My players are expecting a story and politics heavy d&d game. How do I do this?

This, but the way dark souls handles it. Don't tell the story and they will make up the politics as fits.

Chronicles is better.

This pretty much, maybe Fate wouldn't be the adequate system for your players to play after DnD for politics and intrigue though, and I think that [] got it right.

Ask your players for what exactly do they mean by politics and intrigue

No problem in using D&D for politics and role-heavy games, as long as you are not Veeky Forums-like autistic about manuals and rules. Cut the magic, nerf all social skills and make your players actually think, take their own paths and carefully consider who they are talking to, and how.

You should obviously clarify all this AT THE BEGINNING, along with the amount of combat you are inevitably gonna rip away from the system. If they don't like it, just run a normal D&D campaign.

First, do as everyone else says and ignore politics. When people say "politics," they usually mean they want factions with interesting and comprehensible motivations that are nevertheless orthogonal.

For example, you might have a town with a church that's adamantly against undead. That's reasonable! They might or might not be hardasses about this sometimes, but it's hard to argue against that stance.

And let's say you have a huecuva that killed the town mayor yet accidentally put on the Helm of Opposite alignment he owned. He's now a sincerely good and benevolent mayor for the town, yet the church wants him destroyed.

Your players now have to pick a side (as the resident get-shit-doners, they can't sit on the sidelines forever). There doesn't need to be a right answer--whichever one they pick works.

>First, do as everyone else says and ignore politics. When people say "politics," they usually mean they want factions with interesting and comprehensible motivations that are nevertheless orthogonal.
Agreeing with this completely.

There's nothing else to play but dnd

>tfw run political intrigue
>tfw players don't know how politics or nations work
>tfw they have been outmaneuvered by an old baron three times already, the one they were supposed to defeat and move past to bigger and better things

The old man has indirectly sent the party on a fool's errand in order to get their influence out of the city so he could send his own representative in to influence the young mayor. He funded the party's enemies to cause strife in the country side so as to sow a sense incompetence with those observing the party among other nobility. Finally he married off one of his wards in order to ensure he could keep a military presence in an important city.

This so fucking much.

I'd love to run a political intrigue and mystery campaign but my players are way too fucking dumb for it, and at the first situation when they're tricked they'll probably murder everyone while someone else will take advantage of it.

Players are retards, news at 11.

Yeah, I fucked up a setting based on the 30 years war by letting the players get involved. They ended up signing onto a faction based on the Jesuits and ended up getting really mad later on when they realized how far-right it is (and all of them were somewhere in the range of the left). Like the kind of mad where people act like you betrayed them. Like it's somehow my fault they didn't do any fucking intel whatsoever on the other factions, and how most of them are fucked up in some fashion.

The thing is, by definition players are incapable of evaluating anything beyond the scope of what is immediately visible to them. If someone says "Hey go stop these bandits", they will take it at face value and go do it without analyzing the details of the job and who they're actually killing until either A.) They finish and realize after the fact that they've been screwed over, or B.) They just never figure it out because they think they're being the good guys.

It's so simple to have players not only work for an evil person serving evil interests, but the fact that the game is supposed to be about the players being the heroes means you really can't do it without them throwing a tantrum.

ITT: DMs who can't improvise.

Look, in real life you have have cues or other sources of information than the DM that can allow you to realize something is screwy. You have more agency in real life than you do in game.

In the game, you know nothing that the DM doesn't tell you, and it's entirely possible that what he thinks you need to know isn't enough for anyone but him to figure out his mystery.

Remember the rule of 3: if you want players to know something, give them three ways to learn it. If the baron is setting up your players, don't expect them to just figure this out--let them hear rumors he was involved in shady deals, or his ledgers don't add up, or one time the inkeeper used accidentally discovered his secret stash of arms.

You don't need to tell them outright, but something needs to smell.

Or, OR

Players can have minds of their own and ask questions.

Yes, and that leads us back to

>you know nothing that the DM doesn't tell you

The point of leaving sufficient clues is for players to know when to ask and what to ask about. Unless you've trained your table to expect every tavern wench is secretly the kingdom's grand vizier in disguise, in which case you probably have no shortage of interesting campaigns.

And what happens when players are so stuck up in their own concept of the situation that they're unable to see the clues?

The clues are given, the NPCs are acting the way they're supposed to be, and throwing off the challenge of the situation is killing the purpose of the game, so unless you want to railroad your players into success, they're most likely going to have a bad time from their own bad decisions or incapacity to understand the situation

>what he thinks you need to know isn't enough for anyone but him to figure out his mystery

This. Let's not forget how much more sense this kind of stuff makes in the GM's head. It's just like when the GM wants to give you a puzzle, but his only hints are buried under hours of dialogue, he feels the need to be several times more obtuse than normal, the underlying process is disputed by experts (not to mention every armchair general who took a polisci class in college, played CK2 for a few years, and thinks they're the absolute god of manipulation), and the penalty is often the GM somehow humiliating the PCs without warning. Also the plans the GM makes for his favorite NPCs usually wouldn't work in any universe where the GM isn't god.

Every table is different, and there is no magical sufficient number of clues. Either you've told your table enough that they're figuring out what's going on or you haven't, and if you haven't, you need to work on that.

If your entire table has one view of the situation and it isn't yours, you need to ask yourself hard questions about why that is and what to tell them so that they start thinking your way.

Or you need to adapt your story to what they're thinking. Unless you're running a PFS scenario and the adventure path is ironclad, there's literally no reason not to do this.

Now that's an interesting point. I tend to test the intrigue with my friends and see how they add up the mystery and see what kind of conclusion they reach, and most of the time they get it right. Of course, without the context of a rpg, adding up the clues isn't that hard, yet in my table there's another issue going on that I didn't consider.

While most of my players reach their own conclusions of the situation, they have some guy who acts like a leader, who enforces his own view of the situation. His insights and conclusions are usually logically sound, yet he builds his whole idea from one initial clue that he assumed was right and didn't care about investigating its true nature, making his whole theory wrong.

How this shit would go down in semi-realistic (not 'epic' GoT-inspired) politics:

>bad guy accuses PCs' servant(s) at a hundred or county court
>tortures/bribes them into confessing to (probably false) crimes (better than any amount of time in the gaol)
>PCs are summoned and have to pay off the bad guy, let their servant(s) die, or be punished themselves

Real life medieval politics was far more wonderfully fucked up than fantasy stories make it out to be. More GMs should capitalize on that.

If you have one guy leading the group into the wrong conclusion, then you have a great story hook right there. You let the party follow his lead, and it all goes well until they find something that makes it unambiguous that this was all a red herring--there must be another way to interpret the same clues...

In short, you're making the PCs going the "wrong" direction about finding one more key clue rather than making a fatal error. As long as you make the PCs realize their mistake before all is lost, you can still salvage your original plan. Then they get to roll back into town to be heroes just as the baron thinks he won.