Seriously, France should be winning but whatevs.
 

change:
1.Byzantines (i stick by my #1!)
2.HRE
3.Denmark

Dobry wieczor, and dzieki for voting!

Gregness, your swap of the HRE into Denmark's position was invalid according to the rules I established. (Denmark had to keep the #2 position you previously assigned it.) Instead, I counted your HRE vote as a swap with Spain for the #3 position, netting HRE one vote. It didn't influence the outcome, at any rate.

Well, it's 1am EST, and Poland's won with 14 votes. Venice was in second place with 13 votes, the HRE came in third with 12 votes and England was stuck at #4 with 11. Assuming no voter fraud (seriously I hope you guys aren't using alts), there's your results.

Again, feel free to correct my math. I'm more or less ambivalent towards the finalists so I won't feel particularly offended if it turns out votes I didn't count result in a Venice, HRE or England victory.

(All my efforts to encourage Noncon and Bob the Mercenary to vote actually didn't influence the results. Not including their apparently gunpoint-induced votes, Poland would have apparently won 12 to England and the HRE's 11.)

Poland will be...interesting. I've never actually finished a game with them, and I know next to nothing about the country's culture or its history, so I'll have to do my research. They have a respectable starting position and good Slavic units, though. And, rewriting history with a smaller power may be fun -- I was worried that an England or an HRE Let's Play could become boring due to their relatively strong starting positions.

Looking back at your voting habits, Poland has another advantage in that it seems to have broad support as a wide majority's second or third favorite choice. It received several #2 and #3 votes. Hopefully, this means less of you will feel disappointed in the results.

Tomorrow I'm going to start the process of assigning roles and writing the first chapter. For now, let me know if you'd be interested in being included as a character in the storyline.

It may be important to specify exactly what this entails. So, here's a synopsis on your characters in this Let's Play:

A fictionalized version of you isn't really you, and I'll treat your character as an independent being who may merely share a couple generic personality traits with you. I'm likely to flesh out the character in a manner that gives him (or her) vices and virtues that don't exactly match your real-life (or even your online) persona. Medieval 2 is also likely to assign your characters arbitrary traits -- positive and negative -- that will influence the narrative. And Medieval 2 is a gruesome game -- filled with violence, covert operations, mayhem, and deceit. The characters will represent the spirit of the game. I won't indulge in blanketed criticism or violate the rules of the board -- there won't be any blanketed insults or deliberate flamebait, I'm not that kind of a writer -- but your character may kill or be killed, and be loved or hated by the people. In fact, decisions made by voters are likely to condemn some to death and others to become virulent tyrants.

That's why I've been pestering a few friends as to whether they'd like to be included before including them -- given the subject matter and the inherent nature of utilizing elements of your NPF personas as characters, it'd be unwise to include individuals without their explicit permission. You have to know what you're getting yourself into, and in this case, your character is a pawn in a story.

I promise to keep things within the realm of PG-13, and generally speaking, as an aspiring novelist I prefer to imply as opposed to present excruciatingly graphic details of beheadings or bedtime misadventures. For that matter, while racism and sexism and homophobia other similar issues were 'big deals' in the real Middle Ages, my version of our Kingdom will be a relatively tolerant place -- where women serve in the armed forces and openly gay individuals can live in peace and where racial minorities are not persecuted. (I wouldn't be particularly interested in ruling an intolerant dictatorship, at any rate...historical accuracy can be damned in that respect.)

Religion is a touchier subject, given the natural emphasis Medieval 2 places on it. I'll choose to navigate around it by simply treating the Catholic Papacy as less a religious institution and more a political one -- and I'll look at the Papacy's effects on our Kingdom less from a perspective of enforcing narrow spiritual belief and more from the perspective of enforcing an ideology as a bureaucratic nation-state. Cardinals and Priests are essential players in MTW2, and we'll be building plenty of churches, but their 'holy work' won't be a focal point of the LP -- for better or for worse, I'm more interested in writing about armies, construction priorities, legal disputes, and matters of royal succession.

But if you have a soft skin -- if, say, the implication that a character named after you was just brutally stabbed by an assassin is something you'd take personally, or the implicit assumption that your character is going to be reinterpreted as a Catholic Slav is something that causes inherent offense -- then it's best not to volunteer yourself. (You're also free to set arbitrary limits as to how I can and cannot write your character -- for example, you can dictate to me that your character cannot fall in love with another forumite or kill another character or do X or Y, and I'll take that into consideration when assigning your character a role in the story. If murder makes your skin crawl, for example, I won't assign you to be an assassin or a military commander.)

I imagine a Mod will take a look at this and tell me what he thinks. (You're also free to tell me what you think, of course.) If this approach is not sufficient, then I don't think an actual novel-style narrative will work. I'd probably kill the idea of a narrative entirely and just transcribe the Let's Play in the traditional 'Should we do X or Y?' method.

The TL;DR version: It's just fiction, it isn't real, and I barely even know most of you so my portrayals of you would not intentionally criticize you. Using your namesakes is a plot device to invest you all to characters in the storyline and make the Let's Play (should I succeed) fun to write and fun to read. If this doesn't sound appealing to you, you can still participate in the Let's Play without 'owning' a character. If you do volunteer your name, just don't be angry with me if Medieval 2 assigns your character traits like "drunkard" or "bloodthirsty" or "promiscuous." Hopefully, we can all laugh about it and not take it too seriously.

I'll take a character.

Sign me up!

That still stands. If we can pick what role we want (and I'm pretty sure you said we could), I'm totally going for the guy who's either going to try to advance your efforts as much as possible, or for the guy who'll use your trust to screw you over. Is it allowed to collaborate with others? Like, another user gets the ruler of russia as their character, could they PM me and ask me to advise you to launch some attack that they're really well prepared for?

Also, I have a fairly tough skin... If I were to get stabbed by an assassin I'd probably see it as a compliment.

Also also, you said you'd need to do research on Poland's culture to properly play them. Does a nation's culture in-game affect gameplay?

I really need to play more spy in TF2.
 

I've never been especially impressed by connections between fictional and real violence - least of all by arguments that the former leads to the latter.

Feel free to assign me to the most awful personality that the game hands you.

I could assign you such a role, though there's no real equivalent in Medieval 2 (so you wouldn't actually appear as an avatar in game, and you'd just essentially be an off-screen character who appears in the chapters.)

The real problem with coordinating with foreign rulers is that those aforementioned rulers would have absolutely no control over the computer AI, which would actually control the behavior of their nations. Personally, I really only planned to ensure one or two of our most dastardly foreign rivals were eventually "led" by NPF characters and it'd be more an in-house joke (fighting against Mod characters or against egregious NPF personalities like Fifthfiend, for example) than anything else. The impact would be more on the storyline, and less on the actual gameplay.

The extent of what you could accomplish is simply giving me bad advice, and deceiving other voters into believing your advice is still worth following. (Alternatively, all the voters could just deliberately sabotage the LP, but that'd just suck.) Just because you've given me bad advice, though, doesn't necessarily mean the AI will take advantage of my errors.

And frankly, if you do intend to betray Poland? Announcing your intent to do so before the LP even started probably wasn't the smartest move. Who's going to follow your advice now? =P

It will have a far greater impact on the chapters I write than the gameplay mechanics, although the Polish do have access to Slav units that play substantially different than their western European or Muslim counterparts. For example, instead of using lances, standard early-period Slavic knights throw spears while reading in circles at an established distance from the enemy, then close in with swords. My understanding is that these units are a bit faster, but not as well armored as their western counterparts, and they do have a ranged attack.

You could give him a family member or General with low loyalty, chivalry and piety. Or possibly a Diplomat.

Also, for my character, I want Poland's first Man of the Hour. Yeah, I know that they're kinda rare but I'm fine with not having a character until one comes along.

Oh come on. I'm treacherous, but I'll always act in my own best interests. If I can't benefit from other ruler's victories I guess I'll have to facilitate your success. And besides, even if I were intending to betray you, it'd be a risk worth taking. My advice isn't all that bad. Just ask Africa's western coastline. (Though admittedly, that was more of a collective idea.)
Besides, I think quite a chunk of my ancestry's polish. My last name is anyway. Let us lead the motherland of my great-great-great-great-great grandfather to victory!

We may not be too strong... or all that big. But eventually we'll bring all the big countries down. There'll be opporunities. They'll get careless. They'll make mistakes. They'll...

*puts on sunglasses*

Forget about poland.