I’ve been playing a solo game with a friend and we decided to feel the waters by practicing the game and let the story emerge from our different test we’ve made like testing DoW, Fight!, Bloody versus, practice, RnC, etc…The player burned a dwarf hunter made for combat and adventure. We we’re looking for hunting and adventure. Strangely enough the campaign turned into a highly political and skeeming machiavelian story where the protagonist are trying to conquer a city for power and greed.
My question is: Is that happened to you before? I mean a game not directed toward politics at all wich turned into one real fast.
There’s many reasons to explain this but i’m asking because I often read on this forum that the best way to describe BW is to compare it to Game of Thrones wich is a higly political setting…
I feel like since there’s a lot of mechanics to support debate, compromises and dialogue, it kinda make it happen in a subtle way and you end up in a political setting even without trying. Have you ever felt that way with BW?
I don’t think I can recall a BW game that didn’t involve some sort of political aspect—planned or unplanned.
The difficulty, for me, is that once the games get political, I have to drag the players back into the sword play and action.
My games in any system tend to involve the political. It’s just that BW does it really well, and that aspect is often very interesting, so it can easily take things over.
That said, I’ve had adventure-driven BW where the politics are more background motivation than daily concern. It’s all about where the beliefs drive the story. If your player wants politics, though, give 'em to him!
My last campaign was called burning Milan: get rich or die trying.
It was a late middle age setting in the fair city of Milan. what started out as a smuggle and petty crime campaign ended in a full blown civil war between two factions of magi, assassination of the duke and a feud between two noble families.
needless to say… burning Milian was taken literally. they gave up earning money after session 3.
The other thing with political games is that eventually someone realizes that they can’t defeat the players in the political field and so they turn to the assassins to help take care of the problem and you are back into the adventure based game cause now they have a bounty on their heads and someone is trying to collect.
that is exactly how half of milan got burned down…
two well placed fire ball type spells by the grand magus at the players meeting place tavern “the golden duck” , and a failed fire extiguish spell by one of the players. ofcourse the players blamed the other side
Actually, BW is the first game that I’ve played that political issues are, and can be resolved, by the game rules. All the other fantasy games I’ve played (Ars Magica, WFRP, D&D, EarthDawn) revolved around political situations, but it was mostly the GM mind-tricking the players through schemes. Since (mostly) everything social or political was resolved with social agreement, it turned out that these moments were ones of political role-playing, but not political role-playing game. In BW, factions and alliances just… appears as organically as every other aspect of the story. Really interesting!