Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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The Nebulous Clouded in the Achromatic

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Nation RPs are becoming more of a thing, it seems, but I've never been intrigued by the over complicated mechanics that go into most of them; so this one is made with simplicity in mind, and it's something to help participants pass the time as a little side-project. It is, by no means, a full-blown RP that would consume your time.

The inspiration for this comes from NationStates, an online nation game created by satirist Max Barry. While the conflicts and scenarios spotlighted in this RP won't necessarily be of a satirical nature, they will--more or less--be constructed and presented in similar fashion to NationStates.

A Brief Overview


In the not-quite-so-distant future, humans expanded into the cosmos to begin colonizing other worlds. In a remote system on the verge of explored space, a new garden planet was discovered with gravity and atmosphere similar to Earth's. However, most of the surface is actually one giant ocean, with islands (big and small) scattered across the globe. These plots of land became independent colonies of the settling travelers that made this new planet their home.

Making Your Nation

To get started, your colonists will need to claim one of the planet’s many islands to call home. All settlements and colonies are independent of one another, effectively their own sovereign nations. For the moment, there are no higher factions that they can align themselves with, so we’ll assume all are fully autonomous and can freely make their own decisions about how they are to govern themselves (else, what’s the point of this fun little simulation, eh?).

Head over to this website to begin generating your island. You’ll want to click the “Random” button in the upper-right to change through the seeds, or you can try tinkering with it manually to see what you get. I recommend leaving the other settings as they are. Click the PNG button at the bottom of the settings to save a copy of the map on your computer. Then just upload it and paste it into your National Almanac Data (below).

If you have GIMP or Photoshop (or even something as simple as Paint) and would like to designate cities or regions, or do other things to your map, you are absolutely encouraged to! You might even try to turn it into a desert island by recoloring the entire map or find other ways to make it unique.

Use the following BBCode for your National Almanac Data. You’ll want to remove the periods (.) from the HR/line break tags. The code script still generates line breaks, so I had to purposefully escape them. Finally, when inserting the image of your nation, I recommend resizing it to 600x600 pixels, or putting it in a spoiler.

[center][h2]Insert Nation’s Name Here[/h2]
[i]Insert National Motto Here[/i][.hr][.hr][img]Insert your map’s direct image url[/img][.hr][.hr][/center]
[b]Type of Government:[/b]
[b]Type of Economy:[/b]
[b]Current Leader’s Title & Name:[/b]
[b]Dominant Languages:[/b]
[b]Dominant Religions:[/b]
[b]Notable Exports:[/b]

[b]Brief Description:[/b] (put a paragraph or two here describing your nation -- include things like geography, culture, etc.)

[b]Top 3 Recent Headlines:[/b] (you can frequently update this section with three quick snippets of major news that has happened in your nation)

[indent]--
--
--
[/indent]


When you're all set, you are welcome to post your nation in the Characters tab above. You can continue to update the almanac data as we progress through the RP.


Political Influence Points

The game is played by simply making decisions using "Political Influence Points" (PIP, for short). Each decision made earns you 1 PIP and cost no PIP; but, at the same time, decisions require a minimum amount of PIP (basically, the tougher the problem, the more influence you require in order to resolve it). At the start, a new nation has 1 PIP and they can earn up to a maximum of 12. When problems demand the player to make a call, they will have a set amount of choices.

The nature of the responses will either be “Authoritarian” vs “Libertarian” (Social), or “Left” vs “Right” (Economics). Thus, we’ll be using the Crowd Chart from “The Political Compass” to determine a nation’s standing (more on that below).

Most situations only have two or three choices, while other issues may offer some more freedom.

Viva la Revolución!

If, at any point, the player is no longer satisfied with their nation's standing, they can initiate a revolution. Revolutions reset a nation's PIP to 1, and all decisions to situations that arose before are null and void. Thus, if you're no longer content with your fascist dictatorship or have grown bored with your hippie paradise, you can wipe the slate clean and try something new.

Political Standing

Many situations will always be available to tackle, so long as your nation meets the PIP requirement. Others are only available within a set time frame (determined by the gravity of the situation at hand). Situations don't have to be addressed, however. If no choice is picked, your nation will incur no consequence and its standing will remain unchanged.

A nation's standing is its overall style of governing, based on the decisions it has made in response to situations. A new nation that hasn't responded to a situation (or a recently revolutionized nation) is considered to have a "balanced" government. Standing is determined following a confirmed decision and calculated by points assigned to the choices you've made up to that moment.

Points are assigned to determine where on the political Crowd Chart your nation falls in its political standing. “Authoritarian” vs “Libertarian” (defining social politics) is shown via the Y-axis, while “Left” vs “Right” (defining economic politics) is shown via the X-axis.

When a choice is picked, points are awarded to one (or two) of those criteria and your nation’s standing will adjust on the flow chart according to the total points accumulated since you started (or had a revolution). Keeping track of your points is the PLAYER’S RESPONSIBILITY, NOT MINE. You’ll also need some basic math skills, as picking an option that puts you “5 pts left” and then another option later on that puts you “2 pts right”, will actually have your nation end up standing “3 pts left” on the chart (assuming this example started at 0, in the center).

For easy visualization, you can use Political Compass’s “Build Your Own Chart” form on this web page: (politicalcompass.org/crowdchart?showform). If you’re using that form, you’re plugging in the total amount of points you’ve calculated after all decisions in each field. The “Name” field can be the name of your nation, of course. Remember, “Economic” is the X-axis, and “Social” is the Y-axis. Points to the right/up are positive (i.e. +5), while points to the left/down are negative (i.e. -5). You can paste a screenshot of this chart at the bottom of your posts to provide a continuous visual update of your nation’s standing.

Example of a Crowd Chart with a nation's total standing below:


Invoke the Powah!

When players choose to respond to situations, they have the opportunity to play out their government's choice in two parts:

1.) The official declaration of the decision itself (i.e. a presidential press conference, or a crowd-stirring speech) -- In the form of a post that declares the player's action of choosing an available response

2.) The fallout of their decision (i.e. a news story about riots in the streets, or a dramatic change in the nation's GDP) -- In the form of a follow-up post no sooner than 24 hours (real time) later.

War!

As of right now, I don't have a solid plan for integrating a fair war system into the game. This is just a relaxing RP that you can do on the side whenever you get time in between the other RPs you might have going on here. However, I'll work on coming up with a system we can use in the future for acting out conflicts between the island nations.
Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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The Situation Room


Your most trusted advisers and cabinet members work tirelessly to present their fearless leader (that would be you!) with different options for tackling issues making national headlines as they arise. Sometimes, even the most fair-minded leaders wish they could solve a problem on their own with a bright idea they come up with on the spot, but nations just don't work that way anymore. Most of your citizens are educated, ambitious, and hold strong political ideals of their own. Thus, your government can only present you with options that would best appease the loudest voices of the population; and, at times, they can be majorly divisive.

Whether you were elected into office, took it through force, or born to rule, you cannot deny--that in this age, anyway--a government serves its people...

When posting in the IC, the BBCode format you'll need to follow is contained in the hider immediately below:



PIP 1 Situations




PIP 2 Situations

Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by Inkdrop
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@The Nebulous Where is the link for the island generation website?

Edit: Found it. Also, hot damn, my nation went way off the end of the batshit crazy scale right quick. Uh. I am okay with changing it if you do not like it.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Skylar
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Can you post the link to the island-generator? I'll get started on my NS right away.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by babbysama
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babbysama The babby

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Will get started on an NS soon!
Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by Walnutella
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Walnutella Grand Magus

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This is my first Nation Roleplay. I always show interest but I'm afraid to join, most rps have complicated system. I really like your current system and I wonder if I can join this rp ^^ @The Nebulous

wonder where's the link to the Island Generator :D
Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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Oh my, did I really forget that link? Derp.

www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/ga..

(Edit)

Alright, the two new nations look pretty cool! I'll get started on putting out the situations that you guys can begin responding to. I'll go ahead and also list higher PIP situations, too, so you can start thinking ahead about them. With that said, I should clarify that players should limit the amount of situations they respond to in a 24-hour real-time period to two (2) for the time being. I'll look into some innovative ways to allow for faster decision making and consider increasing the PIP-cap as the RP moves along. This is all experimental, after all.
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Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Inkdrop
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@The NebulousOh boy. I can't wait to start calling people heretics.
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Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by Nodal Swami
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@The Nebulous So I've made a map, a bunch of cities, and named them. I have also decided the "theme" of my nation, with all the social/economic superstructure to go along with it. You can have a look at my map here: img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/f34..

However, I have yet to decide on a name, and will be heading home soon. When I get there I'll upload the full sheet.

Does this planet have a name? It would be nice to know for the sake of naming my nation.

One more question- would it be OK if I did the country information in the Wikipedia style rather than yours? It would allow me to add more detailed information such as slogan, national anthem, coat of arms, etc.
Hidden 8 yrs ago 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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@The Nebulous So I've made a map, a bunch of cities, and named them. I have also decided the "theme" of my nation, with all the social/economic superstructure to go along with it. You can have a look at my map here: img.roleplayerguild.com/prod/users/f34..

However, I have yet to decide on a name, and will be heading home soon. When I get there I'll upload the full sheet.

Does this planet have a name? It would be nice to know for the sake of naming my nation.

One more question- would it be OK if I did the country information in the Wikipedia style rather than yours? It would allow me to add more detailed information such as slogan, national anthem, coat of arms, etc.


Your map looks good!

I actually never thought of a name for the planet, but if you guys throw out some suggestions, I'll consider them and pick one.

And yes, you can change up the format for your almanac data to include more stuff, so long as it's not too different from the others. I value uniformity when it comes to that stuff.

I'm also still working on some situation to add to the index. I got two up last night before I collapsed from a long day. :P Once I get a few more up, I'll start off the IC thread.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Inkdrop
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@The NebulousCan I post yet or should I wait for you to post?
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Nodal Swami
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@The Nebulous One more thing- can we run multiple nations at once? I think it'd be fun to do two drastically different societies at the extremes of the political compass.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Landaus Five-One
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Landaus Five-One The Sadist Insaneous One

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I am somewhat interested in this role play so I might join or I might not. Who knows mostly because of @Nodal Swami shamelessly promoted it on the Chat Channel of RPG.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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@The NebulousCan I post yet or should I wait for you to post?


I'm about to start us off. I got distracted with friends pulling me into a gaming session last night and most of today. :P

@The Nebulous One more thing- can we run multiple nations at once? I think it'd be fun to do two drastically different societies at the extremes of the political compass.


Yes, you can run multiple nations.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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Update: Alright, I've got the IC up and going. Please follow the format that I did my own post in. I'll update the second post in this thread (the one containing the available Situations) with the BBCode.

Also, if any of you would like to submit Situations for me to consider adding to the index, please do! Just PM them to my inbox on here.
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Darkspleen
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I'm pretty interested in this. Are you still accepting?
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by The Nebulous
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I'm pretty interested in this. Are you still accepting?


Yes, we are!
Hidden 8 yrs ago Post by Inkdrop
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I will be posting when I can. On a road trip right now so its difficult to properly compose a post.
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