Ryoken's RPG Rule System

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This is an attempt to develop a rule system that will prevent the prevalence of TOTAL WAR in our games. Nations during this time did not practice total war and total war is extremely unbalancing in the long term. This rule system is intended to be supplemented by various house rules practiced by GMs. The goal is to provide a more historical, realistic, and enjoyable MP experience. If you dont want to play a game with rules that limit player behavior for historical/realistic purposes, dont use these rules. But if you do, I hope they prove useful to you.

- Map Diffusion: Oceanic Exploration and Claimed Provinces made by the major exploring nations will slowly leak into the rest of the world. Every session, the sea and claimed provinces known by any player nation three sessions ago will be edited to all nations.

- War Declaration: War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation without a casus belli before 1648 (Peace of Westphalia). War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation that has been at war against another player for more than three years. War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation with whom you have a Royal Marriage or for five years after breaking a Royal Marriage.

Note: All CB shields on opponent capitals build into a scenario should be removed prior to beginning play.

- Alliances: Any player nation that answers an alliance call from another player nation CANNOT acquire land in the peace treaty. They may only support their ally's claims. This applies to offensive and defensive sides of the war.

- Peace Treaties: A nation can only take one COT province, up to three non-COT provinces, or up to five colonies/trading posts in a peace treaty. Once signed, treaties are subject to the rule of law.

- Vassalage: While vassalized, the vassal must be allied to the overlord. A vassal cannot declare war against any player nation, regardless of CB. Vassals may only answer the alliance calls of their overlord. Vassalage shall be treated as a contract between two nations for a specified number of years. Overlords may be required by terms of a vassalage contract to provide specified resources to the vassal (gold, land, etc). The exact terms of the contract are left to the player. Once agreed upon, the contract is subject to the rule of law.

- National Provinces: Between each session, each player may specify one province that borders an existing national province to become a national province. This cannot be used to make another nation's capital a national province.

- Rule of Law: Any peace treaty, vassalage contract, or in-game truce CANNOT BE VIOLATED without GM permission.

- Counter-Reformation: If you switch to CRC, you must stay CRC until the Edict of Tolerance. CRC nations cannot declare war on Catholic player nations unless they are allied to a Protestant or Reformed nation.

- Technology: At the end of every session, all players that are two CRTs behind or more will have the appropriate technology raised to only one CRT behind.

- War Demands: Upon any declaration of war against another player, the attacking player must immediately make public war demands. If the defending player agrees to those demands, peace must be concluded as soon as the demands may be made using the game engine (non-core provinces need to be captured, for example). The attacker may not change their demands if the defender agrees at this time. However, if the defender refuses to immediately submit to the attacker's demands, they may be changed at a later date.


Comments are appreciated as always

 

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Nice Ryo,

I like rules

Map diffusion: appears a little burdensome for the GM, but if he wants to, then an interesting feature. Would years instead of sessions be better? Since some sessions are very short because of connection problems, quitters etc)

War declaration.
- The CB thing is nice.
- The "war for 3 years"-rule is a little troublesome to apply in practice. It is not that easy for you to keep track for how long he has been at war. One could search in the ledger, not that easy, or one can ask the guy who one intends to DOW o not very smart) . Perhaps it would be easier to relate to e.g. war exhastion in the capital city of the player you are about to DOW.
- The RM looks interesting. Yet again it may turn out a little troublesome to remember when you broke it. BTW, you did not intend to include "not 5 years after a RM ended"?

Alliances.
This I personally do not like. It means that you in practice must do a separate DOW in case you want to acquire territory.

Peace treaties
This rule is imperfect, as I have seen many times in different campaigns. It does not take into consideration you taking provinces of different types. In this case normal non-COT provinces and colonial provinces. The correct approach is to assign a value to each category and then decide what the max combined value you can take is. In your case the numbers could be e.g.
COT - 3 points
Colonies/TPs = 0.6 points
Other provinces = 1 point
Max points = 3.

I was just going to ask about "the rule of law" but then I found it further down. Definitions should be presented before they are used.

National provinces
Do you mean cores? If not, what is the legal consequences of this rule?

Technology
Interesting, I myself would really try to (ab)use this rule. Naval tech is the prime candidate for most nations. For naval tech it should perhaps be 3 CRT levels rather than two.

War demands
I really like that one.

RPG
I hate RPG, a bad name on a set of good rules. May I suggest e.g. "Reality rules" instead?

 

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Whaaaaa! Daniel has been unbanned

 

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Indeed, having served my sentence I am now a free man without any guilt

 

[BiB]

Indeed, having served my sentence I am now a free man without any guilt

Of course should you transgress again, previous offences WILL be taken into account.

 

[Casluerj]

Excellent Ryo, I shall be implementing some of your ideas in my next EGA.

- War Declaration: War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation without a casus belli before 1648 (Peace of Westphalia). War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation that has been at war against another player for more than three years. War CANNOT BE DECLARED against a player nation with whom you have a Royal Marriage or for five years after breaking a Royal Marriage.

Great idea. This will made ppl use more "Guarantee independence" and "Claim Throne" buttons. Pretty historical too.

- Alliances: Any player nation that answers an alliance call from another player nation CANNOT acquire land in the peace treaty. They may only support their ally's claims. This applies to offensive and defensive sides of the war.

This I personally do not like. It means that you in practice must do a separate DOW in case you want to acquire territory.

Actually no Daniel. This will made the allies to discuss things before the war. If A DOWs B and demand that his ally C join the war, A must "convince" C to join, ie, shared spoils.

This

- Peace Treaties:

and this

- Vassalage:

are already pretty normal is MP games.

- National Provinces: Between each session, each player may specify one province that borders an existing national province to become a national province. This cannot be used to make another nation's capital a national province.

I still think that National Provinces can only be asked if the nation owns it for a very long time AND if the province claimed is a State Culture.

- Rule of Law: Any peace treaty, vassalage contract, or in-game truce CANNOT BE VIOLATED without GM permission.

Perfect. I'd even say that none of them can be violated, even with GM permission... It'd suck break a word at that time.

- Counter-Reformation:

I've already use it more or less.

- Technology

Good Idea.

- War Demands: Upon any declaration of war against another player, the attacking player must immediately make public war demands. If the defending player agrees to those demands, peace must be concluded as soon as the demands may be made using the game engine (non-core provinces need to be captured, for example). The attacker may not change their demands if the defender agrees at this time. However, if the defender refuses to immediately submit to the attacker's demands, they may be changed at a later date.

Well... this already happened naturally so I dont think we need a rule for it.

 

[King John]

Ryoken, your ideas are interesting, but IMHO are not for those of us who lack the raw enjoyment of rules Daniel has . But even then, there are also some that don't seem very good ways to improve RP.


War Declaration is I think already a factor in "total war" games to some degree. If a player fails to come up with a valid pretext for a war, his fellow players won't look as favorably on that war. If you DO have a good reason for going to war however, they're not as likely to come to the defense of the one being attacked. Since this is already the natural law when you have a game with diplomats who know what they're doing, it probably isn't a good idea to add a rule that would only take away flexibility.

Alliances, I agree with Daniel. And, IRL that's not how it worked anyway. Monarchs entered wars for their own ends, not to help a neighbor out, unless that served their own ends. It seems to me this would discourage selfishness, a very un-RP thing to do.

Peace Treaties seems like a major hassle to bother with, and is too restrictive when considering that IRL, in a decisive war, it was normal for a country to demand much higher terms than that. The reason this didn't happen in most wars is that they weren't decisive enough to allow for it, and most monarch's considered it not worth the very expensive costs to try to push a war all the way. The ideal thing would be to educate players on the wisdom of moderation in peace; how much money and good will you can save by not trying to wipe a country off the map as opposed to wasting tons of gold in wars that, even if successful, may just result in yourself getting into a gangbang as unreasonably harsh terms alert your neighbors. Players that understand this will ask and take light peaces naturally and easily, and do much better in the long run than players that don't.

Vassalage might be a good rule. Without something like this, it's not really worthwhile to vassalize a human. It brings you prestige, but not much else. However, if you ever do vassalize a human and you're truly strong enough compared to the vassal to justify trying to vassalize them, that should convince the vassal to stay loyal to you and obey your commands. If the alternative is annexation, it's not a bad deal right? The logical thing is to obey the overlord, support his wars etc, until you're actually strong enough to resist. If a nation IS strong enough to resist, it shouldn't be vassalized in the first place. None of the major powers of Eu2 were ever "vassalized" IRL while they were powerful. This was rational IRL, and it's rational in Eu2. If players play rationally, it will model the rationality of rulers IRL. With a good crew, this would be better for RP.

National provinces I think is a fun idea. What if though, instead of being able to claim one core, you get to claim regions, like Northern Italy, Southern Italy, the lands west of the Rhine, southern Germany etc. Each player were able to claim one of these regions, but in order to keep that claim, they had to assert it. Failing to back up claims IRL led to your neighbors not taking those claims seriously. I think someone might have had this idea before, but I don't think anyone's tried it yet. It might not be a good idea to let everyone claiming here and there I suppose. Perhaps a better idea would be to do it capture the flag style. In order to be able to issue a claim like this, you have to defeat the "flag holder" nation, the flag representing the ability to make claims. If you defeat that nation, that nation can no longer make these types of claims at the beginning of a session, but you gain the ability to do so. If somebody ever beats you, that ability goes on to that person, and so on.

Rule of Law seems reasonable, although again, I think this is pretty well regulated within the interactions of the players themselves. Each player gets to consider whether its worth it to break an agreement or not. If someone breaks an agreement, that person gives away credibility, which is extremely important in making diplomatic deals. If you dare to do this, I don't see why you shouldn't be able to break agreements. We could just as well make a rule against stupidity . Which would be a good rule actually .

Counter-Reformation looks like a very good RP rule. It's too easily exploited otherwise.

Technology also looks very good. It's stupid to have half the nations in the late game unable to even think about building a navy, even if they're uber wealthy, simply because they didn't keep up in it during the early half of the game. This would be sort of like lifting the neighbor bonus cap.

War demands seems to me to be something that happens anyway. In the odd cases where it doesn't happen, the one changing demands tends to look like bad boy in the eyes of the rest of the world. I don't think this is necessary.

Map diffusion looks good, but as Daniel says it'd be a lot of work for the GM.

 

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Aside from Casleurj, a lot of you guys are missing the point.

The point is not to provide a rule system to dominate and control people, nor is the rule system designed to fulfill NEEDS. Instead, the aim is to provide a common framework for a certain type of play. If you want to play a power game, fine. If you want to play a no-rules game, fine. My aim is to create a reasonably simple but fun way of playing the game. I am not trying to make exploit proof rules per se, because I am assuming that you are going to have a crew who wants to have fun not power-game.

Some examples:

This I personally do not like. It means that you in practice must do a separate DOW in case you want to acquire territory.

That is the point. Alliances should not result in massive gang warfare at the drop of the hat. This is not 1914. And if you have to do a seperate DOW, you will be subject to the DOW rules; meaning you NEED A CB and so on.

Interesting, I myself would really try to (ab)use this rule. Naval tech is the prime candidate for most nations. For naval tech it should perhaps be 3 CRT levels rather than two.

This rule cannot be ABUSED. If you fall 2 CRTs behind, you are not doing yourself any favors. The rule was actually designed for naval tech but I left it open to land tech for nations like Portugal. I am tired of (as King John points out, kudos) people being 4 CRTs behind in the late game and completely unable to fight with those who invested. One CRT down is manageable and it will allow you to catch up later if you invest heavily. No rule means catching up is impossible. In reality, Russia was able to build a large fleet at the end of the game time period because they invested in it. They cant do that now just because Ivan IV didnt invest in naval power. That is stupid, imho.

Alliances, I agree with Daniel. And, IRL that's not how it worked anyway. Monarchs entered wars for their own ends, not to help a neighbor out, unless that served their own ends. It seems to me this would discourage selfishness, a very un-RP thing to do.

In real life, monarchs did not sign alliances to create BoP. The alliance mechanism itself is actually fairly unrealistic. France, on many occasions, fought one Habsburg power alone. If they ally in EU2, France can never have a one-on-one with a Habsburg. The risks becomes incredibly high. If they fail in a war, the French lose tons of territory. Same applies for Austria vs France/Ottomans and Sweden vs Denmark/Russia. Those coalitions were almost never formally allied per se, but declared war seperately. Remember, even after the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, France was still fighting Spain. Habsburg power was seperated. Same for Denmark/Russia and France/Ottomans.

 

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I appriciate greatly the avoidance of TOTAL WAR that you are suggesting here Ryoken. It is indeed unhistorical. I live very much the idea of not allowing DOWs without Casus Belli.

I like also the CRC restrictions, and the CRT reform (I think naval should work for all nations, but land CRT should only work for European powers). -not the OE or Persia or perhaps not even Russia, IMHO... or maybe they could be no more than two CRTs behind.

The vassalage rules are excellent.

Map diffusion I don't like in principal, but if given to only the human players that are major nations, then it's historically plausible.... again one wonders about the OE and Persia and such colonizing South America.

I live very much the war demands.

and the alliance rules are good too.

I like also what others have said about the local regioun claims, and having to back them up or lose them. Perhaps that should apply to all cb shields? just a thought.

In general this is an excellent discussion of how to avoide total war... BUT

I don't like province rules for peace treaties. I never have liked those. They do not seem historical, for reasons other people have already said.

And it seems to me as I have said berfore that people don't realise, that the game is better at avoiding total wars if the settings are VERY HARD and AI Agression FURIOUS.

Very Hard outright lessens the resources available to do anything. The BB point lowering restrictions also does so. And the AI agressiveness re-enforces this.

The usual retort is that it allows free wars for human players to munch up the AI countries. This might have some merrit, but if you play with the rule of no game-made human alliances before 1700 or so, and only two people per alliance after 1700 or so, then you make the DOW always take a stability hit for supporting annother human directly. Combined with your not allowing human players to declair war without a CB anyway, it can be very effective, I imagine, at making players forced to handle the AI BB wars by themselves.

Basically in your quest to avoid TOTAL WAR it should be remembered that war was extremely common none-the-less. war itself should be encouraged, but not total wars. I think part of what leads to total wars is the human players fighting each other for territory because the AIs are gone. And the AIs get swallowed up too fast, so that resources are too easily available to finance total wars.

But also in general not only do Total Wars bug me as a-historical, also the annexation of AI in general bothers me as unhistorical. If people want to play a game with only a few human powers and nothing else in Europe, they should play VICTORIA or HOI where people are encouraged to eat up all the AI as fast as possible and then to fight each other to the death.

Everything, including wars, should be avoiding waisting money. people should be economically starved, essentially. Fortifications are not useful to avoid the nation from being completely conquered in a total war, but rather to avoid losing territory AT ALL in a war for any amout of time. this last part I don't know how to encourage yet. But anyhow, I didn't mean to change the topic

Good Job Ryoken et all.

 

[King John]

Aside from Casleurj, a lot of you guys are missing the point.

The point is not to provide a rule system to dominate and control people, nor is the rule system designed to fulfill NEEDS. Instead, the aim is to provide a common framework for a certain type of play. If you want to play a power game, fine. If you want to play a no-rules game, fine. My aim is to create a reasonably simple but fun way of playing the game. I am not trying to make exploit proof rules per se, because I am assuming that you are going to have a crew who wants to have fun not power-game.

If you want players to avoid total war, you need to educate them. The game mechanics already make it highly disadvantageous to fight total wars. If two nations go at it for ten years, grinding away, all their neighbors will become more powerful relatively, and may even decide to join in just as the two are worn to the bone. Refusing stabhits in the early game for anything other than highly excessive terms is the stupidist total war behavior there is, but people still do it. If the noobs(and many veterans) out there will realize that this is not smart, borders on idiocy, and is one of the prime reasons these players don't fare as well as some of their less extremist neighbors, things will change and we'll have a new kind of game. The rules you've outlined could be implemented for some benefit, but you have to think of it as an equation.

R/E = F, where R = realistic value of the game and E equals the effort you have to put in to keep this realism. Remember all those big RP games that crashed and burned? It was because there was too much effort going in to it, but not great enough returns in realism because the players themselves never changed.

In real life, monarchs did not sign alliances to create BoP. The alliance mechanism itself is actually fairly unrealistic. France, on many occasions, fought one Habsburg power alone. If they ally in EU2, France can never have a one-on-one with a Habsburg. The risks becomes incredibly high. If they fail in a war, the French lose tons of territory. Same applies for Austria vs France/Ottomans and Sweden vs Denmark/Russia. Those coalitions were almost never formally allied per se, but declared war seperately. Remember, even after the Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years War, France was still fighting Spain. Habsburg power was seperated. Same for Denmark/Russia and France/Ottomans.

We've used a no-alliances rule in WAR 3, 4 and Thirst For Glory, and we don't have these problems. Your rule would probably accomplish the same thing, since much fewer people would want to join an alliance to fight a war where they don't gain anything. Another rule HG and I thought about is making a rule against peacetime alliances. If you're at peace, and have humans in your alliance, you have to ban them from your alliance. If you want to bring them to wars with you again, you have to DOW, then invite them back to your alliance. The whole point of that would be to let people share supply.

 

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Another rule HG and I thought about is making a rule against peacetime alliances. If you're at peace, and have humans in your alliance, you have to ban them from your alliance. If you want to bring them to wars with you again, you have to DOW, then invite them back to your alliance. The whole point of that would be to let people share supply.

We used this rule in Newbie game. Quite successful in my opinion. More fluidity in the early years. Later in the game, fluidity was less there but we saw rapid change of alliance and suchs which gave a lot of action and diplomacy. With our war indemnities (basically you give money to the loser(s) between sessions) we had a good "natural" balance of power in Europe which gave, in the end, a dynamite final session where almost everyone could aim for victory.

 

[Wyvern]

Like the rules on the whole Ryoken. Would be tempted to implement many of them in my next game.