What's the best rpg for some good old plotting and scheming and maybe some backstabbing?

I like the Song of Ice and Fire rpg, but I am biased because I like the books.

I would love to see a politics RPG where one can play a scumbag like those folks on the city council in Bell. Kickbacks, embezzlement, bribes, what larks!

Probably the most overtly political game I remember was Underground, where in the future, Amendements to the Constitution have corporate sponsors.  I personally refer to it as the MARSHALL LAW Role-Playing Game.

JG

Amber

Quote from: jibbajibba;807478Amber

No matter what, every Amber game I've ever played in or ran has turned into political scheming, 95% of it of the PC-vs-PC variety. I don't know if the diceless aspect has anything to do with it, but from the GM side, seems like players are much more likely to come up with all sorts of crazy crap when there are no obvious mechanics. Damn I love that game...

Quote from: jan paparazzi;807429What's the best rpg for some good old plotting and scheming and maybe some backstabbing?

I like the Song of Ice and Fire rpg, but I am biased because I like the books.

Traveller, using Imperial Nobles fighting for control of worlds, star systems, and corporations.

Although I have also heard good things about Legend of the Five Rings.

Anyone got any experience using Dynasties & Demagogues for Penumbra? I ordered it from Noble Knight recently but it might be a while before I get to read it. I'm hoping it will prove useful for running political games although I'd want to run them with True20 rather than D20.

theres always Council of Wyrms.

Quote from: jeff37923;807487Traveller, using Imperial Nobles fighting for control of worlds, star systems, and corporations.

Although I have also heard good things about Legend of the Five Rings.

Is there a book about these nobles? I love nobles. I like them in Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, Fading Suns and even in Houses of the Blooded (even though I don't like Fate). I guess it's a third imperium book.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;807614Is there a book about these nobles? I love nobles. I like them in Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire, Fading Suns and even in Houses of the Blooded (even though I don't like Fate). I guess it's a third imperium book.

For T4 there is Pocket Empires and Mileu 0. For GT there is Nobles. For Mongoose Traveller there is Dilettante and Dynasty.

Most of it is Third Imperium, but the subjects covered can be applied to any setting with dynastic houses of government.

Actually, in two and a half hours, my Traveller game will center around a change in dynastic leadership for the world Marissa. The rules works nicely IMHO.

I think that creating a good political RPG campaign is almost entirely depending on the setting and the interactions between the PCs and potential allies, rivals, representatives of other factions and of course, each other. Gaming mechanics should have little influence on these interactions (enter rant about useless, over-designed social combat systems here); people usually manage to talk and make deals well enough without rolling dice.
Settings work well for political games when they allow for the players to be believable players on the political field, and conflicts of interest are both understandable and (most importantly) plentiful, and the game is open-ended enough to allow the players to influence not just their personal fate, but the political landscape on some scale.
The best example I can think of is the Kaldoran Succession Crisis sub-setting for HarnMaster: The king will die soon and has no legitimate heir, but  there are dozens of potential new kings and kingmakers, allies and turncoats all over the place and the outcome is completely open. The kingdom is quite small and completely provincial, and the whole conflict, even if the situation will decline into a full-blown civil war, won't have a huge continental scale, which is completely great for introducing player characters into the mix, bcause they don't have to be the greatest politicians, demagogues or strategiests ever to still feel relevant in the context (chances are, the players won't be) and the relative small scale makes the different factions quite personal and accessible.

Quote from: Beagle;807651I think that creating a good political RPG campaign is almost entirely depending on the setting and the interactions between the PCs and potential allies, rivals, representatives of other factions and of course, each other. Gaming mechanics should have little influence on these interactions (enter rant about useless, over-designed social combat systems here); people usually manage to talk and make deals well enough without rolling dice.
Settings work well for political games when they allow for the players to be believable players on the political field, and conflicts of interest are both understandable and (most importantly) plentiful, and the game is open-ended enough to allow the players to influence not just their personal fate, but the political landscape on some scale.
The best example I can think of is the Kaldoran Succession Crisis sub-setting for HarnMaster: The king will die soon and has no legitimate heir, but  there are dozens of potential new kings and kingmakers, allies and turncoats all over the place and the outcome is completely open. The kingdom is quite small and completely provincial, and the whole conflict, even if the situation will decline into a full-blown civil war, won't have a huge continental scale, which is completely great for introducing player characters into the mix, bcause they don't have to be the greatest politicians, demagogues or strategiests ever to still feel relevant in the context (chances are, the players won't be) and the relative small scale makes the different factions quite personal and accessible.

You really need to take a look at Mongoose Traveller character creation. In the initial game, we created the two major political opponents for the PC and their motivations by randomly rolling and some choosing. Here is a link to a free download of Book 0: An Introduction To Traveller.

I actually do own it, I really like life-path based character creation, but I never had the opportunity to play Traveller. I do, however, have a -quite primitive - random event generator for character backgrounds, which we use for HarnMaster (and pretty much every other RPG; it is quite generic), for exactly the same purpose you describe: add some additional, random background events to the mix.

Quote from: jan paparazzi;807429What's the best rpg for some good old plotting and scheming and maybe some backstabbing?

I like the Song of Ice and Fire rpg, but I am biased because I like the books.

All of them.

However not all settings support plotting, scheming, and backstabbing equally well. A Song of Ice and Fire RPG supports a specific setting which happens to feature nobles families fighting with each other. And devotes mechanics to detailing those houses.

But in the end it depends on the setting and style of campaign you are running.

And this kind of stuff is largely divorced from the mechanics you use to create characters and resolve combat with. It is easy to mix and match political/realm/etc mechanics from different system to get the exact feel and level of detail you are aiming for. The only limitation is the genre of the setting.

The following are my opinions on various games. Mostly focused on the fantasy genre.

ACKS has a nice integrated system that ties well to classic editions of D&D and 5e. Useful when you don't want to use a RPG with a skill system.

A Song of Ice & Fire RPG has a very nice gamable system for detailing noble houses. They also have the Chronicle line which expands the Asoiaf RPG into general fantasy. The only thing I don't like is that there is little to tie it back to real world numbers.


Harnmaster is the gold standard for me. Everything is given in real world units so you can translate it into just about any system you want. The centerpiece is Harnmanor especially the section that gives some nice tables to handle the life of the manor over the year. Also highly gamable being as complex as classic Traveller. But like classic Traveller it does involve a worksheet.

AD&D, OD&D, and D&D 5e have a nice set of basic mechanics. But it is just the basics. D&D 5e has a solid setup in the PHB and the DMG.

There is also the Magical Medieval Society series from Expeditous Retreat Press for 3.X/D20/Pathfinder. Western Europe and the Silk Road are both really good.

There is the system out of Kingmaker for Pathfinder but I find it too abstract with little to tie it back to real world numbers. It has been refined is part of the Gamemastery Guide and also part of the Pathfinder SRD.

Ars Magica has a excellent series of books detailing the life of a medieval society.  The four are Art & Academe, City & Guild, Lords of Men, and The Church.  The mechanics are perhaps tied too tightly to Ars Magica to port to other system. But the information is highly useful and covers many areas not found readily in other RPGs like Art & Academe.

GURPS 4e has the Low Tech series. However you have to do the work to extract the specifics for your campaign. Like much of GURPS the individual details are not particularly complex just they try to present everything under the sun.

Pendragon also has a series of good books useful to detailing the life of medieval kingdom. But like the Ars Magica it is tied tightly to the parent system.

My advice is that the power of a political campaign is not in the details of acres, men at arms, and gold coins. But in the personalities involves and their motivations. What mechanics and data give you are the hard numbers to determine that in a trade war or a battle does Lord A defeat Lord B. But what makes a political campaign is all the stuff that leads up to battles, duels, trade wars, law suits, courtly intrigue.

You can get by with a pretty basic set of mechanics and data and still have an awesome political campaign by having a great set of personalities for the PCs to deal with. Which is something that most RPGS can handle right out of the box.

Paranoia.