In the upcoming fifth season of WorldPowers, the mod team is keen to reemphasise roleplay - both external, internal, and in short-stories, and deemphasise the kind of no-RP powergaming that has plagued previous seasons of WP. This is a noble goal, to be sure, and one that will doubtlessly never be fully achieved, but we must do all we can provide the electorate of this subreddit with the tools they need to take advantage of the new economic climate, so to speak.

In Season 5, **roleplay is mandatory**. How you do roleplay is entirely up to you, and we aren't going to try and impose specific ways of measuring it, but it is your responsibility to flesh out your claim beyond foreign policy and military development. For every government, domestic concerns are just as important as foreign concerns, policy is shaped by the personality and views of the people implementing it, and various things outside of government control will happen and directly impact on the abilities of the government to do anything.

## Internal Roleplay

Internal roleplay consists of various things which can fall under both the [EVENT] and [ROLEPLAY] tags, or the [NEWS] tag of old. What internal roleplay is, broadly, is attempting to flesh out your country as a living entity. None of us well ever be able to simulate the myriad of political and social complexities that even the smallest country has, but that does not mean that we cannot offer some semblance of it.

What you will be doing with internal RP, and the direction that takes, is largely up to you, but it is best used for world-building. Internal RP can range from establishing the various political parties of your state to creating unique evolutions and mutations of your country's culture. Introducing legislation designed at tackling the problems of your nation is internal roleplay, but so too is a post announcing that a crack-team of Smurf terrorists have attacked one of your major cities.

## External Roleplay

External roleplay, on the other hand, defines how your country would act on the international stage. When you get your claim, you should attempt to showcase some kind of knowledge about its position internationally. You would not, for example, see France attacking Germany (unless a large amount of roleplay had developed these nations in differing directions) because France and Germany are extremely closely linked allied states.

You must also remember that you are trying to play - relatively - intelligent and comptent people. Many of the diplomatic moves on WorldPowers in the past simply have made no sense. Your country isn't going to suddenly about-turn and abandon a historic ally for another nation because that third party has sold you arms in the recent past. People on WorldPowers need to understand that ties between nations are not strengthened by how recently they were established, nor do ties really wane if they haven't been built upon recently. Just because you have established defensive ties, a common travel area, and a free trade agreement with country A in recent years, that does not mean that you would be in any way inclined to support them over country B, who you have had these same ties with for 25 years.

## Short stories

This is what most people think of when they traditionally think of roleplaying on WorldPowers. Character-based creative writing pieces on WorldPowers aren't the be-all end-all of RP, and they aren't for everyone, but they can allow you to actually make use of the characters and world you have been fleshing out, so I would suggest people try them.

## Characters

Finally, people need to understand that everything is dependent on the characters that you include in your world. Although we would encourage players to have many characters, with competing motives and interests (and this is one of the cornerstones of internal RP) the most important characters are going to be your heads of state or government.

Every single person reacts to every combination of situations in a unique manner. This is no less true in WP than it is in real life. The views, logic processes, and flaws of your leaders can, in the most extreme cases, be the difference between peace and all-out total war. Look at recent American Presidents, for an example. How would the Cuban Missile Crisis have gone down if Nixon, Reagan, or Obama had handled it? We obviously can't know that, but as the person creating your leaders in this game, you can.

I would like to briefly use an example of three of the major leaders in the history of my Season 4 claim, Geneva - Pierre Soult, Napoleon Dassault, and Laurent Le Foll, and the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Soult's government attempted to handle the crisis by enforcing a no-fly zone and keeping out foreign intervention while they tried to negotiate a peace. This is because Soult was an extremely well-educated and literate man, who was convinced that he was the smartest person in any given room at any given time, and because France and Italy had been kicked out of NATO over their intervention in Cyprus. Soult was entirely convinced that, given enough time, he could diplomatically solve the situation, and he already knew the consequences of not doing so.

Napoleon Dassault, in contrast to this, was primarily an arms dealer and a businessman. Dassault would want to make a deal - to a point - and if that fell through, he would simply force the issue. Dassault had also promised less compromise and more action on the world stage, and wanted to prove that he would live up to election promises, as well as being armed with knowledge of the Arab nuclear programme. He attacked the Arabs and defeated them, before setting up a system whereby they would be entirely reliant on Geneva following reconstruction.

In contrast to both Soult and Dassault, Laurent Le Foll was a man who would have favoured big action and big results, and would have been primarily concerned with showing Genevois strength on the world stage. If Le Foll had been in the place of Soult and Dassault, and had learned about the Arab nuclear programme, he would probably have used it as an excuse to levy massive conventional force against the Middle East (and perhaps tactical nuclear force) before setting up the post-war situation in such a way that the Arabs were more akin to Egypt under Geneva than to the states they ended up being.

These are just three examples of how three characters might differ in given situations. When creating a character, it is your job to figure out their motivations and the way they view the world, and change your own gameplay to react to that. Too often on WP have countries never changed with the governments running them, and too often on WP have countries changed entirely depending on who is running them. Your gameplay should not be static, but it should rarely be entirely fluid. What it should be is a reflection of various different people, with different backgrounds and beliefs, viewing and reacting to the same (or similar) geo-political situations as their predecessors and making adjustments to the course of the country depending on how they think they can improve it.

We may have more forthcoming on characters within Season 5, but until then, consider this a basic introductory post to what we are looking for from Season 5 roleplay.