Game of Thrones-like political backstabbing ?

[silva]

(cross-posted here)

Strangely enough, there hasn't been a great politics/backstabbing TTRPG since [Vampire the Masquerade]. You'd think with as popular as the Game of Thrones TV show is, someone would be totally down to exploit this.

I agree. See, even if we do have some nice games covering the topic*, these look to me more on the niche than on the popular side. Of course I could be wrong about that as getting any precise users stats about rpgs is so difficult, but even then one should expect a boom of sorts given the huge success of Game of Thrones (and, on lesser degree, Crusader Kings 2 ), no ?

Thoughts ?

*Shinobigami, Monsterhearts, Sagas of the Icelanders, Houses of the Blooded, etc.

[TheFlatline]

Also, if you don't want to go full Game of Thrones backstabbing, there's still always the inter and intra-party bickering of The Walking Dead, and Survivor has been on for a bajillion seasons now.

Politicking is culturally relevant. But I've found that it's a jarring tone shift for a lot of RPG players, which I can understand. First, it seems to benefit larger groups of players. Politics got rollicking at around 8 or 9 PCs in our old vampire games. Otherwise it was basically MTP. LARPs seemed to be the best suited to the structure due to their expansive nature when successful. So in your classic 4 players/1 GM game, you get adversarial: The players are a clique/power group, and inside party fuckery is generally considered damaging to the overall game. And even in a game where the GM is up front with encouraging PC conflict, that first time one character fucks another over is a dicey moment that will make or break the game.

So I get it, but we see lots of politicking and backstabbing games in the board game world, so there is an audience that would be down for that. It's just surprising that there hasn't been more of a capitalization on very popular social trends right now to reflect it.

[Prak]

Well, there's this-


I haven't played it, or looked at it, though, so I can't say definitively how good it is, but Sword and Sorcery was White Wolf's imprint for d20 games, so I imagine it's not good.

Apparently there's also this-


Which is by Green Ronin, so is probably at least passable as a game, but I don't know how well it does the politicking.

[TheFlatline]

I have the second one. It's a funky system and an okay looking kingdom simulator.

I read through the D20 version and wish I hadn't.

But both of those were published years before the HBO series came out and blew up. And neither of them particularly are especially conductive to political backstabbing. The ASOIAF RPG has social "combat" rules but they are really... weird.

[Kaelik]

But both of those were published years before the HBO series came out and blew up. And neither of them particularly are especially conductive to political backstabbing. The ASOIAF RPG has social "combat" rules but they are really... weird.

As opposed to the totally workable and not at all weird social combat rules in the system . . .

[angelfromanotherpin]

IME, the political intrigue itch is best scratched by LARPing. Thirty people wheeling and dealing in real time is tough to beat.

[silva]

You know what ? I just came to realize that the kind of political intrigue Vampire proposes is indeed rare to find*, but the kind of interpersonal intrigue seen on TV series these days is not. In fact, it seems to be the new thing in the hobby, as there is a FUCKTON games doing exactly that, and most of them with pretty interesting results.

For example, I was just reading on “Hillfolk”, that game from Robin Laws that kickstarted a couple years back. And oh boy, It does precisely what we are talking about here, and in a pretty interesting /non-moronic “duh social-combat” way. The way it does it is by focusing the game on what is important to the characters, through the establishing during chargen of relationships between chars that put those things into tension. Then, after play begins, it revolves around each player establishing scenes where they resolve those issues in ways that are favorable to them. The system for resolving this is negotiating-based, not using any randomizers as dice or cards, etc. but there are specific rules in place to push forward interests, forcing outcomes, falling back and turtling down, proposing compromises, etc. It looks like poker in a way. Also, there is a token economy in place that the players can manipulate (the loser of each conflict gains 1 token so there is incentive for giving up on certain issues sometimes, and these tokens can be used to other effects as well).



And besides it, there are the aforementioned BearWorld hacks that focus on intrigue like Monsterhearts, Urban Shadows and Sagas of the Icelanders, which use carrots/negotiating tokens similar to Hillfolk; There is also Cortex+ Drama a variant of Cortex focused on interpersonal conflict (I think a variant of it was used for Smallvile and Firefly, but I could be mistaken); the older Houses of the Blooded; and the new Shinobigamk which is all about this (and its brother game of a reality show of death). So, Im now convinced this isn’t an obscure genre at all. Quite the contrary, it’s quite popular.

*one could argue that not even Vampire has found it. By the way, how is the new Chronicles of Darkness in this respect ?

[Fwib]

Re:ASoIaF

I've played the second one, the GM banned me from taking both 'good at using a shield' and 'good at dodging' because it made my character harder to kill.

As a group, we agreed the system seemed somewhat crappy.

[silva]

ASoIaF looks one more of the bazillion games released just to capitalize on the D20 fever, with little care given to the source material.

[Omegonthesane]

ASOIAF's "Intrigue" system uses the same engine as the combat mechanics, but there isn't a concept of positioning and instead of a weapon you wield a debating technique which, in addition to determining your attack stats, determines the results of your victory. There's nothing saying you can't change "weapons" mid-intrigue, so if you took Lascivious and must Seduce as your first "attack" every intrigue you can switch to "thing you actually wanted to accomplish" after# one Seduce based "attack", which still counts for wearing their Will down. Unless you one-shot them with Seduction and manage to end up in bed with the High Sparrow instead of renegotiating your faction's position relative to that of the Faith of the Seven.

I wrote a minmaxing guide for the game over on the Green Ronin forums. Looking back, my rating system for feats benefits and flaws drawbacks was basically useless, and I also missed that played as-written you are meant to get new Destiny Points as a reward separate to XP or by the means of taking Drawbacks at random times to gain new Destiny Points.

(When my group played SIFRP, everyone but me took issue with the very concept of ever, ever, ever losing a Benefit once you'd bought it, even when I pointed out that it was literally the Feats mechanic from D&D and that Retraining had been a thing for over a decade, even when I pointed out that your XP expenditure was far more defining than your Benefit choices, even though they never once gave me a meaningful description of how e.g. the Short Blade Fighter chain was a bit of your combat knowledge that would never go rusty and thus never allow you to respend your Destiny Points on different feats even though you absolutely could by RAW and even though there was absolutely no way for you to lose ranks of Fighting OR specialisation dice in Short Blades, meaning that your actual XP spending could not represent the bit of your skill that could possibly go rusty.

Which especially pissed me off because the Aging rules were basically "have more XP, have fewer Destiny Points before spending them on Benefits, have fewer Benefits, have more Drawbacks" which meant the writers clearly expected you to lose Benefits as you grew older.)

[silva]

So, your conclusion about this "intrigue" system is.. ?

Do you have an example for us to see ? How does it compares to the Hillfolk system above ?

[angelfromanotherpin]

The example I always use when talking about Green Ronin's ASoIaF game is the Anointed benefit.

First off, despite being the 'social recognition for being a knight' trait, it has literally zero knightly ability prerequisites. Second, although the setting is brutally unromantic about such things, it includes some bullshit about how you can draw upon your commitment to the knightly virtues for a 1/day defense boost. Do you have to display any commitment to the knightly virtues? Are the knightly virtues even described anywhere? No and no.

And that kind of lazy, sloppy, incoherent crap is basically everywhere. It's got some more interesting and original material in it than the usual Green Ronin shovelware, but nothing that I would say is any good.

[silva]

Thanks. I was considering getting it just to see. Now I wont waste my time.

[Aryxbez]

To any consolation, PoliteNewb did a quasi-review about the product, and has access to houserules he made for the game. I plan to get it someday, even if just to check out the Noble House rules which are supposed to be pretty good in their details. Otherwise, I do want to roleplay in that setting specifically, but it'd be something I'd play, not run (even if I have the houserules).

FantasyCraft likes to say it do Cloak & Dagger type stuff (even has a setting product one can get for it). While it does have some social mechanics, I can't really say how good any of those are, other than I've heard you need to double the Reputation/Social-based rewards normally get. So that's also something that could be worth checking out?

Silva, even if those games are bad, their parts can be useful to cannabalize for games in general. I think looking at other games than all these *World-hacks, Indies or such, could do you some good. One gets ideas from all kinds of sources, stick to similar ones, and those ideas will get stale. Why that "hillfolk" mention ye just made sounded like you were some dull-actor in a commercial advertising to us to buy it.

[silva]

Silva, even if those games are bad, their parts can be useful to cannabalize for games in general. I think looking at other games than all these *World-hacks, Indies or such, could do you some good. One gets ideas from all kinds of sources, stick to similar ones, and those ideas will get stale.

Thanks for this. You just made me take a step back and read more about the game before dismissing it. And you know what ? I've found this "Intrigue" rules are not so bad in the end. And its House creation rules are really interesting too. The problem, I feel, is that once game begins per se, there seems to be little that you can do with your House and domains. But then its just a quick impression.

Anyway, you are right. While the game as a whole does seem unremarkable, it does have interesting bits that could be put to use elsewhere - even if, in all honesty, Im not seeing why I couldnt just use Pendragon or Burning Wheel or Sagas of the Icelanders, as is, and economize on the headache of porting rules over. Though I could see these bits being useful with games like Gurps,D&D/PF, Runequest, etc.

Why that "hillfolk" mention ye just made sounded like you were some dull-actor in a commercial advertising to us to buy it.

Hehe, sorry. I'm really psyched about it. A negative review would make me more calm right now, specially as my budget has blown already and the temptation to order a copy is strong.

[Lokey]

Isn't the answer any game system?

Probably see poorer results in something like DnD, granted. You'd have to forget a lot of skills and spells exist there, it's too easy to get perfect information by the rules.

It's certainly a lot of work to gm, it's a godawful amount of information to track once the number of active entities becomes more than a handful. (Who's telling which lies, who knows what to what degree, what each entity is willing to do to accomplish goals, what each knows about the current world state, etc...)

I guess some kind of mechanical system + random input is possible (and only track things in relation to the pcs), but no idea what the result would look like.

[silva]

Isn't the answer any game system?

If you use rules just as randomizers, then yes, any system will do. But if you use rules to achieve specific goals and behaviours, then no, its not something that any system can do well, and you will need rules suited specifically for it. Though I admit there is a group of players who think politics and back-stabbing is the kind of thing better "roleplayed out", without any need for rules.

[deaddmwalking]

It is my contention that the type of 'back-stabbing politics' that you see in Game of Thrones is generally incompatible with a traditional RPG where you take the role of a single character. It's not hard to get a group of people to sit around and play an adversarial game (Ticket to Ride), but when you have characters that continue to associate with each other from one session to another, it makes it harder to maintain an adversarial relationship.

For example, if you succeed in having your rival murdered, they will not advance from one session to the other (barring coming back as an undead creature).

Even if 'death' or 'elimination' isn't on the table and you're limited to 'set backs' you have to have a 'win condition' to provide meaning and structure to the game. Take Aggravation for another board game example of this - you can't kill your opponents marbles - you just send them back to their home base - but doing so helps you achieve your win condition (getting your marbles to home first).

To make a game of this style of politics work, you're better off in a more abstract game and/or making this the sole focus. A card game would be more suited to this than a traditional RPG where you get 'draws' that allow you to perform moves with conditions against your opponents. It would also benefit from an 'event deck' that helped drive things.

In fact, there's a game I used to play with my gaming group about nuclear war that pretty much follows that type of pattern (After Googling, the name of the game was Nuclear War).

Abandoning the 'common cause' aspect of most RPGs strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bath water.

[hyzmarca]

It is my contention that the type of 'back-stabbing politics' that you see in Game of Thrones is generally incompatible with a traditional RPG where you take the role of a single character. It's not hard to get a group of people to sit around and play an adversarial game (Ticket to Ride), but when you have characters that continue to associate with each other from one session to another, it makes it harder to maintain an adversarial relationship.

For example, if you succeed in having your rival murdered, they will not advance from one session to the other (barring coming back as an undead creature).

Even if 'death' or 'elimination' isn't on the table and you're limited to 'set backs' you have to have a 'win condition' to provide meaning and structure to the game. Take Aggravation for another board game example of this - you can't kill your opponents marbles - you just send them back to their home base - but doing so helps you achieve your win condition (getting your marbles to home first).

To make a game of this style of politics work, you're better off in a more abstract game and/or making this the sole focus. A card game would be more suited to this than a traditional RPG where you get 'draws' that allow you to perform moves with conditions against your opponents. It would also benefit from an 'event deck' that helped drive things.

In fact, there's a game I used to play with my gaming group about nuclear war that pretty much follows that type of pattern (After Googling, the name of the game was Nuclear War).

Abandoning the 'common cause' aspect of most RPGs strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bath water.

That's what NPCs are for.

You can have a game where the PCs all work for the same faction, or alliance of factions, and have other factions around to backstab.

[sandmann]

It is my contention that the type of 'back-stabbing politics' that you see in Game of Thrones is generally incompatible with a traditional RPG where you take the role of a single character. It's not hard to get a group of people to sit around and play an adversarial game (Ticket to Ride), but when you have characters that continue to associate with each other from one session to another, it makes it harder to maintain an adversarial relationship.

For example, if you succeed in having your rival murdered, they will not advance from one session to the other (barring coming back as an undead creature).

Even if 'death' or 'elimination' isn't on the table and you're limited to 'set backs' you have to have a 'win condition' to provide meaning and structure to the game. Take Aggravation for another board game example of this - you can't kill your opponents marbles - you just send them back to their home base - but doing so helps you achieve your win condition (getting your marbles to home first).

To make a game of this style of politics work, you're better off in a more abstract game and/or making this the sole focus. A card game would be more suited to this than a traditional RPG where you get 'draws' that allow you to perform moves with conditions against your opponents. It would also benefit from an 'event deck' that helped drive things.

In fact, there's a game I used to play with my gaming group about nuclear war that pretty much follows that type of pattern (After Googling, the name of the game was Nuclear War).

Abandoning the 'common cause' aspect of most RPGs strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bath water.

That's what NPCs are for.

You can have a game where the PCs all work for the same faction, or alliance of factions, and have other factions around to backstab.

Or have the players be factions. If my "character" is House Stark, than it's ok if Arya or Robb die, as long as the legacy lives on.

[silva]

That's what NPCs are for.

You can have a game where the PCs all work for the same faction, or alliance of factions, and have other factions around to backstab.

But then its not really a game of intrigue, is it ? The point of such a game, I think, is modeling the kind of fiction seen in series like Firefly, Walking Dead, The 100, Vikings, etc. where there is conflicting loyalties and agendas between the characters, even if they form a group with common objectives. Eliminating intra-group intrigue defeats the very purpose of it.

There are games already doing this with some success (see the ones cited above). What is more rare, I think, is the kind of wide political and intrigue web seen in pieces like Game of Thrones, where there are dozens of characters in half-dozen different factions bickering between themselves.

TheFlatline pulled it off with Vampire but he admitted it was more on his group than the system's rules.

[Rasumichin]

What is more rare, I think, is the kind of wide political and intrigue web seen in pieces like Game of Thrones, where there are dozens of characters in half-dozen different factions bickering between themselves.

What's more important here than the number of characters is the general scale of things. Is it just conflict within a group or are there actual political decisions to be made that go beyond who gets to be president of the anime club?
You may notice that in GoT, entirely personal motivations like revenge or loyalty or faith are driving forces for a very minor number of characters and none of these characters get to call the shots.
Even the High Sparrow doesn't act on faith alone - he acts on turning that faith into a political reality, on toppling the established order and replacing it with a theocracy. There's a clearly defined ressource he fights over. Letting the number of his followers surpass the critical mass needed to go all Tehran 1979 on King's Landing and pull off a successful coup is his win condition. GRRM understands that you do not actually wage war over religion - even if you're a deeply faithful religious leader, you wage war over real-world power grounded in religious zeal as a political ressource.

The characters like Arya or Brienne who truly have entirely personal motivations aren't political actors, they are confounding variables. They may cause massive upheavals due to their personal vendetta or code of honor, but these upheavals are accidental, chaotic and may bear no resemblance whatsoever to what these characters intended.

If you want a game of politics, you basically need something to manage on the macro scale. Rules for economics, mass battles, levying troops, controlling the public opinion, building up infrastructure etc. are an absolute must.
If you don't have these, you have no reason for those dozens of characters to backstab each other in a way that deserves to be called political.
Actual politics always boil down to adjusting or maintaining power differentials.
Therefore, you need to be able to measure these power differentials to define win conditions.