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SECRETS

A draft on Thor’s suggestion for the States Game

There are no secrets among rulers. Information flows out and speculation runs rampant. There are too many sources to tell others what is going on.

Practical implementation:
Based on a Birthright-like implementation, all of a regent’s actions are publicly stated, and known to all regents **unless the player adopts a direct cloak of secrecy about an action or project**. If a player opts for secrecy, it costs time, money, attention, material, etc. to maintain secrecy. And other players’ spies can still attempt to breach that secrecy.

The larger the organizational level, the fewer secrets there are. Emperors have no secrets at all, dukes may have one or two secrets, barons may be able to keep at least some of their affairs from public knowledge, etc.

Acclaim – a level of power and prestige. The higher your Acclaim, the more that others know about you and what you are doing and planning. On the other hand, Acclaim is worth many perks and goodies. This is just one of its costs.

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METAGAME LEVELS

There are two levels of Metagame to be dealt with. There is an individual level Metagame, which deals with a character’s between-adventure activities and issues of connection, community and lifestyle. On the other hand is the Metagame of kings and countries. This is the game that is connected to Birthright, Blood Royale, etc. Of course, a Metagame (individual) character could be the ruler of a Metagame country. The hierarchy of the games looks something like this:

Metagame
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Character Game
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RPG

Attention was most intricately wound into the Character Game. Whether the character was doing work for his secret society or was instead pursuing the Countess X was something that divided up a character’s Attention, and required the player to balance his choices.

What if Attention is not a stat? We’ve been treating it like one, like Physical Strength or Dexterity or some such. But what if, instead, a character’s Attention allotment is based on something else, and is variable? The assumption being that the rest of a character’s time not dealt with using his Attention allotment is taken up with leisure or recreation. Sort of a “task expands to fill the allotted time” approach? And at the same time, taking more leisure time allows a character to be more rested, etc.

Say that there are a uniform 20 points a day for all characters. (No one has more; no one has less.) You need to allocate 4 points for Rest, or else you start to accumulate Fatigue. And you cannot optimize things by shifting your Rest around. Changing your Rest costs one or more Attention points. (So a routine schedule becomes a desirable thing.) Many things that cost Attention also add Fatigue, so balancing Attention and Rest takes some work. Maybe different races have different allocation patterns (hobbits require more Rest, elves can go longer without Rest, but need big chunks of it periodically, whatever…)

As usual, just some ideas to kick around.