What would you want to see from a politcal campaign?

[Gundark]

Thanks for the replies. I've been inspired a lot by "the game of thrones" series. Ideally the PCs belong to a house (or are part of allied smaller houses). I'm thinking of the players owning and maintaining estates eventually (fields of blood sourcebook). As well as mass combat (leading armies, etc).

Oh yeah, and lots of action to go along with the diplomacy.

 

[William drake]

so your DM tells you that your next D&D campaign is going to have a heavy politcal/intrigue feel to it. He/She asks you for input of what you would want to see in the campaign.

What would you want to have happen?

This style gameplay isn't easy. If the DM has to ask, he/she should't be doing one or it may end up feeling like a cheezy soapopra.

 

[Gundark]

This style gameplay isn't easy. If the DM has to ask, he/she should't be doing one or it may end up feeling like a cheezy soapopra.

wow this is an awesome response :\

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

This style gameplay isn't easy. If the DM has to ask, he/she should't be doing one or it may end up feeling like a cheezy soapopra.

Quite the contrrary, I think I a good DM should always be looking out for what the players want and expect out of a campaign.

 

[Gundark]

Quite the contrrary, I think I a good DM should always be looking out for what the players want and expect out of a campaign.

I agree, I think DMs should always "poll" their players on how things are going with campaign.


Also to william, sorry about the semi-snarky answer. I had just posted after an arguement.

 

[CruelSummerLord]

Consider just who your players are, and then try and tailor the political intrigue in a way that might appeal to them. By this, I mean try combining the hack-and-slash bits with the role-playing bits. Some sessions have your players doing one, and others have them doing the other type of activity.

This works especially well when you consider that, up until the Renaissance, many societies, from European nobility to North American First Nations to Japanese samurai culture, often gave people increased prestige and status based on their perceived courage and valor. This can be a great way to introduce the PCs to the political movers and shakers of your campaign-the people are celebrating these heroes for ridding them of the bandit scourge, and so the baron is going to try to get the PCs on his side to increase his own prestige, either by getting them to do various deeds for him, or simply by associating with them.

Your PCs might have to perform grand and heroic deeds to prove their worth and valour, or to otherwise keep it. In the 1E DMG, Gygax speculated that many adventurers might actually be gentry or aristocrats, who inherit very little from their family estates and adventure to gain greater prestige and wealth by doing heroic deeds and winning great treasure. By the same token, when the BBEG, who is himself a major political player, sees that the various deeds the PCs are doing is threatening his own plans, he might use more devious political means to strike at them, which your Role-players will have to deal with. Those players who crave action would still get it when they have to fight all those monsters that keep attacking, either to keep up their reputations, or because they've become so famous and well-known that they're the ones the authorities turn to.

Remember that baron who tried to ingratiate himself with the PCs? Well, in return for greater social prestige and political clout by associating with him or his even sponsoring them as members of the gentry or aristocracy, the PCs will obviously be expected to return the favor by dealing with that band of raiding trolls, or the maurauding band of worgs that are attacking his tenant farmers...

While the PCs who enjoy diplomacy and high intrigue are mucking it up at high society balls and political meetings, the ones who enjoy brawling and fighting are mucking it up fighting rampaging ogres and hill giants out in the hills.

You might like to try reading Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers, for some great ideas on how to combine intrigue with action-even as he intrigues on behalf of the Queen against Cardinal Richelieu, D'Artagnan and his companions fight the English invader and serve loyally in the French armies. They do both political intrigue and hard-nosed fighting, which should keep both types of PCs happy.

 

[Aaron L]

Pretty much all of our games have heavy political elements to them, since back in 1E. Some games are 90-99% in-character discussion.

Dune is a major influence on our gaming tastes, and those are the types of politics we like to play out

Almost all of our characters gain political power as a matter of course when they get high enough level, and by about 10th level our characters are usually political heavy-weights, or on the fast track to becoming one. Diplomacy and espionage play a large part in our games. (not really first-person espionage beyond low levels, though. We don't go out spying ourselves, we send spies to do it.) Wars, assassinations, supporting coups in enemy states, managing kingdoms (taxes, public works and the like), negotiations, forming alliances, forging new kingdoms, succeeding from old kingdoms, etc., are all par for the course in our games.

Going to grand balls and stuff is always great. Hobnobbing with royalty and verbal sparring matches with rivals and enemies are awesome fun.


Heck, in our last game session we had to form an alliance between our Good realms (the Grey Elven kingdom of Islana, the Gnomish realm of Coldiana, and the mixed race confederacy of city-states of the Last Lands) and the Lawful Evil, honorable but wicked military cult of ovak the Destroyer. We needed the strength to oppose Aria, the most powerful kingdom on the continent, formerly a very Lawful Good theocratic monarchy led by Paladins and Clerics of the LG god Ae'ar. The queen of Aria had begun worshiping the CE god Firnok, the god of fire (her family, the House of Jenner, has a long history of falling prey to hunger for power, and wavers between being one of the most powerful forces of Good and one of Evil, and has a strong tendency towards Firnok worship when members fall into Evil) and the theocracy had become infiltrated and corrupted, and the kingdom had begun a war of conquest of all the surrounding countries. So, in order to gain the military might we needed to oppose Aria, we had to get a powerful artifact of the Kovakai (the Sword of Varn, which contained he soul of the Kovakai's greatest general) from it's extraplanar prison, guarded by angels and other celestial beings, and give it to the the Kovakai. We actually had to kill angels. My Neutral Good grey elven Duskblade is still agonizing over that, but it had to be done for the greater good. (Angels can't be bargained with when they've been given a mission by Ae'ar himself; they do what they're told.) We then fought a war (using the War Machine rules from the Basic set) and trounced 7 of Aria's legions.

We are now going off to find the Summoner, the most powerful and feared human Wizard alive, (and another Jenner, the queen of Aria's uncle, who has at times been a force for Evil and servant of Firnok himself, but is normally Chaotic Good when he isn't lusting after power) and are gearing up for an expedition across the planes to find him (our setting, Camathria, has it's own custom cosmology, and it's going to take a lot of digging to find him, although we have a good lead in the extraplanar Grey Elven Duchy of Islana, which relocated to a demi-plane in the Astral after the ancient Elven kingdom of Camathria was destroyed several hundred years ago, and which the current Grey Elven kingdom of Islana has seceded from.)

This is all part of a very involved, very complicated, very political game that started in 92, has been going non-stop since then has lasted about 200 years game-time, and has involved about 20 different parties of adventurers and their descendants, and the loss and gain of many players over he years, with a side campaign taking place about 1000 years in an alternate future, and one about 1000 years in the past.

This sort of dealing with the Devil, lesser of two evils thing is pretty common in the game, and should be an important part of a political game. What is politics but compromise? And sometimes that compromise has to be with Evil.


So I guess I just wanted to point out that for a good political you game should be prepared to get very detailed and complex, have to make choices between the lesser of two evils, take detailed notes and record extensive histories (encourage players to write their own histories; one of our players, who played the Summoner, wrote a long history/autobiography of the character, the Book of Valen [Valen Jenner is his true name] and it has become both an important book of lore in the game world, and an important set of notes, details and history for the players and DM!) and make sure the campaign lasts long enough (both in game-time and real-time) to see that all of the political maneuvering and plans have time to come to fruition.


At least, that's how we've been doing it, and it's lasted for 15 years and been extremely fun the whole time.

 

[Thunderfoot]

One thing to consider is that there are several facets to a political campaign that you not even be considering, for example, the obvious is interaction between public officials and then again to the people. But what about neighboring countries and principalities? Espionage, double dealing, crime (syndicated crime especially), disease, famine, economic collapse, religious upheaval and even a good old fashion peasant uprising can all be elements of a political campaign, especially if these actions are reactionary based upon the decisions of the players.

For example, if the players are member of the nobility and make a decision to even the economic stability of the lower classes, what are their fellow nobles going to think? Likewise, if they uphold the status quo, especially at the cost of a peasants pride, that may be the breaking point and cause a riot or even a revolution. The principal thing to remember while running such a campaign is Newton's 3rd law of Physics...For every action there is an equal but opposing reaction. As an administrator your notes must be very, very good and your record keeping stellar, or else your campaign will either descend into a mucky mire of bad plot or worse still a seething pit of player versus player (or even player versus DM) backbiting that may lead to real world hostilities. I am speaking from experience here, please listen to this advice.