Smid
Junior Chimp
Posts: 6,151
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« on: June 17, 2011, 12:24:04 AM » |
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If I may be so rude as to interupt. I'm not trying to thread-jack or anything, and I'm pretty busy with work, so at this stage I'm not even willing to commit to playing, so feel free to just ignore all of this, it's just a few thoughts I've had.
I think that as the game is focused on the Parliament, the Standing Orders - which dictate the rules by which the Parliament operates - are more important than the actual Constitution. Additionally, as elections will most likely be simulated, the finer details of the electoral method are going to be somewhat less important - so long as the GM knows to make the results somewhat reflective of popular opinion, or create an algorithm that simulates election results. So long as there's sort of an overview to ensure the election results are worked out in a consistent manner, it doesn't particularly matter whether it's FPTP or AV (or PR or anything specifically... I mean, you may want to differentiate between a PR vs Geographic Single Member Electorate model, but if you go with PR, it doesn't really matter if it's PR-STV or D'Hondt, it's more important for the GM to come up with proportionate results that reflect the vote "cast", likewise, if you go with Single Member Electorates, it's more important to look at local areas of political strength for each party, rather than debating the relative virtues of FPTP or AV - unless you do an algorithm to calculate votes in each electorate and then distribute preferences).
I've been working a bit on a Parliamentary Electoral Simulation which could probably be adapted. It's a bit different - bicameral, Lower House has single-member electorates using AV, Upper House has multi-member electorates using PR, etc, but I'm happy to try to adapt that if you'd like. Voting intention in that is meant to be a combination of demographic data (using a formula to apportion votes) and a GM possibly nudging the baseline a little, and a slight random element. Anyway, I won't go on about it, since it doesn't relate to this (unless you want me to adapt it).
Regarding the matter of Standing Orders and the Procedures of the House:
I suggest that each Bill has its own thread. This obviously wouldn't work in Atlasia, where there are numerous regional legislatures, plus a national legislature, plus campaign threads and news threads and all sorts of other things, but with only one Parliament conducting business, Bills will probably not be so numerous as to clutter things up. The Parliament will have to decide rules (Standing Orders) as to how long debate will be open - for example, in many parliaments, debate alternates between Government and Opposition, so two speakers from the Government couldn't speak one after the other. This may not work so well here, as it takes time to type a "speech" and it wouldn't be fair to post, only to find someone from your party has beaten you to it, and your speech needs to be pulled. It probably is reasonable, however, to follow another typical rule in Parliaments, that each MP may only speak once on the Bill (minus questions to the Minister in committee stage, or amendments), as this will mean that people may give greater consideration to what they're typing as their speech. It also would prevent debate raging overly long. Debate could then close and a vote taken on the Bill if no speeches had been made during a 24 hour or 72 hour period.
As for votes and things on the floor of the Chamber:
Obviously, with 150 seats in Parliament, there will be a fair number of Non-Player Characters. I would suggest that these could be managed by the GM for leadership votes for each party, but when it comes to votes on legislation on Bills, these could be controlled by the Party Leadership (each party could decide exactly how they wish to handle that, but probably the Leader of that party would just control all of them). This would reflect MPs, who, to paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan "Always voted at their party's call and never thought of thinking for themselves at all..." As the game progresses, some of these NPCs could be broken off from the rest of them, to be controlled by certain MPs within that NPC's party (at the GM's discretion). The GM could favour MPs who make especially good speeches on Bills, who have been involved in the game (sort of as a reward, but really, this shows Parliamentary colleagues over whom they have some degree of influence). This would mean that certain active MPs (players) would have more influence than inactive ones, and that would include leadership ballots. Of course, if a player was a bit of a maverick, who consistently caused headaches for their party leadership and strayed far from the party's ideology, obviously this would be reflected in them losing that influence and the GM would be able to reclaim some of that MP's NPC support (simply being a bit of a maverick probably would more put a cap on how much support/NPCs they could get, but really going against the party is where it could probably start to see their support wane and actually lose NPCs).
Simulated elections and rewarding active players by giving them "influence" over a number of NPCs would help prevent the game from heading down the sign-up-friends-so-you-win-the-party-leadership path.
Happy to chat about it more, but don't particularly want to get into a firey debate over it, I'm really just floating a couple of ideas to see what people think.
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