What would be the skills to obtain sovereignty?

[Purple Snit]

I might have missed this somewhere in the thread, but a relevant question is:
Is this something you as GM have decided is happening in your campaign? Because if it is, the only required skills are Games (GURPS)-12, Writing-12, and Computer Operation/TL8-11, all of which you obviously possess. If it's what you want to set up as the background for your game, there's no reason to worry about what skills would be used - you can just say, "This is my setting, let's play."
[I tend to suspect this is the case, and that this is the corporation of the characters you had been asking about in another thread]
On the other hand, if your players have decided that they want to do this as part of a long-term campaign, then that's a rather different situation, one I don't see as "realistic" at all. America isn't the world, and most other countries have strong rules regarding anti-trust [here in Canada, the government prevented two of the major banks from merging a number of years ago precisely to prevent too much concentration of finances in one place; we also have a successful book/gift store chain that has competed successfully in the face of Amazon for years, just as two examples]. Therefore, worrying about a "realistic" way to handle it seems moot.
However, it's ultimately up to you; do you want them to be able to do this? What will happen to your world after it happens? What sort of campaign would you have if they succeeded? And are you willing to break the game to let them do it? It certainly could be fun for the players, but where do you go when you rule the world?
Ultimately, I feel that if you are willing to extend Contacts beyond Skill-21, allow society-breaking technology to flourish, and pretty much ignore trends in politics and society in the real world to achieve your ends, you've already decided what you want to do.

[Donny Brook]

Purple Snit has identified an apparent ambivalence which seems to be a defining problem of many of these threads.

[whswhs]

Alonsua, I think there's a basic flaw in your approach that accounts for much of the pushback you've been getting on this thread and on earlier threads.

In one of his nonfiction pieces, Robert Heinlein quotes an old maxim: "If you buy the premise, you buy the bit." That is, if you get the audience to accept your starting assumption, then they'll be prepared to laugh at your joke (per Wiktionary, a bit is "An excerpt of material making up part of a show, comedy routine, etc."). Or to read your novel, follow your television series, play in your campaign, or whatever. And if you set out to run a campaign, you can probably use the rules of GURPS to define the things that occur in the campaign, at least for a very wide range of "things" and "campaigns."

But you have to start out by getting your audience to accept your premise.

In terms of narrative, there are two basic ways you can do this. One is the realistic way: Your audience buy your premise because it is something that has actually happened, or that there is convincing reason to believe could happen, in the real world. If the realism of a premise is questioned, you need to present more evidence of how things happen in the real world, and of your knowledge of how things happen. And this is a kind of question you face a lot: To put it plainly, you are not convincing a lot of us that the things you postulate could happen, or could happen as easily as you imagine, and in your attempts you are convincing a lot of us that you haven't learned about the realities you're addressing.

This is not something you can address by saying, "But the rules of GURPS allow this to happen!" In the first place, the rules of GURPS are not limited to what is "realistic"; they can equally well be used to describe things that are not at all realistic. But beyond that, you only have occasion to apply the rules of GURPS once you have people committed to your campaign; you can't use them to win them over. Indeed, if you're trying to gain and keep the trust of players in a realistic campaign, one of the worst things you can do is to respond to protests that something is unrealistic by saying, "But that's what the dice came up with" or "But that's what the rules say"—because that tells them that you are treating the rules as an end in themselves, not as a tool for attaining realism.

The other way is the cinematic or epic way: Your audience buy your premise because it promises interesting stories. It's not realistic that a Chinese official carelessly breaks the seal confining 108 imprisoned spirits, who are then born among men as wuxia outlaw heroes; or that a baby sent here from a distant dying planet grows up to look entirely human, but with powers and abilities beyond those of mortal men. But the resulting stories are enjoyable enough to get readers to set aside realistic doubts for the duration of the story. And there are two things to be said about this approach in relation to your ideas: First, if you are going for that, you don't need to be nearly so concerned with whether it's "realistic," whether you define this in terms of game rules or of actual facts about how things are. But second, it does not seem that you have convinced many people that your proposed campaign IS cool and exciting enough so that they would want to take part in it if they could. Rather than eager contributions of ideas for things you could do with your basic premise and theme, you're getting a long series of objections to them. And that seems to me to be an even more basic problem than the problem of realism: Your audience, at least the one here, don't WANT to have faith in your narrative, because it doesn't appeal to them, to US, as something we would enjoy imagining. And, well, if someone doesn't like the dessert you made for them, you can't make it taste better to them by arguing.

[Alonsua]

Originally Posted by Purple Snit

...

Let's try to stick to the subject, which essentially deals with the set of indispensable skills to achieve sovereignty or government over a population and a territory, on the one hand we have the peaceful way, and on the other the violent one. You could say that with the peaceful path we have already reached an agreement, so the other option is the one which is missing.

[Purple Snit]

I AM sticking to the subject - why are you asking this question in the first place? Because it is a complete waste of all of our time to think about it, ask questions about it, and make suggestions about it, if you won't even define what it is you want, and why you want it.

It was a simple question: is this something you have already done for your campaign, or are you asking because your players want to do this? Because the answers are different depending on the situation.

Are you trying to be "realistic", or have you already decided to make this a dystopian Cyberpunk future, and nothing said here will alter that?

Avoiding polite and direct queries by waving your hands and saying, "Stop asking me to define my terms, just answer the basic question" isn't getting anyone anywhere. If you want input, we need to know why, and what for, and we [or at least I] need to feel that there is a point to it, that you are listening to input, and are willing to consider changes to your premise. If this is, once again, a case of "I have already made up my mind and do not intend to change, I just want you to agree with me and tell me how to use the rules to do what I already did", then this is all a bit pointless, isn't it?

[sjard]

<Moderator>
This thread, and several other, very closely related threads, is once again going nowhere and will now be closed.

As this is just one of several on only extremely slight variations on the theme, please DO NOT restart this topic as it has been asked and answered many times over.

Thank you.
</Moderator>