Apocalypse Lawyer
Game idea that sprung from a conversation with @brazenautomaton about nonviolent gameplay. Ideally, it’d be Fallout branded, but that’s not necessary
Most RPGs get nonviolent solutions mostly wrong. You click some dialog options, and if you choose the right sequence, people change their minds. This is sort of like how real conversations work, except all the perception and creativity are the author’s. If they have a third solution that you didn’t see, you can take it; if you have a third solution that they didn’t see, or wanted to exclude for some reason, you can’t suggest it.
And it takes real courage for them to actually replace a boss fight with a dialog option. Being able to talk down Legate Lanius is such an example; in Mass Effect, you can, by convincing your opponent they’ve made a colossal mistake, get them to commit suicide–but that means you skip the first stage of a two-stage boss fight.
But there exist games where nonviolent solutions are the primary gameplay mechanism, rather than a shortcut past it. What would it look like to do a similar thing in a Fallout-like setting?
My answer is from David Friedman: viking sagas.
The purpose of this paper is to examine the legal and political institutions of Iceland from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries. They are of interest for two reasons. First, they are relatively well documented; the sagas were written by people who had lived under that set of institutions[3] and provide a detailed inside view of their workings. Legal conflicts were of great interest to the medieval Icelanders: Njal, the eponymous hero of the most famous of the sagas,[4] is not a warrior but a lawyer–“so skilled in law that no one was considered his equal.” In the action of the sagas, law cases play as central a role as battles.
Fallout is divided into ‘civilization’ and ‘raiders,’ where you can shoot any raider without penalty (and, indeed, are actively rewarded for killing them). But the player is, in some deep sense, the ultimate raider, roving, killing, and stealing more than anyone else. Almost every quest involves making a bunch more corpses, and almost all of those corpses are people that no one will miss.
Imagine a world where everyone has concentric loyalties, and thus are all ‘morally grey’ in a universalist sense. Very few people are secure enough that they won’t steal from a stranger if presented with a good opportunity, and no one will choose to let their brother die instead of a stranger. In order to neutralize bad elements without earning the enmity of everyone else, you need to put them on trial, basically. In order to end feuds without mutual extermination, you collect wergild. Incidentally, that’s how the players gets paid–victimization creates property rights, which NPCs can sell to the PC, as well as rewarding them for doing natural things for a rover like delivering mail. (Imagine that, a courier who actually delivers the mail!)
A ‘quest’ doesn’t look like “there’s a bunch of mirelurks in the watering hole, kill them all,” it looks like “tribe A and tribe B are about to come to blows over their disagreement over the watering hole; can you convince them of a peaceful resolution?” And if you can’t come to a successful peaceful resolution, they’ll fight, and a fight may develop into a feud, and a feud may result in a tribe getting wiped out.
What’s neat about this is that you can procedurally generate these disputes, not just by drawing cards from a “dispute” deck or having them always be the same when the player visits a particular town, but by simulating the game world. People consume food and water and various services; other people provide those services or obtain that food and water. And if you can’t trade, you steal, and if you can’t get along, you fight. Combine with a personality and relationship model, and you have a world where conflicts to settle will arrive as a natural consequence of time moving forward. If there’s not enough water to go around, someone is going to get dehydrated, and they (and their friends and family) are not going to be happy about it.
So anyway, in order for this to work well the conversation model needs to be very well done. My thought is allow the player to basically string together ‘concepts’ according to some rules, trying to make various arguments to sway the opinion of other people around them. (They collect those concepts from people they meet along the way / stories they learn / etc., and can also teach them to others.) Much of the challenge, I suspect, is figuring out what will convince who, especially if there’s a lot of things similar to a jury trial where one’s arguing a case before a council.
Reblogged so I can find this when I remember what this reminds me of. I swear there was some game where you went around learning phrases or something you could use later.
You might be thinking of The Secret Of Monkey Island, where you learn insults and rejoinders to use while swordfighting. (That mechanic is fairly common, though–I mean, in Skyrim you learn phrases you can use later!)
This also has a very nice opportunity for a ‘leveling’ mechanic I haven’t seen anywhere else. You start as a wandering arbiter, and each conflict you resolve increases your legitimacy, which would be tracked numerically, separately for each person. It goes up a lot for the winner of the dispute, regardless. The loser may either gain or lose legitimacy points, depending on the nature of the resolution and your solution to the dispute. ‘Just’ solutions in the eyes of the loser will gain a small amount of legitimacy (smaller than the winner), but strongarm tactics or deception will weaken your position. Then, everyone connected to the aggrieved parties on the social network will also gain or lose a portion of that legitimacy number. If the solution is mutually satisfactory, you gain legitimacy with everybody, but less than you would with a clear winner.
Aside from gatekeeping more difficult quests, legitimacy has the important role of allowing you to propose elements of a treaty/ system of laws- these are the rough equivalent of player perks. Each law requires a given amount of legitimacy with you to be active, and each is ranked- the more influence you have with a person, the more laws they will follow, in the priority order you set. They can do all sorts of things- regulate commerce, (dis)incentivize militarization, grant the player access to locked safes and terminals (alternative to a lock pick skill), even require people to be more polite.
So basically, the player is gradually building a social contract.
This has a few immediate consequences that I think are neat. First, the player has to decide whether to go ‘deep’ or ‘wide’ in legitimacy. That is, do you prioritize the interests of a small group of people, and be able to exert a lot of influence over the behavior of that tribe? Or do you keep a more even approach, working for a small number of more universal laws?
Second, it incentivizes corruption by the player. If an important person (a mayor, a merchant prince, or just someone with a lot of friends) calls for your services, an influence gain with that person could be incredibly important. You can get this bump by throwing the trial their way regardless of circumstances, but at the expense of a)perpetrating an injustice and b)lots of influence lost with others, especially if you’re obvious about it.
Yep!
I think something like the Icelandic system of law–where you have the godi / alderman / elder / whatever as a contractural representative of a congregation / group, and the country’s laws determined by all of them voting–makes sense, and is a thing the player should have access to and potentially participate in. If you want to settle down, you can be elected head of some group. Being the Lawspeaker, charged with memorizing all the laws as acting as, essentially, Supreme Court Justice, seems like a great brass ring to reach for.
How much of that should already exist when the player shows up seems uncertain. Probably any group of two or more people has a senior member, or it’s not really a “group.” But all of, say, post-apocalyptic California regularly meeting to decide on laws seems much too civilized for the start. More likely you have some existing leagues–maybe the NCR equivalent is make up of ~eight ‘congregations,’ each of which has a representative, and the league has a president (which is probably a rotating post among the representatives). But getting the NCR and the adjacent ghoul trading post to agree on laws and fines (which will dramatically cut down on the border skirmishes between them / increase trade) requires work on the part of the player, and until that happens the player will have to keep straight two different legal systems.
It’s unclear to me if it’s better to start the player off as a wandering arbiter, or have them have actual parents / a backstory / pre-existing relationships, which they have some ability to modify. Both approaches have their benefits.
It also seems like giving the player full access to the economic system opens up gameplay in a big way. If, say, there’s equipment necessary to purify water or a skill to doing right, the player can buy / craft that equipment or learn the skill. An easy way to be very popular is to be a doctor–which requires an immense amount of training to do well.
(This may open up gameplay too much, depending on how things are set up–if the main source of legal trouble is water conflicts, and the player invests all they money they can get their hands on into drilling more wells, then the water conflicts dry up. Presumably, population can expand until something else becomes the next pressure point, but that may be a bit too slow of a scale.)
(via metagorgon)
2 weeks ago · tagged #apocalypse lawyer · 127 notes · source: vaniver · .permalink