Thanks for the explanation
The problem I have is that it was decided what the game would be, based on a provisional parliament made up of x number of players based solely on the order in which they joined. So they essentially got to decide what the game was going to be. It’s not surprising that an exclusive group ended up designing an exclusive parliament! I don’t mean you’ve done a ‘bad job’, quite the contrary but you can see why it might raise a few eyebrows.
You said that the ‘parliament should be a cluster of active schemers.’ I don’t disagree, but what makes you think those that have signed on here aren’t active schemers? Why else would they have signed up?
So as I mentioned before; you’ve stripped the game of most offices. You’ve established it so that ‘the most committed players lead the narrative’. What is everyone else supposed to do if you’ve left them nothing to do?
If you’ve left them nothing to do, and as Sjoyce says hope that there will be newspapers, pressure groups then you’ll find everyone else essentially ‘rabble rousing’ and doing nothing else. Those in the parliament can essentially ignore that, as there’s no established mechanism for what everyone else does impacting on the parliament. You’re re-creating a situation like Atlasia where a huge proportion of participants are outside of the game. Yet unlike Atlasia there’s not really much else for them to do as of yet. If you’re running a
parliament sim and not a government/elections sim, I think you need to be a lot broader than that.
I think you already have all your parliamentarians already. Parliaments are supposed to have lazy bastards as well as active schemers. It makes sense at least to start out, in having a universal parliament. Then you can cut it back if it grows too large and once everyone gets used to it.