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I have had my share of this behavior in groups I GM'ed, and to be frank, I'm fed up with it.
Currently, when offering to GM $whatever, I make it clear that "I want to have a group that is able to work together, as a group. If it is your heart's desire to disrupt one another's play and hide behind the shield of 'I am just playing my character', please do not attend. Thank you."
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I think a lot of players like RPGs because it allows them to have complete freewill and not have to obey parents, teachers, bosses, etc. I think it is okay to have NPCs in positions of authority (who the PCs can choose to obey or not obey), but I think it is better to keep PC adventuring groups more egalitarian.
As for the paladin/assassin issue, just don't allow evil characters in your game.
I guess that would be me.
I've been in many games where the PCs have come to recognize one of their own as the informal leader and don't have a problem with it, but I absolutely can't stand being told one of the other PCs is my boss and when he says 'jump' I should ask 'how high?'
It's no fun not to have autonomy. If a PC wants to have a staff of people who do what he tells them to, he and the DM need to play a solo game and have NPC cohorts that don't mind being overshadowed. If I'm taking the time out of my life to play a game, I want to make the decisions for my PC, not hand them over to the guy across the table. If he's going to tell me which dice to roll when, why doesn't he just eliminate the middleman, take my character sheet, and roll them himself and let me go do something I can enjoy?
It should be noted I don't want to be the boss, either. I don't want to tell the other PCs what to do any more than I want mine to be told. What makes it fun is everyone finding a way to work together because they want to, not because they're going to be court-martialed if they don't.
(Also, since this discussion is system-nonspecific, it ought to be in Game Talk.)
I am going back in my mind over 30+ years of RPG gaming.
.... nope, I can't think of a single instance where we had a party with a defined authoritarian hierarchy. Not once.
Why is that? I think there are multiple reasons:
1. Adventuring parties tend to be conceived as a sort of corporation where the PCs are like the Board of Directors. It is usually a joint economic and glory seeking endeavor, not a military operation. As such it's more of a democratic arrangement than an hierarchical one.
2. Players tend to take roles in the group that they are comfortable with, and as a group a "natural leader" tends to emerge. That leader usually operates as a decision maker, not an authoritarian. In other words, he/she tends to make the key decisions for the group, after taking input from the group, but they don't mandate their desires be followed nor do they impose any penalties on the party members for not following orders.
3. Adventuring parties which don't assume the "corporate" model tend to become an aggregation of individuals seeking their own goals, and those campaigns tend to become more about the inter-party dynamics than they are about the "campaign." This usually happens with a group of very experienced players and is usually how "evil" parties tend to normalize their behavior.
I've never played an RPG where my character was organizationally subordinate to another player's character and I frankly don't have any desire to play that way.
I'd be interested in hearing how common playing as a military or other sort of organizational hierarchy actually is. I've simply never seen it in an RPG.
are you talking about a pc mouthing off to the town mayor. and not suffering the consequence for it? but he would never mouth off in real life?
or players being smart asses to the king. instead of respectful I run into that all the time.
are you talking about a pc mouthing off to the town mayor. and not suffering the consequence for it? but he would never mouth off in real life?
or players being smart asses to the king. instead of respectful I run into that all the time.
No, he's not talking about NPC authority figures; he's talking about one PC out of the group of players being chosen as the captain/sergeant/whatever, and all the other PCs playing his subordinates. A common set-up in military games, blessedly uncommon in D&D/Pathfinder.
Yup, this would not fly with the other party members. They would likely gang up and murder the wannabe leader.
Not at all coincidentally, I have no interest in either Kingmaker or Skull & Shackles. :)
I don't have a problem with the PCs being part of a crew under an NPC captain or a paramilitary squad with an NPC commander or the City Watch with an NPC sergeant, but the minute one PC gets chosen as the one who gets to give orders to everyone else, it kills the fun for me. "You, go to the science lab to research the problem and roll a Knowledge check; you, go canvass the area and roll a Diplomacy (gather information) check; you, guard the prisoner and make a Perception check." Why not just roll the dice for us? And then the leader gets to have all the RP scenes with important NPCs because he's the only one with authority to do anything but say, "Let me talk to my superior about that." :P
In what few groups I've been in that had the issue- we solved it by all the PC's being the same rank.
If someone was clearly the leader they might get a promotion but . they were already the leader so no issues arose.
You are going to have a very difficult time *forcing* the PC's to obey rank in and amongst themselves if they aren't already inclined to do so. (i.e. agreed to do so as part of the campaign or whatever).
Pc's have one little thing to control in the D&D universe. Their character. Thats it.
Don't expect most PC's to just give that up on a whim.
-S
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Not at all coincidentally, I have no interest in either Kingmaker or Skull & Shackles. :)
I don't have a problem with the PCs being part of a crew under an NPC captain or a paramilitary squad with an NPC commander or the City Watch with an NPC sergeant, but the minute one PC gets chosen as the one who gets to give orders to everyone else, it kills the fun for me. "You, go to the science lab to research the problem and roll a Knowledge check; you, go canvass the area and roll a Diplomacy (gather information) check; you, guard the prisoner and make a Perception check." Why not just roll the dice for us? And then the leader gets to have all the RP scenes with important NPCs because he's the only one with authority to do anything but say, "Let me talk to my superior about that." :P
I think this would work better in a game like Kingmaker in which all of the PCs are equals, but the "leader" PC is simply the First Among Equals. That is, all of the PCs have an equal say, pretty much like a town council or senate. However, the leader PC is the one who expresses the will of the other PCs to the NPCs. He is essentially the diplomat between the player group and the NPC population ruled by the player group.
As such, the designated leader PC acts more like a Constitutional Monarch or Congressional Speaker than an autonomous authority figure. But I think it is best for group cohesion.
The interaction of adventuring parties with royalty in the gaming world is one of those verisimilitude stretching exercises.
In many cases the PCs are by far the most powerful force in the kingdom. If not the most powerful, they are still a force to be reckoned with. And yet they are expected to regard royalty as something special just due to the person's genes.
In the real world royalty has all the power. Even if the most amazing knight in the history of the world were in the castle of the lowliest king, that lowly king would still have far more power at his beck and call than the single knight, or even a party of knights could challenge.
In RPGs that's not the case. Even in the midst of a powerful king's stronghold a well-prepared and well-constructed adventuring party could wreak havoc on the kingdom.
So the whole situation has to be handled very, very carefully. Some GMs resort to having castles permeated with anti-magic fields or arbitrarily make the guards three levels higher than the highest party member in spite of how insane that would actually be. (Why would a level 15 fighter remain in service to a minor Duke on the outskirts of the kingdom?)
So this situation is fraught with complications just due to the nature of the game. In reality a powerful wizard would very likely have little problem backtalking your average king. The average king couldn't really do anything about it anyway. Not without inviting destruction into his realm.
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In a heirarchical context, you have a role to play and the leader should make sure all bases are covered (that's one of his/her jobs). Who does what is already established as the team is built.
This. I should have mentioned that it is probably best for the player group to discuss how things should be run from the beginning when you are going to do a campaign involving kingdom-running. I doubt it would be the best decision to approach the issue in an ad hoc manner.
When I've seen this be a problem in the past, it's been as much a problem of the person in the leadership role trying to lord it over the others, as anything else.
In Kingmaker, I dealt with this possibility by ensuring that the player LEAST likely to behave like a bossy git was the obvious choice to be ruler. I've also carefully emphasized activities that involve the ruling council, and been very careful about whether I set up situations where only the leader is expected to participate (and if I do, likely I'm also setting up situations for each of the individual ruling council positions as well, to keep everyone equally engaged with the game).
Even in real-life hierarchies with one person in charge, most people have the authority to perform the tasks they're trained to do without constant instructions. If a leader is constantly directing everyone for every little action they take, it's seen as micromanaging, and elicits much the same sort of negative response in real life (although we may hide our reactions in the interest of keeping our jobs, we sure do complain about things to our friends later).
So if someone is acting up, as leader or follower, in a way that's making the game un-fun, that person gets coached/scolded, depending on the nature of the offense. But you really have to look at what caused them to react with the negative behavior, to be sure you're not ignoring the real source of the problem.
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Sounds like there's two different issues, if related, here:
1. Lack of party cohesion/disinterest in working together
One thing is to be sure to review PC backgrounds and talk to players about their characters' goals--and MAKE SURE there is, then, based on this discussion, a goal the party can agree upon. If everyone has a personal, driving motivation to find the treasure/slay the damsel/rescue the dragon/order tacos, then they will find ways to work together with the people who want to work toward the same goal.
If someone seems particularly resistant to working with the party, then you need to sit down and have a civil chat about the fact that they are playing a cooperative game, and what is keeping them from wanting to work with the group? There's some good advice in the GMG, IIRC, about this as well.
And the above goes doubly for the kind of player who wants to make an assassin just to taunt the paladin -- it's one thing if the two players together say, "He's gonna be an assassin and I'm going to be a paladin, we want to take on this challenge to see how it works. We understand it'll be hard but we want to try it." It's quite another if someone says, "Ha, I hate paladins! I'm going to make a CE Infernal Sorcerer so as soon as you agree to work with me, I'll make you fall." That intimates at an antagonism that should not be welcome in any friendly cooperative game, because their goal is precisely to ruin other people's fun and be asshats, not actually play the game. That kind of player needs to be talked to and, in the worst case scenario where no resolution is found, kicked out.
2. Setting up an in-party hierarchy and the players/PCs respecting it
The big thing here is -- were the players aware you expected them to have a hierarchy, and did they agree to it? If no to either or both questions, then you are bound to have problems.
Setting up an in-party hierarchy can be tricky. RPGs are usually by nature games with no "winners" save for the adventuring party as a whole. If a party member gets assigned leader by the GM, without the players' awareness/OK, that can smack to them of favoritism, and they may well revolt. Whether they have good reason to or not is another matter, but it still sets a poor tone for the group.
There's also a flip side to this that sometimes a player who is saddled with leadership may feel unwilling to do it -- I remember having a GM tell me MY character was leader and I felt very strange about it, I didn't feel right ordering the PCs/players about and I was with some players I didn't know very well and wasn't sure how they'd feel about it either. I think in the end it was okay, but I may have not roleplayed well because of the role my GM threw me into.
Most games I run I avoid having the parties having a leader and never assign one myself. If the plot demands the party have a representative, then the party is always asked IC who their leader or representative is, and the PCs/players do the choosing. Often parties will not have a single leader, but assign specific responsibilities to each other -- okay, you're the smooth tongued noble, you do the talking here--but the halfling does the talking in the seedy taverns and with the caravanners. The ranger leads us through the wilderness; the cleric, you know how to deal with undead so if we get attacked by those, we'll do as you say. Etc. etc. So no one is the "leader" full time but everyone has their responsibilities and everyone has moments where they are expected to take charge -- but again the key thing here is these are responsibilities determined by and enforced by the players themselves, not the GM.
If a scenario demands that a group has a hierarchy -- say the premise of the game is that you're a military unit or a law enforcement unit -- then I would make it absolutely clear that this is the case when I invite the players to play and repeat it during character creation. "You guys are going to need a commander, and you'll also need someone in charge of the purse and someone in charge of X and Y. When you create your characters and write up your backgrounds, make sure you assign these responsibilities amongst each other, and let me know who's who. And remember, you're supposed to be a disciplined unit, so be willing to follow the orders of whoever you guys pick to be your commander most of the time--absolutely do what you think is right but please keep the scenario in mind when you determine your PC's personality and how they respond to orders."
The key here is that again, the players pick who is leader and the players are made to understand from the get-go that there is a hierarchy that they're expected to follow.
The other trick here is of course, again, to make sure everyone else also has responsibilities that they must keep track of, so no one feels like they're sitting around twiddling their thumbs while the leader gets to do everything.
TL;DR hierarchies need to be established with player agency foremost in mind.
If your players don't respond well to having hierarchical set ups, then my advice would be to get rid of the expectation that there is a hierarchy at all.
If they still aren't getting along with each other or bickering, then we're back to 1 -- and a good long talk with them needs to be had.
Ironically I've never really had this problem...
and we HAVE had a few games inherintly hierarchle...
Seems like most of the time, nobody else wants to be 'the leader' and It falls to me.
Star Wars Smuggler campaign (similiar to firefly... though years BEFORE firefly) My ship, playing the captain.
Beast Wars type game: I played the 'Prime' of the group...
Kingmaker will be starting in a few weeks, I'm the paladin going for the crown...
We never really had any 'loose cannons/mutinous crews... but I never ruled with an iron fist either... Everyone still got to play their character however they saw fit.
Honestly, almost ANY group has a 'natural leader' even in media...
A-team.
Leverage
Ocean's 11
Transformers
He-man
Thundercats
TMNT...
I'm having a hard time thinking of a standard 'party' where everyone is entirely autonomous... or a 'true democracy'
There's a big difference between the party naturally following a leader they've chosen for themselves and one of the group breezing in all, "Hey, guys, I just got promoted, and you're working for me now. Things are going to change around here because I run a tight ship, and if you talk back, you'll be spending some time in the stockade."
(That would be the point at which my PC threw her badge on the table and walked out, btw.)
I think this would work better in a game like Kingmaker in which all of the PCs are equals, but the "leader" PC is simply the First Among Equals. That is, all of the PCs have an equal say, pretty much like a town council or senate. However, the leader PC is the one who expresses the will of the other PCs to the NPCs. He is essentially the diplomat between the player group and the NPC population ruled by the player group.
As such, the designated leader PC acts more like a Constitutional Monarch or Congressional Speaker than an autonomous authority figure. But I think it is best for group cohesion.
This is how my KM group looks to be working out. Which is probably for the best as the Magus and Barbarian have nowhere near the social skills necessary for handling the delicacies of politics, while the Oracle is possibly too good at it...
There's a big difference between the party naturally following a leader they've chosen for themselves and one of the group breezing in all, "Hey, guys, I just got promoted, and you're working for me now. Things are going to change around here because I run a tight ship, and if you talk back, you'll be spending some time in the stockade."
(That would be the point at which my PC threw her badge on the table and walked out, btw.)
Yeah, that's sounding more like the player of the 'lead' character letting the power go to their head and deciding to push the other players around. Not cool.
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I used to game with a group that was comprised almost entirely of people who worked on my team and reported directly to me. So in the "real world" I actually was that "authoritarian" figure who could direct their actions.
So when we started gaming together they assumed that we would have the same relationship in-game. I told them in no uncertain terms that I had no desire to be their boss at play as well as at work. In fact I told them that being their boss was a lot of damn work, made for a lot of difficult decisions and stressed me out plenty. The LAST thing I wanted to do was have the same thing in our gaming.
So I told them we were gaming as equals.
The end result was that our work relationships actually improved because they always felt like we were equals outside of work regardless of what our organizational hierarchy forced on me during the week. I moved to another job five years ago, but I still game with them. We still game as equals.
In Kingmaker, the "King" is mechanically a leader, in the sense of making specific dice rolls and adding certain bonuses. He is also, in a sense, the face or symbol of leadership that the party shows to the rest of the kingdom/world. He should not become an actual dictator over the PC's. I would leave any game where that was intended and/or enforced (even if I was named king).
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I am going back in my mind over 30+ years of RPG gaming.
.... nope, I can't think of a single instance where we had a party with a defined authoritarian hierarchy. Not once.
So, in our current Pathfinder game, my character is the Captain of a Mercenary Company, where the other PCs are the other members of the company. (There are no NPC members of the company...yet.) The way that happened was fairly humorous -- my character one day decided we were mercenaries, made some business cards and began introducing the party that way. The other PCs decided it was easier to go along with it than to argue.
Or in other words, no one else wanted to be the leader, I had all the face skills, so I made an Executive Decision to be in charge.
So then the problem was that whenever my character wasn't available, everything would fall apart and no one would know what to do. (We had night encounters where the people on watch would notice things happening, but ignore it and let everyone sleep, to bad results. Multiple times.)
So I made a command hierarchy. But it wasn't so much for giving orders down the chain as for knowing who to ask advice of up the chain.
The funniest part? My character is the Chaotic in the group. She *wanted* to have a totally flat hierarchy, but then nothing got done. So now we've got this totally vertical structure that she *hates*, and uses as little as possible, but exists when she needs it.
But that last part is actually why it works. You can't 'enforce your will' on PCs. You have to lead by just leading, and then the players' choices are to either follow along or leave you hanging. And if you've done your job, they won't want to leave you hanging.
I'd be interested in hearing how common playing as a military or other sort of organizational hierarchy actually is. I've simply never seen it in an RPG.
The GURPS group I was in in college actually used ranks quite a bit. The key there is that Rank was an advantage that cost character points, so it was something that tended to be picked up by people who had been in the campaign longer, so it made an organic sense in the game world. Plus, the people who were giving the orders tended to also be the people who had mastered the combat system, so they were generally very good orders.
Here is the thing that an unfortunate number of people seem not to get about those kinds of scenarios. The Leader isn't the guy who gets to make the decisions, he (or she) is the one who to make the decisions. Not all of them, but the important ones. 'Do we take the job or possibly starve (,or , do nothing this game session because the only thing the GM had planned was this one job that we all know is insanely risky)?' 'Do we ignore the threat to the area or possibly start a war?' Decisions like that. Those situations are the reason why clear hierarchies exist. There are real reasons why in Paranoia, the Team Leader's symbol was the bulls-eye.
Irnk, that's one of the points I was trying to make.
I'm a boss in real life. I have to make life-affecting decisions all day long.
The LAST thing I want to do in my game play is do the same thing. Making decisions is hard work. That is, it is hard work if you care about the impact of your decisions. I happen to care. So when I game, the last thing I want to do is deal with the same stress and politics that I have to deal with at work. If someone else wants to do that, I could live with it, but as I said, so far in all of my gaming, we've always had an equal-partner setup, no boss. No hierarchy. That's the way I prefer it.
After 20 odd years of gaming, I've run into a recurring issue. I don't have it right now, but I'm curious as to how common it is and how you deal with it, short of asking the players to self-evict.
Whether it be robotech, rifts,generic military adventure or the skull and shackles AP... and I suppose Kingmaker can have this issue as well.
When you have one PC that must obviously be the leader in an Authoritarian view (Captain, Colonel, Sargent, King, General), I invariable end up with players who routinely disregard the in-game hieararchy.
The attitude seems to be: "we're all PCs, so I should do whatever I feel like. And if the game context has a hierarchical component, I must be as obnoxious about it as possible"
note: I'm not talking about somone playing the "loose cannon" of the group (and then getting penalized in-game and accepting the penaly as RP).
These players may or may not be the same players who, upon noting that one of the group is making a paladin, will then go about creating an assassin, necromancer or wizard with a quasit/imp/cacodeamon and be obvious about what they do.
Kingmaker was not really designed to let anyone be in charge. The positions are just fluff. That is stated in the book IIRC. If I know someone is not going to cooperate I would not have that as a part of the game. I seen this work well in games, and I have seen it not work. It normally boils down to the player's personality. Those that are not willing, just won't do it. There was one time when the player that was in charge was just not trusted to make any important decisions so it could be that the player in charge is not trusted to be competent.
I do have a question though. How much control the does the PC in charge have over the others?
These players may or may not be the same players who, upon noting that one of the group is making a paladin, will then go about creating an assassin, necromancer or wizard with a quasit/imp/cacodeamon and be obvious about what they do.
I missed this part. They can stop being jerks, or they can be booted is the easy answer. I might bring realistic consequences on them in game though. Them being having a quasit alone can be dealt with, even if it is not ideal. If they start performing evil acts, just to annoy the paladin they are now breaking laws, and may eventually find other adventures looking for them.
I had an interesting conversation recently with friend who introduced me to Small Group Theory - a philosophy attempting to define roles (not ranks, roles) in small groups or parties. Broadly speaking, there are two 'leaders' to a given group - a Task Leader and a Socio-Emotional Leader. These may or may not be the same person - roles can be passed around, in fact it's often considered healthy to do so, pending party specialties. The Tension Releaser is often passed about and clearly as important as leading. Then there's the Central Negative - that oft-abused role of constructive criticism. There are two inherent issues (aside from the outright abuse of non-constructive criticism, aka b!%%@ing and moaning) with the Central Negative, at least that I can spot. First, if any one person holds the role for too long, the others are likely to start thinking of that person as no longer a part of the group. Second - and this one, I suspect, is particularly strong in geeks - the Central Negative often wishes he were the Task Leader. They're different skill sets, and both are very necessary, but nevertheless.
Now, as a subculture, my belief is that we're largely composed of Central Negatives. Drop us in a fantasy RPG, then, and we all think we're the best Task Leader. Nobody seems to want to fill any other roles, no matter how good they may be at it.
This issue is exacerbated when we lose sight of the fact that there are, in fact, two Small Groups at play. The Players (including the DM) and the Characters (not necessarily including the DM). Within the group of Players, it is a given that the Characters, someone is going to have to be the Task Leader for any given task, and the others are going to have to acknowledge that. Usually, so far as I can tell, the DM throws an NPC in there to be the Task Leader. Frankly, most players can't handle the role and they sure as feck can't handle anyone else having it. So there it is.
It seems easier to allow for in Pbp games - there are more ways to enjoy writing a character, I think, than playing one. Most of my PCs actually seem to kind of go with the flow, putting in their two bits and reinforcing the party structure wherever it's needed. I do have one Task Leader, of a sort, and that's a belligerent old lady who yells and bosses everyone at every available opportunity...and as a player, I've been totally encouraged to go this route with her. The other players are pleased and amused, and have taken to calling her General Granny in our OOC thread. She's a blast to write, as well.
So...well...some thoughts there, I guess. Haha, didn't set out to deliver a Wall of Text. Oops.
When you have one PC that must obviously be the leader in an Authoritarian view (Captain, Colonel, Sargent, King, General), I invariable end up with players who routinely disregard the in-game hieararchy.
The attitude seems to be: "we're all PCs, so I should do whatever I feel like. And if the game context has a hierarchical component, I must be as obnoxious about it as possible"
The only games I have played in with this structure are Star Trek and Babylon 5. In both cases everyone knew what the set-up was right at the start and made characters to fit into it, and just got on with what they were meant to be doing. The 'official leader' effectively ran things by committee anyway, other than the occasional speech or tie-breaker decision.
It's no fun not to have autonomy. If a PC wants to have a staff of people who do what he tells them to, he and the DM need to play a solo game and have NPC cohorts that don't mind being overshadowed. If I'm taking the time out of my life to play a game, I want to make the decisions for my PC, not hand them over to the guy across the table. If he's going to tell me which dice to roll when, why doesn't he just eliminate the middleman, take my character sheet, and roll them himself and let me go do something I can enjoy?
It should be noted I don't want to be the boss, either. I don't want to tell the other PCs what to do any more than I want mine to be told. What makes it fun is everyone finding a way to work together because they want to, not because they're going to be court-martialed if they don't.
I think there is a huge, profound difference between having somebody in charge and being told what to do. You can have the hierarchy and not get ordered around, as long as you respect the hierarchy.
The best way such things are handled is for the person nominally in charge to ask for volunteers for tasks and then give free rein on how they are achieved.
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I think assigning any kind of leader of the group by the DM is a very bad idea. If you have ever gamed with a group where the DM constantly let his best friend make characters (prince(half-fiend), knight commander, leader of the rangers, head of the mages guild, mercenary commander ,etc) to which the other pcs were supposed to be of lower rank of that character, you would too.
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When I play in these types of games, I never attempt the leadership role, preferring to be a power behind the throne type. I will usually will be an Intelligence based char, tech, engineer, or something of the sort, keeping close to the one in charge to offer advice and opinions. When asked why I don't try to lead, my answer is always the same, when things break, that's my problem, when a plan fails, it's the problem of the one in charge.
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Personally, I have no problem with playing a game with a preset hierarchy amongst the PCs if it is made clear form the outset. In reality is not such a far cry from having a group of players decide whose PC will fill what role (i.e. - heavy, face, "acquisitions specialist", etc.).
But, as I said, if there is going to be a strictly enforced hierarchy, all the players need to be on board before the game ever gets past the discussion phase. If it doesn't sit well with any of the players, the game won't last.
Adding to the list above of games that have the hierarchy structure aspect:
Twilight 2000 (love that game)
Games with a hierarchy are fun, if handled correctly. The leadership role SHOULD go to the character/player combo that is most capable of actually doing the job. If the DM is controlling the NPC that makes this distinction, the choice should be one that an experienced leader would make. Otherwise the NPC looks incompetent, the party will fall to infighting and it's highly likely that good RP will lead to the poor leader replaced/demoted. Bad RP will break the game apart, with potentially hurt feelings in real life.
In our Kingmaker campaign, the first ruler proved to be less than adequet. This was a semi-deliberate choice on his part. He was deposed in a bloodless coup prior to the 3rd part of the AP; he retained authority temporarily but no real power.
Kingmaker's kingdom building rules are built with this stuff in mind. While one player may be "king", another player controls the army, yet another controls the church and yet another controls the magic users of the realm. Then there is the real power, the guy who controls the money. Eventually my group ran the kingdom like q syndicate and did it very well.
In Skull & Shackles, one player may be Captain but another player will command the siege engines, another the boarding parties etc. It's important to note that if your players wanted, there are potentially numerous captainships available, just take another ship. Sandbox games are designed to be somewhat political and or hierarchical, that's not a bad thing. The players just need to explore that element of RPGs, not let one obnoxious player dominate the game.
As to PCs constantly mouthing off to authority figures I let them, but my worlds strive for internal consistency. Laws exist in most civilized settings and players may skirt them but outright disregard has consequences. I'm not particularly interested in indulging player ego trips that don't benefit the overall story. Players can be tough characters but taking on a kingdom is hard to do especially without backup. The notion that the current king is just a level 3 aristocrat is silly, he might be but there is going to be some powerful behind the throne types keeping junior on that throne.
Now when you get the Paladin/evil Summoner dynamic I have 2 choices. Tell one player that his class option is not available. Or let it happen. In the second case I'm not going to coddle the conjureor when the Pally kills his familiar and tells him "whew I just saved you from that little demon on your shoulder". Antogonizing a paladin at my table is dumb, there is nothing that says LG Paladins should tolerate the continued existence of a spellcaster that traffics with fiends. Paladins destroy evil things, it's what they gotta do.