Honestly [@Vilageidiotx] raised a strong point here: that as a social activity, NRP is like a quilting circle. Or even a Dungeons and Dragons game. How.many DnD campaigns have actually been finished? How many melt down because of lack of interest and they're just running on so long? Stats or.not: does it really matter since at the end of the day it's dealing with people and the flow with any "game" can be disrupted by a major player in it failing to commit as much as the others and stalling things, or disrupting the pattern, and eventually stalling it all. A stat RP may give the absent player's nation a bit of autonomy if the player drops out and leaves through calculating dice rolls but at this point you might as well also just play a solo Crusader Kings game or Europa Universalis; when someone leaves the entire social framework an NRP is built off of sort of collapses too.

To add something else as well, the entire notion that an RP *must* abide by a universal principle is itself a flawed notion because this too also breaks it by disallowing any and all flexibility or depth; or a lot of it. Because while you can so easily say the goal of politics is dominance I could argue the goal of politics is more self preservation; sometimes at the cost of other's preservation but just as well the cost of one's own state. The thought process that all must be for conquest and Social Darwinian exploitation of the others is a toxic concept that does of course kill all social cohesion between the players. At this point a pen and paper civilization game would be appropriate; but you really should consider moving that to Tabletop Games because you're just playing what's a steadily more nerdier Catan.

So go play Catan, you filthy nerds.

Really the most important thing is less to do with an advantage of statistics vs narrative as a competitive thing but the network of relationships, between players and even between characters. Not just internationally as between two diplomats but internally as some regular Joe to a regular Jane. NRP presents a weirdly unique space where as a nation you control not just the state apparatus but the populace at large. You are presented with an infinite possibility of solo stories or vignettes that can be as equally interesting or as important as the high-level politics and House if Cards activity above. All of this combined in and out of borders converges into what is - to steal a Deleuzean term - rhizomatic.

The Rhizome is in the work of Deleuze and Gutarri a descriptor of the relationships of individuals and/or objects to one another forming a web within society or an organization. An organization can also be described as Arboreal, or stratified and hierarchial like government; but the adsymetric rhizomatic relationships of people and groups can still exist within Arboreal systems. What arises really as the narrative failure in an NRP isn't a percieved lack of structure that statistical RPs get to funnel and channel various interactions but an inability by the same crowd to conceptualize parties beyond the political. Internationally politics can be done on the assymetric scale of two diplomats having a close personal relationship, or two spies even. Likewise the character of relationships between two citizens within or anyone of rank can at the least prove as an illustrative means to explore and conceptualize that nation. And people coming up with a hyper detailed application with all the technical specefics drawn out indicates that the relationships between actors to one another, or actors to the structures and objects around them and how they percieve and react to them has not been fully realized. It's coming up short on the essential character if writing a story, any story. Especially one so big as to go beyond any single character or two.

To percieve of a nation as the completed whole of all its parts with it's contradictions resolved overlooks the organic totality of all of it. A society is never without its contradictions from too to bottom and to percieve the body as completed in its final form only does it a disservice. This lends back to the universal notions of "domination" as being the sole narrative goal and not something broader as "self preservation" though that too is a disservice because a national character is derived from its constant metamorphosis shaped by the failures and successes of its moment. A medieval king may be overthrown if he loses a war and thus fails to pay back the duties he levied on his vassal Lords. An election may change and alter the course of an entire nation with a scandal or major event. In these cases the national character changes immensely l. Fortunately these pertain to what is the higher levels of politics and are not ignored. Perhaps more importantly are the minor details that contribute to the evolution: who the king is married to, who has the most social pull at court, who hates who, who are the donors to someone's campaign, whose advertising, who - unrelated in all things - makes the big announcement that catches them off guard? Who is the inventor who develops the next big thing to be revealed later? What are the internal and external material conditions? What role does the epistemic and ontological world view of the culture map onto the decision process? Are there two kids doing an international motorbike your from China to Ethiopia?

I hate to toot my horn but honestly I think this is where Precipice prevails over a lot. Much if what's written in PoW can be considered small fish topics in other RPs. Where someone might write a war strictly from the command post or the map room to detail the high abstractions of war PoW has war told through the soldier's eye and how it effects themselves and their companions; never as completed objects of their own but perpetually unfinished. Precipice has had a royal sibling travel through a dangerously racist America, when she herself was from America. We've had cops and detectives, bandits and rogues, hash pipes and hookers. Two college kids on a motorbike traveling to Ethiopia. A war traumatized cartoonist. Not all of this contributes to a single plot of "domination" or pushing the world off of the Precipice and into War. But it contributes to its own world and self realization. It's as rhizomatic as Thousand Plateaus and as cut and fold as Naked Lunch. Pick a thread in the RO and follow it, there's not one story but a dozen or more.

Tl;Dr - write better, fggts