Vilageidiotx

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

I agree. France should be recovered by now economically, and they should have some political clout. It is just that these things need to be weighed with the current balance of power so that Grey's France can grow into the RP organically.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

We never wanted them to not recover. Hell, the entire point of the RP was that the US wasn't involved in the war and it ended differently, we didn't actually mean for Europe to be weak. Like, if I knew in the beginning where it would got and what part I would play, I probably would have picked a European nation to cover the bases.

The impression that they never recovered is incidental, caused by the fact we never got much in the way of consistent European posters. What we have to make up for now is the absence of these European powers in the RP so far. It is difficult for somebody to join and say France was always important, when they have had nothing to do with anything that has happened in the RP so far.

Communists appeared in Europe only after the Russian Revolution, so I have no idea how things shaped out in PoW. In France, the Communist Party seceded from the SFIO (Socialist Party) in 1920. Without the Russian Revolution, it would probably have taken longer.

This is not quite true. There had been a hard-line communist faction in most European countries since Marx, but it had always been in competition with the Social Democrats. All the Russian Revolution did was give the Communists a unified leadership in Europe, which did more harm than good in the end. Moscow's orders often contradicted the political realities of Europe, so the Communist parties were stuck between disobeying Moscow and losing international support, or hamstringing themselves and losing political maneuverability.

In Precipice, Moscow never takes control of the Communist movement in Europe, so they remain more competitive.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

<Snipped quote by Vilageidiotx>

Anarchists too. Unless the Anarchists were a done-deal by the 20th century.

@Dinh AaronMk

Anarchists of that time period are sort of like Communists in the US during the fifties. I mean sure, they were around, but a lot of what people blamed on anarchists were something else entirely. A lot of times they were communists or break-away nationalists.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Vilage, I'd just like to add that during WWI, asides from mutinies in 1917, which were "solved" by higher salaries, a better permissions system, and better FOOD by Pétain, and low-level strikes, French society remained rather stable. The Socialists, who were the only ones who could have caused trouble, were in the government, so even though they were rather unhappy with the war, they couldn't really criticize the government. With the war lasting so long, of course, the situation would have changed, I can imagine. It's probable a more authoritarian regime would have surfaced, lead by Clémenceau, who received emergency powers in 1918. After a few years of that, I can't really tell. We would need to know more about the situation on the front.

@Veoline

Oh yeh, I am aware, Germany faced trouble quicker due to the blockade. But the fact that there were cracks showing in the military shows that the pressure of the war was having an effect. I mean, our version of the war lasts more than twice as long as the real deal.

Also, wouldn't the communists also be a potential threat? They were always a wild card in European politics. I can imagine a potential situation where food shortages and resource depletion causes a desperate population tired of war turning to extremist causes.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

1) What we mean is that the industrial economy of Europe was damaged to the point that it caused a ripple effect in the world economy. Honestly, I don't think the war would remain an unmoving trench war throughout our version of the conflict, since having it last until the mid twenties is pretty extreme. After the Russians withdrew from the war in the real world, the Germans launched an offensive that nearly broke the war for the allies and very well could have ended the entire thing in favor of Germany if it wasn't for US intervention stabilizing the line. At the same time the US entered the war (again in the real world), the French military was plagued with a wave of desertions and mutinies in their military. A year later, the Germans suffered from a string of revolutions that overthrew the Kaiser's government. The point I am trying to make is that the war as we know it couldn't have lasted that long, so there must have been some evolution that changed the nature of the thing. It must have broke out of the trenches at some point, and the damage to the industrial capability of Western Europe would have been hampered.
2) Veo covered this, but it is important to remember that WW2 didn't fix the Great Depression, that was already happening. Rather, WW2 mobilized the economy in the US to a degree it had never been mobilized before and built an industry that made the earlier recovery hard to distinguish from the Depression.
3)
4) I think they would have suffered from an exaggerated version of what the Germans suffered in real life, but political collapse would have been the more dramatic issue. France at the turn of the century was a divided society, and the social strife of such an extended war would have brought those divisions to a head. You're looking at nationalists, republicans, socialists, and catholics all blaming each other for what had happened and fighting for control.

A advanced jump-in roleplay?

I think the problem is that, once you are dedicating that much detail to an RP (you can write a sentence or two in five minutes, but if you are going to get 500+ words it can take you thirty minutes or more. It takes me a few days to write posts most of the time, for instance), you want to make sure everyone involved can keep up with the subject matter, and that means apps.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Sotelism sounds like a deaf person saying "Socialism."

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

That is definitely an option, albeit a bit bland and vanilla. If you want to give it some flair though, you might go for something else.

One option you might shoot for is using the name of a leader with an -ism on the back, like "Stalinism" or "Peronism"

Another option, in the vein of the Juche in North Korea or the Fascists themselves, is to use a single word or phrase (in French) as the name of your movement (which is easy, run a word or phrase through Google Translate and have someone who knows French like Veo check its correctness). For instance, this movement might build up support by declaring themselves the victors of the otherwise indecisive Great War, in which case they become the "Vainqueur" or "Vainqueurist" for victors. Or they might adopt good old fashion Ancien Regime symbolism and combine it was a political message of reconstruction to come up with the "Fleurir" or "Fleurist" for the double meaning to "Bloom", and a reference to the Fleur-de-lis.

We talk about the technical shit all the time this is true, but if you really want to be memorable it is a good idea to do colorful things. Just imagine Precipice as the pulp-magazine version of alternate history, where our gangsters wear horse masks, the largest rebellion in recent African history was lead by a cross dressing anarchist, and the Spanish "Cazadores"(Hunters) are the most well trained fighting force on the field with a tendency to steal trains.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Just a few nitpicky things:

1: Fascism, like I said on the last page, isn't a term you should be using because the word wouldn't have evolved in this timeline. Come up with another term. This being Precipice, we like obscure melodramatic shit. If you are stuck, Veo might have some ideas that the rest of us wouldn't think of.

1 1/2: The loss of colonies is going to be propped up by A: Colonized people getting access to western educations and using their knowledge to better the condition of their people, B: The fact that your government probably won't be able to afford to properly upkeep the colonies, so you will be relying on the locals more and hamstrung when it comes to defending your interests abroad.

2: The depression in France is going to be a problem, but the biggest problem is going to be the massive damage done to the nations infrastructure and industry during the war. The problem you will be facing is the difficulty of rebuilding all of that with very little wealth. I think that, considering our WW1 is unrealistically long, the damage to Germany and France would have been so bad that both nations would have teetered on the edge of national collapse. I mean, the German Empire DID collapse in the real world, so the extended length of war would have caused much much more damage.

3: You know, I am as much a leftist as any modern internet kid who isn't sucking off of Daddy's credit card, but I have to point out that taxing the rich itself does not fix an economy. That is more a question of where a state gets its funds to pay for shit; the wealthy or everyone else, since you always have to pick one.

Precipice of War - We Write Under The Sign Of The Goat

Not to mention the waxing industry.