Whoever controls this issue selects what happens to the Rheinland.
In my plan, after the game was over you would go to a website or app and enter in all the final choices that were made on these Issues.
It would then spin out an alternate history based on those choices, that would go, ideally, through the end of the 20th century.
There are two approaches I look at to do this. One I called a scenario system. In this, I would write up a series of “short stories” - think of them plot summaries for “What If” episodes. Then, based on the selections of the players, the website would serve up one of these scenarios as the post-game report.
The other option I looked at was a
procedurally generated simulation. Again, you’d enter the players’ choices into a website. It would use those choices to build a ‘state of the world’ model in 1919. Then, it would simulate economic change, political stability, and more, year by year by year.
There are challenges with both. The scenario approach limits the possible result space, and collapses a lot of the decisions. If all the other decisions are the same, except that in one game Rheinland is left with Germany and in the other it is French occupied, that may not make a big enough change to shift it to a different scenario. That would be exacerbated by knowing that I would be limited in the number of different scenarios I could personally write. But maybe that would be enough given the number of times players would play the game.
In the end I chose to work on the second approach, procedural generation, with its shadow of
Foundation and “
psychohistory”. I actually got pretty far on it and developed a model of economic and political instability that led to the coups, revolutions, wars, and the rise and fall of different alliances.
However, it was, in the end, really unsatisfying. One reason was that it was hard to create a narrative that tied everything together. But the main issue was that very small changes in the starting conditions actually led to really huge changes in the end state. There was a healthy batch of dice rolling under the hood - like whether there would be a revolution based on the level of political instability. I did have the starting state deterministically create a random seed, so that if you did exactly the same thing in the game, the simulation played out exactly the same way.
However, there was a huge “
butterfly effect”. If everything was the same but you chose a different Rheinland option, the future history that was created started similar, but rapidly diverged. I had created the mathematically definition of
chaos - small changes in initial conditions led to huge, unpredictable changes in the future.
There was so much variability that it didn’t feel satisfying to try a slightly different input. You felt that you had basically no control over what happened.
The Scenario method had too little variation, and Procedural Generation had way too much. Maybe there was some middle ground where I used Proc Gen, but kept it more on certain rails. But the whole project started to seem pointless.
In the end I gave up on having a Versailles 1919 post-game story. If someone wants to pick up the idea and run with it, that’d be very cool. But it really led me to do some deep thinking about what it means to have an ‘alternate history’. I actually think that the butterfly effect of my Procedural Generation model is way closer to the ‘truth’ of alternate histories (whatever that means). But for our embrace of narrative flow and cause-and-effect it is very unsatisfying.
Designs that allow the players to explore alternate history need to balance these competing factors of keeping players constrained while still giving them a sense of influencing events. It is often a precarious balancing act, particularly as time frames and scopes expand. In
History of the World the same empires will come up at the same times, game after game, for the most part. The Persians will come onto the world stage in Epoch II, the Chola in Epoch V, and the British in Epoch VII. But, of course, the chances of their having been a “British Empire” the way it happened if you rolled back the history clock are basically zero.
But sometimes sacrificing ‘realism’ for gameplay, particularly gameplay that fits player expectations, is the correct way to go.