ok, I've been looking for something for a while now and I thought this would be good place to ask people. I'm looking for a game that I can make a charecter, build it's personality and abilities, you know, role play for a while. Then move up to a tactical level to have them command units, direct battles, oversee production and deployment, tactical stuff. Then build themselves a reputation, gather a nice band of followers, become a major power, move up to the strategy level.
But I want it to be relitively seemless in transition with the option to move up or down in detial using one coherent system. Oh and the system has to be simple, no pages of charts, one kind of die, minimal book keeping.
I don't just want it for battles either, I want politics, intrigue, espionage, ancient ruins or high technology, the works.
Oh and while i'm at it! I want it to have a mechanic so I can build my own followers, buy my land, upgrade my people and whatnot. So I can have a persistent clan of sorts.
Uhhh... anyone know where I can find a game like that? Anywhere, ever? Or am I just asking for too much?
I don't know, I've played D&D and with some fairly ambitious DMs. Don't get me wrong, a good DM can make build a world and make it sing. But there are two problems.
First, in my experience mind you, most DMs shy away from the higher levels of play like tactics and strategy on grand scale. There is a good reason for this. It tends to eat their life. I would contend that a good DM, that can actually pull off what i'm looking for, not only commits masive amounts of time to doing so, but also has built a custom system for managing it.
Second, the fact that you need a gifted DM to pull this off means that it's not systemized. The mechanics for handling the higher level either don't exist or don't work well enough to make the process systemizable.
A game that systemized a simple way of getting to the higher levels would be able to produce the same results a good DM can, only more reliably and with less time commited.
I agree that D&D has become a fine role playing system. But I can't see it as having systemized a good way to reach the tactical and strategic levels of play.
This isn't D&D's fault. I can think of a lot of games that do strategy incredibly well, same with tactics. D&D does Role Playing. No honor lost in that.