My last campaign ran somewhat in this vein, so I'll relate some experiences. This was a Dragon Warriors campaign, set in the game's equivalent of England.

I set the game out with the intention that engaging with the politics would be optional, but strongly suggested. The campaign was loosely structured around two concurrently running factional conflicts. One was a brewing civil war between the various barons and warlords of the island, and the other was the machinations of the various dwellers in fairyland: Elves, trolls, etc., with the plan that the two would intersect towards the end of the campaign. The campaign suffered an early death due to unrelated personal circumstances, so I can't say how it would have gone long term, but it was going well for about a year.

There are few takeaways from it that I think are helpful, if you want to run a more political campaign, especially with a traditional fantasy RPG.

The big overarching point is that it's a good idea to make the political elements simultaneously ubiquitous and optional. In the average party of five or six players, you're probably going to have at least two of them that have no interest in playing politics, and it is possible to cater to both types of player at the same time. Probably around 70% of the named NPCs my players met were tied into one of the two big conflicts, but that usually wasn't the surface reason they were meeting. I also tried to make it it so that every adventure had both a political and a supernatural angle to it. So a quest to investigate a haunted graveyard leads to evidence of an assassination plot against the local baron, and then later on a mission to help said baron retake his castle from traitors turns out to involve a vampire lurking underneath the castle. That way you give both kinds of players something to sink their teeth into.

I also think it's ok for the political players to seek out the PCs. That runs contrary to some people's instincts, but the way I see it, if a group of people goes around slaying monsters and recovering lost treasure, they're quickly going to come to the attention of the the powers that be, and those people are going to see the PCs as potentially valuable assets. At the same time, the politicians aren't going to come right out and say "I want you to go assassinate my political rival for me". There's going to be a two-way courting period while they feel each other out, so the NPCs can give the players more traditional RPG activities to do, while you seed in hints of how influential they are. The players that want to will take the initiative to try and barter their service for clout, while the ones that don't care can just focus on the fantasy adventure seeds they're being given.

TL;DR I think it's a good idea to keep the politics in the background until the players proactively engage with it.

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Pt. 2/2

As far as mechanics go, Dragon Warriors is very similar to a lot of old-school D&D. It doesn't really have dedicated social mechanics, but it has a charisma-equivalent stat and a general rule of "roll d20 under your attribute to succeed".

My solution to the "10 CHA fighter" issue was two-fold. For the most part I do social encounters just by common sense; i.e., "would this character go along with this or not?". When I did need a roll, I imported the reaction roll mechanic from AD&D, with just a +1 bonus for good Charisma, which balances things between the characters a bit. One of my high-charisma PCs didn't care for that, so we landed on a compromise where if I thought the deciding factor would be more of the PCs performance, I used the charisma check, and if I thought it was more contingent on the NPC's temperament, I used the reaction roll.

Personally, I'm not a fan of domain rules. I run a pretty short session, so I have to cut away almost anything that gets in the way of the moment-to-moment roleplaying. Plus the players I play with aren't very interested in them, and I've seen them turn into a campaign-stalling disasters in other games. If my players do reach the point where they become feudal land-holders, I'm probably going to either automate or handwave it. To me, that's the point where you stop tracking money, rather than do more of it. The players hire a steward and a sergeant-at-arms to handle things for them, and then the minutia of running a domain only intrudes on the game when something comes up that leads to adventures for them to go on.

One game that has rules for this which I really like is Lamentations of the Flame Princess. It boils property ownership down to just a few monthly or yearly rolls. It's not great for the political side, but if I ever run a more urban campaign, I'll probably use it. It also has rules for investment, which is good for players that want to do something constructive with their money, but don't want to bother with being landlords. 

Quote from: jhkim on June 27, 2023, 02:13:12 AM...what are the best practices of taking the PCs from dealing with immediate physical problems like monster fighting and dungeon-delving, into bigger stuff like regional politics. In skill-based games that I've done, the character sheets have sometimes had stuff connecting to them to stuff like that - because they'd have a few more things like Social Rank advantage, specific skills, allies or contacts. It seems a little trickier in D&D, because I feel like what's on the character sheet doesn't connect as well to bigger-scale play.

Every campaign I run, I always create the social systems and factions that inform why the world is the way it is with greatest detail wherever the game is currently being played. Between sessions I'm working on crystalizing that resolution so that I'm constantly squeezing more detail into the game while the players do their thing.

Politics *always* happens in my games. Local authorities - temporal, ecclesiastical, mercantile or whatever hierarchies that exist are generally outlined and mapped out as needed. The NPC's all have their motivations. So that when the PC's need to do things, they get to interact with them naturally.

I do tie in all my PC's into their backgrounds so they know their social ranks (at least where they come from - which may/may not be germane to where we're playing) so that everyone knows their place in the big picture. More importantly they are free to rock the boat as they see fit, as long as they're willing to do deal with the consequences.

Effectively there is no "transition" required from "dungeon-crawling" to "political theater" that isn't implicit in the game itself. For example of the PC's are heading into a large city-state flush with gold, they might attract unwanted attention trying to bigtime the local guards checking people at the gate. They might make some completely unwanted fans listening to their tales of daring, and attract powerful interests (with their own agendas in finding useful tools to their machinations). OR maybe some of the PC's are of noble birth? They can roll in strong using their political clout (which may be nothing more than an unlanded title) to bypass the bureaucracies (tax collectors etc.) and press the local lord/lady for shelter. Politics means engaging with civilization. Dungeoncrawling is personal helldiving for gold out in the wilderness. The transition is an inverse of what each character's background dictates in relation to the world they're in.

Quote from: jhkim on June 27, 2023, 02:13:12 AM.This maybe touches on reward cycles that people have talked about. Combat and dungeon-delving involve more mechanics like spell-casting, hit points, initiative, and other stuff on the sheet.

I realize that in my last extended D&D campaign, I started transitioning them from the beginning -- because the players had a sheet of all the NPCs who they were responsible for. The premise was apocalyptic - a bit like The Walking Dead - so there were a bunch of non-combatants that the PCs were helping to survive. That made the campaign more social/political from the start.

I just have my PC's keep a list of contacts. I keep a master list of all relevant (and even a lot of non-relevant) NPC's and their general dispositions and stat-blocs as necessary. The PC's need to keep the cavalcade of personalities which I do my best to represent in their own unique idiosyncratic ways sorted in whatever fashion they deem important. The cool part is the players that do a poor job of this often react inappropriately to those of rank ("Count who? I don't remember that guy... ) only to find out their indifference to paying attention to their presumed "betters" might not be so well inclined in roleplaying encounters. /shrug.

So treat your non-dungeon content (and encounters) as important as your dungeon-encounters... and just PLAY. Let your players run their PC's in context to the world you present - and always present your world authentically to your vision of it.

I have always introduced in-game politics as players advance. This would be a reality if the story actually happened. A rough rule of thumb....

Levels 1-3 - the players are nobodies except perhaps locally after they have caused some chaos.
Levels 4-6 - The players are known, people have heard of them, and local nobility or VIP's are wanting their assistance in their schemes.
Levels 9-12 - The players become major league heroes and villains, known by rulers of countries, possibly even beginning to assert their own political power.
In excess of level 13 the Gods are starting to take notice. Epic quests and fate intervene. A legend is not just born - it's being cast in stone.

In practice players don't easily adapt to becoming major faction leaders. In one old campaign, they were introduced to factions within a state and never committed themselves to any of them despite some clear encouragement to do so, but to be honest, they rather assumed they could act like overpowered nobodies permanently, and actually got frustrated when they found their own reputations were acting against them. In the end they allied with a tribal warrior region across a sea from that state and still struggled to grasp they had to make major decisions.

Quote from: caldrail on June 29, 2023, 11:13:41 AM
Levels 4-6 - The players are known, people have heard of them, and local nobility or VIP's are wanting their assistance in their schemes.

This puts Captain Jack Sparrow squarely in the level 4-6 range.

Quote from: caldrail on June 29, 2023, 11:13:41 AM
I have always introduced in-game politics as players advance. This would be a reality if the story actually happened. A rough rule of thumb....

Levels 1-3 - the players are nobodies except perhaps locally after they have caused some chaos.
Levels 4-6 - The players are known, people have heard of them, and local nobility or VIP's are wanting their assistance in their schemes.
Levels 9-12 - The players become major league heroes and villains, known by rulers of countries, possibly even beginning to assert their own political power.
In excess of level 13 the Gods are starting to take notice. Epic quests and fate intervene. A legend is not just born - it's being cast in stone.

I do similar, except that I would cast it more as sphere of influence. At levels 1-3, the players could be heroes at the level of a village. They could have a major effect on the locals and local politics. They could potentially take down the mayor in favor of a rival. There are tales told in the village about their exploits. All of that is at a smaller scale, though.

At levels 4-6, they start having influence more widely, to more major towns and regions. At level 5 in my campaign, the PCs gained the goodwill of the regional governor by solving the case of his missing son.

I don't plan to go past level 10, and by then they'll be having an influence across the empire. (I'm basically keeping the top NPCs around level 10 as well. That's already plenty superheroic and legendary.)

Quote from: caldrail on June 29, 2023, 11:13:41 AM
In practice players don't easily adapt to becoming major faction leaders. In one old campaign, they were introduced to factions within a state and never committed themselves to any of them despite some clear encouragement to do so, but to be honest, they rather assumed they could act like overpowered nobodies permanently, and actually got frustrated when they found their own reputations were acting against them. In the end they allied with a tribal warrior region across a sea from that state and still struggled to grasp they had to make major decisions.

I suspect when you say they "don't easily adapt" or "still struggled to grasp" -- that's part of the transition problem that I'm talking about. I think slowly introducing threads is one technique to get them to adjust, but there are more. Maybe we should list them, like

(1) having an official contacts/factions sheet so players can work from that

(2) having homebrew/custom politics-related game mechanics on the characters sheet, maybe (I'm not sure of examples)

(3) connecting political influence to adventuring game abilities, like a cleric having influence through their church, or even more specifically with particular spells or abilities

+ ??

I pin nothing to level anymore. It's about what the campaign dictates in relation to the setting and the PC's and their background. I have no problem letting a player play royalty and be a 1st level <X>. We just need to contextualize their PC with the setting.

I find it kind of fun watching a noble low-level PC learn the realities of the world - often with out-sized influence which when they start throwing their weight around can come to bite them in the ass later.

Quote from: jhkim on June 29, 2023, 01:41:38 PM
(1) having an official contacts/factions sheet so players can work from that

Blades in the Dark factions sheet could be a good inspiration here: https://bladesinthedark.com/sites/default/files/sheets/blades_sheets_v8_2_Factions.pdf

Quote(2) having homebrew/custom politics-related game mechanics on the characters sheet, maybe (I'm not sure of examples)

For examples of strategic abilities on the characters sheet, Legacy: Life among the Ruins playsheets could serve as inspiration. Notice how the Sentinel has a move to defend a place or settlement, the Envoy has moves to convince and sway courts and politicians to his/her interests, the Firebrand undermine governments through dissention (like a Rogue-led underground network would), etc. Adapting something like that to your player classes/roles shouldn't be difficult.

I hope it helps a bit. Good luck. 

Quote from: amacris on June 27, 2023, 01:45:44 PM
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Jhkim drop me a private message if you want a sneak preview of ACKS II. Least I can do for enjoying your writing on the threefold model all these years.
--

The way that ACKS transitions players from adventurer to politician-ruler is with XP incentives. You need lots of XP to level. It gets harder to find that much XP just lying around in treasure hoards. But the game rewards XP -- lots of XP -- for domain activities. A lot of players in ACKS often are reluctant to set up a domain, fight a pitched battle, run a guild, make a magic item, etc. until they see the XP that their party members are getting for doing so. Then they suddenly become very interested.

The crucial but overlooked part of this system, however, is that it is carefully tuned so that the reward for domain activities of any given size domain declines as you level (there's an "XP threshold"), so that the player is constantly motivated for 'more more more'. You can get to 5th level with a barony, but you need a duchy to get to 9th level, etc.

If you put these incentives in place, and put together a game world that is structurally positioned for collapse/conquest/political advancement/etc, then the players freely enter this style of play. I tend to set up the world to be filled with either evil or incompetent rulers and threaten it with an existential enemy. This helps players, who might be reluctant to tread the jeweled thrones of the earth into dust, feel virtuous: "The King is in league with the enemy! We have to conquer his realm in order to lead it against the Dark Lord."

In terms of the transition from play, I did not do a good job of explaining this in ACKS so I have gone out of my way to do so in ACKS II. Also in ACKS II I've included rules for politics with mechanics for bribery, slander, assassination, spying, gaining influence over legislators and rulers, disputes, etc. There's also expanded rules for thieves to engage in various hijinks. These had previously appeared in AXIOMS.

I'm a complete nobody to you but I have to say I'm really looking forward to the next edition of ACKS. And I just wanted you to know that me and the group of kids I GM for really like ACKS 1E.

Another useful thing may be to define a downtime phase between sessions, with the respective units of time and possible actions/moves.

So for a more local, "zoomed in" game about, say, norse settlers in medieval Iceland, you may propose that the downtime takes just one (1) month between sessions, and the group has just one (1) "strategic move" to enact, be it a cattle raid conducted by the rogue, a viking expedition by the huskarl, a diplomatic feast by the jarl to improve relations with neighbours, etc. Same could apply for a local game of gangers maneuvering for turfs and contacts on a city district, etc.

While for a more "zoomed out" political game (say, where the group owns a duchy with vassals and all) you may define the downtime taking a full season and allow 2 or 3 strategic moves between sessions. etc

The important is to quantify the relevant strategical moves, stats and resources for your game. And then talk it out with the group as to engage them and see what they want to see, etc. The later may be specially important to get everyone onboard with the change in scope you're going through.