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What about a 20th century ModernPowers?

posted by PMYA on ModernPowers

I think we briefly talked about this before the start of season 2, but decided not to do it because it would mean people would need to know certain bits of history.

I noticed there is a sub doing something similar on Reddit, /r/ColdWarPowers. Rather than it being more difficult to do than the normal ModernPowers, I think it might actually eliminate a lot of issues we had moderating it. For example, there is no way anyone can dispute something we know to be historically accurate, whereas people had all kinds of interpretations over stuff happening right now, and it was even worse once we got 20-30 years into the future.

The basic idea is we would start at the very beginning of the 20th century and go from there. The main difference between this and the current version of MP would be that certain historical things would definitely happen, no matter what players did. Both world wars, and maybe stuff like the great depression would still happen without any chance to stop it from happening, but they could play out in different ways. If we were going to do this, we would need to write a different ruleset, with a list of things that would definitely happen in-game.

There were also less countries in this time period too, so we wouldn't need as many players. There are probably 30 countries that would be worth playing as at the beginning of the 20th century.

I think we briefly talked about this before the start of season 2, but decided not to do it because it would mean people would need to know certain bits of history. I noticed there is a sub doing something similar on Reddit, /r/ColdWarPowers. Rather than it being more difficult to do than the normal ModernPowers, I think it might actually eliminate a lot of issues we had moderating it. For example, there is no way anyone can dispute something we know to be historically accurate, whereas people had all kinds of interpretations over stuff happening right now, and it was even worse once we got 20-30 years into the future. The basic idea is we would start at the very beginning of the 20th century and go from there. The main difference between this and the current version of MP would be that certain historical things **would definitely happen**, no matter what players did. Both world wars, and maybe stuff like the great depression would still happen without any chance to stop it from happening, but they could play out in different ways. If we were going to do this, we would need to write a different ruleset, with a list of things that would definitely happen in-game. There were also less countries in this time period too, so we wouldn't need as many players. There are probably 30 countries that would be worth playing as at the beginning of the 20th century.

11 comments

[–] PMYA [OP] 2 points (+2|-0)

Edited

This is a straight-forward randomization exercise; the day doesn't matter for our purposes, so we roll a die for the year and a die for the month, and we have our assassination date. So maybe WW1 occurs a bit earlier, or a bit later - but as a mandatory historical event, it always occurs; but no one can be sure when.

This is probably the best way of doing everything. It is easy to change the probability of rolls based on changes that are made to the historical timeline by players.

I do like the idea of having certain requirements for events to be triggered though, although I can foresee a bit of metagaming going on where people are only posting to meet certain requirements.

edit: I do still think certain things need to happen on time exactly as they did IRL though. WW1 and 2 start dates should be the same.

[–] Lord--Gaben 1 points (+1|-0)

Does it really need to be exact? If it looks like it needs to happen, mods know the reqs, so they can push for it.

[–] PMYA [OP] 1 points (+1|-0)

I would like it to be. I think MP got too free form at certain times and turned into more of an RP sub rather than a game sub.