AY! Where to start?

[Averrhoa carambola]

Hola denizens of the world!

I've known about Nation States for a long time, and I made a few nations, but I always lost interest after a while because I didn't realize there was an entire RP aspect to the game! So I know about the mechanics, but I guess I want to know where to start with the forum RPing on this site. I am familiar with RPing online and I'm not worried about how to RP in general, so much as I am wondering how to get into the RP here particularly. There is a lot of history I'm not in here and it's pretty intimidating!

Some questions to lead the discussion are below, but if you have any tips and tricks let me know!


Do you RP as your nation's leader or do you RP as your "nation in general", playing the parts needed as they come? Or is it more like Hetalia (lol)? What kind of situations are people RPing and how relevant are the game mechanics to the RPing aspect (IE, do people directly reference the website for RP material or are they making it up as they go?) How important is you region to RPing? I guess that goes along with the last question but I'm specifically interested in that. How easy it to get into an actual RP session and do people tolerate other players being inactive for swaths of time? Can I expect things to be pretty similar to general forum RPing?

Thanks in advance everyone!

[Phydios]

This is the Gameplay forum, and it is explicitly stated to be not for roleplaying topics. Instead, I will refer you to an excellent post for RP newbies: viewtopic.php?p=30402843#p30402843

[Averrhoa carambola]

Any way I can get this thread moved then? Or should I just post it else where

[Norstham]

Any way I can get this thread moved then? Or should I just post it else where

The mods's will probably and notice soon, and I doubt you'll get warned because you genuinely didn't know, so it's all good, but just look a bit more at where you post.

[Crazy girl]

Towed to a more appropiate forum.

[Impireacht]

- You don't really RP as your whole nation or your leader, just a variety of characters that are important to your nation. This means sometimes you're the leader, sometimes you're an ambassador, sometimes you're a suburban housewife, sometimes you're a faceless soldier filling the front lines for the glory of your nation, it all depends on the RP scenario. Somtimes you're RPing as all of them at once. I've got a whole dramatis personae for my nation in progress if you want to check it out.

- You don't really need to know much of the history yet, or ever. You can just keep track of what is important to your nation; I know what's happened in the 2 wars I've fought, at the confrences and meetings I attended, etc, but I don't have any clue what went down between Uboslaybia and Guguralia in 2006, nor will I ever need to.

- To get into RPing, start with the "National Information and Factbooks" board. Create an embassy program, and begin opening embassies in other nations to increase your diplomatic relations and become somewhat recognized. This could also open up more RP opportunities later. Then, go and answer some "_____ in your nation" style surveys to get a greater understanding of your nation's culture and politics, before you finally begin real RP.

- The NationStates board is usually used for most diplomacy, balls/conferences/meetings, character RPs, etc.

- International incidents is the closest you'll get to RPing your nation as a whole. Here you have your warfare, major diplomacy, natural disasters, and the likes. A few good rules for warfare: don't use WMDs, even if your nation has them, be conservative with your military; most RL countries don't have standing militaries that make up %80 of the population and don't deploy 80,000 main battle tanks when they go to war. Even my military at around 400,000 for a population of 19 million is pushing it, but Impireacht is a very militaristic country, so it's not going to have the same civilian to military ratio and military budget as a nation of comparable size. Applies here the same way it does IRL: Ireland has 9,000,000 people but a tiny military of around 5,000 people if I recall - but Ireland is pretty much the polar opposite of a true militaristic state. Then you take North Korea, which has only twice the population size of Ireland, yet has 1 million active military, because they're incredibly militaristic. So definitely keep that in mind when you build your military.

- Lastly, Global Economics and Trade has pretty obvious uses. I know what my nation exports and what they need to import, and make my trade deals based on that. A particular challenge I've given myself is not to have my nation manufacture RL military equipment, I can buy it secondhand from other nations but that's it. Because of this I find the arms shops on GE&T incredibly useful, as anything I can't purchase I must design myself, and still factor into my military budget anyways. I recommend a similar playstyle, as those who use RL arms are often looked at as bland, and they definitely kill GE&T.

Enjoy the game!