A new set of thoughts on how to bring Midgard back

[DreamWeaver]

Ok, I like a lot of the ideas that have been summarized and proposed here, but let me first ask about the factions which seems to be the biggest issue.  My complaint is that there won't be enough players to make use of the factions while the consensus seems to be that there will be plenty of players.  I expect that most (90%+) of the player base in the early phases of the restart will be returning players rather than new players.  If we're going to have several players in each faction, and lots of factions, that means we're going to need 50-75 players to start (if they're all in different factions) or let's call it 25-50 players if they spread out somewhat.

So show me that we can get, say, a bare minimum of 25 unique players willing to pay hard cash to start playing again, and I'll open up lots of factions.  Does anyone want to start up a poll (formal or informal) on that subject?

 Your asking us to do the recruitment for the game for you, and there is no way to do that.

We are just pointing out that if you call this game Midgard and don't offer all the factions that players played in... they may not even bother to return. They may sit out and take the approach of wait and see what happens and just sit back and wait till their factions return. Just return all the factions and see what happens.

[Davin]

Next we also feel that the GM should open it up to all players to run up to (6) clans per player.

I don't have any philosophical or technical problem with running many clans.  My biggest worry is keeping flagrant abuse under control.  How do you suppose we might limit that if not by limiting the number of clans?

[Davin]

Some game advice to the GM to stop abuse that we have seen in the past:
Ok with this rebut reduce all the cities in size, defenses, and city buildings. Wipe away almost all factional Offices and Temple and make most cities Independent.  Only have a small number of cities declared for ever faction scattered around the Midgard content. Next don't have anyone with huge resources to be handed out to players. Also have NO Factional regiments at game start. Just have the resources that are at hand and the factional clans. It will be years before a starting clan of 200 retainers can take on anything, let alone a city. Part of the problem in the past, factional resources and/or factional regiments were handed out to players like there was no tomorrow. It didn't matter what rank someone was, it was handed out like water to a thirsty man. I say to the GM, make players earn factional aid. Make the player's roleplay their clan's faction's goals and keep them in-check and on target. A lot of the abuse of the past was because the GM's didn't make people play the way they should play within the factions they were playing. Make them do the right thing.

I do want to reduce the game start to about the minimum that we can get away with and make everyone build back up from very little.

I also worry about factional resources, and perhaps the best way to deal with that is to just not provide factions with as much to begin with.  If there's less available, then there should be less misuse of what there is.  We could even set a minimum rank limit that was needed before you're eligible for factional help, if we need to.

Can you think of any way we can restrict gathering influence (in general) to only those clans that are playing according to their factional goals?  It would be great if we could come up with some way to prevent abuse that way, but I certainly don't have the GM time to review every case so it would have to be something relatively automate-able.

[Davin]

Imperials. I would like to see the Imperials more willing to work with others and allow factional offices within the Preserves, especially the Religions.

That would certainly help with the "ganging up" problem I mentioned, but how do you resolve that within the existing history?

[Davin]

Imperials. I would like to see the Imperials more willing to work with others and allow factional offices within the Preserves, especially the Religions.

I would also like to get rid of the unbalanced nature of the Imperial Preserves.  Why not just have them have cities like everyone else, with normal defenses like everyone else?  It's always rubbed me the wrong way that the Imps can have all these high-powered benefits for free and the other factions don't get them at all.

FYI - every city leader can deny entry to the city to any faction they wish (provided they can get away with it politically and militarily).

[Davin]

The merc factions of MercVerk and SOA would be good additions but I would only like to see the MercVerk if they are like they were originally intended.  I remember MV Senior Cletus Graham from the 1980s and somewhere in my long term storage stuff I have a copy of the MercVerk "The Book" and "The Code."  I don't know much about the SoA, as I never played one.

I don't know much about the details of the additional factions, so we'll want to rebuild those by consensus (and the base ones if we want).  Any old materials or information anyone has will be very useful in that regard, sometime before we get rolling again.

[Davin]

The reason to allow all the factions that were LIVE in a version of Midgard, is because players played them and wanted to play them and not the original core factions. Cutting out any faction that was live, runs the risk of not having a former paying Midgard player returning. Realize these other factions were stood up by paying players because the other factions for what ever reason failed the task of being interesting to a group of players. So I say just round out all of the factions and return them live to the game and put them all in Midgard and let the game happen.

If we can get enough players, then fine.  But if we need to limit some of them then what's wrong with the ideas I mentioned before about "combining" factions together so everyone gets to play it the way they like, even if it's not called the same thing?  Isn't a faction that works in several cooperating ways more interesting that one that only plays one way?

[Davin]

OK the key is not to just get people to start playing the game but to stay playing the game once they start.

Agreed, certainly.

While I do think all factions should be available, I think what you should do is close off certain areas of the world especially since you will have no naval.  Closing off the Imperial Homeland, Alfheim, Skelts, Seakings and Manchuria.  This gives you the ability to down the road put them in as you see fit

I was planning on only opening the Midgard continent for the time being, and I think it would be a good idea to only populate one area in the beginning and let them spread out as they need more room.

Ask yourself do you want players that will play and continue with the game or players that get tired of something and find no interest else where and leave.  Most all these factions had people of interest of Zan would have never created or made them part of the system and if he had been healthy enough to run the game consistantly with out great pauses the number of players would not have dwindle nearly as much.

I certainly don't want players getting tired of something, but I'm hoping to defer that somewhat by making everything more interesting to begin with.  If someone doesn't want to be where they are, then it's not fun enough, right?

[Davin]

A startup clan has 200 retainers … that clan will be hard pressed to take on a NPC Bandit

That depends on how big of a bandit clan they find.  It could well be that they only find bandits numbering 10-50 at a time and you'll have to work hard to get them to engage in combat because they're at such a disadvantage and will be trying to hide or run away.  That gives you a lot more opportunity for determining and using interesting styles of play to reach your goal (like convincing them to attack you instead).

[Davin]

Let alone attack a city, to do that you would need like 8+ clans to take on a city together and even then they will all be IC troops in skill ability.

I don't expect anyone to be seriously attacking a city anytime soon.  For one thing, why would they?  The city wouldn't have much of anything they want in the beginning.  And don't forget that the cities won't have much in the way of defenses early on, either.  It's probably easier just to walk in by force and do what you want.

I'm guessing that attacking cities (later on) will be more of a faction-against-faction issue and will involve quite a few clans working together.