Missionary Networks

General
21

I’m aware that this will be an unpopular opinion but I’m honestly unconvinced that Congregations should have any assumed, default and direct role in missionary efforts to other nations at all. Any role they have should be at a remove - for example, if sending Liao to foreign enclaves of the Way were a tool for helping them, meaning that those with Congregations would have best access to such Liao in the first place but opening it up to others as well.

Congregations are already a pretty meaningful personal resource because they slide you into one of the houses of government just by possessing one, so I’m also unconvinced by arguments that Congregations are dull and need to be improved by having more options like that.

A number of tools already exist for uptime support of notions of missionary efforts and religious spread; I would suggest that making them coherent and explicit would be far more valuable than trying to work entire new downtime options in. For example, we have the magical capability to send letters and materials via magic if we know the name of the recipient. Therefore, I’d like to see messages from named missionary leaders in foreign lands coming in, either to the Synod as a whole or to specific Assemblies and Cardinals as relevant, saying ‘hey, we’re doing X, it’s going Y, we could really do with Z’ where Z is often going to be ‘please send us liao so we can roll around in the purple stuff and binge on holy drugs while showing the locals how awesome it is’. This would allow general citizens and priests to, as individuals or groups, get together and gather funds for overseas missionary efforts, sending them in uptime via ritual. The key things needed to make this happen that we currently lack area) names for recipients b) a regular feedback element via messages or whatever.

It’s also clear that missionary elements can trivially be represented through the existing system of works that the Senate currently handles; the issue here is that the Senate handles all of it. While on the one hand I could see the Senate handling a big motion to get political permission to build a religious enclave in another nation, giving a target that players can come together to pool their resources to achieve, It would be nice to have some of these kinds of things come straight through the Synod instead; a surprise request to ship 10 wains of White Granite to our missionaries in Weirdland where things are going very well and they need to build more shrines (or possibly they’re lying and actually they need the stone to build ramparts because hostile natives are attacking, and this will cause a political shitstorm down the line when the rulers of Weirdland start sending emissaries to the Empire asking why the fuck we’re funding insurgents building fortifications in their territory).

I would also note that a key place to bring elements of missionary and religious work would be newly conquered or reconquered territory, and a sort of ‘spiritual/pastoral clean-up’ process of bringing in resources and manpower to such areas would be one of the better ways of actually representing the spread of religion by fire and sword.

22

I’d love to see decisions about missionary activity come to a Synod vote using traditional congregation-based voting strength for instance. It becomes an uptime decision that involves more than just one person - or rather it means you have to do all of your political support-gaining roleplaying every time, rather than only when an election is coming up.

23

Yes, bringing missionary work etc directly into the Synod political arena like that would be excellent, rather than relegating it to a downtime activity based on clicks.

24

Excuse me?

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25

On a slightly related note, I absolutely loved the bit at last year’s Marcher player event where NPCs came in basically to be evangelised at, and after a bunch of amateurs had bounced off, the actual priests came out and showed them ceremonies of the Way and they roleplayed being profoundly and deeply affected. It was great, it let the priests show the non-priests ‘look, this is What We Do’ just as much as the warpainted Navarri terrifying someone or the Marcher warriors forming up and grinding the enemy into the dust or the ritualists turning around and knowing everything.

So, uh, more of that. Not sure how, but more of that.

26

As much as I like the Synod judgement voting system, I would hate to see missionary work reduced to a vote or three. Missionary work should be something that you can just do, rather than have to seek permission for it. By all means the Imperial Synod can be used to influence / direct / condemn / reward such work but it really shouldn’t be the means to do it in the first place.

You shouldn’t even need an uptime event, permission or invitation to preach. You may not get very far without some support from the locals but if you can travel and trade to foreign lands you can visit and preach there too.

Riffing off what Dre said earlier, we have a military game that allows people to participate in both uptime and downtime. Yet the religious game is entirely focused on the uptime with a consequent focus on the internal finger waiving that is only one side (and arguably the seamier side) of the Way of Virtue. The Highborn brief even has a whole speciality / profession of priest devoted to missionary work - I don’t play one but those that do must feel some frustration that they can’t go Wayfaring to foreign lands and have meaningful impact / feedback in the same way that fleet and military unit owners can have.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

27

Maybe add in something that we need imperial permission to build that either let’s us proseltyze or lets us coordinate our proseltysation, maybe something that looks kinda like a spy network.

That way we have an uptime game (should we focus on organising things in asavea or faraden? Should we focus on one nation or try and expand in every direction at once?) and a downtime game (what support do I send? Do I help the imperial mission or forge my own way?).

28

permission seeking sucks, apologising for doing stuff is great,

29

The focus of the game is, and must remain, on the field.

The DT elements of military game are a compromise and you will note that we have designed it as much as we possibly can to make the decisions take place on the field. If I had my way, every player with a military unit would sign that unit up to a general at the event rather than click a button in downtime; every fleet owner would put a note in their pack as to which foreign nation they were trading with; and every priest would work out their money/liao ration before they pack up to go. Unfortunately that’s not feasible with so many players.

I hate downtime game. Seriously. Part of it is a knee-jerk to Maelstrom where all the cool stuff took place in downtime, and much of the event was about organising your downtime - to the extent that in some cases when we tried to add uptime game elements or plot, some players resisted becuase it was interfereing in their ability to organise their downtime. Or ignored any element that didnt have an obvious downtime benefit.

I understand that there are priests who want to do cool stuff - to spread the faith; to get into arguments with heathen priests; to cause problems for the Senate by undermining their compromises with hard non-ecumenical facts about slavery and idolatry.

But I do not believe the way to do that is to suck all the fun out of it by making it a click box on a downtime form. Yes, judgements in the field might not be the most exciting thing in the world but you know what? They’re a hundred times more exciting than clicking a tick box. They don’t require anyone to write individual reports for each foreign nation describing how the proselytising is going.

Why stop at a click box to convert foreigners? The empire is full of heresies and schisms. Shouldn’t there be, say, a button to let your Lucidians preach their heresy to the Dawnish? Maybe a database to track the percentage of NPCs associated with each heresy, all the agnostics and so on? I’m mostly joking … but Maelstrom did that. And it produced very, very little actual game. Especially compared to the weeks and weeks Matt and I spent developing it and then the months Matt spent coding it.

I’ve already explained that we’re slowly working on uptime ways to try and support the player desire to engage in religious RP with foreign nations. But I do not believe the best way to do that is with a downtime clickbox.

Finally, I feel the need to point out that every foreigner page begins with a paragraph in box out text that points out that "The focus of the Empire campaign is on the Empire and its citizens … "

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30

But the counterpoint to this is that the Imperial religion is built on the principle that all humans must learn about it, and the foundation of the Empire itself is the concept that all humanity must be united in pursuit of the Virtues. So perforce we as PCs must try and convert or conquer foreign nations to Imperial theology, or else be off-brief.

My view is that Empire could do with a little bit more PD-provided fluff between events, because currently it is hard to reconcile the wealth of setting information on the wiki with a total absence of any idea of what’s going on “at home” between summits. This is independent to any idea of “button-clicking”, but having “something I am doing all season” would help because then there would be some feedback, and some interaction with the wider world setting (which is currently something that feels very lacking).

I’m massively in favour of anything that provides that world setting feedback. Especially if players get independent information, e.g. military unit owners get a more detailed “Winds of War” than the rest of the playerbase, priests who’ve voted to contribute to missionary schemes get a “How the faith in $_foreign_nation is doing” return, that sort of thing. Say what you will about Maelstrom downtime, but it was utterly magical in how it set the scene for events. Sure, the core gameplay mechanic of Maelstrom was “sort out my downtime (and don’t get killed)” but that was a clear mechanism for engaging with the world, even if it went a bit too far in intricacy and user interface nightmares (and also meant play-by-post was the optimal solution). Downtime is important, engaging people via downtime doubly so.

31

The ref load of downtime is disproportionate to its impact.

Little back-of-the-envelope calculation based on reffing CUTT back in the day suggests that 60ish little pieces of fiction to add to people’s downtimes per event (roughly one per archetype per nation, which seems like a reasonable model for how much copy you’d need to make it feel personalised) would be a job for a dedicated writing team of three or four people, including one poor dedicated soul who’d have to liaise closely with the overarching plot approval system to make this work consistent with the wider world plot, because I’m going to go out on a limb and say that the existing plot approval system doesn’t have enough stretch in it to add that editing to the workload of any of the people in it (and dear God you do not want feral unedited copy getting into play).

And while Plot would probably love a new team of three or four dedicated and creative writers, I don’t think that the first thought that would come to mind upon adding those writers to the team would be “Okay, Team War And Peace, we need sixty 500-word pieces of downtime fiction per event”.

[edit] You could do it with one writer and one editor if the writer was capable of sevenish thousand words a week, which is faster than most fanfiction writers. Getting rid of the editor, that way madness lies: that is how plot goes feral.

[edit2] The problem with adding it to the existing system without more people isn’t actually the copy. The problem is the editing. Five minutes to read and feed back on each of dozens of pieces? That’s a whole ref-meet that could have been creating plot for uptime and was instead basically painting backdrop. The time of the people in the middle of the spiderweb is extremely valuable - is this an efficient use?

As a personal testimony, I’d like to add that after a couple of years doing downtimes for CUTT the first thing I wrote was a treatment for a larp set in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, in which downtime was mechanically forbidden.

32

Pieces of fiction are never, ever small.

Here’s an amusing true story. Maelstrom downtime generated loads of little pieces of text like “Aug 20: 3 men go to mow.” “Sep 24: you harvest 1.8 crystal mana from you Minor Mana Site called [Insert $nms].”

They were horrible. So we started editing them and adding a few more descriptive lines in to make them a little bit cooler.

Then we discovered we were doing that instead of creating any game for the field. We discovered we were losing weeks to just writing battle reports - because wouldn’t it be cool if we name checked every PC involved? We would regularly lose the entire Thursday before the event not to setting up cool game but to writing port reports for each of the old world ports. Each of these 12 to 20 pieces of fiction went to anywhere between 1 and 20 people.

The focus of the game shifted to downtime. I remember one memorable incident where I was presenting a dilemma to someone and they kept returning to the idea that the “best” way to handle it all was to get on a boat and go back to talk to my superiors … because interacting in the field was less effective than e-mailing what they wanted to do between the events and having us write a chunk of text.

Oh! I remember the best one. Myself and two other writers sweated blood for a great many hours to create a downtime text for someone who retired their character ten minutes after getting it. Can you imagine how that made us feel? How wasted those hours spent?

Imagine if you could spend liao to influence the religion of a foreign nation. What effect would that have? Maybe every 100 liao spent makes the trade routes there 10% more effective. That’s interesting. But it is not game, it is not roleplaying and it is not fun. It is button pressing. It is the kind of game that encourages zombie retainers. Suddenly players aren’t bothering to talk about Sumaah in the field, they are sorting it all out on facebook between events - do you really want to supplement the “which army am I meant to be supporting?” facebook posts with “which foreign nation am I supposed to be missionarying?” posts? And thats before we get to the "helpful"person who uses the power of maths to demonstrate that missionarying X nation is more cost-effective than trading liao for money because you get mana there and mana is worth Y if you sell it to Z on a thursday.

[size=150]Downtime is a drug[/size]. I cannot stress this enough. And it’s not a harmless little drug - it doesn’t lead to a muggy stoned weekend, it leads to waking up in a filthy bathtub in the Bronx missing the last three weeks. You think you can have a little, but then you wake up six months later and all your pre-event prep is about creating the results of downtime.

I am going to fight tooth and nail against every single attempt to make downtime more interesting. Because one of our core design philosophies, after maelstrom, was that downtime should be as boring as possible. Because there is only so much cool to go around, and the more of it you put into writing text adventures between events the less of it there is at the event. Or - worst case scenario - the less the players want there to be cool DT at the event.

I’m going to try and stop now. Because nobody ever believes me when I tell them why downtime is dangerous, why you should be doing everything you possibly can to make uptime as cool as you can possibly manage. Because you have to have nine years of soul crushing horror to truly appreciate how fucking shit downtime is.

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33

RAFF IS RIGHT

34

I don’t want “missionary nation X, receive trade bonus Y”, I want “tick missionary box”. Winds of war includes cryptic message of pissed of dignitaries turning up who in the field demand the heads of those spreading sedition.

I wouldn’t mind it been controlled by cardinals and me having no control over it, the funding for missionary work is controlled by my cardinal so I can go where they say or go home. Our try and get them revoked etc.

I don’t think anyone wants dt being the reason one attends or does stuff in the field (from experience the Maelstrom dt priest game was boring) more that they want wrenches and levers that can do the things that is in the wiki and in thier minds.

Admittedly, arguing with myself now if someone wanted to condem the idolators and the back sliding Senate that treats with such Heresy why wasn’t there an angry mob at the last few groups of heretics that turned up

35

+1

36

Well, what’s the alternative to downtime fluff text? Writing a brief for an NPC, writing an IC letter? I don’t for one instant want to suggest something as complex as Maelstrom’s downtime, and I appreciate that the very word “downtime” is now sullied by the Maelstrom experience, but surely if we can have Winds of War and Winds of Magic we can have some sort of feedback for some other levers pulled on the world stage?

I’m not even advocating making those levers a downtime action of any sort. All I’m saying is that it would be nice to have some more ways of interacting with the rich, detailed world setting in a way which makes sense IC and which provides actual feedback aside from “an NPC shows up”. Because there are finite NPC crew and finite game hours, as well…

37

I think that the most illustrative issue on the subject is the fact that there are 8 potential write-ups for the military downtimes, about half of which might well be creative ways of saying “very little happens, but gosh is it tense”… and we’re two weeks from the event without seeing these.

I want them to be brilliant, well written and dramatic (seriously, the Battle of Holberg was tense and inspiring)… but I also want to know the results so I can do some theorising on future seasons before the event-based sprinting begins.
Anything that adds even more workload between me and those Winds of War is lining up for a kicking.

tl:dr RAFF IS RIGHT, also Winds of War pls. :wink:

38

Just Say No to DT - got the message.

If there is meant to be a clash of priorities like economics vs religion in foreign affairs then you need to give both sides the ability to influence the board in recognisable ways - otherwise it will never be a clash.

Currently the Synod have no levers at their disposal to do this except the Inquisition / Condemn / Excommunicate and Revocation escalation trains, which isn’t subtle, simply reinforces the Synod’s reputation for reactive finger wagging and would still have no separately recognisable impact on the World (e.g revoking a treaty with the Asaveans will annoy them with diplomatic and economic consequences but with no theological benefits in regards to spreading the Way of Virtue).

Simply waiting for Plot to turn up at Anvil to give missionary inclined players the chance to do some missionary work on the poor NPCs doesn’t lend itself to long term plotting and planning - it is reactive once more. It would be like the Military Council relying solely on the Sentinel Gate / Anvil battles for the sum total of their game.

So if we had levers to proactively pull on the field, with enduring and recognisable consequences, then I’d be a happy happy little interfering priest. What those levers are and how we pull them I look forward to finding out.

39

Is it worth pointing out that actually changing the religious opinions of a foreign nation is probably actually a really bloody difficult thing? Their religions aren’t just “haha, silly native cults”, they are religions just the same as the Imperial Way is and fervently believed by the citizens of the nation in the same way as the citizens of the Empire believe in the way.

I think there might be some overestimating of just how much impact clicking “I send x of my congregation to be missionaries in Asavea” will actually have in Asavea. What I imagine happening is a Winds of Religion being sent out going “your missionaries are laughed at/eaten alive/stoned/ran out of town/converted to local religion and there is no appreciable increase in the number of believers in the Way”.

40

It may be difficult but it is still Virtuous to do so!

According to the Way, all Human Destiny leads to the Labyrinth and eventual Ascension. As a result, there are those who believe it is a moral imperative to at least try and tell everyone about this and/or do something about it. A certain Highborn woman realised this 378 years ago and decided to do something about it, despite the fact it was going to be ‘bloody difficult’.

The Sumaah Republic has also decided to do something about it and is rapidly expanding with military conquest and conversion - becoming a major power in the process.

The Way is really quite unique in the setting - so much so that Liao is banned in some countries as dangerous and even Eternals are fascinated with its implications.