test driving GURPS Realm Management

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I have played Civilization. The second time I sat up playing till my eyes were sore, I uninstalled it. I tried reinstalling it a year or so later and did the same thing . . .

Heh. It does do that, yeah. :-)

Originally Posted by whswhs

You know, it’s fine to say “purely abstract.” But I still don’t have a process for deciding how many abstract thingumbobs a realm should have. I mean,if I’m building a character, at least I know that a normal character has 10 HP and 10 FP. If you were building a realm that was in average condition, how many resource points would you give it.

That's fair. In my head the rule of thumb has been "Look up Realm Size Value on the SSR on the size column and read across to the Linear Measurement and du up to triple that." But that makes as much sense as anything else.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

In my head the rule of thumb has been "Look up Realm Size Value on the SSR on the size column and read across to the Linear Measurement and du up to triple that." But that makes as much sense as anything else.

I'm not sure how that's consistent with the principle that 3 Agriculture Points will feed your realm for one turn during famine, no matter how big or small the realm is. Do Points scale in size with the realm, or does a bigger realm get more points? (meaning that Points are proportional to the log of realm size?)

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure how that's consistent with the principle that 3 Agriculture Points will feed your realm for one turn during famine, no matter how big or small the realm is. Do Points scale in size with the realm, or does a bigger realm get more points? (meaning that Points are proportional to the log of realm size?)

Originally? Yes. But it was pointed out that a small realm might have oodles or resources at its disposal so I ditched that early on. In the end there is no formula for this. It's literally, "Do what feels right/guess." Realms with more resource points can do more starting off, but that doesn't mean those with less can't do things either or build up points and then start acting.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

Originally? Yes. But it was pointed out that a small realm might have oodles or resources at its disposal so I ditched that early on. In the end there is no formula for this. It's literally, "Do what feels right/guess." Realms with more resource points can do more starting off, but that doesn't mean those with less can't do things either or build up points and then start acting.

Unfortunately, "Do what feels right/guess" just doesn't work for me.

I'm trying to do sketches of 15 Martian cities. I could work with

* Give every city a starting value of N points, regardless of size/scale
* Scale resource points to such and such a function of some characteristic of the city
* Give a city M points if it's on a narrow margin, N points if it's typical, O points if it's comfortably well placed and secure, or P points if it's a great power in its world (where M < N < O < P)

but I don't have any sense at all of what "feels right."

I think, actually, what I'm going to do is disregard the whole issue of Resource Points. I'm not planning to have the players govern a city, turn by turn (experience tells me that these players would get bored with that really fast). And I'm not planning to play out the fortunes of fifteen Martian cities just to create the background for a slice of life/soap opera campaign in a science fictional world. So I don't think I have any need to track Resource Points. I'm just going to assume that they're 0 for every city—which does count as "Give every city a starting value of N points," in a trivial sense, I guess.

The descriptive scales of education and infrastructure and so on seem to be fairly helpful at gaining a sense of what cities are like, so the book's not a total loss. I've worked out that the average Martian city has neutral loyalty, loose infrastructure (they don't get the latest tech from Earth right away), moderate control rating, conformity, and insularity, near-universal education (they can't afford to let people be ignorant), and neutral habitability, for example. But I'm looking for a tool for worldbuilding, and Resource Points seem to be mostly a tool for gameplaying.

I do appreciate the trouble you've taken to try to clear all this up for me.

[Christopher R. Rice]

More like a tool for storytelling. Removing Resource Points will remove most windfalls/disruptions and the entirety of the Wheel. If you're looking solely for a way to describe realms then I suppose you might get away with it, but there will be no real way of resolving how things are going outside of pure GM fiat.

Good luck.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Something else I discarded early on that might work for you. 1% of the total Realm Value in Resource Points if you were using the rules to buy RP in play.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

More like a tool for storytelling. Removing Resource Points will remove most windfalls/disruptions and the entirety of the Wheel. If you're looking solely for a way to describe realms then I suppose you might get away with it, but there will be no real way of resolving how things are going outside of pure GM fiat.

I can't see it as a storytelling tool, but that's because for me, storytelling is inescapably bound up with worldbuilding.

On one hand, while I can tell a story about a city (indeed I'm working out the stories of their origins), I don't know how to translate that story into values of Resource Points at any time in the city's history. On the other hand, if I know that it has X resource points at time T, that is, as you've said, a purely abstract statement, and I don't know how to translate it into something concrete.

It's like the Control Points in the supplement about grappling, or the points of social influence someone proposed I should use in GURPS Social Engineering. Both seem to give quantitative form to something that I don't think is readily quantified, at best. At least with Hit Points, I know that one HP is a wound significant enough to impair someone perceptibly; that more than half of total HP is a major wound; that accumulated HP equal to total HP has a chance of causing unconsciousness; that double that level can kill. Those and other nuances give me something like a picture of what's going on in a fight. But if I read that a realm has used points of workforce to produce points of luxury goods, I don't have any picture of how many workers we're talking about, or how many luxury items, or what exactly they look like. It all feels very abstract to me, and that kind of abstraction feels gamist.

If I know what the world is like in concrete terms, I can figure out things that are likely to happen; I don't really need an engine to generate randomly rolled events for me.

Good luck.

Thank you.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

Something else I discarded early on that might work for you. 1% of the total Realm Value in Resource Points if you were using the rules to buy RP in play.

I'm not sure I know what that means.

Say that a realm has Realm value $100,000,000. Do you mean (i) that one Resource Point represents $1 million (1% of one hundred million)? Or do you mean that it has one million Resource points (1% of one hundred million)? I guess the former is more likely; the latter would generate absurd results for any likely realm.

[Christopher R. Rice]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm not sure I know what that means.

Say that a realm has Realm value $100,000,000. Do you mean (i) that one Resource Point represents $1 million (1% of one hundred million)? Or do you mean that it has one million Resource points (1% of one hundred million)? I guess the former is more likely; the latter would generate absurd results for any likely realm.

The former. Whatever you can buy with the 1% of its Realm Value. So about 10 points since RP cost 0.001 x RV per point.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Christopher R. Rice

The former. Whatever you can buy with the 1% of its Realm Value. So about 10 points since RP cost 0.001 x RV per point.

So at TL8, a realm with 1000 people would have 600 people in the workforce, earning $1,560,000 a month. And 1% of that would be $15,600, or the monthly income of 6 people, or of 1% of the workforce.

And since that represents, not workers who are currently keeping things going, but workers who are available for special needs and projects, they amount to what Marx called "the reserve army of labor." That is, they're not currently employed, but can be hired or drafted when suitable projects come up. Yes?