Political Intrigue?

coyote6 said:
Do be careful with the layers of intrigue; too many, and the players may just say, "$#(*& it! Kill them all, and take all their stuff!"

Or maybe that's just my group. ;)

No, it is not just your group.

"Political Intrigue" = 1/2 my players go for pizza and beer as thier fighters and barbarians go for ale and whores 'off scene'.
 

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Incidentally, I mentioned Final Fantasy Tactics in my last post as the basis for an ongoing political/espionage campaign.

But, for DMs looking to learn how to set up their first political intrigue campaign in a fantasy world, FFT isn't the game I recommend. I strongly suggest finding a copy of the PS1 game Vandal Hearts 2 (or its script). The gameplay was questionable, but the weaving of a save-the-world plot into an extremely complex and believable backdrop of civil war was absolutely breathtaking.

I can honestly say that I've never seen a better job of giving every single important character an understandable and relevant motive for their actions and reactions in the midst of a very complicated situation. That includes books and movies as well as games. It even had some branching plot points and multiple endings, making it less of a railroad for story's sake than most console RPGs.

VH2 is like Intrigue In Stories 101 - required reading (or playing) for anyone who wants to weave this kind of tale.
 

The best intrigue novels I have read that can help a D&D DM are David Liss' three novels.

A Conspiracy of Paper
A Spectable of Corruption (this one is political and a sequel to the previous)

The Coffee Trader (economic intrigue, no direct relation to the previous two).

Liss has chapter samples on his website.

www.davidliss.com


Another novel that will assist a DM in planning adventures involving any sort of mystery or intrigue is Jeffrey Ford's The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/t...f=sr_1_1/103-8845946-5587046?v=glance&s=books



In my opinion, all four of these books are required reading for DMs looking to improve their campaigns.
 

Political stuff can be fun to add, but you've got to know your group somewhat. I've added political issues to adventures to find out that the group bypassed them and just decided to live with the consequences. I now have a socialist character in my groups party, which I'm very happy about. I've always added political and social issues to the game, but very few times has anyone bit the hooks/took me up on them. Now that will happen more often.

One issue is that you have to be much quicker on your feet as you can't just plan for everything. It's much harder when your players decide to bite that political hook as they often get very suspicious and paranoid.

On the other hand, one session I had a long time ago had PC's being tricked into stealing something from a mansion. The PC's spent the session debating on what to do and it was actually fun. The group was interested in not just fighting, but talking through what to do next.

I do my best to watch the group and get a feel each session. If the group is definitely looking like they need to hack n' slash, I'll try to work as much in as I can when I've got another agenda. I take it to be my job to help them have fun with the session and not just do what I want regardless of their interests. Of course if you're a really good DM, you can make if fun regardless of what the players are feeling, but alas, I'm not that good :p .

Just some thoughts on the mechanics of running political/social based adventures.
 

coyote6 said:
Do be careful with the layers of intrigue; too many, and the players may just say, "$#(*& it! Kill them all, and take all their stuff!"

Or maybe that's just my group. ;)

Or worse, you realize that you have made things a little to complex and most of the PCs have no skills/knowledge/desire to disentangle things.
 

Here's an easily recalled maxim for political intrigue:

"There are neither permanent friends, nor permanent enemies - there are merely permanent interests".

If you wish to intorduce political intrigue into your campaign world, begin by establishing goals for each group/race/culture in your campaign world. Then look at how these goals are best achieved by those groups. You will find it remarkably easy once you begin to look at it this way.
 

Prince of Happiness said:
[cynicism]It means sitting around a table talking about what you're going to do to X's (resources/henchmen/loved ones), and then talk to Y to do it for you, then talk about that. After that you wait for everyone else to talk their way through the same cycle until the DM's attention is back to you and you repeat your previous steps. After the game's over, you slap each other on the backs about what great roleplayers you are.[/cynicism]

Based on my own expiriences, that's actually a very accurate description of roleplaying-heavy political intrigue campaigns. :lol:
 

If there's anything that I've learned from Poratecat's story hour it is that political intrigue need not be used as a means of limiting the oppurtunities PCs have to kill things and take their stuff. You can actually use intrigue as means to set up the sort of over the top action that I like to have included in D&D games. I wish I had an example at hand, but it's getting late over here.
 

The stories I've seen here are fantastic, for the record.

From a D&D perspective, this style of gaming brings up several opportunities and several considerations:

1) Skills become really important, unless the players are fine with their characters being like the hero in "The Perfect Weapon", the not-terribly-bright guy who goes around believing what each important person says and beating the tar out of people, only to later realize that he was lied to and pointed at people's political enemies. In this game, the wizard and fighter are only useful once initiative gets rolling, and that's an endgame kind of scenario. In this game, the rogue and the bard are the two powerhouse classes, the former because of his insane number of skill points and the latter because he's almost as skilled and can, at high levels, cast a spell that alters people's memories.

(My happy happy joy moment as a DM was getting a secret society of paladins to attack the duke because evil monsters that were essentially high-level bards that looked like cockroaches had used Modify Memory on a bunch of peasants in coordinated fashion to make many people remember seeing the duke committing horrific atrocities.)

So, short version: Skills very important. Some players are going to complain that their character is useless because they don't have enough skill points or helpful class skills. This is either a sign that they're playing a character concept that isn't good for this campaign, or a sign that the campaign needs a few more endgame notes for them to feel happy blowing stuff up while the party bard/rogue takes care of the political stuff.

2) More complex skill checks or more innovative use of skill checks can be helpful. As a DM, you really want to have Bluff and Sense Motive nailed down in terms of definitions before you go, here. By the core rules and FAQ, you don't Bluff every time you lie -- a Bluff is an attempt to manipulate someone into following a course of action you desire. It can be made up of several totally truthful statements. A Sense Motive check can determine someone's general personality and can oppose a Bluff check, but it is not a lie detector and should not be used as one, especially in campaigns like this. (Exception: In d20 Modern, the Investigator gets a class ability that lets him turn Sense Motive into a lie detector -- which, to my mind, serves as evidence that it shouldn't ordinarily work like this.)

Unearthed Arcana has some ideas for more complex skill checks, and they're worth looking at. If the DM wants people without Sense Motive or Bluff to feel useful, he can allow things like:

-Using Diplomacy to improve someone's attitude, and then letting the bluffer take over from there. (Good for Clerics and even Paladins, sometimes, who have Diplomacy)
-Using Knowledge skills in place of Sense Motive in some limited cases, to find holes in somebody's story ("He said that he survived his journey in the desert by finding oases, but I've been in that desert, and all the water holes are too salty to drink -- you only survive that desert by cutting off the tops of cactuses. This man was never in that desert.")
-Remembering to let observational skills like Spot and Listen come in handy -- it's nice for the burly ranger that nobody takes seriously in court to feel useful by overhearing a frank conversation between the bad guy and a henchman.
-Allowing other ability scores to modify certain rolls in certain situations, like using Intelligence to modify a Diplomacy check when the Wizard has had ample time to prepare his statement, or using Dexterity to modify a Bluff check when the Ranger is pretending to be badly injured from a rival group's attack.

3) Magic has to be handled carefully. The DM has to decide whether he's going to limit divination spells in his campaign (ie, change the game-world), arbitrarily declare that the bad guy has a plot device that stops divinations from working against him (the Baldur's Gate approach), or use in-game spell mechanics to make the bad guy impervious or well-defended against such divinations (ie, a ring of mind blank or a convoluted-enough plot that asking "Who is the evil culprit" produces an "everybody" answer). In this game, a potion of glibness can be absurdly overpowered as magical items go, and social skill-boosting magical items, while tempting to help out the party Fighter or Wizard, will inevitably find their way into the hands of the rogue and bard, who will then get seriously powerful.

4) Monsters can and should be altered to make use of the intrigue. Skills can and should be swapped out liberally for this world, unless you want the monster to be a force that is acted upon rather than a force that acts upon others. At least in 3.0, there were many outsiders with impressive combat abilities but lousy social skills. In 3.5, a lot of this is corrected, but look at those changes and consider applying them to any creature that you want to be a vital schemer in the big game.

Anyway, not much to add to the story angle -- again, this is marvelous stuff. Just make sure that your players are either ready to play, content to wander around killing whoever their leader tells them to kill, or comfortable being uncomfortable. When I sprang political intrigue on my players after many simple sessions, they got frustrated.

Also, as a DM, you should consider whether you should let the PCs reliably trust anyone. My players got frustrated when they felt that they couldn't trust anybody -- even Mulder and Scully had Skinner to back them up, and just about every time he seemed to be against them, he still had their best interests at heart.
 

(Psi)SeveredHead said:
DnD-style novels aren't much help here.

Try Dune. The first book is the best, but the 2nd and 3rd aren't bad.

Then read The Prince.

I find the best way to do political intrigue is to assign a number of powerful NPCs or NPC groups beleifs (as in "I beleive that a world ruled by priests of the god of culture would be a better place" or "I beleive wizards lie at the root of the problem of demons invading the world") and motivations, resources and weaknesses, and then set them into motion.
 

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