[quote=Letter Bee]
So, anyway, how are Nation Roleplays usually played in RPGuild?
[/quote]

There are two ways.

My least preferred being the statistical approach. If I do anything it's not in this fashion. At the most extreme players need spread-sheets and a forty-page manual detailing the numbers and equations required to formulate their nation's capabilities and production outputs and resource inputs. Usually in these instances the RP is extremely top-heavy with the GM being the grand arbiter of the RP since he calls the end of necessary turns and makes decisions based on the current stats and what requested orders he's been given. As a whole these RPs play out like a slower-paced case of Age of Empires, Civilization, or Victoria. I've never found any narrative worth in them and I don't like to drown myself in numbers during my evening and weekend hours. I'm not a math person.

The other function is more narrative-driven. One recognizes they're another writer in a collaborative world and we either directly or indirectly collaborate on the story. In situations like this I like to drop basic lore across a large diverse area and let players sandbox it out to build up their world. In the case of Fallout we'd be working on preexisting lore notions as well as strictly fanon pulled from somewhere in the Fallout story. There's no strictly bound notion of nations functioning on numbers in a spread sheet and the RP progresses at a more organic pace than everyone getting in their orders and the RP progressing a set block of time (day, week, month, year). Conflict and its resolution is handled in a more story-oriented sense.

I feel the narrative-driven format is better over the statistic-driven format since it allows for ultimately more freedom and diversification of potential stories with all-level emphasis than simply concentrating on the faction leaders. Since tracking important statistical facts is not important you can explore the leadership and the people at a more personal level than simply using them as a way to explore the numbers with a thinly-veiled post narrative.

And given story-driven focuses on things on such a more personal level I feel that this allows a greater flexibility. You're not just your nation, but all the characters inside the nation. It's a focus on all the people inside of it making the whole as opposed to the whole making all the people (and these people being treated as census data). In this environment I've often felt this allows me to freely mash my favorite "Diversity of choice" button until I get to a very liberal state; within reason. In these conditions I don't see there being any reason to not allow someone to join as just a single character in the nation-driven world and down the line he could maybe break into more complicated "national" matters with his own evolving state, or he could stay that way.

Given how Fallout generally works with you being the deciding hero or villain I think this could work well into things. In the instance two nation-players meet and don't seem to want to give ground on anything we could assume gridlock between the two with no significant gains made by either until this RP's Courier or Vault Dweller or Chosen One walks into the conflict and picks a side and tips the tenuously balanced scales just that much to facilitate victory of one over the other.