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View Full Version : DM Help Each player controls a faction of a metropolis



Kafana
2016-12-27, 06:47 AM
So, I came up with an idea for a campaign, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to think this up, so I was wondering if there are any rules/systems that might support this concept (even homebrew).

The idea is that I, as the DM, really flesh out a metropolis and its surrounding region. Now this is basically an exercise in world building that I aim to undertake as I enjoy doing this generally. So, after about say half a year of on and off world building I should have a very large city fleshed out, with all major factions and many smaller ones, with a storyline of the city that will take place during the campaign which might or might not be affected by player actions, etc.

Now, I'm not interested so much in the actual story as I am in creating a huge, living, breathing sandbox, and I also plan to create a small website for this so that the players can easily gain access to any relevant information about a faction, NPC, region, history, etc. so as to avoid creating one huge word document and instead rely on links.

Ok, now moving on to the players role. The idea is for every player to have some collection of assets that represent his power level. So a power level of 0 can be a beggar, 1 can be a peasant with a shack, 5 could be a trader with a store in a good district and a home, while 15 might be a nobleman with several estates, a mine, etc.

A power level is basically a collection of assets, where an asset might be:
- real estate;
- liquid wealth;
- artifacts;
- their character level;
- character levels of loyal NPCs;
- loyal monsters;
- influence with faction X;
- etc.

The idea is for the PC group to be an alliance of characters/factions that are of certain power level, where one example might be that the PCs are children of a nobleman who died and in his will split assets evenly among his children. Another example would be that a each player is a lord of a council of a district in the city, and aims to seize power for himself or his allies.

What I'm proposing requires a lot from the players themselves, but the whole idea is for a group of DMs which are developing the same world to play this, so I believe we can pull this off, though we need some underlying skeleton of rules to handle this power level system. We realize that most of the gameplay will actually be world building, story creation and pure roleplay, where a round might be a week, a month or even a year.

So the question is - what would the players do in this campaign? Well, pretty much anything, they can try to increase their assets, they can try to improve the city, their name, their district, they can try to gain power, start a war, run a thieves guild, etc. Basically play with the sandbox from the perspective of a powerful player in the city, and not a level 15 wizard or barbarian.

Anyway, has anybody tried something like this? Any books or systems you can point me to?

TheTeaMustFlow
2016-12-27, 01:10 PM
The Romance in the Air (http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/141360/Romance-in-the-Air--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core) setting for Fate Core (Doctor Zhivago meets Downton Abbey IN AIRSHIPS (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RecycledINSPACE)!) does something like this, with a pregame where players each play one of the major nations of the setting (which are statted out like characters with 'skill' ratings in diplomacy, warfare, industry and espionage), and their actions in the pregame sets the backdrop for the module. The system could be easily adapted for another setting.