Noodling/Politics RPG

Random bits for a politics thing.

Overview

This isn't exactly mechanics or setting - it's more notes on structural design. The general thing here is there's an empire (or galactic federation or whatever) that is of one of two models. In the whimsical emperor model, there's an autocratic ruler, but the ruler doesn't have a strong agenda of their own for whatever reason (they're weak, young, corrupt, etc), so there are a lot of opportunities for advisors to insert their own agendas. In the house model, the emperor is ruled by a senate type thing made up of representatives from different groups that form shifting factions as they battle for control of the senate. The PCs can be involved at various levels - in the whimsical emperor model they can be advisors, or assistants to advisors, or unaffiliated people who have an agenda of their own they'd like to push (ie, aspiring advisors), while in the house model they can be rulers of a house, or members of a house, or senators not belonging to a house, or unaffiliated people who nevertheless have an agenda (ie, lobbyists).

Goals and Issues and Alliances

Usually the way this works is various involved players in the empire each have their own deep goal, the thing that they ultimately want, like "get fabulously wealthy" or "destroy house X" or "become the emperor". These generally aren't directly actionable in the political system, though. Then the empire has issues that it has to make decisions about, like "should we invade X?" or "who should be appointed to secretary of the treasury?" These are directly actionable politically, but don't necessarily advance the deep goals directly. So the political players look at the active issues as they come up, figure out if there's a way to decide them such that it advances the deep goals, and then attempt to get them decided that way - somebody wants to get rich, so they decide it would be useful to be appointed secretary of the treasury because they can then leverage that to change how taxes are done in a way more friendly to them. Since usually individual players don't have the power to decide issues on their own (or else they could just advance their deep goal directly), they have to find other players who want the same decision made on this particular issue and form an alliance to get it done.

Assets

Some things that are good to fight over:

• Political positions (Chief Warlord, Secretary of the Treasury, etc) - usually people in these slots get to control some part of how the empire as a whole works
• Taxes - individual taxes can funnel a bunch of money around
• Land - land is a source of wealth and can be strategically important also if it controls some important site

Getting Issues Decided

• Entertaining the emperor
• Blackmail
• Bribery