to be restricted to. Now the interesting point you make about how the Middle Ages were an interesting time period is itself also steeped in fantasy. I'm sure no one has yet RP'd his knight as being properly accurate for the time period by relieving himself of his bodily wastes during a long battle. You aren't getting out of armor in the middle of battle because it's too hard to do it yourself and you'd be a dead moron when an enemy arrow pierces your chest. So if you drank a bit too much mead or had a bad pork chop the night before guess where you do your business?

Oh, and let's see...Mathematics finally started developing once people stopped using I's and V's and X's to count but I'm pretty sure the reality wasn't as cool as having an epic journey from across the Middle East back to Europe to bring back the great gift of Arabic numerals.

What about decorum? I see a ton of messages that seriously break any sort of acceptable speech that a noble of the time period would have been allowed to say without being laughed out of court or worse.

But hey, we can't give people lessons in proper etiquette, nor are we all PhDs in Medieval Studies, nor do people like it when we decide to be a bit too accurate and graphic with the events of the time period. All acceptable. What makes this stuff about realm organization unacceptable? I see nothing wrong, since it is easily accessible to people now. They can actually understand realm level government. Relatively fewer people of the modern age understand the system of duchies. It would simply be a new mechanic for them to learn, if anything., and achieve possibly no real RP value.

[Fleugs]

Well then we return to the original topic, namely huge realms that kinda pull the plug out of the game too.

[Indirik]

Well then, Mr. "I run the largest realm in the entire friggin' game", why don't you bust that massive "sucking the fun out of the entire game" monstrosity of a realm up into smaller bits? Surely that would be more fun for everyone, right? Somebody has to start the trend.

[Fleugs]

That's entirely not the point, Indirik. Nor is it the largest realm of the game. It is however true that I had this system for Ibladesh in mind.

[Indirik]

I just checked EC, FEI, AT, and Dwilight. Ibladesh has the most regions of any realm on any of those islands. So, unless there is a bigger realm on BT or the colonies...

And, really, it is the point. You're here complaining that realms are too big, and that players should make smaller realms to increase the fun factor. Yet you run the biggest realm in the entire game. So there must be some reason why you're not busting it up. Perhaps those same reasons apply to everyone else, too?

[songqu88@gmail.com]

There's nothing wrong with wanting to hold on to a ton of power. Heck, I think just about everyone dreams of being ruler over a huge realm.

[Fleugs]

Yeah, right, I'll do it in the middle of a war. Should be a walkover for Caligus and Perdan then.