Player Stories

Overview

The player is a single class with several concrete instances. Each instance — a story — answers the same three questions differently:

• What am I trying to do? A one-line goal, stated in the player's own voice. A story's goal is what the rest of the game's verbs are for.
• What can I actually do? A verb set: the actions the story makes available, drawn from the rest of the design docs. A planner can submit a plat; a private equity flipper can't — but the flipper can do things a planner can't.
• Whose hand am I on the table? A position relative to the city's other actors: am I inside the city government, an outside market force, or somewhere in between? This is what makes a story feel like a story and not a job title.

A story is not permanent. The Player Role section in Civics & Politics already notes that a planner who wins a mayoral race becomes a mayor for a term and reverts when the term ends. Stories work the same way: a player can drift from one to another, run a campaign as a hybrid, or sit on the most dramatic version of one for an entire save. The four stories below are the ones the game is meant to ship with; the table at the bottom is where the next ones go.

Tone matters. Two of the four stories below are written as outright villainy. The game is fine with that — the authoritarian mayor end-game in Civics & Politics already commits to letting the player abolish elections; the Simpsons and the AirBnB-ification stories extend that commitment to the rest of the player-type roster. A run as a cartoon villain is a real campaign, not a debug mode.

The Stories

Developer

“I'm planning a new subdivision.”

The closest thing to a default story, and the one the rest of the design docs are written against. A developer picks a parcel, draws a plat in the surveyor, commits it, and watches it work its way through the civic review pipeline. The verbs are the surveyor's: draw roads, place parcels, set zone intent, tune density, then submit and wait.

A developer's relationship to the city is inside the planning process and outside the city government. They propose; the council disposes. The developer doesn't set tax rates, doesn't run the mayor's office, doesn't buy neighboring land — they submit plats and live with the city's verdict. If the verdict is consistently no, the developer can run for mayor (see Civics & Politics) or pivot to a different story.

The developer story is also the game's tutorial: it's the only story whose verb set is the full surveying-and-submission loop, with no shortcuts and no back-channels. New players learn the city's machinery by being at its mercy.

Civic Authority

“I'm seizing and razing your homes to make way for a new fancy monorail! (ha ha)”

The player as the government itself. A civic-authority story holds the mayoral office and uses the powers of the office — eminent domain, public-works spending, bond issues, the bully pulpit — to reshape the city in a single signature project. The signature project is the verb: a stadium, a freeway, a transit line, a civic-center plat, anything whose cost dwarfs the normal plat budget and whose path through the city requires the office to wield power against individual property owners.

The voice in the pull-quote is deliberately the Simpsons-monorail voice: an elected official with the power of condemnation, having too much fun with it. The story's dramatic engine is displacement. A signature project that wipes out a settled neighborhood generates the highest controversy score in the civics pipeline, and the citizenry's reaction is a real read on the HUD. A mayor who picks a low-displacement project (a brownfield site, a vacant lot) doesn't get the dramatic engine — the story is at its best when it costs something.

The civic-authority story is the natural lead-in to the authoritarian mayor end-game in Civics & Politics. A first-term mayor who seizes for a monorail is a memorable run; a re-elected mayor who seizes for a monorail and abolishes the next election is the kind of run the game's trailer is built from.

Resident

“I just want to get to work without missing the bus again.”

The player as a single citizen inside the city they've otherwise been building from above. A resident story drops the god's-eye plat tools entirely and hands the player one agent — a home, a job, a commute, and a wallet with a hard balance. The verbs are personal scale: pick a home and a job (subject to availability and commute cost), ride the transit network or drive it, work a shift to earn, pay rent or a mortgage, and spend down a limited budget on the same goods and services the citizen sim already tracks for every other agent.

This is a standalone campaign; it's paired with at least one other human-driven plat-authoring story.

The resident's relationship to the city is inside the simulation, not above it — the first story that makes the player a citizen instead of a citizen's landlord. They have no plat authority and no office; their only formal lever on city government is the same one every other citizen has, a vote. A resident participates directly in council and mayoral elections, and can run for office themselves, which is the story's natural on-ramp into the Civic Authority story — a resident who wins a council seat plays the rest of the term with civic-authority verbs layered on top of their personal ones.

The wallet is the story's dramatic engine, the same way displacement drives Civic Authority and acquisition drives the flipper. A tight budget makes rent increases, transit fare hikes, and job loss legible in a way the top-down economy view never is — the player feels the land value curve as a rent bill, not a heatmap. And because the wallet is tight, the story is also where the game's illicit verbs live: a resident can lie on a permit application, cheat a utility meter, or steal from a neighbor or a business, each with its own detection risk and consequence in the citizen sim's reputation model. These aren't win conditions — they're the resident's version of the villainy the other stories get from institutional power. A resident with no money and no patience for the review queue reaches for the same corrosive shortcuts a flipper reaches for at city scale, just scaled down to one person's life.

Beyond their own wallet and commute, a resident's primary social verb is conversation. A player converses with other residents and civic officials across several distinct motives:

• Education & Onboarding: Direct, timed dialogues with local figures (like the Mayor welcoming a newcomer) that walk the player through foundational city mechanics and their first life choices.
• Data Gathering & Opinion Polling: Conversational pulses and floating thought bubbles (reminiscent of SimCity BuildIt and real-world neighborhood polling) that reveal local sentiment, commute complaints, housing satisfaction, and neighborhood gossip.
• Inspect & Inquire: The micro-scale equivalent of the classic SimCity 4 Query Tool — striking up a chat or querying an individual parcel/citizen to discover their name, workplace, mood, and personal perspective on the city.

Conversations operate on an immutable dialogue tree evaluated by a lightweight, timer-driven state runner with action-gated prompts. Future extensions include branching dialogue choices, voice blurb sound effects, and simultaneous multi-citizen conversation scheduling.

How shall the city grow and change when the player is only a resident?

Let the resident petition, not plat:

Borrow the development hell's "political opposition" hell-state and give the resident a matching lever: a NIMBY/YIMBY petition on a nearby plat already in the review queue. The resident can't submit or withdraw a plat, but they can sign or organize a petition that nudges its controversy score, the same signal a tier and a council vote already read. Growth still happens above the resident's head; they just get a hand on the scale closest to home.

Petitioning presumes something to petition about. Therefore, a resident petitions against the planning queue.

Let the resident's own choices be the demand signal:

The citizen sim already aggregates commute and shopping needs up into the macro sim's RCI demand. A resident who changes jobs, moves home, or stops shopping locally is one visible agent inside that aggregate — the game could surface it directly, e.g. a “your commute just got 12 minutes longer” toast when a nearby plat converts to a use that displaces the resident's own routine. It wouldn't move land value on its own, but it ties the resident's daily loop back to the same macro numbers the other stories manipulate directly.

Private Equity Flipper

“I'm a private equity douche-bro. I've bought all your neighbors' homes and your whole neighborhood is full of Air BnBs now. (mwahaha, evil!)”

A market-pressure story, not a planning story. The flipper doesn't submit plats. The flipper acquires existing built parcels — single-family homes, small multifamily, mixed-use storefronts — converts them to short-term rental use, and watches the surrounding neighborhood's long-term housing stock thin out. The verbs are the macro economy's: bid on parcels, close, re-zone the use class to STR, raise nightly rates, repeat.

The flipper's position relative to the city is outside the government entirely — they have no seat on the council and no veto over anyone else's plats. Their power is the price they can pay. When a flipper has bought a critical share of a neighborhood, the citizenry reacts measurably: long-term residents leave (the citizen count drops, not because the buildings are gone but because the buildings are empty most nights), the land value curve bends (a neighborhood of all AirBnBs has a very different value profile than a neighborhood of residents), and the controversy meter on any plat in the affected area spikes.

The flipper is the most novel of the four stories. The developer and the civic authority are both recognizable from real city- builder tradition; the flipper is the one the design needs to justify. The justification is the same one that justifies the authoritarian mayor: the game's best stories are the ones that model a real-world force on a city, even when the force is corrosive. AirBnB-ification is a real thing that happens to real neighborhoods; a city builder that pretends it doesn't is leaving a tool on the table. The flipper is also the story that most clearly needs a counter-play: a council that can pass a short-term- rental cap, a citizen faction that forms a tenants' association, a competing developer who flips the flips. The counter-play is where most of the design work for this story will land.

Story-to-Doc Map

Each story draws its verbs from a different slice of the design docs. The same city engine powers all three; what changes is which slice of the engine the player gets to push on.

Open Questions

• Whether the story is picked at campaign start, drifted into during play, or both. The Player Role section in Civics & Politics assumes both, but the start-of- campaign selector still needs a concrete UI.
• How much of the city the flipper needs to own before the citizenry's reaction kicks in. A single AirBnB is invisible; a full neighborhood of them is a crisis. The threshold is a tuning constant, not a UI number.
• Whether the developer can pivot to civic authority mid-run by winning a mayoral race, and whether the same is true for the flipper (a flipper who runs for mayor is a different kind of villain than a planner who does).
• The full counter-play for the flipper: a short-term-rental cap as a council ballot measure, a tenants'-association faction that pressures individual flips, and whether a developer can deliberately plat in a flipped neighborhood to push back.
• Whether the civic-authority story should be a separate player type or a temporary mode the other stories can opt into (the latter matches the existing mayoral-term framing in Civics & Politics more cleanly).