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Gambit |
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I think you might have better luck on a site more diversified in its gaming preferences, I would suggest taking your question over to the rpg.net forums or on the rpg reddit. I wish I could help, I have played Green Ronins Dragon Age game, but never GoT. Good luck.
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Irontruth |
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I ran a short campaign a few years ago. I used to be fairly knowledgeable about the system and could answer some questions. I used to be very active on their forums, but that was 5+ years ago (all my posts are in the archived section).
Elements of the system I found I really liked. Other parts are horribly unbalanced. Characters in generally can get hyper specialized, but it's not like Pathfinder specialization, since it's a skill based game. If one person is specialized in an area, they're useless in other situations, and make the rest of the group useless in their area of specialization.
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Irontruth |
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Running political intrigue can be challenging (not the mechanics) as a GM, particularly if you're new to GMing. The crux of it is deal making. Basically you need to know what everyone wants (PC and NPC). Then you need to figure out who can give that person what they want, or help them get it.
1) Keep copious notes. I'd have a notebook with a page for each NPC, so when the PC's interact with them, you have room to write down a summary of what happened and any new info learned about that NPC.
2) Be prepared to make stuff up on the fly. With a few notable exceptions, most intrigue focused TV shows don't even know where they're going when they start. Plus, an intrigue focused game is a little sandboxy, players will go in strange directions you didn't anticipate, so be prepared to invent information on the spot. This also goes back to #1.
3) Be honest with your players. While NPC's can lie to them, you as GM shouldn't. I'd also consider pulling back the curtain and talking to them about how you're going to GM this. Ask for feedback.
4) Don't push to a resolution. Let the players push towards an endgame. Instead, just throw up roadblocks and shake things up to keep them on their toes. Instead of dungeon encounters, they're going to make backroom deals. Getting a knight who serves a minor lord to do a favor should be the equivalent of one encounter (1-2 scenes, not too hard). Getting that minor lord to do a favor should be like a small dungeon (a session or two to finish, multiple steps and obstacles to overcome). Changing the course of the kingdom would be a whole campaign.
Other than that, I'd watch some TV shows. Game of Thrones, obviously, is a good one. Here are some others, with an eye towards watching people within negotiate each other and the political landscape around them:
The Wire
Rome
House of Cards
Scandal
Lost
If you've already seen them, rewatch a few episodes, looking specifically to create a map of how the characters interact and how their goals intersect.
Hope that helps.
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Neurophage |
Don't discount the value of people immune to certain kinds of influence. The honest knight who lives by his honor and fights for what's right can't be bribed. The broken man with nothing left to lose can't be threatened. A person with nothing to hide can't be blackmailed. These stopgaps don't just exist to block players from overusing certain tactics. They also exist to give the players the opportunity to succeed where their rivals failed (or, sometimes, vice-versa).
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"Other than that, I'd watch some TV shows. Game of Thrones, obviously, is a good one. Here are some others, with an eye towards watching people within negotiate each other and the political landscape around them:
The Wire
Rome
House of Cards
Scandal
Lost
If you've already seen them, rewatch a few episodes, looking specifically to create a map of how the characters interact and how their goals intersect....
"
To be honest I haven't seen any of these shows yet including game of thrones! Though I did srart the books. but I'll make sure to get around to it. Edit: have not figured out how qoutes work in the messageboards
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Irontruth |
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If you're new to GM'ing, I do have other games that I recommend. They can help you learn/practice skills that are useful to GMs in a very direct way that is hard coded into the rules.
Dungeon World - helps you learn to make stuff up on the fly. A lot of the game is directed by the results of player actions. A player activates a move (game term for ability/action) and that move contains certain queues as to what happens as a result. It doesn't tell you what happens, but rather the nature of the thing that happens.
When GMing DW, you don't create a complicated plot. Rather you create a starting scene, have a pocketful of possible NPC's and/or factions, then let the players run wild. I find this useful because it forces to you fly by the seat of your pants, you can't prep your way through a session.
The game isn't perfect. It doesn't do a long, complicated plot well. Rather it does short, zany, random well. Not great for a long campaign (unless you like zany and random), but good for 1-shots or episodic games. But like I said, it does teach you a specific skill as a GM. Also the GM advice is very good IMO, and much of it isn't advice, but actually rules that make Dungeon World behave like Dungeon World (as the writers intended).
Fiasco - this is actually a GMless game. The shortest description is that Fiasco recreates a Coen brothers movie (O' Brother Where Art Thou, Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, etc). The game is about people who want things, will do stupid stuff to get the thing they want and the terrible consequences they inflict on themselves by doing stupid things. Sometimes, someone comes out smelling like roses, but usually through no fault of their own.
Fiasco is very, very light on rules. It's all improv, you don't even have a character sheet. Instead, there's a sheet between you and the person sitting to your right and left. That sheet has information that connects you to them and that connection tells you who you are.
For GMing, this game teaches you to think on your feet. Empathize with your character and feeling okay when bad things happen to them. Basically it's practice for making a good villain, and then feeling okay about them getting stomped on by the PCs. Making good villains is tricky, you have to make them realistic enough to be believable (which requires you to empathize with them) while still presenting them as bad guys, and then cheering the PCs on when they finally are victorious.
Plus, the free-form nature of the game is good for flexing/strengthening those creative muscles. It only does 1-shot sessions, which take about 2-4 hours to play through. It plays well with 3-5 people. I've played with 8, but it gets long and you have to wait a long while between your turns.
I don't recommend these to play instead of SIF, but rather just other games to consider having in your library. I personally have found that playing lots of different games has really changed how I play all RPG's and has improved how I GM significantly.