Noodling/Politics RPG

Random bits for a politics thing. This isn't exactly mechanics or setting - it's more notes on structural design.

Political Models

The general thing here is there's an empire (or galactic federation or whatever) that is of one of a couple models.

Whimsical Emperor

In this 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 outside parties to insert their own agendas. In practice this means the emperor is surrounded by a number of advisors, each of whom is in favor to some degree, and they offer their opinions to the emperor on what should be done (or beg the emperor for favors or whatever). The PCs can be established advisors, or assistants to advisors, or unaffiliated people who have an agenda of their own they'd like to push (ie, aspiring advisors).

Getting things done in this system involves figuring out the best way to get the emperor to do what you want (which usually means getting in favor with the emperor and getting your opponents out of favor or out of the way, but also presenting the request or recommendation in a way that the emperor will go with). Because the emperor is the only one making decisions, it can be possible to slip in a request that the majority of advisors oppose, assuming your timing is opportune.

Great Houses

In this model, the empire is ruled by a senate type thing made up of representatives from different houses (or guilds or institutions or whatever). There are probably some arcane procedural rules about how stuff works, but in practice if you want something done, you introduce a bill and get the majority of senators to vote for it. PCs can be a house as a whole, or rulers of a house, or members of a house, or unaffiliated people who nevertheless have an agenda (ie, lobbyists).

Getting things done here involves lining enough votes to pass a bill. Generally any bill will have some people who intrinsically support it, some who intrinsically oppose it, and then others who can be persuaded, traded with, suborned, etc. Figuring out who might support your bill and how to get that support is the main thing here.

Political Players

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, but you can't be too short-term-focused in your alliances, since you don't want to help someone who is ultimately working against your deep goal.

Issues

Some kinds of issues that the empire has to decide:

• Should the empire be friendly/hostile/neutral to other power X?
• Should the empire encourage/discourage/ignore internal group X?
• Should the empire encourage/discourage/ignore subject X? (education, religion, technology, etc)
• Who gets control over this asset?

Assets

Assets are a big deal since they are delegated control of some part of the empire. It's often not delegated absolutely, but, say, the chief warlord has a lot of control over whether the empire will attack someone and how it will go about it (and sometimes the asset's non-core functions are what's actually useful to a player - if the chief warlord decides to go with a particular munitions manufacturer, that could be a very big deal financially).

Some kinds of assets:

• Leader of some empire-wide department (Chief Warlord, Secretary of Magic, Treasurer)
• Noble title (which is essentially being emperor over a smaller area than the empire)
• Right to query for some kind of information
• Right to collect taxes of some kind
• Right to build something which the empire will pay for (an army or a building)
• Control of some piece of land (could be strategically important if you build a castle there, or like it has a uranium mine on it)

Swinging Decisions

Here are some ways to affect how issues are decided (generally these items are about affecting advisors, in the case of the whimsical emperor, or senators, in the case of the great houses)

• Blackmail
• Bribery (either out-of-band bribery, or changing the decision so it gives them a cut)
• Trading support here for support on some later issue
• Getting them officially posted or tricked elsewhere so they're not around
• Decoying them with something else (perhaps another issue, or perhaps a new lover) so they don't have as much time to focus on this issue
• Control some friend of theirs and get the friend to lobby them
• Set up an astroturf campaign to get the public to endorse your view
• Get someone the emperor is fond of for non-political stuff to lobby them (in the whimsical emperor model)
• Use some procedural rule to remove certain people from the vote (in the great houses model)