How to make D&D more political?

[Rich Baker]

Hi, Haakon -- Just opining on a topic that caught my interest. Don't mind me!

When I mentioned the idea of a prestigious "office," I was thinking about office in the medieval sense--a post created for a specific purpose by royal authority, usually with significant revenue opportunities. The major noble families would all be trying to figure out how to get one of their scions awarded the title. And my idea of a high councillor in the Council of Lords is that only members of the Council would vote on that, so it's not terribly democratic, really. OTOH, providing players with situations they recognize and understand is helpful, too, and does some of the work for you in presenting politics as a major driver in a story arc.

Rich

Indeed, welcome Rich.

I was trying to form a good reply to your post -- seemed to perhaps imply a "democratic" or consensus style of government that might be too "modern" for many D&D societies -- but then I noticed it was your first post and thought I'd say "welcome" instead.

And then I noticed who you are.

 

[Piratecat]

Interestingly, one of my two current D&D campaigns ("The Merchant Prince") is really political. The PCs are the children and associates of the most powerful spice merchants in the empire. They're movers and shakers, and when the emperor dies and everything goes to hell, their father decides to toss himself into the 5-way civil war that develops for control of the entire land. Doppelgangers assassins, spies, double-agents, political marriages, behind-the-scenes maneuvering; this is the PCs' lives.

It's a 4e game, lvl 17 PCs now, going on for 4.5 years.

 

[Argyle King]

Interestingly, one of my two current D&D campaigns ("The Merchant Prince") is really political. The PCs are the children and associates of the most powerful spice merchants in the empire. They're movers and shakers, and when the emperor dies and everything goes to hell, their father decides to toss himself into the 5-way civil war that develops for control of the entire land. Doppelgangers assassins, spies, double-agents, political marriages, behind-the-scenes maneuvering; this is the PCs' lives.

It's a 4e game, lvl 17 PCs now, going on for 4.5 years.

How do you prevent the PCs from just using brute force?

That was one of the problems I had with 4E when trying to do social encounters. The power level of the PCs was often far more than the world around them, and the players had no qualms about hacking through things. In later games, I discovered some ways around that, but most of my methods required heavily modifying some of how the game worked.

 

[gamerprinter]

For all my published Kaidan adventures, there's always a ton of vying factions, each with their own private agendas, some wanting to work with the PCs, some wanting to work against them, often the PCs not knowing who represents what, and why are they concerned with the PCs in the first place. Often PCs align with one group only to discover they were the wrong party to back. There are lots of social encounters and sometimes combat between faction members. I find it easy to create political hot-beds in D&D games.

 

[Piratecat]

How do you prevent the PCs from just using brute force?

No house rules have been needed. I think there are a few secrets:

1. Every action has consequences, and actions are ripples in a still pond. What you do today affect how people react to you later, and (more importantly) what they do to the people you care about when you aren't around. Think about your local state congressman. If he threatened to beat the crap out of the other politicians every time he wanted a bill passed, politics would be really amusing for a while, but he'd never get what he wanted. Same thing in D&D. Makes the stakes high and not easily attainable.

2. Reward roleplaying. Make sure that the benefits from diplomacy far outweigh what they'd get from killing someone and taking their stuff.

3. Once the PCs earn it, recognize their standing and political importance. Have villains defer to them from reputation alone, possibly trying to ingratiate themselves instead. Have lackeys compete for their attention. Have inn-keepers kick other people out of the best rooms so that the PCs can have them instead. Have people gossip about them, and try to arrange marriages, and present business deals that lead into adventures.

4. Reputations matter. There's no mechanical benefit, but the group wants to be respected in polite society (usually), and that means that a reputation as simple uncouth thugs is embarrassing. Use this to your advantage. A NPC raising an eyebrow and sniffing as they walk past speaks volumes. You can't buy respectability.

5. Give them family who are also important (MORE important?) and whose fortunes, good or bad, affect the PCs as well.

6. Entangle the PCs in the family's troubles. The PCs will have great joy beating up the local tax collector, but the family may still owe several million GP to another rival family, unless the heroes can do something about it.

Johnny, can you give an example of one problem you ran into?

 

[Argyle King]

No house rules have been needed. I think there are a few secrets:

1. Every action has consequences, and actions are ripples in a still pond. What you do today affect how people react to you later, and (more importantly) what they do to the people you care about when you aren't around. Think about your local state congressman. If he threatened to beat the crap out of the other politicians every time he wanted a bill passed, politics would be really amusing for a while, but he'd never get what he wanted. Same thing in D&D. Makes the stakes high and not easily attainable.



Johnny, can you give an example of one problem you ran into?

I quoted #1 because it relates to some of the problems I had. Mainly, the PCs didn't take consequences seriously. They were confident that they could handle themselves in a fight well enough that future consequences weren't often a serious concern. They had the attitude that they were above and beyond the world around them. In a game where I was a player, the GM of the group I was a player in once made the comment that he had mostly given up on social encounters because some of the players too easily turned to violence as an answer.

As I said, I did eventually find ways to fix this for myself in the games I ran, but it took a lot of work. Most of the work revolved around changing how I built solos and elites; I likewise rewrote encounter XP guidelines to better suit the changes I made. I had to do a lot less of that sort of work with later 4E books, but I still had to do some of it. The problem I had was -if I can tie back into the first paragraph- that the PCs actually were above and beyond the world around them. While I realize that's intentional, the power disparity between PCs an the world around them made it difficult to create a world in which the PCs felt threatened and cared about consequences.

A while back, there was a 4E thread in which I gave an example of why I say such things. I created an encounter which took place on a gondola suspended above a pit. The PCs were riding one gondola, a group of enemies was on a second. I fully expected that attacking the gondola's support mechanism would be a valid tactic; what I didn't expect was that the PCs would be able to destroy it so easily; the encounter didn't even last a full round. The numbers that the PCs were able to generate were so far beyond the numbers that the game world was built on (according to the info in the DMG) that it was hard to contain them. In contrast, the numbers that NPCs and monsters would generate struggled to keep up.

How that translates into problems with social encounters is that it became obvious very early on that this was the case. The players were highly aware of their power relative to the world around them. They felt confident enough that they could handle things around them that they mostly did what they wanted to do without regard for the feelings and emotions of the NPCs or the world around them. To be quite honest, a big part of the problem in this regard was attitudes of the players, but I couldn't fully blame them either. If I woke up tomorrow with the power level of Superman, I'd see fit to impose my will on a lot of situations which I'd like to change. It took a lot of work for me to adjust the numbers involved with the game to put things on more even footing so that the PCs would take a king's guards seriously as a deterrent for why they shouldn't just beat what they wanted out of him. The other thing I learned was to largely ignore some of the official encounter building advice; it didn't work for the group I gamed with.

 

[Piratecat]

You'll love the solution to that: subvert expectations. Make the important NPC a minion.

Seriously; he may be brilliant and charismatic and extremely important, the linchpin keeping the church working with the local government working with the thieves guild, but he has 1 hp. When the PCs kill him, people look at them in shock and say "holy crap, you killed Sir Julius." Then they all back away. Before you know it the government is fighting the thieves guild, the church is refusing to help, and all three have decided to discredit, shun, or try to kill the PCs. Then the town falls to a nearby neighbor due to their weakened state, which makes something vulnerable that the PCs care about. All because, unsurprisingly, the important old guy wasn't a combatant.

This isn't an immediate lesson. It needs to roll out slowly over time, and the players need to decide for themselves that occasionally talking to people is better than just killing them. More fun, too.

You can actually use the players' knowledge of their own power to your own advantage. I once had cause to arrest my PCs. The arresting officer was very polite. "Please come with me." "You gonna make us?" "I don't see how I can, but it is the law. I'd like to get this sorted out." Then he asked them to enter the jail cell as a formality, and didn't lock the door. "Err," asked a PC, "aren't you going to lock us in?" The officer turned around. "If I did, couldn't you just break out?" "Err, yes." "Then the lock is a formality. I'll leave the door open. If you want to leave, you will. If you want to do what's right, you'll wait until your counselor arrives. Anyone want a drink?"

You get the idea.

When the PCs are that confident, it's cool to have other people acknowledge and respect that.

 

[haakon1]

Good advice, Mr. Cat. I've done some version of each of these, except the last. I'm a bit shy of "using the character's background against them", since there are so many whines about that here.

No house rules have been needed. I think there are a few secrets:

1. Every action has consequences, and actions are ripples in a still pond. What you do today affect how people react to you later, and (more importantly) what they do to the people you care about when you aren't around.

2. Reward roleplaying.

3. Once the PCs earn it, recognize their standing and political importance.

4. Reputations matter.

5. Give them family who are also important (MORE important?) and whose fortunes, good or bad, affect the PCs as well.

6. Entangle the PCs in the family's troubles.

 

[haakon1]

Most of the work revolved around changing how I built solos and elites...The problem I had was ... the PCs actually were above and beyond the world around them.

I don't use the solution of "ramping up the world to keep up with the PC's". Instead, I use enemies with numbers and cunning. Numbers can often overcome mid-level PC's -- a company of 1st level warriors gets off 100 arrows in the first round, and if you roll them all (as I actually do!), you might come up with a lot of crits. If numbers don't do it, I always like to make comments like "a 1st level commoner with the right poison in the right place can take out anybody".

I don't like the concept of D&D superheroes, so I max it at about 13th level (3.5e rules).

I don't have problems with players "eating the scenery", attacking innocent NPCs, etc., but I suspect every party is different.

 

[Piratecat]

Good advice, Mr. Cat. I've done some version of each of these, except the last. I'm a bit shy of "using the character's background against them", since there are so many whines about that here.

Good thinking, but you may be thinking of something different than what I mean. I'm not referring to a hostage of the week, a "Today is Tuesday so Spider-Man needs to go rescue Aunt May" issue.

Important NPCs should have ambition. I'll argue that ambition should be a major theme in a political adventure. That means that they have their own goals that they're actively seeking. This probably gets them into trouble, and gets them great success, and both may affect the PC.

- a brother gains wealth and respectability by marrying into money, and hires bards to boost the reputation of his rapscallion adventurer sister (the PC)
- a father becomes ensnared in a demonic cult but is so good at managing people that he actually gets control of them, has them kick out the high priest, and starts converting them to good gods. The exiled high priest is so angry he rats them out to the authorities.
- The family needs magical security for an important diplomatic deal about to be consummated.
- The PCs are promised a vacation in the family's seaside mansion if they can find out why the cooks there keep hanging themselves.
- The PC's little sister has become an adventurer herself, and she hasn't returned from a recent expedition. She isn't dead; instead, she's found a gem mine that could make their family rich. The local tribe of homicidal gnomes disagrees. They're in the middle of tense negotiations when the PCs arrive.

That sort of thing. Use NPCs to trigger adventures, not be the helpless cause of them.