Walls, walls, and more walls

[Davin]

Part of me hates the idea of a "restart."  If that is the way the game is going to go then so be it, whatever works.

I like to play cities because they are more fun for me to play than a 190 retainer clan!  But if all the cities are tiny then they too might not be much fun to play.  I kinda sucks to think that the game isn't going to be good for a few years while we build up.  I would rather it be fun now, and have some decent cities to work with -- but the restart seems to be the vision that has won out (still not sure why).  A lot of what we discuss here seems to be revisioning Midgard, and I'm not sure much of the revisioning is necessary.  Midgard wasn't broke, it just died because no one was able to keep it going.  Does it really need to be completely recrafted?  I think some Factional shuffling doesn't seem like a bad idea, but it seems like we are really trying to reinvent the wheel.

Well, that restart was my idea to begin with.  The way I figure it, the old game was too unbalanced to try to continue as it was.  Plus, the majority of the players aren't around to pick up their clans and cities again, even from my version of the game which apparently doesn't match what most of you were playing in anyway.  I'd rather start everyone out on a relatively even footing and get rid of the big power bases in the game that cause so much difficulty for others.


But the cities need not be virtually empty - they'll have enough people in them to keep things going.  But I don't want to start everybody with artificially inflated positions for no good reason, so my best plan is to reduce things down to a commonness that everyone can live with.  For instance, I could give all the cities high walls or take away the high walls that exist, and they'd be more "even".  But that doesn't mean everything's exactly the same everywhere.  For instance, cities will have variable populations to start, some small and some reasonably populated - maybe even a few thousand people.  But I want to get rid of the multi-hundred-thousand-sized preserves and give everyone something more modest to work with.  And walls won't be reduced to nothing, but I think they should have modest defenses based on the population size and surrounding areas.  The cities of more than minimal size should be able to defend themselves against common intrusions, and clans can help build them up again to something more serious, but I'm not expecting them to have to deal with any serious early on anyway.
Also, I need to be able to rework many aspects of Midgard to allow me to run it on the web with a limited amount of GM time available.  So while it wasn't "broke", I also couldn't keep it going just the way it was.  I'm trying to keep it reasonably familiar, though.