I am a sucker for holiday -themed one shots, but I find myself without anything for labor day.
Joking with my local game group, I suggested we play as goblins, trying to unionize the mine.
But I have no idea what to use for the core mechanics of a game where the goals are not acquisition and conquest.
All I've got so far is a note to maybe repurpose BitD's gang rules for our union. But even that seems like phase two. I want to start at the start; how do you get a bunch of worn out and frightened goblins to act in their collective interest? How do you make an interesting and fun game out of it? How do you keep players coming back when private security hobgoblins are threatening their PC's family?
And this has started a big discussion in my group about the role of race and racism in our games. My thought was to use a full d&d race pallette, then reveal that the races are biologically the same, and the racial attributes are just common cultural prejudice. We all liked the idea for about a minute before it felt too real. And while I trust my players, I fear that some people would get really into it in a way that reveals too much about the player's character (and not just the players's character, if you follow). But if we're not leaning into the fantasy racism, what does the fantasy genre really bring to the table? The only answers we came up with are escapism and union-busting mind flayers.
And, of course, I have (history) books full of horrible things to throw at the PCs.
But the truth is I have never even questioned that all the rpgs I play are about taking stuff and doing violence, and I don't know how to support gameplay where those things are tangential to the characters' goals.
And what goals? My inclination is to let the players set them, but can the same set of rules support both "The Revolution" and "nights and weekends off" as victory conditions?
It shouldn't be very difficult, these links could give you some ideas:
The trade unions of the Middle Ages - People's History Museum: The national museum of democracy
Labor Organizations in Ancient and Medieval Times – Brewminate: A Bold Blend of News and Ideas
Guild | Trade Associations & Their Role in Medieval Europe | Britannica Money
Guilds are very much not unions. Unions are about employees uniting to have a stronger negotiating positions with employers.
Guilds are associations of business owners. Or maybe like a chamber of commerce. Very much not like a union.
Of course, unions as we know them are a product of 19th century, and the guilds became less important.
But in some of unions' characteristics evolved from the guilds, as can be read in Organized labor | Definition, Movement, History, Examples, Unions, & Facts | Britannica Money.
It should be noted that if you want to organize the workers into a strike they need some organization and in medieval era a guild can be a way to do it, or could be other means of self-orgnization, see the links below:
Forming a union in a high fantasy is probably in the uppermost ranks of challenging game concepts. It's something that is inherently rooted in the social realities of 19th and 20th century industrialized economies. I think doing that with goblins would likely make the fantasy world mostly window dressing. What would it add to an industrial story to dress it up in high fantasy imagery?
That being said, perhaps it would be better to approach designing such a game not from starting with typically RPGs as the reference point for creating the basic rules, but instead look at strategy board games? It does not seem like a story that is about dealing with what's right in front of you, one encounter at a time. But one about shifting popular moods and public opinions. I think such a game would have to take place primarily on a more zoomed out level of the world.
Well, I think you're right, the scale is all wrong. We should have been aiming for a simple holiday themed "bad things are happening, party come help" or "party, help us achieve what we cannot alone" adventure.
What we tried didn't work, but we had fun playing with the idea, and I may re-use some parts from it. And, certainly, the fantasy setting was just set dressing, but my players liked it; "we deal with enough real life already". We played the goblin workers a little goofy, and the management as cartoonishly evil. We figured it was about twenty years after some brave adventurers had pacified these lands in the name of Good.
The closest thing to a successful mechanic that we came up with is a kind of graded-rhetoric game. One player would make a pitch to some NPC workers and the rest of us checked off which rhetorical "moves" they used, and which of the workers concerns had been addressed. Moves and unaddressed concerns added bonuses and penalties to a final +CHA die roll vs a difficulty that was based on the number of miners you were talking to. The players picked the difficulty of the group they wanted to talk to, based on limited information (pre-rolled groups of workers on index cards). We agreed on two minutes per conversation before an overseer noticed, and three minutes before someone came to break it up. Of the other four players: 2 were good at the speech game, 2 thought it was fun, 4 liked the overall concept, and all of us thought the mechanic was "interesting."
I think it didn't work for a lot of reasons, and I would never want to run a game around it. But, I think the mechanic could be a fun way to gamify a petition to a captain, monarch or council. Run it like a heist: gather intel (councilors concerns, or logical fallacies that they've fallen for in the past); make a plan to check those boxes (as a group! not making one player do an impromptu speech in an imaginary world!); then run the scene, adding complications on a timer. Definitely don't end on a die roll though, that was an unfun move. When the players are doing so much work it feels totally unfair to leave the result up to chance. Or do the CHA roll at the beginning, and let them decide if they want to push for more challenging goals or risk running over time to check more boxes?
In any case, I have another year before we attempt this again.
