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Old 06-01-2021, 07:13 PM   #1
lugaid
 
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Default Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

One of the reasons that GURPS Realm Management was very exciting for me is that I have always wanted to run a "noble houses" type of game, but it seemed daunting to handle the logistics and administrative elements. At first, I thought that GURPS Boardroom and Curia would solve those issues, but it wasn't quite there. The Wheel, the large-scale minigame from Realm Management, seems to fit the bill of exactly what I need.

In setting up a background setting for such a game, it occurred to me that the note in Realm Management about using The Wheel with Boardroom and Curia allows me to cover the internal politics of a realm by representing various factions within the greater body. I am not sure, though, when to use one or the other. For example, if I were running a game during the Japanese Ōnin-Bunmei war that set off the Sengoku era, would it be better to represent the various provinces as separate realms and the noble houses as organizations? Or should the Muromachi/Ashikaga state as a whole be a singular realm with various provincial factions represented by organizations? Similarly, if running a game set in the background developed in the Dune series of novels, would the Imperium be a singular realm, or should each planetary system be developed as a separate realm?
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Old 06-03-2021, 08:55 AM   #2
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

I generally would use realms for provinces. Realms should have a fairly robust single governance and transportation system, so in Dune that means planets and in Sengoku that means provinces.
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Old 06-03-2021, 05:17 PM   #3
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

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Originally Posted by ericthered View Post
I generally would use realms for provinces. Realms should have a fairly robust single governance and transportation system, so in Dune that means planets and in Sengoku that means provinces.
This is probably would I'd do as well. I plan on a follow-up at some point which will give some rules for nested realms. Still waiting to see how this does really.
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Old 06-10-2021, 12:14 AM   #4
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

Please forgive me for being away from the forums for several days. Life intervenes at times, as we all well know.

I think I may still not be quite sure how to divide up a setting, so I am going to go through some more examples to try to get there, if that's okay.

How would one go about dividing up the Third Imperium of Traveller? Would each Domain (Domain of Deneb, Domain of Vland, etc.) be set up as a Realm, or would that be better at the Sector level, or for that matter should it just be the whole Imperium as a single Realm? How about the Solomani Confederation? The Aslan? I imagine that the last would have Realms per Clan, but since those intermix, frequently on the same world, perhaps they are better modeled as Organizations? If the latter, then what is a Realm in the Hierate?

A related question occurs to me, which is what is the game difference between Realms (or Organizations) of different sizes in The Wheel, other than one with more income being able to hire more military units? That is, if I'm running a megacorporate duel in a cyberpunk setting (or whatever), and things are all in Realm Points as far as The Wheel is concerned, what's the actual difference between, say, a Workforce Point worth $500,000 and one worth $5,000,000—that is, if the tiny Fleaweight, LLC spends Workforce to Threaten mighty Omnicorp, does it really just come down to skill rolls with no consideration for Omnicorp's more extensive, and expensive, security section? I imagine that it's laid out somewhere in Realm Management, but I'm not finding it.
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Old 06-10-2021, 10:26 AM   #5
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

Quote:
Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
One of the reasons that GURPS Realm Management was very exciting for me is that I have always wanted to run a "noble houses" type of game, but it seemed daunting to handle the logistics and administrative elements. At first, I thought that GURPS Boardroom and Curia would solve those issues, but it wasn't quite there. The Wheel, the large-scale minigame from Realm Management, seems to fit the bill of exactly what I need.

In setting up a background setting for such a game, it occurred to me that the note in Realm Management about using The Wheel with Boardroom and Curia allows me to cover the internal politics of a realm by representing various factions within the greater body. I am not sure, though, when to use one or the other. For example, if I were running a game during the Japanese Ōnin-Bunmei war that set off the Sengoku era, would it be better to represent the various provinces as separate realms and the noble houses as organizations? Or should the Muromachi/Ashikaga state as a whole be a singular realm with various provincial factions represented by organizations? Similarly, if running a game set in the background developed in the Dune series of novels, would the Imperium be a singular realm, or should each planetary system be developed as a separate realm?
That's a good rule of thumb. In European history a lot of times the big game in town was fighting over titles to political regions not expanding one at the expense of another. Even wars between nation-states tended to be reflected in the hegemony over constituent provinces.
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Old 06-10-2021, 10:38 AM   #6
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

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Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
How would one go about dividing up the Third Imperium of Traveller? Would each Domain (Domain of Deneb, Domain of Vland, etc.) be set up as a Realm, or would that be better at the Sector level, or for that matter should it just be the whole Imperium as a single Realm?
What's your game about? What scale are the players operating at?

If you want to do high-level Imperial politics, you might want each Archduke of a Domain to have their own Realm so they can contend, each with their own power base. If you're trying to do the Fifth Frontier war, you might move up a step and have the Imperium and the Zhodani Consulate as two realms so they can duke it out directly. Making the Fifth a multiplayer game, maybe you break them both up into separate realms, so there are multiple players per side (in which case, you probably need some individual victory conditions in addition to "our side wins the war"). If you're doing a classic Free Trader game, all of those are too big for PCs to really notice -- likely even ever get to another realm from the one in which they start -- so you might want to zoom in and treat sectors or even planets as realms.

The communications delay in Traveler favors smaller realms to emphasis the feudal nature. But time, too, is a function of scale. Daily events are not the same as monthly events or yearly events. (With a year-long "turn", the Imperium is only two turns across, and there's no noticeable lag. With daily turns and planetary realms, you don't really want a policy change to be instantly reflected across the Imperium as a whole.)

It's all flexible, so just be guided by your goals and concept for the game.
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Old 06-10-2021, 10:41 AM   #7
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

Quote:
Originally Posted by lugaid View Post
How would one go about dividing up the Third Imperium of Traveller? Would each Domain (Domain of Deneb, Domain of Vland, etc.) be set up as a Realm, or would that be better at the Sector level, or for that matter should it just be the whole Imperium as a single Realm? How about the Solomani Confederation? The Aslan? I imagine that the last would have Realms per Clan, but since those intermix, frequently on the same world, perhaps they are better modeled as Organizations? If the latter, then what is a Realm in the Hierate?
I suspect that depends on what level of play you are looking at. You should tailor realm size to the size the action is occurring at.



If you really need too, you can layer the realms, I think. The hardest part there is getting the tax rate right. You need to know what the total tax rate is, how much the people below you are taking, and how much the people above you are taking, leaving how much you are taking. Add some "soft" politics between the two different levels of government and you have most of what you need.


Quote:
A related question occurs to me, which is what is the game difference between Realms (or Organizations) of different sizes in The Wheel, other than one with more income being able to hire more military units? That is, if I'm running a megacorporate duel in a cyberpunk setting (or whatever), and things are all in Realm Points as far as The Wheel is concerned, what's the actual difference between, say, a Workforce Point worth $500,000 and one worth $5,000,000—that is, if the tiny Fleaweight, LLC spends Workforce to Threaten mighty Omnicorp, does it really just come down to skill rolls with no consideration for Omnicorp's more extensive, and expensive, security section? I imagine that it's laid out somewhere in Realm Management, but I'm not finding it.
Besides general cash flow, which scales readily, there is a conversion system between different realm points on page 37, under trade.



I suppose you could insist that the threaten attempt must be the size of one of your target's realm points, not one of yours.
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Old 06-10-2021, 07:04 PM   #8
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

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Besides general cash flow, which scales readily, there is a conversion system between different realm points on page 37, under trade.
Right, although that has little effect on any of the actions. It only really covers how to convert one Resource Point into different-sized Resource Points.

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I suppose you could insist that the threaten attempt must be the size of one of your target's realm points, not one of yours.
Okay, but I think I'm asking where, in the rules that have actually been playtested and published, there is any discussion of the matter. It seems like it must have come up at some point.
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Old 06-10-2021, 07:24 PM   #9
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

There are no published rules other than that box for how realms and organizations interact with each other. I have the rules I pulled from the first draft early on and they are being modified and playtested for my current campaign, but no one but my Patreon folks will see them for some time.
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Old 06-10-2021, 09:34 PM   #10
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Default Re: Realm Management in Practice - Realms and Organizations

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There are no published rules other than that box for how realms and organizations interact with each other. I have the rules I pulled from the first draft early on and they are being modified and playtested for my current campaign, but no one but my Patreon folks will see them for some time.
What about entities of different sizes? Sticking to Realms, if Luxembourg attempts to spend a Workforce Point to Bluff Russia, is Russia just screwed if their relevant skill isn't very high, despite having a much larger (presumably, due to the expense of each Workforce Point) counterintelligence operation?
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