GREATREDSPIRIT'S PROFILE

Its tl;dr is one explanation of how RPG governments work is silly. It does have a fair number of assumptions which I never mentioned so that didn't help with what I write when running on low sleep.

Assumptions:
Your average RPG Kingdom/Empire is an autocracy: One person rules all. Nobles and other people with authorative power seem to be in short supply so the most likely government type is an autocracy/despotic monarchy. There's the odd republic with a council here and there, and I think there's a Count in FF12 which is the only nobleman I can name off the top of my head without going into Suikoden territory. The most common government of medieval Europe was Feudal Monarchies (I believe, no source) which isn't possible under autocracies.

The average RPG cities don't have any sort of government or authorative figure. This leads to wondering if 90% of cities are sovereign city-states or subject to a kingdom/empire. If they are all city-states then most of my points are moot (although then they all seem to be ran by anarchy and how the cities are stable or aren't under immediate threat is a mystery) but if they're subjects to a kingdom/empire then the lack of an authorative figure means there isn't anyone to enforce or implement the government's decisions. So these cities are probably largely autonomous (which leads back to the problem of how) from the autocrat's control so the kingdom/empire would be largely decentralized. City follows the autocrat's guiding principles and sends them tax and in return the autocrat defends the city. There's always the Holy Roman Empire way, I believe the members of the HRE were all sovereign while being part of an empire.

The more I think about it the more I believe the correct explanation to how common RPG cities are ran is and is worth just handwaving away as "they work by magic".

There is no infrastructure. There are no roads. There are very few docks. There are an abundance of huge maze-like caves between cities. How kingdoms/empires that span cities like these is beyond me. Communication and transportation between these cities would be slow, inefficient, and very dangerous (especially considering how weak some soldiers are). Transporting taxes from subject to master would be very expensive and considering how autonomous the subjects would be who knows how much tax would even be collected. This probably strengthens that most of the cities are sovereign since most empires would be a rediculous waste of money and manpower.


These assumptions are pretty simple ones. I don't know everything (or even a lot) of how governments run besides simplified versions of the real deal. Someone who has actually studied government systems is far more qualified than I am to talk about this stuff. Its just a bad explanation of how RPG governments work / they don't.

edit:
For my own game, I'm trying to create the world in a believable manner. Kingdoms that could actually exist with the proper levels of infrastructure (like roads between cities) with infrastrucutre proportional to the distance from the frontiers. The various nation-states will have defined political systems with the nessecities available for the player (hopefully enough so at a glance it appears functional without trying to drown the player in ). As a result I already have a mess of characters with little characterization but several of them have almost no role in the plot so I'm going to pretend I can get away with it.

RPG Kingdoms/Empires just have incredibly decentralized autocracies. You have the one castle where the King hangs out and all those other cities are subjects to the King but since the heroes have a monopoly on any sort of transportation and due to the complete lack of any sort of infrastructure the subjects of the empire are pretty much self-autonomous city-states in all but name. They follow general principles of the autocrat like no authorative figure (Feudalism? What's that?) and there's probably some tax but due to the lack of infrastructure, monsters being everywhere, the decentralized system and lack of control, and that the level of guards range from 1/8th to 27 (and are usually only on par with the local monsters) makes it difficult for any tax collection and transportation to take place unhindered. The only thing stopping these almost-city-states from proclaming independence is the capital's 4:1 soldiers:everyfuckingbodyelse ratio and their ability to use plot transportation (or a hidden fleet of ships/airships/flyingdragons).

The reason why this form of government works at all is the same reason why everything else in RPGs video games works the way they do.