Making a political game.

[Username17]

So a friend is running an oVampire Dark Ages game and wants me to help him with the political game aspect. The characters are all powerful, so interacting with things through minions is what should be happening most of the time. However, as we know that game doesn't actually handle that sort of thing at all outside the realm of magical teaparty, so we're putting together a set of rules. Essentially writing a new game. Shhh: don't tell the people who demanded that oVampire be played in the first place. If it all works well enough, it's going to get a full writeup for After Sundown.

Anyway, the basic concept is a combination of Ars Magica, Junta, and Jyhad with a little jRPG tactics game shenanigans thrown in. Which is to say that you have Assets, and you send those assets on missions, and those missions normally make them unusable next phase, which means they can't be assigned to intercept an action against you this phase or next. But longer "dispatch missions" can keep an asset out of play for longer. When you commit an asset, you literally put the paper it's on forward, and if the asset is lost, that paper is torn up. When your character does things personally, the character sheet is put forward in the same way to psychologically encourage players to act cautiously and through minions.

Each turn would be either day or night, so it's roughly 12 hour turns. Since the minimum amount of time to be "resting" after acting is one turn, and the characters are vampires who get hefty penalties in the day phases, they would normally act every night. Which emergently requires them to keep minions unused to protect them during the day.

The big issue of course is people. With agents and enemies and bystanders and politics and everything, the number of people involved can be staggering. Indeed, if someone goes to the wooliers guild and starts trying to take it over, the expected cast could increase substantially in a short time. To handle that, there are people decks. These are pies of index cards with stats on the front, and a name on the back. When someone is needed to fill a role, whether it's the captain of the guard or the chief scribe of the judges' guild; a person is drawn from the appropriate deck, their position is written in under their name, and they are placed on the table with their appropriate power structure. It looks like we can get away with two decks: one for thugs, and one for city folk. To account for the fact that a person placed drawn into the silk merchants' guild would presumably have a different skill set to someone drawn into the priesthood, most characters have a "professional rating" which gives them skills relevant to whatever their position happens to be when drawn.

The guild system is based on the Guilds of Florence, which means that there are 21 guilds. But they don't start on the table. What starts on the table are the Duke, the Bishop, the Captain of the army, and the nine Priors. As the players and the plot take actions which draw in other characters, they are drawn as needed. If players successfully investigate characters, they get to see the front of the card. The front of course, has an abbreviated list of abilities and also tells you what they "want." Right now there are four wants: Health, Wealth, Power, and Love (this last one gets rude names sometimes). Any character can be bought for a large enough price, but if you can give them what they want, it is cheaper to recruit them. Obviously, a few characters in the deck can be "ringers" who are werewolves or whatever and far more powerful than the average joe. And it being the dark ages, there is of course no meritocracy at all, and characters can jolly well be way better than their immediate superiors.

The third deck is the "event deck," which is crazy stuff going on. Characters can investigate the event deck and find out what's coming. It's kind of like the Mythos cards in Arkham. Ideally, players should also be checking individually to see if things and groups are moving against them. The bigger their organization, the more plusses they have to generate a direct action against them.

Ideally, we'd like to do a couple things from Junta that tare very fun. The first is real estate versus assassination attempts. You can maintain havens, and each day phase you get to choose which haven you're in. Assassination effects have to guess, and if they guess wrong they can't kill you that turn (although other assassination effects still could). The second is the coup. If there's a breakdown in social order, people can start fighting in the streets. Organizations get to put down units on the map for all the influence they have, and if the rebels control more than half of the control points of the city at the end of the coup, they can change the city charter. That is: guilds can be added or eliminated, the duke's family can be replaced (or the form of government changed to one without a duke if you want), or the city can be given a new religious interpretation (replacing the church hierarchy with a new one friendly to Catharism or whatever).

-Username17

[codeGlaze]

These are pies of index cards with stats on the front[...]

Mmm, pies of index cards.

Given the number of console games that've used a system like this I'm sort of kicking myself for not trying this out, too.

I look forward to seeing the rules; or rather, the AS write up and the feedback you get from your group.

[fectin]

This is an aside, not a criticism: is it even possible to make a politics mini game that doesn't devolve into a board game?

[Username17]

This is an aside, not a criticism: is it even possible to make a politics mini game that doesn't devolve into a board game?

Well... it could devolve into a card game if you kept all the elements self contained. But I don't think you can really do politics without having more moving parts than you can keep track of in your head, and that means that you need some kind of "feelies" to keep all the balls in the air.

The biggest current issue is nailing down actions. It's a role playing game, so any amount of it (up to "all of it") could be magic teaparty. But it would be nice to have more specific actions. The most basic one is the investigation action. You get dirt on someone, or you investigate goings on, or whatever. The result of a successful action is that you get to look at a card (a card may have to be drawn for this purpose if you are investigating a position that hasn't yet been filled like the Duke's stablemaster). Another basic one is Arson, which if successful destroys a piece of real estate. A number of others can be drawn from Jyhad Political Cards. But the list needs expansion.

-Username17

[Korgan0]

Where do you see the mechanics of this game transition into regular oWoD mechanics? As in, if an assassination attempt is made against you, does the battle music start and the d10s come out, or does it continue to resolve within this politics system? What about investigation, negotiations, bribery, and so on?

[RadiantPhoenix]

Where do you see the mechanics of this game transition into regular oWoD mechanics? As in, if an assassination attempt is made against you, does the battle music start and the d10s come out, or does it continue to resolve within this politics system? What about investigation, negotiations, bribery, and so on?

I would presume that anything where your characters are actually present would go to the "base game", while things without PCs present would use the "expansion".

Some NPCs might be important enough to merit being resolved as PCs.

[Username17]

Where do you see the mechanics of this game transition into regular oWoD mechanics? As in, if an assassination attempt is made against you, does the battle music start and the d10s come out, or does it continue to resolve within this politics system? What about investigation, negotiations, bribery, and so on?

Battle music involving major characters (player characters, retainers, etc.) would indeed go to oWoD mechanics, painful as that is. For most missions, the plan is pretty much to try to pretend that we're playing After Sundown with d10s in our dicepools. So you have a mission, you roll one test, that determines if the mission succeeds. If you are being intercepted, the interceptor rolls one test to see if they stop you.

Now for a Recruitment action, you'd want things to be a leetle bit more complex. Succeeding at the subterfuge test doesn't let you take them as an agent, it lets you make an offer. There is a cost to buy them based on their rank, but if you know what their wants are, you can buy them cheaper. If you're recruiting people personally, you may have magic options that let you recruit people for free - and those would of course bust out the rpg rules for the powers in question.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Ideally, we'd like to do a couple things from Junta that tare very fun. The first is real estate versus assassination attempts. You can maintain havens, and each day phase you get to choose which haven you're in. Assassination effects have to guess, and if they guess wrong they can't kill you that turn (although other assassination effects still could).

Part of the fun of Junta attempts is that locations are halfway predictable. Players with significant cash in hand want to make it to the bank - but those players know that assassins will be looking for them at the bank so there is a risk/reward tradeoff An assassination minigame based on this should incorporate risk/reward elements for at least some of the potential locations.
Also there are a few cards which target specific locations only: character assassination for a character at their mistress's and burgalry for a character who is NOT at home - and these sorts of things change the deductions and bluffing on both sides in interesting ways.

The second is the coup. If there's a breakdown in social order, people can start fighting in the streets. Organizations get to put down units on the map for all the influence they have,

If you are strictly basing things on Junta, that part is exactly backwards. Part of the genius of Junta is that the LESS political influence a player has, the BETTER their military units are. This gives the players losing the influence game multiples reason to try to start a coup and incite riots in the streets. In a political RPG, you probably don't want quite so much incentive for instability, but if there is a positive correlation between influence and force of arms you will get a stable situation where the have-nots are just locked out of both political and violent means of achieving their ends. You want a mechanism to prevent that sort of complete stability - for a WoD type setting that probably means that the units strongest in the violence and rioting phase should be the least loyal and easiest to be convinced to switch sides during said violence phase.

This way the factions controlling the best fighting units would have incentives to try to end any violence quickly, before their champions defect, while factions with less potent, more loyal units would want to try to drag conflict out until the big-shot champions start switching sides and changing the odds.

[TheFlatline]

Multiple ideas:

You can only meet with and directly control so many people at a time. So your agents are eventually going to need to have agents of their own. In fact, it might be preferable to isolate yourself, as the more agents you directly meet with, the more likely you can be tracked down and killed. Perhaps each agent has a control value. You yourself have an especially high control value, and retainers like trusted Ghouls will have pretty high control values themselves. That way, in addition to being a target yourself, your agents are targets of attack, to either turn, eliminate, or to interrupt the flow of power temporarily. So the city captain may have a high control rate and you put a whole little power structure under him. If he's incapacitated for a "turn" or two, that power structure is unavailable. If he's coerced to turning sides, he takes his power structure with him. If he's eliminated, the power structure either dissolves or splinters into a sort of city/state of it's own trying to maintain itself until someone bigger comes and eats it up. Naturally, the closer to you that the power structure is, the more insulated and well protected it is. Your Capos that report directly to you are almost as hard to interdict as you are.

Events: There's a game called Andean Abyss about the Colombian Civil War that is a card-driven wargame, which is essentially what you're kind of doing here. It has an event deck, and it's actually a rather brilliant concept where you have to risk/weigh if you want to take one of the two events on the cards or if you want to act on the "board", or if you want to pass entirely:

The play of Andean Abyss is driven by a deck of event cards. Each card has an ordering for the icons for the four factions (Government, FARC, AUC, Cartels) across the top, which is the turn order for this card. Two cards will always be visible, this turn's and the next's. Each faction in turn has the opportunity to do something – take the event, run one or many operations – or pass. Only two factions can be active on each card, and whatever the first faction does generally forces the second faction into a more restrictive action (so if the first faction does an operation, the second faction will have a limited operation). Additionally, taking an action this turn forces a faction to sit out next turn, so a cycle tends to develop, with two pairs of factions alternating cards. However, being the first faction to act usually means significantly more flexibility than going second, so it's important to know when to pass because the turn order on the next card up is favorable and giving up an opportunity to act now will give you more freedom later.

Of course, for the vampire game, you'd have as many "factions" on the cards as there were players, which could get complicated if there's more than 4 or 5. Then you have to create event cards and a randomized but fair distribution of initiative. If you didn't want to match events with certain initiative, you could easily create an init deck or roll init out for the upcoming turn and mark it down, and just pair initiative with each event card.

Still, it'd be interesting to make your economy of action kind of agonizing. I'm not sure off the top of my head how you'd balance this with allowing retainers to act during the day. I'm sure there's a middle ground that could be struck.

[JonSetanta]

Some friends and I used day-long turns in a D&D adaptation of Wesnoth.

It was interesting but calculating the little actions throughout a day became odd when they didn't add up to a 24 hour schedule.

[Username17]

If you are strictly basing things on Junta, that part is exactly backwards. Part of the genius of Junta is that the LESS political influence a player has, the BETTER their military units are.

Sort of. Certainly the Internal Minister is ungodly powerful, but his police are not actually very good. But the Generals are considerably more powerful in a coup than either the Skymaster or the Admiral, and they don't have any less peacetime authority.

But for the influences, we're talking about the stuff like dock strikes and student protesters, where having certain kinds of political influence allows you to muster crowds of supporters when everything goes pear shaped. Basically, each of the guildmasters are going to have a number of thugs they can muster (not unlike the merchant houses in Romeo and Juliet). So each of the guilds you take over gives you some automatic boots on the ground during civil disorder.

You can only meet with and directly control so many people at a time. So your agents are eventually going to need to have agents of their own.

Illuminati does this pretty elegantly with the conspiracy control structure. he problem of course, is that it isn't easy to delineate a card's relationship to another card if it is also supposed to be moved to different areas or inclinations to indicate its current status. Or to put it another way: once you are moving cards to the inactive pile or putting them forward on the board to do battle, their topological position in the command pile is disrupted and the control arrows no longer point the right way. INWO had a way around that, which was action tokens, but now we're tlaking about more than doubling the number of feelies on the table, and I don't think it's worth it. Also, putting an action token forward just doesn't generate the visceral terror that putting your character sheet forward does.

---

I'm not sure random turn order would really help all that much. For one thing, the game is at least potentially PVE, the players don't have to turn on each other and squabble like children (although given the players, I wouldn't bet a quarter against that happening). Rather than writing every player on each card, it might be better to simply have each event have a neighborhood where the action is - and whoever happens to have last havened closest to that neighborhood gets the initiative that phase. This would make investigation actions on the events deck more valuable, because it would mean that you could mess with turn order by knowing that there was going to be chaos in the market square.

-Username17

[RadiantPhoenix]

Also, putting an action token forward just doesn't generate the visceral terror that putting your character sheet forward does.

Then use the action tokens to construct the org chart.

[TheFlatline]

Illuminati is actually what gave me the original idea, but you're right, in a game where you're going to pack up and redeploy and move stuff around, that web of power becomes tricky, which is why I figured a simplified version, similar to like a mafia family, would be a worthy examination. Each "leader" agent on the back of the card or whatever could just quickly jot down who was under them. It wouldn't take much time to recreate power structures. Though now you create upkeep for power transfers both within and outside your sphere of influence.

I actually like the idea of whatever faction is near the event gaining initiative.

[Koumei]

the game is at least potentially PVE, the players don't have to turn on each other and squabble like children

Actually, it's not just those players. Check out page 29 of the core Vampire rules, it clearly states you have to fuck with each other and try to kill each other.

At least, that's what every Vampire game ever has lead me to believe.

[Lokathor]

I actually like the idea of whatever faction is near the event gaining initiative.

Smaller force charts should also have a better bonus to initiative, probably. which could be a way that they keep up from being crushed.

[TheFlatline]

Out of curiosity, what was the end result of this? Did Frank manage to get something rolling or did the game stall?

[Username17]

Out of curiosity, what was the end result of this? Did Frank manage to get something rolling or did the game stall?

The players decided to drop all their contacts and allies and backstory character hooks and go sail to the new world and become pirates. Because in between writing their character backstories and the game starting up, some of the players got their hands on the new Assassin's Creed. Because LOL Vampire Players.

Storyteller: "You guys are fucking killing me."

-Username17

[Chamomile]

If I were their GM, I'd refuse to run their game. Radically altering the premise of the campaign because you played a new video game and are way interested in pirates for the next three weeks is not cool.

Any chance this thing will be fleshed out anyway? Ditching the connection to oWoD mechanics can only make things easier.

[TheFlatline]

Out of curiosity, what was the end result of this? Did Frank manage to get something rolling or did the game stall?

The players decided to drop all their contacts and allies and backstory character hooks and go sail to the new world and become pirates. Because in between writing their character backstories and the game starting up, some of the players got their hands on the new Assassin's Creed. Because LOL Vampire Players.

Storyteller: "You guys are fucking killing me."

-Username17

I could see a mage game where you always had an auspicious wind or even a werewolf game where you deal with were-sharks and shit... but VAMPIRES in the sun drenched Caribbean?

Yeah, they're fucking killing me.

Too bad the political game sounded kind of awesome.

[RadiantPhoenix]

I could see a mage game where you always had an auspicious wind or even a werewolf game where you deal with were-sharks and shit... but VAMPIRES in the sun drenched Caribbean?

Sunblock!

[Maxus]

It'd be dark in the hold of a ship, right?

[schpeelah]

It'd be dark in the hold of a ship, right?

The iconic pirate eyepatches come from sailors needing night vision in one eye because the hold is really fucking dark when you don't have light sources that don't involve fire.

The vampires would necessarily have to be operating ghost ships that only show up during the night to do stuff.