How much do you use political-level play in your D&D game? Do player characters get caught up in the intrigues and conflicts of the aristocracy or other power-brokers of your campaign setting on a regular basis? Or are they frequently the power-brokers initiating the intrigues?

Or do you prefer to avoid all that?

depends.

Sometimes depends on the level because in some of my games , more the older ones, levels equated to power. As I have grown up I have realised that political power doesn't have to have any relationship to level. So I have been more willing to have low level people involved in stately politics.

Depends mopre just on the game. If the players wand to play a game of thieves lurking on the rooftops and alleyways of a city, or bounty hunters chasing bad guys, or questers lookign for a magical mcguffin they probably won't get involved in politics at least not unless they want to.

Sometimes they just get involved. I recall a party randomly meeting the Prince of a city state in a random city encounter and the Prince rolling a 00% reaction roll and thinking one of the PCs was his best mate ever and the whole adventure becoming a political one by accident. they we have had games where the plan was political intrigue but the PCs left it and sailed away on a boat.

Depends on my D&D game setting and my players' interests.

If I hand out the premise that they are mercenaries and running out of money to carouse, well, I don't ensnare them in politics willy nilly. And they wouldn't normally seek it, just out for dungeons and loot, which in a way is safer.

But other games, like domain management or city intrigue, Birthright and Lankhmar pop immediately to mind, it's a necessity.

It is something I talk to my players about beforehand in the premise and style part of The Table Talk. It's only polite to keep them abreast on the same page.

I lean toward city adventures so intrigue tends to come up quite a bit.

Political intrigue results from player actions.  

In the current campaign I'm playing in, we've been mostly 'monster hunters'.  There was some bad stuff happening in our happy valley, and we started rooting it out.  Eventually, we learned that a particular noble was involved in the most dire aspects.  

Now we have a bit of a political quagmire.  We're trying to stick with our normal mode of operation which is straight up brutal murder of the bad guys, but that's complicated.  Since we're in a large city and have run afoul of several laws (despite the fact that all the people we killed were members of an evil cult) we're in a bit of trouble.  The fact that law and order are on the side of the evil noble who is about to kill most of the people in town to power his own dream of immortality, we've managed to lose most of the evidence (our fault for turning it over to a corrupt city guard captain).  So yeah, things have started to take on a political dimension despite our best efforts to avoid.

In a city with disparate motives, these types of adventures can arise organically without being deliberately choreographed.

Quote from: RPGPundit;661467Do player characters get caught up in the intrigues and conflicts of the aristocracy or other power-brokers of your campaign setting on a regular basis?

Yes, despite my best efforts.  I just want them to go out and kill stuff.  Instead, I have to come up with all these Byzantine schemes and plots for them to get involved with.

(Kidding, I actually enjoy it and it keeps me on my toes.)

In my games its very common.

I almost always focus on political intrigue.

Often the players jump right in and become major factions themselves.

In my games, political intrigue is everywhere, but it is below the surface. It only starts to come up when the Players begin asking, "Why are we doing this job, anyways?" Unless you start to scratch the surface and ask about motivations, you can be as blissfully unaware as you like.

I've commented to more than a few friends that "Game of Thrones" is pretty much my ideal version of a D&D game.
Full of intrigue, and bloody as hell.

It's an intrinsic part of my ACKS game, and indeed tends to be standard for almost any game my group plays anyway. The players might sometimes be blissfully unaware, but it's always there.

I intend to have elections (with all the bribery, intimidation and corruption that entails) in my game as a rare example of very open political intrigue.

Not sure if I could run a game without political intrigue if I tried. As a GM, it's the 'mainspring' that makes most of my games tick. As a player, I find games without it less than engaging.

Any game where the goal is to convince someone of something instead of just taking their stuff could be said to be political, which is great fun. I based a short series of adventures on something similar to the situation which existed in Byzantium for a while, power in the imperial capital and hence the empire largely relied on the support of the mob.

QuoteThe ancient Roman and Byzantine empires had well-developed associations, known as demes, which supported the different factions (or teams) under which competitors in certain sporting events competed; this was particularly true of chariot racing. There were four major factional teams of chariot racing, differentiated by the colour of the uniform in which they competed; the colours were also worn by their supporters. These were the Blues, the Reds, the Greens, and the Whites, although by the Byzantine era the only teams with any influence were the Blues and Greens. Emperor Justinian I was a supporter of the Blues.

The team associations had become a focus for various social and political issues for which the general Byzantine population lacked other forms of outlet. They combined aspects of street gangs and political parties, taking positions on current issues, notably theological problems (a cause of massive, often violent argument in the fifth and sixth centuries) or claimants to the throne. They frequently tried to affect the policy of the emperors by shouting political demands between the races. The imperial forces and guards in the city could not keep order without the cooperation of the circus factions which were in turn backed by the aristocratic families of the city; this included some families who believed they had a more rightful claim to the throne than Justinian.

The matter which most concerned the man in the street however was sporting events involving two teams, the reds and the blues. The reds were associated with the emperor as their patron, the blues with a variety of nobles jostling for power, so of course the PCs got caught up in fixing the games through a combination of strongarm tactics, bribery, and general persuasion. In hindsight I could probably have turned that into a full blown campaign, there were a lot of ways to play it.

Its a super-common thematic for me too.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;661550Political intrigue results from player actions.  

It's not really something I push as a DM, but when PCs start having a bigger and bigger effect on the setting it's inevitable. At some point this merry band is going to arouse the attention of the powers that be if they haven't already. Are they friendly? Hostile? Indifferent? Coy about their intentions one way or another?

There's your intrigue.