Running Political Intrigue: TTRPG Lessons from Suzerain

Recently, I have been extremely into the video game Suzerain, by Torpor Games. I've described it to friends as "the most complicated Choose-Your-Own-Adventure ever." In it, you play as the president of a fictional country in a fictionalized version that takes inspiration from Central and Eastern Europe. The country is struggling through recession, a powerful military that is prone to coups, a corrupt constitution and Old Guard faction, ethnic tensions and a rebellious region, as well as a predatory monarchy on your border who would love nothing more than to conquer you. You need to steer the ship of state through these perils, shaping the economy and constitution and Parliament through to prosperity. The game is text-heavy, almost like an interactive novel.

In my first playthrough, my best friend and Vice President died, my economy completely collapsed, and I ended up being fully conquered by my monarchical neighbor, abandoned by my allies. Not a story of success. But hey, I reformed the system and made it far more democratic with an overwhelming majority.

I love political RPG experiences. It is one of the things that draws me to worldbuilding--thinking about the political systems of my world, beyond a stereotyped and inaccurate image of a monarchy. A number of my games have set my players as major political figures in a country, from leading a revolutionary front to a letter-writing RPG I ran where players were debating tax and trade policies and dealing, above all, with the vicious gossip and party planning of a royal court. Suzerain, while not a TTRPG, has been one of the best roleplaying political experiences I've played, and it can give us a few key insights on how to do political intrigue in your TTRPGs.

Lesson 1: Factions Need Faces

I've talked about this element in a previous blog post, nor am I the first person to propose this as a key lesson for building engaging factions in a political game. However, playing Suzerain really did confirm my deep belief that for a political intrigue game to work, each significant bloc that you care about needs to have a single spokesperson.

In Suzerain, for example, the "Old Guard" is represented by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Orso Hawker. This is even better exemplified in Suzerain's DLC about the Kingdom of Rizia, where you're playing as a monarch, and there is a less baffling array of characters. The Reformists are led, in the DLC, by Manus Sazon--a liberal noble. Alienate him too much (or exile him, as I did), and you might end up with a far more radical voice leading the faction. The ultra-nationalist, anti-minority extremists? Represented (though not really "led") by your cousin, Rico. In each case, there is an easily identifiable spokesperson for the agenda of the faction.

This does a few things for you as the GM. First, it helps your players put abstract political thoughts to a face. It is often a pain for players to think about the nuances of politics in the world of the game--they're not living in that world, and even then, how many of us are digging into the policies of every faction of the political parties of the real world? It is a lot easier to remember those ideas if you tie them to a character whose personality reflects their policies. For example, Gus Manger is your Minister for Rural Development in Suzerain's core game. He favors unbridled capitalism as the means to unlocking economic growth: his faction. He also is notoriously corrupt, often offering you the opportunity to do insider trading and personally enrich yourself. These elements connect nicely, such that when I'm weighing a decision like whether to nationalize a business and put it under government control, I will think about Manger offering to sell me a winery for cheap, remember that he supports free market capitalism, and know that my decision to nationalize the business would alienate Manger and his allies in my cabinet. That's far easier to remember– because of his personality– than trying to remember the abstract opinions of exactly how much of my cabinet I'd be pissing off if I opt to nationalize the steel industry.

Second, it gives you the ability to add personal feelings into otherwise dry political calculations. When I'm trying to avoid democratic reforms to my monarchy, but my daughter falls in love with Manus Sazon, the leader of the reform movement, will I let love triumph... and give Sazon more power to tear down my monarchy? Or do I pressure him into exile, breaking my daughter's heart? I chose the latter, and now she's cold to me every time we have family dinner. This makes decision points far more emotionally complex than just "do I pursue reform or not?"

What I think Suzerain does better than I had argued in a previous post is to often give two of these "faces" to each faction, to better showcase alliances between factions. Gus Manger is the face of capitalism-as-greed, croneyism, and bribery. But Symon Hall, my chief economic minister, is a technocrat. He also wants to bring the country towards a free market, but his logic is purely for economic development. The people are suffering under the stagnating economy, and letting our rich neighbors invest will raise their quality of life. Sure, it means that we have less control over the economy, but with unemployment hitting 40%, anything that creates jobs and doesn't involve taking out debt and crippling our government's ability to function is worth it. Gus and Symon are often allies, both advocating for free markets, but the game shines too when they are placed in opposition over some nuance. And when Gus allies with someone else greedy and corrupt but anti-free markets, against Symon allying with anti-capitalists interested in the plight of the common people, it shows me that this is not a "capitalism" vs "planned economy" decision. Having two faces, representing opposite sides of one faction, allows for that faction to be more complex, and can be a way to telegraph to your players what sort of decision you're putting in front of them.

Lesson 2: Politics Is Overwhelming

Honestly, this is a generally good piece of RPG advice, and is exemplified in Apocalypse World's system for Fronts. Suzerain gives you a ton of plates to spin: economic, religious, separatist, ethnic, foreign policy, military. The game works through a series of scenes, so it's not like you can completely neglect any of these. Spend too much effort and resources prioritizing reforming your constitution--as I did--and you end up having to make your military decisions based on the fact that you have no money left over because you've been pouring it into making the school system and healthcare to appease the reformist progressives, to get their vote on your new constitution. But you've failed to invest in the military, which means you can't really project much international power, which means that you neighbors don't respect you and won't defend you when war comes.

The game is hard because of this, but it feels apt for a president or king to be trying to juggle so much at once.

Similarly, for an RPG, don't let your players just pursue one storyline--or if they do, it should be at the expense of something else. Focusing on handling that foreign trade dispute means essentially dropping the plotline of the old king's murder, and by the time they return to it, the trail has gone cold and they never get the benefits that would have been secured by knowing who to blame. Let those abandoned threads come back to bite them, even though they were "dropped" plotlines. Having a plan for "what happens without player intervention" is critical here, and that should be a living document. If the players intervene in Plotline 2 but don't in Plotline 1, you might still need to edit your plans for Plotline 1 because of the impacts of what is going on in Plotline 2. Political intrigue games thrive in this complexity, because what allows intrigue to happen is the connection between disparate goals.

Lesson 3: Make the Middle Path Bad

My third and final lesson from Suzerain is about stopping players from just trying to appease everyone and everything. In a number of politics games that I've run in the past, there is a tendency to drift towards the "middle" if you have allies on both sides of an issue or plotline. Players want to try and accomplish everything, which means supporting threads from all sides and appeasing everyone. Why anger my allies when I might need them in the future? Why burn bridges? Especially if you've done a good job showcasing the positive AND negative elements of both sides/factions, there's an easy tendency to do everything by half measures.

This is partly what doomed me during Suzerain. I wanted to oppose Gus's unbridled free market corruption. But when I had to build a new railroad for my country, and my options were a lean private construction company or the state-owned behemoth that would cost double, and I have a tight budget, I chose the private one. Playing that middle-of-the-road, mixed policy was less effective than either. I got the worst of both worlds, and my economy plunged into recession.

Still, Suzerain often gives you binary options. Do you intervene in this war, or not? Do you invest in this project or that project (or no project)? While TTRPGs can be more open than video games, there is still a benefit in these sorts of polarized choices for big decisions. Having an either/or choice can draw a stark line between your constellation of factions. It can force the players into taking a real stance, rather than trying to accomplish absolutely everything.

Regardless of if a choice is boiled down to being a binary or not, players should be incentivized towards allying with a side rather than waffling. Trying to appease all sides sounds like the best way to keep all your allies, but really in politics, everyone hates an untrustworthy, waffling friend. So encourage your players down a path; playing the middle means the spoilage of all their goals, and when they look back, they should see all the evils that they've done in the name of their side.

Conclusion

Stories are about character and emotion as much as they are plot, and the one of the most effective emotions to cultivate in a political intrigue game is guilt. Breaking my daughter's heart to accomplish my political ends made me feel bad. Allying with a maniac dictator in order to have at least one ally against all my powerful enemies made me feel awful, as I heard about his war crimes.

All of these lessons helps build that emotional resonance. Giving your factions faces humanizes them. This can provoke guilt when you have to choose between your personal feelings about the face and the policies of the faction. Having a bunch of spinning plates means that you're going to drop threads. This can provoke guilt and emotion when you see the consequences of failing to pursue a particular plotline. When your father's killer goes unpunished, that feels bad. And making the middle path bad can drive you down an occasionally problematic path, because no faction is without problems. When you look back at the fact that to stimulate the economy and get people jobs, you cut back on worker's rights, you feel bad... but you'd also feel bad enforcing worker's rights and driving up unemployment because your economy is deeply troubled and an influx of investment is the only thing that is going to save you.

Anyways, play Suzerain. It is a fantastic game for playing through the complexity of politics in a really challenging situation. I can't wait to try and capture the feelings that I had playing Suzerain in an RPG campaign.