Tell players I am running an intrigue game with multiple competing groups with competing interests

You can describe a scene to them that they here OOC but their characters don't know about.
I would describe what happened and let them know that their characters don't know this, and try to have an NPC tell their characters about it after

Of course it did.
It's like your group has never played Gangbusters

Forgot pic

If the players obviously think the first one is going to happen, why not give it to them but with some twists? You're a GM, not an autismal computer who can only return a "this is what would happen IN THE REAL WORLD!" output.

>but immersion!
If they thought this was likely to happen in the first place they're obviously not going to be unimmersed if it happens.

>but consequences
Yeah, definitely throw some consequences their way. But "you die" is a shit consequence. Unless you have someone trying to pull some "PCs are immortal" bullshit, hit them some other way.

Honesty, I'd be going what the fuck at you too. The first scene clearly establishes that you're going cinematic as fuck, given that they're able to take down an entire hideout with no casualties. Then you open the payback scene with them getting gunned down with gritty rules instead. Pick one and stick to it.

Also, remember, you can always show the consequences indirectly. Having someone from a rival congratulate them on the job but that they might want to lay low, for example. Or having an NPC contact ask what the hell they did, and say word on the street is that the boss is on a warpath. Something to let them know things are moving the way they want.

Or you could not be a killjoy and

>Players break into a mob family hideout, shoot up all the mooks, leave one mook alive to tell the boss that the players are in town.

>Two days later, a van full of hitmen pull up outside their motel room and light the place up, but the PCs fight them off

>Oops, now there's a mob family on their heels! They'd better seek allies among the enemies of this family. The enemy of my enemy is my friend after all.

>But the other big crime family in town doesn't trust them yet. Looks like they'll have to do some jobs to win 'em over.

If your players do something stupid don't punish them for it, but move the plot forward with it.

And nice reddit spacing, fag.

>Complains about reddit spacing while reddit spacing
Who's the fag now, cocksucker?

Underrated post

idk what you're talking about, I've never heard anybody lie about their coffee preferences

>worrying about immersion

If you ever worry about "immersion" as a GM, you have immediately made a drastic mistake. You are all playing a game together to have fun. If they think it'd be fun for scenario A to happen, and you have scenario B happen instead, you're a shitty GM.

I'm not saying that you should just give the players everything they want all the time, I'm saying that GMs are often extremely shitty at running intrigue-centric games. I mean, really? You just have the bad dudes show up all of a sudden and kill part of the party? In what way is that intrigue? If I show up for a game about diplomacy and backstabbing and you just have me get jumped constantly, it's not my fault you're fucking with me.

A lot of noob GMs buy into the meme that you should be antagonistic to your players, which is compounded by the funny greentext stories and banter about punishing shitty players. It's like a power trip. And in new groups, shitty GMs breed more shitty GMs until everyone is sick of tabletop roleplay in general.

>Not play maffia
Intrigue + murder
Perfect combination

Caring about "reddit spacing" is dumb shit.

When I drink coffee I actually prefer Americano, honest.

>It's another "Redditors arguing about who among them is the most reddit" episode

This. I haven't heard anyone like either.

Personally I drink black coffee. Sometimes with sugar when I write, like Michaek Moorcock, but its always black coffee.

Lie... haven't heard anyone lie.

When asked I'll say I hate coffee
When ordering I ask for water

>>the astounding autismo misses the point again and again and again

>use metaphor
>"From my personal experience that metaphor doesn't really apply" from several people
Eh.
Probably autistic anyways but what can you do?

I drink mine black with no sugar. Don't even know what the difference is between brewed and espresso, I just know they're all bitter and that's how I like 'em.

Never, ever works. Players are incapable of separating OOC from IC knowledge.

>This is apparently now a coffee thread
What do you guys think of cold brew?
I never got used to the bitterness of regular coffee, and cold brew typically lacks this.

You probably have tits then, most pompous assholes claim to like it because it makes them look 'macho'

>That baby in a stroller behind them
Kek

Coffee with lots of milk but no sugar.
After being on god's green earth for 30 yrs, I'm not going to lie about my coffee preferences.
I also like how coffee snobs seem to go off on me about how I ruin coffee.

I just add extra 2% milk in response.

>Drinking coffee
>ever
Never developed a taste for coffee, or tea for that matter. But a warm mug of Cider? That's my jam.

Nobody is capable of separating in character and out of character knowledge. At best they end up making decisions about when their character is allowed to act on that knowledge and when they aren't.

My brother. Don't get me wrong, I love a good cup of coffee. But like a good bar of chocolate, it's better diluted to about 75% rather than consumed pure.

Give them a mentor NPC to baby them through plots and suggest resolutions to them. Instruct . Teach. When the time is right, betray.

That's not what reddit spacing is, retard.

Explain what reddit spacing is then.

Some degree of immersion is important. Not because immersion itself has any integral value, but because convincing your players that they aren't the whole world has value. Obviously they are - you know it and on some level they know it - but if reality just rolls over for them every time sooner or later they'll just stop caring (unless they're the type of player which masturbates to progressively larger numbers, which is rare in my experience).

Pressing
Enter
After
Every
Line
:^)
IMHO it's the GOAT, Famdamily.

Milk, Sugar, and Ovaltine, please!

No, reddit spacing is definitely two returns for every one intended.

Players need to either be very experienced, or of a special breed to actually play intrigue.
Otherwise, what happens is that you have a bunch of people make fight guys, antisocial wizards, and weird hippie-types with no reason to have agency given said agency. At best, they will produce a tribe with themselves as despot, because politics and intrigue is hard, especially when dealing with imaginary groups.

Start with baby steps. Make them someone's lacky or mercenaries, and give them tasks that you specifically say can't be solved by making them hit 0HP.

It's a bullshit focus group anecdote from like twenty years ago; it's as relevant as bringing up a 'subliminal messages in movies' study from the '70s.

>They don't get to experience the Don's drama when he finds out they kicked his son into the hospital and how he plans to get revenge.
>not running a cutscene involving the reactions of various NPCs
git gud

>reddit spacing
this is the dumbest meme

in a while

yet

no, it's dumbasses trying to force a dumb

meme

I can smell the inferiority complex through the internet.

No, that's called "double spacing", and has been used on Veeky Forums since before Reddit even existed, likely as a conditioned method of typing from schoolteachers who wanted to easily be able to correct papers.

>not forcing yourself to drink black coffee until you like it
Git gud

Anyone ever notice how Fred Flinstone always acted like working in construction was a dead-end job? Nowadays it's probably one of the better jobs you'll find on the market. Good pay, good benefits. Better than being a college graduate working retail at least.

Better days, man, better days.

Terrible idea. If you would have players who can play intrique, then you don't need this kind of baby sitting. And if you don't, then you can't trust them to not metagame.

I think you are making a lot of assumptions here.
>When PCs assault the hideout they catch mob members with their pants off
>They probably know the opposition, and came prepared
>They catch medium and low members, probably many non-combatants
The odds were on their side from the beginning

>When Mob members assault the PC hideout, they catch the PCs with their pants off
>They probably know the opposition, and came prepared
>They sent highly skilled personnel, armed to the teeth
The odds were on their side from the beginning

Also there might have been good rolls one one session, and bad rolls on the other. Blaming success on "cinematic style" and consequences on gritty rules is just making assumptions

What system are you using?

If your chosen system differentiates characters mechanically based on how they beat up other people, then don't be surprised when players decide that their characters beat up other people. You'll get folks who'll gladly roleplay in just about anything, but I've found that quite a few players go "this is what my character does, and that's what they'll do".

If they've got characters that can disembowel a guy with a spoon or use foul magic to raise the dead, then they're likely to default to "I use the cool thing my character has on their character sheet to try and solve the problem".

I might be making assumptions. But I'm also familiar with how most DMs handle actions having consequences. The consequences are generally a "fuck you!" to the players rather than good gameplay - an attempt to punish them for misbehaving rather than tell a story. You ever read any thread where GMs talk about their players killing NPCs they weren't supposed to kill? Because invariably the overwhelming response will be some variant on "slaughter the PCs."

But Reddit pacing = double spacing, because that's how it works in reddit retarded comment system and they keep it here.

Can Reddit Spacing just be wordfiltered already? Or better yet, can using the term in a post just trigger an automatic ban?

>players want an intrigue game
>'you guys don't want an intrigue game you want a beat em up dungeon crawler'
>players continue to want an intrigue game
>'WTF why are you guys spending so much time in town? Get adventuring already!'
>turns out the reality is the GM is terrible at writing stories, preferring to go the dungeon-builder route
We ended up switching someone else to GM, letting him become a player, because he realized that what we wanted wasn't something he could effectively provide. In the end it worked out and everyone had fun.

>an attempt to punish them for misbehaving
you're projecting. actions have consequences. When people pul out bullshit like "do what's fun" what they mean is "do what strokes your player's ego"
If they make a stupid plan, they die, simple as that.

Because you're playing a game, not railroading them into fellatioland.

>you're playing a game, not railroading them into fellatioland
Hey! I didn't railroad them there! They just chose one of the two roads that lead to fellatioland!

the other road also lead to fellatioland but they'd have to bypass the anal rapids first

Memes aside Ned is the perfect example of what happens when you try to play a political campaign.

For a game to be political you need a thick web of bullshit happening in the background. Now the big issue with this is how do you communicate this massive web of bullshit to your players? You can't write it all out and give it to them, it'd be too much of an info dump, and they shouldn't be aware of half of it anyway. So you end up with a bunch of people with only an outside perspective coming from your summaries of the setting and its big players with their visible plans.

You need to be smart to survive an intrigue plot. More importantly you have to be setting smart. You have to be able to predict the outcome of touching one of the web's many stings. Ideally things will be subtle another thing that doesn't mix well with players. By default as the gm, all of this is handed to you. All of your plotters, the movers, the shakers, all of them can be said to act as subtly as you can imagine. They're setting smart by default because their actions are the setting.

You can make them super dumb in order to allow the players to stand a chance, but that's going to ruin the mood.
At the end of the day the players lack access to the direct setting in your mind. In an intrigue campaign that means they're crippled by default. If the settings antagonists have functional brains, happens the second the pcs stick their noses where they don't belong.

This guy also gets it. If players do not act with absolute genre savviness they're fucked. Well shit, could have saved myself some time by just typing that.

If you're nudging the players the entire time then you're taking the bite out of playing.

Presumably rolls were made for shooting up the place. Regardless gangers filling a building full of lead is so par the course that it would be downright weird if they didn't expect that to happen.

He has a point:
I mean if you just go gun-fu on a mob fortress you can expect some movie realism.

>My fellow negroid citizen

Sugar really isn't for me either. Lots of Milk and the coffee isn't bitter or to Sweet.

Just popped in to say this is an excellent comic and OP has great taste.

>Anyone ever notice how Fred Flinstone always acted like working in construction was a dead-end job? Nowadays it's probably one of the better jobs you'll find on the market.
Yeah, it's weird how a show made in the 1960s doesn't reflect current trends.

Well the jetsons got it right, so I don't see why you're giving the flintstones a pass.

Well allright, I give you that. Too many GMs try to use "consequences" as a punishing stick, instead of actual, netural consequences

I'm not saying the Flintstones got it wrong, I'm saying it's funny how times have changed.

>in the future, women will spend their days shopping while the husband is able to provide for a family of four with a single paycheck
If you're talking about his job pushing a button all day, that was a commentary on the way industry was heading at the time; specifically how George complains about being overworked.

Is this trying to subtly hint at ?

To be honest, it sounds like you are having trouble communicating what you want with your party. That, or your descriptions/story is not immersive for the party and causes them to lose focus on crucial details so that they say "we kick so and so's ass" instead.

Also...

I don't believe you.

Here's an idea: Try doing what your players actually expect instead.

>You can't write it all out and give it to them, it'd be too much of an info dump
So much this.

You can play a political game, but you would have to dump massive amount of info on the players, preferably before Session 1.
If you wanna go hardcore, give different info for all the players, with perspective on what their char would know about it.

They could decide on what they share this way, and could even have their curiousity roused by disparancies between their intel.

But this requires a lot more discipline, thinking, and initiative from Players, and a lot lot more work from the GM.

Exactly. I mean imagine the smallest of intrigue games. A who dun it. Let's set that in a really small area, a single business.

So let's say you've got 4 players. Now you could get clever and work with the premise of one of them dun it, but then you lose control of the subtlety and pacing, so let's not. So you need some npcs to populate the building. At least 1 per player you'll want multiple possible baddies, or things will get too easy and it will all be over with an hour or two. So let's say 1 person per player that's directly connected to the bad thing, and an additional 4 people just milling about.

So now as a gm you have to have a map of all of the connections between all of these 12 characters. Each and everyone connected in at least some way to every other. Some of these connections interwoven into others, and all twisty and tangled.

Now you need to parse that out to players. Got to give them all little dossiers on everyone even if all they know about an npc is "oh that tall guy whose lunch break sometimes overlaps with mine". You've got to condense all of the connections built up after years of knowing someone (because even if the players are new all of their fellow employees likely aren't), and you need to get all of that across before session 1. Because that information will be necessary for pcs to judge the consequences of any given course of action so they can make informed decisions.

In normal games all you need is to be able to create the illusion of a past. That a person or place has history that extends before the moment the pcs met them. In intrigue you need that to be "real", and you need details.

>stop using terms I don't like!

Pretty sure that was a thinly-veiled /pol/ joke.
How many black people in Jetsons hurr durr.

Wow no. It was me being smarmy for the sake of it. Literally 0 sociopolitical commentary in my post. Entirety of the logic behind it was the jetsons airs around the same time as the flintstones (at least in my mind fuck if I know), combined with an underserved nuh huh. I know /pol/ is the boogeyman but come on.

Apologies, but I've got an uncle who thinks that's the funniest joke in the world, so I've grown to assume it's a joke with wider reach than it actually has.

I think that one of the biggest issues with intrigue campaigns is that a proper one can't start in the middle of a story.
A mastermind at intrigue uses connections that they made over decades of careful planning. Players usually will not have this. They never have the tools at their disposal for playing it smart because it takes too long to get those tools and the GM shouldn't have to make them all for the players and then spoon feed them every single one of them. Unless the players are really good at collaborating with the GM to make their own assets (most players are not) they will just flounder around with no idea what's going on. This is one of the reasons why I quit an ASOIAF campaign. I made a character that has a decent backstory and is built to rule a small castle and join other people's causes. He's literally a mercenary lord. The GM sent us to King's Landing immediately. We didn't stand a chance. Everyone failed at what they wanted to do but nobody important died either. It was just an unfulfilling mess. At every turn, someone NPC would have more connections, more supporters, more plans, and better skills because they live this kind of life and we don't. They also have the perspective of the GM. I never asked for an intrigue campaign, I just wanted a little bit of politics on the side with some war mixed in.
When players ask for an intrigue campaign, what they need is some well-disguised railroading. They don't need 40+ characters, just a dozen or so will do. They want something that sounds complicated but can really just be set down in a chart with a few interconnected names.
The real fun is making a nationbuilder with tons of players. They naturally start making schemes amongst themselves and backstabbing without much prodding. I prefer the players come up with their own politics and every so often throw in an NPC to shake things up.

>Apologies, but I've got an uncle who thinks that's the funniest joke in the world, so I've grown to assume it's a joke with wider reach than it actually has.
It stopped being applicable after the Jetsons Movie had non-white characters, which invalidated the entire premise.

I remember a kid telling me that joke in the mid-90s, so it's not uncommon (just incorrect).

>having "the thing the players thought was gonna happen" happen is railroading
Are you mentally deficient or just confused about what railroading means?

>we need to ban all the things I don't like because I am incapable of ignoring things I don't like

Yes, we need a new >>>/redditspacing/ board about as much as we needed

Try again.

I had a similar bad time with an ASOIAF game. We as the group spent some time collaborating on a household, only for that to all grt thrown out the window within the first session because the GM was like 'lol Red wedding' 'lol sudden betrayal', as the two other houses in the immediate area, one of which was a subservient ally, had apparently been plotting our downfall for months. Not eve together, just independently. So while we managed to fight our way out of the wedding nonsense, we were immediately betrayed and conquered by our allies because our status had gone down to 'slightly weaker than usual'.

It's a very frustrating feeling, and after the fact the DM basically said the only way to avoid it was to put our city on high alert, ignore all his plot hooks, and never go outside.

I've caught two GMs doing 'hp doesn't matter' fudging. It's really obvious when people do it. Honestly it makes me really pull back on my investment in events when I realize there are no stakes or chance of failure in combat. In my experience these sort of GMs are also the type to let basically anything the players try work. "Yes, and..." is a good policy for improve. It's not for TTRPGs.

>Presumably rolls were made
Why leave it to chance if the outcome is TPK? Unless the players firmly deserve it for reasons of trying to exploit narrative forces, that's not gonna be fun for anyone. Putting the players in a situation where they just die benefits no one. It'd be trivially easy to give them a tip beforehand, or to just have the hit squad accidently wake them up (allowing for a dramatic shoot out, which is fun). Of course, once that battle is joined, if the dice happen to knock a guy off, no biggie. The rest of the squad can keep on trucking and dead guy can rejoin with a new character (and be satisfied that he went out swinging).

>Regardless gangers filling a building full of lead is so par the course that it would be downright weird if they didn't expect that to happen.
Maybe, maybe not. Depends on context. Regardless the example said they didn't - their expectations are established. Of course you have to subvert their expectations somehow, but "rocks fall" isn't a good way to do it.

Or just start them as bit players and have them work their way up/in. Introduce NPC relationships as they go. Have them accidentally make some enemies as they go

Nay, thou.

>Why leave it to chance if the outcome is TPK?
Because there are damage rules for this and it probably wouldn't be?

I'm the the guy who wrote the example, but at least with player characters in savage worlds (which I'd run this in using deadlands noir without the supernatural stuff, or maybe with it), that sort of this is more likely to lead to a desperately needed series of back alley surgeries than a tpk, and that's with the gritty damage rules.

If in your system of choice that's enough to kill someone, then they should have known the risks. That's the problem with intrigue games. Players need to know the risks, but more often than not don't, and how could they?
This is not one of those times though, because that's literally gangstering 101 right after pulling up next to someone on the street, slowly rolling down a window and giving them a taste of the old typewriter if you catch my drift, and right before saying "nyah see here" a lot.

TTRPGs are just improv with rules for figuring out who dies when someone starts a fight.

Also, you don't need to make "everything the players do" work, you just need to make everything the players do interesting. "No, but..." is fine too.

All right, I'll spell it out for you.

The problem is not that the players expecting what actually happened is railroading. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the posts you're responding to. The problem is that user here is suggesting, as a reaction to , that a profoundly stupid course of action should not have consequences; not out of any internal reason to the game world, but because the players expected a better outcome.

That in essence nullifies their ability to choose courses of action, because if you run that way, they cannot lose. Imagine if you simplified it; any system of your choice. Players randomly attack a friendly NPC who is vastly more powerful than they are. You sit there and go

>Well, they EXPECT to be able to beat him. So he goes down like a chump, I guess.

Railroading by eliminating likely consequences to actions is still railroading. And it's no different if you force them into trouble with it than if you force them out of trouble with it.

b-but user, if I don't destroy my own game by coming down like the fist of an angry god for any and everything they do that I don't like, no matter how slight, it means I'm just letting the players walk over me!

>You have to be able to predict the outcome of touching one of the web's many stings.
>web's many stings.
what fucking web has stingers

The kind you don't want to be caught in.

this is why every good intrigue game NEEDS multiple perspectives. This is why the party needs to be split up
>b-but muh split party
at the very least, someone in the party needs to have an in to things, like a mole. Someone on the inside. Otherwise, a party acting only from the outside will be ineffective and probably not very fun.