For most of its
How it seems to be happening now: It is lucrative to play a certain way, but people are pressured ooc to not play that way.
It is lucrative for a store to secretly charge your credit card an extra $100 every time you visit.
It is lucrative to invite people to invest with you and promise them a huge return on their investment, then run off with the money.
But we have rules against these things, because they are not good for society as a whole.
Similarly, based on our own observations of player behaviour, we have decided that certain things are not good for the BattleMaster game and community as a whole, and are, through various means, including but not limited to new rules, working on preventing, disincentivizing, and banning them.
I would love to find more good ways to mechanically incentivize these things, and I'm working on some in the background. But there's no simple way for the game to detect, for instance, that a realm declared war with a goal of making their target ban a Royal Duke—an impossibility, and it carries a massive risk of an open-ended war where the targeted realm has no way to say "look, we give up, you win, we just want
out" beyond dissolving the realm entirely.
Throughout BattleMaster's history, there has been a tension between two basic forces among its players: the desire for strong roleplaying, and the desire for strong strategic combat.
Over the past few years, Vita and I have been coming to the conclusion that we really need a third force, that stands above both of those. You speak of BattleMaster as a "political and strategic simulator", and to some extent it is; it is a number of different things, in varying degrees, but the one thing it absolutely is, 100%, to
all the people involved, is a
game, and the one thing a game
must have to succeed is
fun for all the people playing it.
The changes we've been making have been aimed at that goal, and we know we've been far from perfect about it. Even designing a brand-new game from scratch, it's hard to make things fun for such different groups of players, and when we're changing things on the fly, that's 100% guaranteed to make some people mad—mostly the people who have benefited most from the status quo. We appreciate and invite constructive criticism and, especially,
more ideas on how to actually create incentives that lead to the goals we've articulated (smaller wars; smaller, more temporary alliances, etc) without hard rules.
