Rules update 2018

Overview

Over winter of 2017/2018 we carried out a review of the rules from the third year of Empire. As a result of that review we implemented some changes to the published rules. This page summarizes and explains the changes so that players can identify and understand the changes easily.

We try to include a section after each rules update to explain the reasoning behind the change.

Arcane Projections

We are changing the time-scale required to create an arcane projection. Rather than being something a character does over night, it will become something that takes several weeks of study and experimentation to complete. As such, players will only be able to submit arcane projections as part of their downtime. This will give us several weeks to process them rather than a handful of hours each event. Players will receive their successful arcane projections in their player packs at the start of the event, or a more detailed explanation of why their attempt to make an arcane projection has been unsuccessful.

This change will be implemented after the first event of 2018. The current system will operate up to and throughout the first event. But it will not be possible to submit a request for an arcane projection and receive a response at the same event. From the Spring Equinox (event 2) onwards, players will be able to submit arcane projections at the event - or in downtime - as they do now - but they will not receive the response until the start of the next event.

Reasoning

The ritual system in Empire is designed to be a toolbox to allow characters to achieve various goals - be they economic, military, or political. As such each ritual is carefully play balanced against the wider framework to try and ensure that it has the appropriate realm and magnitude. Of course no process is perfect, and occasionally we alter rituals when it is clear that there a mistake has been made. But the reason we make these changes is because it is so important for the framework to be as robust as we can make it.

When we created the game we envisaged that players might create new ritual magic effects on the fly in response to plot developments. In practice this approach did not work - the underlying ethos of Empire just does not lend itself to creating a plot which is then solved by casting an appropriate ritual. Over the five years the game has been running the number of spontaneous rituals successfully used in response to ongoing plots has been small.

Instead, the majority of players who made frequent use of spontaneous rituals were looking to investigate the metaphysics of the Empire world, to better understand the limits of magic in the game. Unfortunately any arcane projection of this kind still has to be play-balanced against every other ritual in the system, a job that is particularly laborious the more conceptual and novel the ritual is. Although it was probably obvious in hindsight - we hadn't expected so many spontaneous magic rituals to be trying to achieve something completely new and we struggled to cope with the ensuring workload.

As a result of that challenge, three years ago we switched to the current system where players submit requests for arcane projections and then receive the response the next day in most cases. This approach worked, just, for the number of players that we had then - and so we have continued to operate that system ever since. It was still challenging, taking many hours to complete the requests each night, but for the most part we were able to meed the demand.

We were really pleased that the game grew in size rather dramatically last year - with the average number of players rising from over thirteen hundred at the start of the year to well over sixteen hundred by the end of the year. This growth is great for the game - new players are full of enthusiasm and it gives us more money to invest to improve Empire. The huge rise in player numbers was the reason we were able to buy the spectacular land sharks used in the final battle in 2017.

Sadly, the one downside of that growth is that every additional player means more magicians playing the game and more mana available - which means that the number of arcane projections submitted scales roughly with the number of players. For example, at the last event we have roughly one hundred arcane projections submitted over the course of the event. Even if it took only five minutes to look over each one that would be more than eight hours of every event spent doing nothing other than processing arcane projections - and it often takes significantly longer than five minutes to evaluate an arcane projection.

We realized that we were struggling to cope with the increased demand at the end of the year; we were making more errors, our response to failed requests were becoming less detailed and more requests were missing the next day deadline. It was clear that we were operating right at the limits of our capacity and any further increase in player numbers would jeopardize the whole arcane projection system.

We considered a couple of other options, but in each case we would have been forced to compromise one of the core design elements of the arcane projection - that any magician with ten mana could attempt one. Thus, we rejected options that meant limiting the number of arcane projections that could be submitted or the number of characters that could submit them. We appreciate that most players will always prefer to be able to create an arcane projection as quickly as possible, but ensuring that anyone with the skills and mana can submit an arcane projection meant that we have had to compromise over the speed of response.

IC Reasoning

The delay in creating arcane projections is believed to be a consequence of a recent conjunction. Some magicians point to an ongoing series of disruptions in the skein of magic represented by multiple conjunctions and the recent chaos involving the Phoenix, a constellation that some say has a close association with the creation of arcane projections (and magical inspiration in general). Whatever the precise cause, the result is that arcane projections have become considerably more difficult to create - meaning magicians have to spend days or even weeks to create one where before it might have be possible in a single day.

Senate Session

We have updated the rules for the Senate session to make clear that civil servants are allowed to be present during the session and are allowed to speak. This has been working practice since the game began, but the published rules did not make this clear. We've amended the rules to ensure that civil servants are subject to the same need to wait for authorization by the Speaker as the PCs.

Reasoning

The civil service are NPCs whose job is to help run the game for the benefit of the PCs. They provide the players with rulings on what the law says, what commissions will cost, how long they will take to build and so on. In effect they are something akin to in-character referees - they are characters providing information on the rules and laws of the Empire world, but the information they are giving out is ultimately a ruling on how the game works.

Having them present in the Senate and able to speak to correct mistakes reduces the chances that the players present will act on bad information about the game world. In theory that possibility ought to be present - in reality people act on bad information all the time. In practice it always falls on Profound Decisions to correct that bad information at some point - and more often than not that is using information published on the wiki at the point where players are no longer in-character and roleplaying at an event. Finding out afterwards that the facts that you voted on were simply not true has a very negative impact on the game, as it undermines players confidence in the game and the information provided by us.

Previously we have been somewhat inconsistent in our approach - with some civil servants correcting mistakes by players - but others not. The updated page makes clear when the civil service will speak up (when they are certain that facts known to the civil service are presented incorrectly in the session) and when they will not (if they are not certain or the information is not known to the civil service). In practice this is most likely to be either Gerard La Salle (Graeme Jamieson) who is present in most sessions or Magistrate Abraham (Matt Pennington) who is often present for the last session.