I’m writing this story about Franz von der Trenck and his pandurs. Von der Trenck was Austrian colonel. So my question is should I put player to be Franz von der Trenck or should player be one of his pandurs. Also what stats to use? Should I put swordfighting and shooting as two skils or one, morality meter of some kind, intimidation (pandurs were known for it), tactics? Also how much should i stick to actual history?
I hope to get some helpfull answers.
P.S. If you have any questions about von der Trenck or pandurs feel free to ask.
It depends on how you want to tackle the story. As observer that takes part of the story or from Franz POV.
Lordy that’s an awful vague question…
Realistically if you’re making a military game, it might be better to play as a lower-ranked soldier, that way you won’t ‘get in the way’ of history by making decisions that alter your own timeline. Plus with these sorts of story-games people like to build and select their own characters so it helps them fit into the story better.
As to historical accuracy, you have specified a particular person at a particular time, so perhaps it would be best to stick as close as possible to history. The details and accuracy of your story might give your story an edge over others. Most stories of a historical bent take a great deal of liberties with their source material, so something more focused and educational might be interesting to look at.
You clearly seem enthused about the time period, so perhaps adding details about the battle-tactics, weapons used and even conditions on and off the field would be an interesting thing to explore.
I can’t specify any stats for your use but the ones you’ve come up with seem like a fairly good place to start. You’ll probably need some sort of health or ‘hardiness’ score to give your character the physical good health necessary to muscle their way through tough situations and avoid illnesses.
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I know absolutely nothing about Von der Trenck and the pandurs, but the idea sounds interesting. I would like it to learn about them through a game.
Von der Trenck was a real person, right? Then it would be better to make him an NPC and make the MC one of the pandurs. This would give the player a lot of freedom to customize the MC without violating historical accuracy. Maybe you could even include an option to make a woman in disguise. It would also be better to have the MC start a common soldier or junior officer than as a colonel, this would allow the player to rise through the ranks as the game proceeds.
I think it would be a good idea to make swordfighting and shooting two different stats. A morality meter is a good idea too. Intimidating would be interesting too, many games have a charisma stat that feels kinda generic, intimidation would be a nice alternative. Tactics would be include leadership, right?
Were the pandurs cavalry or infanry? In the former case it might be good to inclide riding as an own stat.
People would probably like it more if they got to play as Von Der Trenck, although I understand this could lead to decisions that could potentially alter history, so maybe have it based on historical characters but make it clear that this is a parallel universe, and therefore not historical fact.
Also, I understand this would require a lot of coding, but it would be nice if a game like this finally had all the individual skills as stats, musketry, dueling, horsemanship, etc.
So I took a quick look at Franz von der Trenck, and he has a fairly well recorded life. I believe it might be a challenge to make a fully historical story about him whether or not you have the player as him or as one of his soldiers. All of this can be corrected by a bit of artistic license and figuring out alternate historical impact from different actions.
The question would be, how would you handle the reader’s experience as the character if they are in control as the Freiherr, as opposed to one of his pandurs? Would the array of stats involved change and by how much? How in-depth would you be able to go into historical events that you are interested in if you take one POV over the other? Would you allow customization of the character even if they were the Freiherr von der Trenck?
Ultimately, what do you want to get out of the story? Do you want to give our a fairly good historical account or do you just want the setting and be loose with it? If you want to make it possible to get involved in alternate historical paths, then it doesn’t matter what POV you choose, because there’s no “correct” historical path to go down on and the pandur might be just as important as the Freiherr. If you want to stick closer to historical accounts, then you probably should place the POV with the Freiherr. Pandurs change, they won’t be around him or his repeated imprisonments all the time, kind of deviating from the point of your story.
Well first I should learn to code in ChoiceScript. Are there any tutorials on Youtube?
And about placing MC as Trenck or one of pandurs I would go with one of pandurs and ability to gain ranks. But highest rank to achive would be rank of “harambaša” (sergeant).
One more thing about playing as women will not be possible for several reasons.
First reason is that to become a pandur you had to be really tall, over 190 cm.(and they were tested before joining)
Second reason is that women in that time could not become soldiers.(its historical fact)
Third reason is that she would most probably get cought.(pandurs were considered to be savage)
It requires a lot of research, but there is certainly potential in alternate history games. Turtledove has certainly been able to make a career out of telling alt-history stories and there’s no inherent reason why it couldn’t work with interactive fiction as well.
Of course, this comes from someone who got the Darkest Hour game just so he could play the Kaiserreich mod, so take it with a grain of salt.