V&V Post-Mortem Discussion

[Nightbringer]

I liked the structure of the game a lot, and found it quite understandable once I started actually doing it. I must say it was very intimidating when I was just starting though. I really enjoyed the game and would play one like it again anytime.

That said, I think the main problem is simply the amount of work you put on yourself Civic Cecil. What with calculating finances, controlling the ai factions, and arbitrating, you had more to do than could be reasonably expected, which slowed the game down. I think it would help if you had put the responsibility of keeping track of money on the players. A report of income, expenditure, unit locations, and total funds left each turn by the player. It would be easier to track only the things you control than the gm doing it all, and would make situations like an army disappearing/turning rebel be dealt with by the player rather than having to run it through the gm.

If this was done, you wouldn't need to worry about exactly what the players were doing, just controlling enemies and arbitrating any rules disputes.

[phonicsmonkey]

Civic.

Ahem...Cecil, you mean?

[Nightbringer]

Ahem...Cecil, you mean?

ugh, yes. Sorry Cecil.

I constantly combine/switch/confuse those two names. Frankly it is amazing I have gone this long without doing it. I hope you do not take offense Cecil, I certainly know who you are, and that it is in fact you, NOT Civiv, who hosted this game.

[phonicsmonkey]

Zim will have feedback too but he's on vacation right now..

[The Celtic Viking]

I might chip in late as well then, by shortly saying that there were many, many times that I came very close to starting PvPs. Something that worked against this quite strongly though was how uneven it would be no matter what I did. If I attacked the Kaiser, who was always the primary opponent, I would not only have had the Kaiser against me but also no doubt the Osterreich - and that's everyone else in the game. If I attacked someone in the Osterreich, I would've had the whole of Osterreich against me and possibly/probably the Kaiser as well, but even if not, that'd still be me against everyone else with the exception of one. Neither seems a fair fight, and that's the primary reason that discouraged me from really starting anything.

The biggest exception to this was with Zirn. The Margrave always supported him, first only in mind and to himself but later also expressed in secret letters and through financial aid. Had Zirn been able to escape with the ships, or if his character had been kept in the game but as a captive in the Prinz's army, the Margrave would've entered the war on Zirn's side. As soon as I heard he was captured I made up my mind that I would try to free him through force, but alas! I never got the chance.

From the Osterreich's side I suspect there were never much incentive to go to war against anyone in their own faction. What would they have to gain from that? Their Duke was the Prinz so they were already in line for a Kaiser that they could count on, and they had a strong command in the Diet as well. They had much more to gain from expanding their territory at other factions' cost.

If there had been more intra-factions with a fairer power balance so that no one could dominate the other on their own it would've been much more conducive of civil war and scheming for power.

(One can perhaps guess from what I've said already that while the initial civil war was all-in-all sort of a failure, it did have a large impact on the character known to us as the Margrave all throughout the game. In this regard it would have worked as intended, had the powers been more equally aligned.)

[Zim]

I'm back.

I had a lot of fun with the game while it ran.

In contrast to Phonics, I thought we initially we were fine as far as avatar numbers. With the extras created for the civil war we had enough for a strong core of players. There was a hiccup with the Civil War (which included me with some computer problems) but I thought the reboot went well and the time skip was a very interesting way to get back into things.

Avatar problems started afterward, and not only in respect to numbers. We had a pretty good balance of duchies after the war. Then I ruined the postwar balance by going off and getting the Duke of Bavaria killed. Flanders fell shortly after with their duke dead. Austria was getting all of the new adoption offers. One large House wouldn't have been as big a deal with multiple duchies to get alarmed and oppose them (each with their own different interests), but with just the Margrave and the almost but not quite a rebel Zirn it limited interaction somewhat (with just two sides on most issues and not enough players to make that work). We still had some quite interesting conflicts and Diets, but I think more dividing interests would have helped. In that respect the game might have been quite different if the Dukes of Bavaria and Fladners had survived those battles.

Pumping up the number of players could have helped but new avatars came up slowly. Part of this was a return to the pre recruitable general days, which had both good and bad points (I like that the new generals came into a "family" of sorts, for example). Part of it was also the immense amount of pressure put on the gm. Turns moved very slowly, and a two turn wait for an adoption offer could translate into 2 weeks at the worst and 1 when things were going faster. Previous games sometimes went at a clip of a turn a day and more frequently every two days or so. I think this is mostly up to the strain on the gm calculating everyone's income and often playing enemy turns as well. The Chancellor position was always much easier and still sometimes quite unpopular in the older games, and sometimes a would be Chancellor wouldn't even have an opponent. By contrast this game a single gm had to do much more work and could not sit out a term if he was tired or had a lot of real life stuff to attend to.

I think a future game will have several challenges. We have a smaller player base now (and when V&V started) than previously. The Throne Room is pretty active but most of the guys who played in the different MTW2 rpgs are gone. There are also fewer MTW2 players around, making it harder to get new players. Ruleset is also an issue. I liked V&V's concept very much but wonder if it was too hard on the gm. That said, the MTW2 rpgs have always been my favorite part of the Throne Room. I enjoyed V&V very much, and would gladly join any future games.

[GeneralHankerchief]

I quite liked the game; the Diet politics in my opinion were at the best they'd been since KotR, which is no mean feat. However, as TCV suggested, I think we were hampered somewhat by the fact that there was really no balance of power whatsoever to speak of. In this game the Kaiser was always able to stop tensions before they boiled over simply by threatening to unleash holy fury if everyone didn't shut up and play nice. With a very large and powerful Austria going up against the Margrave, with my character somewhere in between, these things usually had a predictable result. Had the balance been somewhat different (say, Brandenburg had been more powerful, or Bavaria and Austria had been present), the Margrave and/or Herden could have easily circumvented me and looked to other places for allies. Unfortunately, the House structure as it was was just the way the cards fell in this game, and there was nothing anybody really could do about it. I bet that if we played this game the exact same way starting tomorrow, we would have an entirely different structure.

In terms of running the thing, Cecil put forth a Herculean effort for just around a year or so, something which absolutely boggles my mind. To the point that Zim alluded to in the post above, I would like to see the return of a strong Chancellor role in future games like we saw in the very old TW RPGs: the first part of KotR and even Will of the Senate. There's less player freedom, yes, but at the same time the turns move at a much faster clip and I think centralization allows for the empire to properly build so that when the internal politics inevitably hit the fan, there's actually things at stake.

[Zim]

As someone who joined KotR during the Cataclysm you'll have to refresh my memory. In the game's early days, the Chancellor did all of the movement? I recall reading about someone who ticked him off being put on "watchtower" duty.

As far as chancellor positions go I always liked the system used in the second half KotR and later games, but I've never played under the older system.

I've always wondered if something similar to KotF's rules set would have worked well if the gm (me in that game) didn't flake out and disappear due to loss of internet access, or if we now have too much of a taste for financial freedom.

One thing I appreciated about V&V that hasn't been touched on yet was the setting. While in general I would have liked to see more rpgs outside of the Central Europe area I thought it worked very well in V&V. It had been just long enough since KotR to invoke nostalgia and I liked the little touches like the starting character names (and my character's sharing part of a name with each of two different characters from KOTR). The HRE also matched very well with the greater financial and political freedom of the Hosues in V&V.