My Online Campaigns, Part 3
The third online campaign was known as "The Great Space Game" (an unofficial but accurate description). It was a grand political, economic, and military campaign set in the same GURPS Space universe with the players taking the roles of the various national leaders. It was ambitious, it was grand in scale, it covered diplomacy, it had conflict, it had role playing.
It was seriously unbalanced.
The game had one huge nation, which I tried to balance by giving it to the most social player (Amanda), and a whole bunch of little empires. The problems started when Amanda tried to reach out to the other players and was snubbed by almost everyone right away. After a few turns of this, she decided that she had a large enough economy and military to do what she wanted without any of the other players. And she was right.
Like I said, it was seriously unbalanced.
It should have been balanced, but the game was set in my campaign universe and things weren't exactly balanced there. What made for a good role playing environment really didn't translate well to a large-scale conflict game.
It was a fun game, even if it only covered a few years of the game's history. It inspired me to make a few changes in the RPG game and brought a little more flavor into the setting. Even though the campaign failed, I still think it was a fun little experiment. For years afterwards I would still have players mention things that happened in the game, or bring up their own ideas on how a game like that should be run. Every once in a while I would spend a night or weekend trying to make a better campaign setting or work up better rule. Although I never quite got it the way I wanted, or ran another game like that again, I still would like to give it a shot someday.
