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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Barastrondo" data-source="post: 5901338" data-attributes="member: 3820">You speak as though there is one powerful group behind all the assassination plots. So far the PCs have (a) foiled one assassination plot in one city, and gotten the person responsible for hiring the assassins sent out on a suicide tour of duty(b) earned the favor of an assassin's guild in another city (the same guild as in the previous city, just a different chapter) by helping them out(c) cashed that favor in in a third city to get in good with the assassins of same said guild(d) prevented another assassination attempt in said third city, contracted by a different and wholly unrelated person and employing rival assassins to the guild the PCs are in good with(e) begun negotiations with assassins of the first guild in a fourth city, to target the different and wholly unrelated person from City Three who is cut off from his House resources and causing trouble.These are just the assassin-related subplots. All sorts of other trouble is quite separate.In the meantime, the PCs have benefited from the fact that most of them are expensive targets -- it costs a lot to assassinate a House Sespech necromancer, particularly if you want all of her well-connected friends gone as well -- and that they tend to financially ruin their opposition as part of their meddling. It might change when they start swinging above their pay grade. Of course, their opponents can always afford cheap assassins instead of the good stuff -- but in a swashbuckler game, a plausible simulation of a cheap assassin attempt is ideal in ways it wouldn't be for a "The Guy With The Bigger Pocketbook Wins" scenario. Ha ha, yep! That's about how D&D games tend to run. Did your fight club involved trained apes? (Mine involved trained apes. You get a gorilla in gladiator armor miniature painted, you look for excuses to use it.) There's some level of "the easiest way to deal with certain problems is just kill the antagonist" in any D&D game, but really, in an intrigue-laden swashbuckler, I find that it's very satisfying when it's not the case. You could kill all the members of the aspiring Sorcerous House, maybe, but that would infuriate their Prince patron -- so you need to catch them in the act. You could kill the bastard who nearly started a civil war -- but that's the father of one character's fiancee, and one of the group is very concerned about the ramifications of kinslaying. When both sides have powerful allies, it plays out more like a chess game where you try to set the other guys up where you can kill them without the ramifications being worse than just having them alive. I very much enjoy this style of play. It's the sort of thing that sometimes could stand relationship maps to keep track of who's in league with whom and can act freely against whom: but a lot of fun for us.Have you read Scaramouche? Princess Bride? Count of Monte Cristo? Phoenix Guards? Locke Lamora? All of these things lie within the yawning excluded middle between No Danger and You Die, No Save. My game's somewhere in there too.To clarify, one of the more entertaining sequences in The Phoenix Guards is where a variety of escalating assassination attempts are made on the PCs, but they take the form of hiring bandits and the like in order to make it look "accidental" and not like an outright assassination. These play out in grand fashion, with the protagonists managing to avoid or deal with increasingly dangerous odds. Within the political context of the book, these attempts make sense -- it's how things are done if you don't want to expose your hand to the powerful forces that you're trying to undermine -- and they also have the benefit of being mightily entertaining. Ambuscades make for fantastic scenes.If the PCs were the only thing a villain organization had to worry about, yeah, things might play out pretty differently. But the interesting thing about an intrigue-heavy setting is that you have full license to create villains who are concerned with their plots against other powerful entities (the Crown, a prince, a rival House, etc.) at the point where the PCs get involved. It's kind of like Yojimbo or its derivatives: the PCs are the catalyst that takes an existing struggle and explodes it one way or the other. Not that there's anything wrong with villain organizations that are in control of every aspect of their function, and have nothing to worry about but the PCs -- but I find them kinda dull by compare, personally.</blockquote>

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