Amnesy wrote: ↑Fri May 10, 2024 6:44 am
Starting the campaign when elections are called is already too late. Any citizen can call the elections after the grace period, thus a politician-PC should campaign and roll out their RP way ahead of when this is possible.
Include other PCs to run with pamphlets,
Actively interact in contrast to the present settlement leadership,
Strike deals, favors, alliances with factions of influence (even outside the settlement),
Have something to show outside complaints against the current regime; deeds to support PC claims/campaign values.
When elections are called, by the PC or someone else, the politician-PC cranks the effort up.
And those who see 'elections are in progress' and only then start the process, well in my book usually are not suited to win already.
As a personal tip, let the politician-PC be creative, the best settlement leaders are those who generate and bring RP to the whole settlement (think of Katernin or more recently Ginny and the shifts they made to Cordor - how much RP it generated).
I read this and I feel like you have no idea where my op is coming from. I'll do my best to explain it better.
1) There's no way in hell I can advocate a perpetual election by starting a campaign as soon as the last election is over. It's a nightmare for a new leader who is trying to find their footing, even if its a five term chancellor you just lost to it seems a bit sore loser-ish, and the settlement is going to hate you for not accepting your loss and waiting for the next cycle, offsetting any good that may come from going that route.
2) Launching an election, as you pointed out, can be done by everyone that's a citizen. Including the current chancellor. That means that the best strategy with the current system is to keep your intention to run as close to the vest as possible, tossing out your "involving other's" points. When I ran for chancellor as a new player some 5 years ago now, I was given the advice to launch the election during the wee hours because my potential competition played in US evenings. That gave us a twelve-hour head start on random votes before they were even a candidate. We didn't need it to win, thanks to harpers extra votes it was all but guaranteed, but it certainly eliminated any chance my rival could have had of mustering up the randos. This is the part that this thread is trying to eliminate, which leads to three.
3) Logging in to find out the election you have been planning to run in for two or three weeks now has started and voting has been going on for 12 hours is deflating. It's not about winning or losing, there are several factors that relatively ensure the victor every cordorian election, and i will get into that in an add on below. But I know the person who was planning to run definitely had cool campaign ideas and I was working with them and I definitely had cool campaign ideas, and win lose or draw it would have been nice to see that play out. That went out the window with the surprise attack election, because now we are just struggling to put together as many votes as possible from the people we know would support us just so we made a decent show of it. A complete missed opportunity for fun roleplay thanks to the gamey aspect of the system.
As promised, my add-on on why cordorian elections are Fubared. It can really be summed up by two words. EXTRA VOTES. So, you have leadership, which gives you the candidate 2 extra votes. Thats cool, as both sides could have it. Then you have landed nobles who are actually given the title by the chancellor (say what?) that have 2 extra votes each. Then you have the harpers, who don't have extra votes themselves, but can vote in any election. That means that the harper in Cordor who more often than not are part of the existing government can rally all the other harpers to vote for who they want. Slap up a note in the harper base, and you might even get a few rando harpers your harper never interacted with voting with you too. I have no idea what the actual number could be with this, but I think its a conservative estimate to say this can add up to 5-10 more votes at a minimum. That's somewhere between 13 and 18 extra votes if you remove leadership from it since both sides can have it, and cordor gets what? 100 votes total?
And yet somehow, I have to worry about whether or not my casual character roleplays enough in the settlement to justify if I vote for the sake of fairness >_>.
So just to summarize an already long post, if you like the gamey lopsided style of elections, that's a legit position to take. I think it's awful for the game, but you are 100% entitled to your position. But if you are trying to make the case that its fair, I don't see how you can given everything I just laid out.