D&D 5E How much politics do your campaigns usually have?

[Sunseeker]

Depends, I'm a political scientist, so politics is my native tongue. It's easy for me to write politics into a world and for the world to be functional it must have some politics. If players get involved in the politics that's really up to them. I tend to plot the general course of the game and fill in the details as players reach those portions or show interest in them.

The only game I've designed to be politics heavy is my Drow campaign. I've yet to get enough player buy-in to run it.

On the other hand, I just about broke a DM because he let me play a political character.

I once did the same, one of the few times I've played Lawful Evil too. High-five for poli-sci!

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

There's not really a "usually" for my campaigns as pertains to any particular element, other than that they usually involve adventurers.

How much politics are involved in a given campaign ranges from entirely far off in the background (i.e. there certainly is some form of government somewhere, but no one needs to know anything about it to understand and enjoy the story and game-play of the campaign), all the way to the PCs being the movers & shakers shaping the future of nations if not entire worlds (i.e. the adventures tend to focus on political goals, like establishing trade agreements, staging a coup, and that sort).

The only real tendency that might create an appearance of a "usual case" is that I tend to intentionally juxtapose a campaign with high involvement of politics with a campaign nearly devoid of politics, but that is more a case of me and my group liking striking changes from campaign to campaign rather than more subtle shifts, as it further differentiates the experience of playing in each (meaning it's easier for the player snot to get the events, or their characters, mixed up between campaigns).

 

[Mercule]

I once did the same, one of the few times I've played Lawful Evil too. High-five for poli-sci!

I see a pattern, here. I was playing the scion of a devil lord (not D&D, so not horribly inhuman).

 

[Sunseeker]

I see a pattern, here. I was playing the scion of a devil lord (not D&D, so not horribly inhuman).

I was just a simple wizard who used his adventures to make a name for himself as a hero of the people and then used that popular support to gain land and titles. I leveraged my support to make allies out of what the DM had intended to be enemies (bandits, orcs, you name it) and then blackmailed the existing nobility to help me further my standing. I think I died horribly to a vampire family though (they were well-to-do nobles I think I crossed at some point), I wasn't very combatty, mostly illusions, alterations and such. It's surprisingly easy to blackmail mortals, the immortal undead don't break so easy.

Now my DM doesn't let me play politicians anymore. I still get my politics fix in since I'm the only person who can see the "big picture" in a lot of cases but I'm not really allowed to play politician anymore. Personal power, wealth and such are kosher, but he puts a cap on how far he'll let me go, or keeps the adventures moving over large areas so I can't settle into amassing power in a single kingdom.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It varies from campaign to campaign, but I've found that my gaming group tends not to care very much about political machinations and schemes. More often than not, someone decides on a Gordian Knot solution with a battle axe+1.

 

[The Crimson Binome]

In my recent campaign, most of the major nations were theocratic, since the gods were the source of magic. There was a significant point where one nation was turning against their chief deity, in favor of newly-discovered arcane magic, but the heroes were able to step in and fix things before that got too far out of hand.

 

[Mallus]

Back in the day when I ran 2e, politics was main focus of the campaign. You could have called it "The Post-Colonial Religious Diplomat Chronicles", although we didn't at the time.

Nowadays we have less politics. I mean, in my 5e campaign the PCs are currently involved in a Communist revolution, have taken control of one district of the campaign's main city, and are trying to set-up their first soviet, but it's mainly a violent caper/farce.

Unless that means it's exactly like politics.

 

[Derren]

So most people seem to either ignore it or make it the center of the campaign.
How about using politics to add flavor to the setting by using "uncommon" political system (elective monarchy, Venice style trading republic, etc)?

 

[Fanaelialae]

The amount and variety of politics is dependent on the campaign setting and group buy in. Some settings favor politics, some don't. Sometimes we feel like getting political, other times we don't.

For example, in the campaign where we played space demons invading a zombie-infested planet, there was unsurprisingly little politics. There was a bit, such as the time our CO was arrested for shielding us when we disobeyed orders (I forget exactly what, but we were doing what needed to be done), just not much.

On the other hand, the recent Underdark campaign I played in was heavily driven by politics. We chose to back a well-positioned trading town run by a council made up primarily of successful merchants appointed by the medusa who was head of the council. One of the PCs earned himself a seat on the council, whereas my character was sometimes called in as a special advisor (they didn't want to give him a seat because of his ties to the thieves' guild). There were a lot of political machinations going on (some of which we failed to unravel, to our own detriment). The local duergar kingdom had trade agreements with a republic of deep gnomes, but the king coveted our trade town. The gnomes had recently made a giant leap forward in technology (which we later learned was salvaged from a crashed alien spacecraft) and the head of the engineers was poised to take the election from the traditionalist head of the wizard college (who was currently in charge). To dissuade the duergar king from attacking our settlement, we stole the plans for the gnomes' new tech and framed the duergar. Later, when we were more concerned about an army of mind flayers heading our way, we forged an alliance with both groups by returning the plans to the gnomes and convincing them that a shadowy group of goblins (who had been up to all sorts of mischief in that area) had stolen the plans and framed the duergar. This is a vast oversimplification of what happened (a theocratic monarchy of humans from the surface was also involved), but doing it all justice would require a novel.

I would say that at least our trade town's council would constitute an "uncommon" form of government. It certainly did add to that town's depth.

 

[Imaculata]

Politics play an important role in my pirate campaign. The players operate as privateers, under the protection of a letter of marque, as bestowed upon them by the Marquis on behalf of the kingdom of St Valenz. St Valenz is at war with the nearby country of Kturgia, and so as long as the pirates only attack Kturgian vessels, they are contributing to the war efforts of St Valenz.

The players have no love for the Kturgians, who commit quite heinous acts of piracy themselves. But they also fear that if the war between those two countries comes to an end, the legitimacy of their piracy could suddenly end as well. The kingdom of St Valenz is their ally as long as they are needed as allies. And after the Marquis was assassinated, it seems they have very few allies left in St Valenz that could protect the freedom of the pirates.

And now the players have gotten their hands on the daughter of the king of St Valenz. A princess who was believed to have been captured by Kturgia, and part of the reason for the war. So they are in a position to return her, and put an end to the war... but do they want the war to end? This is a complex moral conundrum.