Can we bring back Counties?

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Jonas
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Jonas »

As a Kildarian I don't want to meddle in the affairs of my colleagues, but I would like to say that I'm not very enthusiast with the idea of merging and splitting when needed. It will not bring more activity and threatens to destroy the culture which has been developed by the former counts. You could better have counties, which get developed via the wiki (or the subforum of baronies) and change the borders of the counties when it's felt necessary. :)
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Shyriath
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Shyriath »

Briefly interrupting the topic:

Scott, look here for the beginning of a moonshot-related contribution.

We now return to your regularly scheduled county debate.

Despite having brought it up, I'm not sure how I actually feel about the question. On the one hand, permanent counties can be an easy path to inflexibility if you let them; but what Jonas said reminds me that it wasn't all that long ago that the possibility of county-destruction for inactivity stirred up some very, very bad feelings, and I'm not sure it's worth going through all that again.
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Erik Mortis
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Erik Mortis »

That's part of the reason I'm not keen on them. They just become monoliths to inactivity and entitlement.

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Scott Alexander
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Scott Alexander »

So what does it hurt you? If you make it so that it goes Machinaria -> Counties -> [specific counties], then you'll never even see any of the forums unless you look for them.

I don't think that every type of activity comes out of a central fixed activity pool, so that any time I spend doing stuff for my county on a forum is time that I don't spend debating in the Landsraad or writing stories about Kaiser Raynor I. If that were true, you'd be justified in restricting counties since it would hurt broader national life.

But I think that the limiting factor is interest levels, and that working on a county builds interest levels in the rest of Shireroth. Anything that makes people think about Shireroth more and makes them more excited about micronationalism is going to trickle up to broader benefits for the rest of the country.

This is one reason why the Duchies with the most developed counties, like Elwynn and Kildare, were also the ones that were most active at the Duchy level. And why Shireroth has always been most active at the national level when it had strong Duchies, as opposed to times like New Feudalism when the Duchies failed and interest in the national government also collapsed.

Tau
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Tau »

As a compromise, rather than giving counties their own subforum, why not preface threads with the county name in them, e.g., "[Hyperborea] Your topic here"? You avoid the clutter and rigidity of county subforums while still making it easily identifiable which threads are for which counties. Those who are interested in particular counties can ignore the threads of other counties. Counties that become inactive will naturally fall to the bottom of the forum.

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Shyriath
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Shyriath »

As a compromise, rather than giving counties their own subforum, why not preface threads with the county name in them, e.g., "[Hyperborea] Your topic here"? You avoid the clutter and rigidity of county subforums while still making it easily identifiable which threads are for which counties.
And it also requires a minimum of effort, which is a nice plus. :-D

Incidentally, another county-related thought occurred to me: One of the other possible pitfalls of permanent counties is geography. You have this duchy, it's already chopped up into counties, many if not most of those counties have a name, a concept, some kind of history behind them, and they already have defined borders on the map. If you want to do something new, start fresh without baggage, then you're basically constrained to either adopting an existing county and doing sweeping changes to it (not always bad, but it can be), or convincing someone with the proper authority to shift boundaries around to allow for a new county.

BUT, it occurs to me that you could invent a very sneaky way around that if you didn't actually have to worry about the borders. The treatment may not be universally applicable; if an area were particularly well-defined by geography or ethnicity or some such (Scott's Lirikoth Syaivene concept, for example, would qualify in both those senses), then some borders might be in order. But for a lot of counties, you could get away with redefining them as being more like spheres of influence. You could say a particular area was the County of X, for example, but exactly where X stopped and turned into Y could be up for interpretation. And if there was a sort of undefined area between counties, particularly an area that no one had paid attention to, then you could just stick another county there.

If you wanted to get really serious with the idea, you could let people expand or strengthen their influence by doing nifty things in and around the county. Creating a new town, or writing up a story or wiki article, or depicting something in art...
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ari
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by ari »

You know, I'm pretty sure that at this point the rule is "don't sweat it". Any restructuring of congovernment to "facilitate" awesome things like people actually taking the time to create cool fiction just falls so far short of the effort of actually doing that creation that most structure gets ignored anyway any time you do something really cool.
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Erik Mortis
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Erik Mortis »

He has a point.

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Shyriath
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Re: Can we bring back Counties?

Post by Shyriath »

Yeah, that he does. So, we just do whatever and don't worry about it unless it causes trouble?
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