febas <\/em>point<\/strong> \u2013 a measure of the reputation of a king, represented in our game as the \u201chit points\u2019 of a player. This would account for, in an abstract manner, the personal and dynastic cost of leaving a hostage to die.<\/p>\n\n\n\nMy idea was that the free play scenario encouraged emergent gameplay, nudging players to challenge history such as it happened. Sabotaging your own coalition? Turning coat three times in a roll? Appealing to \u201canarchy\u201d and declaring war against the whole map? Everything was possible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In practice, however, this turned the game so confusing that it defeated its very purpose for existing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Without alliances at the beginning of the session, no player had any reason to take part in a war. And if no one waged war on anyone else, players had little to do other than sitting on their hands and asking while they decided to play Vinicius\u2019 games instead of doing something productive with their lives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Even when people forced themselves to take action, the result was disappointing. People would offer alliances to their friends, reproducing the \u201ccliques\u201d that united them in real life. Given that these alliances were negotiated sequentially, there was also an implicit pressure to join the coalition with more players. After all, why would you ally yourself with the underdog if your enemy had 3\/4 of the players in their hand?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was also a historical issue. Marriages, fosterages and hostages were political relationships too complex to be simplified to a single mechanic. In the way we had implemented it, the game left the impression that medieval kings could make the alliances they wanted, whenever they wanted. Which couldn\u2019t be farther from reality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The historical <\/strong>setting was more focused, but had its own share of problems. Since the game counted with only a handful of factions, it wasn\u2019t as if there was a great variety of outcomes one could reach after the dice started to roll.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIt didn\u2019t take long for our players to find an \u201coptimal solution\u201d that made every match go down the exact same path.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
… to complicate them<\/strong> once again<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nI can\u2019t say I wasn\u2019t expecting that outcome. As I said, the whole point of simplifying the rules was to help us see in which ways<\/strong> they needed to be fleshed out.<\/p>\n\n\n\nto see in which points <\/strong>they needed to be complexified.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAnd that\u2019s exactly what we did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My fist solution was to create different starting scenarios, <\/strong>corresponding to the balance of power at different points in the war. It wasn\u2019t an easy task, for, as I\u2019ve already mentioned, the weave of alliances was so complicated \u2013 and the historical sources so confused \u2013 that sometimes it\u2019s impossible to know who was fighting whom.<\/p>\n\n\n\nYet, after a great effort, I managed to settle on seven selected dates: 1277, 1278, 1281, 1284, 1315, 1317 and 1318.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Aside from being well-documented, these scenarios had the advantage of being very different from one another. <\/strong>In 1277 and 1278, for example, one of the O\u2019Brien lineages starts the game in exile. In 1281, the kingdom of Thomond starts partitioned between them. In 1284, the English don\u2019t play at the beginning of the match, reflecting a leave of absence taken by baron Thomas de Clare to take care of his lands in England. Their Irish allies would thus have to learn how to fend for themselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe second solution was to transform hostage taking into its own mechanic. <\/strong>This change was made while we were tweaking the victory conditions, making taking part in the war mandatory. This way, we managed to combine the two things in a manner that seemed satisfactory.<\/p>\n\n\n\nAccording to the new scheme, being allied to <\/strong>a faction meant that to ensure it wins the war is the ally\u2019s victory condition.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nHostages, <\/strong>on the other hand, became \u201ctokens\u201d players give to others \u2013 and that can be \u201csacrificed\u201d in case someone breaks a vow and causes their relatives to be executed. They are also automatically \u201creturned\u201d in case the player that holds them captive is eliminated in combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\nHostages represent different things depending on who surrenders them and who accepts them. Between the O\u2019Brien clans and the English player, they work as a mix between an alliance<\/strong> and a bond of vassalage. <\/strong>To surrender hostages to the English is a statement that an Irish king is willing to rule under their authority \u2013 in exchange for military support.<\/p>\n\n\n\nBetween the O\u2019Briens and the the lesser Gaelic kings, they represent an assurance that the player in question will not mobilize against <\/strong>they who receives the hostages. This represents a type of situation that is very frequently mentioned in the sources of the period. Forced to provide soldiers to a king they did not support, many Irish chiefs opted instead for not taking part in the war and surrendering members of their family as hostages instead. In this way, they weren\u2019t forced to work for the enemy, but also avoided the worst consequences of challenging them (or so they hoped).<\/p>\n\n\n\nResult<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\nNeither of these solutions is perfect. Although the different starting scenarios bring some much needed variety to the game, they do not represent how alliances were formed and dissolved. <\/strong>As I explained above, however, this is a limitation of the sources themselves, since we don\u2019t have much information in this regard \u2013 and that which we have don\u2019t fit in a game with such a limited scope as ours.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOur hostage mechanic, on the other hand, ignores the fact that kings of this period sometimes skirted around these treaties by surrendering unimportant relatives. Our hostages, on the contrary, are always crucial.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Be that as it may, I think we managed to find a nice balance between representing the complexity of the diplomacy at the time and fit it into a game simple enough to be fun. Any criticism this decision may come do provoke is feedback I\u2019ll humbly accept.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As for the rest? If a least one player tells me that playing The Triumphs of Turlough <\/em>made Irish politics seem less confusing to their eyes, I\u2019ll take that as a win.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Quando fazemos um game hist\u00f3rico, certas coisas s\u00e3o dif\u00edceis de acertar porque s\u00e3o complicadas ou abstratas demais para fazer caber em um jogo. J\u00e1 outras s\u00e3o dif\u00edceis porque n\u00e3o parecem fazer o menor sentido. A diplomacia na Irlanda medieval \u00e9 uma delas. Esse \u00e9 um problema que salta aos olhos a qualquer um que se […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":22842,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[580,21],"tags":[702,175,483,589,671],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i2.wp.com\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/20210505-tarlac-diplo-cover-1.jpg?fit=1510%2C1193","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9rUzW-5Wk","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22836"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22845,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22836\/revisions\/22845"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.finisgeekis.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}