The first major hurdle in intrigue design is referee informational bandwidth. Ideally, you want to present a list of NPC, each with various social scores (for lack of a better term) with each player character. The issue is that this obviously creates exponentially more data to track. Add to that the fact that the referee also needs to handle that goes on behind the fog of war and it rapidly becomes a source of burnout.
Braunstein games tend to focus on player v player intrigue as it helps reduce the social information for the referee. When it's Jim deciding how he feels about Bob as opposed to the NPC Princess, her father, and 17 suitors all feel about the players and each other, there's far less for a referee to worry about. Then they can focus on maintaining fog of war and adjudicating actions, which is still a large amount of work
To mitigate the proliferation of things to track, I would only track relationships for PCs that have interacted with a specific NPC. If they don't do their research or ask around, they may not even know that there's both a Captain of the Guard and a Captain of the Watch, and neither NPC needs relationship tracking until a PC interacts with them.
That helps, but I very much agree that information bandwidth is a critical problem to resolve. Social interaction is one component, but it gets even more complicated when there are multiple armies on the field sending back weekly (or even daily!) scout reports, dozens of spies looking for new developments in towns across the region, and a mage with henchmen all scrying targets of opportunity in response to the above. It really plays up the fact that gathering information is a pillar of this sort of gameplay, but it would be wonderful to have a faster resolution method.
Braunsteins can help with many of those things, but once there's asymmetrical information involved (fog of war, as you note) it's hard to run that without a Judge to oversee. I'm not surprised that multi-Judge gameplay was developed pretty rapidly in early D&D to help address those issues, though I wonder if there are ways to automate things now to make it more manageable.
Perhaps information has to be gamified in some way. If players were to write down their manuevers secretly to be revealed at the table, you could then have a period of time for making information gathering "checks" (again for lack of a better term). Then players can help handle some of the informational load. Almost like a game of En Guarde! First thing though would be determining what's is analogous to a "turn" and how many actions you get in a turn and such.
Good stuff. Not sure if intrigue is what I'd call it overall but the structures laid out are solid. I think you can actually segment/firewall content decently well using information; can't disrupt a scheme if you don't know it exists, same as can't kill a goblin you haven't encountered. The relationship web seems like the heaviest part for the DM to manage so maybe it'd be best if they maintained a roster of 'active' figures while other NPC's are mainly passive.
Also, if you want some good scenarios starters for this, raid some of the trashy 'noble fantasy romance' genre books. The Princess is betrothed to the bloody knight who conquered her kingdom (who actually harbors dreams of rebellion) under orders from his lord. Genre is full of fun melodramatic relationship webs.
The first major hurdle in intrigue design is referee informational bandwidth. Ideally, you want to present a list of NPC, each with various social scores (for lack of a better term) with each player character. The issue is that this obviously creates exponentially more data to track. Add to that the fact that the referee also needs to handle that goes on behind the fog of war and it rapidly becomes a source of burnout.
Braunstein games tend to focus on player v player intrigue as it helps reduce the social information for the referee. When it's Jim deciding how he feels about Bob as opposed to the NPC Princess, her father, and 17 suitors all feel about the players and each other, there's far less for a referee to worry about. Then they can focus on maintaining fog of war and adjudicating actions, which is still a large amount of work
To mitigate the proliferation of things to track, I would only track relationships for PCs that have interacted with a specific NPC. If they don't do their research or ask around, they may not even know that there's both a Captain of the Guard and a Captain of the Watch, and neither NPC needs relationship tracking until a PC interacts with them.
That helps, but I very much agree that information bandwidth is a critical problem to resolve. Social interaction is one component, but it gets even more complicated when there are multiple armies on the field sending back weekly (or even daily!) scout reports, dozens of spies looking for new developments in towns across the region, and a mage with henchmen all scrying targets of opportunity in response to the above. It really plays up the fact that gathering information is a pillar of this sort of gameplay, but it would be wonderful to have a faster resolution method.
Braunsteins can help with many of those things, but once there's asymmetrical information involved (fog of war, as you note) it's hard to run that without a Judge to oversee. I'm not surprised that multi-Judge gameplay was developed pretty rapidly in early D&D to help address those issues, though I wonder if there are ways to automate things now to make it more manageable.
Perhaps information has to be gamified in some way. If players were to write down their manuevers secretly to be revealed at the table, you could then have a period of time for making information gathering "checks" (again for lack of a better term). Then players can help handle some of the informational load. Almost like a game of En Guarde! First thing though would be determining what's is analogous to a "turn" and how many actions you get in a turn and such.
Good stuff. Not sure if intrigue is what I'd call it overall but the structures laid out are solid. I think you can actually segment/firewall content decently well using information; can't disrupt a scheme if you don't know it exists, same as can't kill a goblin you haven't encountered. The relationship web seems like the heaviest part for the DM to manage so maybe it'd be best if they maintained a roster of 'active' figures while other NPC's are mainly passive.
Also, if you want some good scenarios starters for this, raid some of the trashy 'noble fantasy romance' genre books. The Princess is betrothed to the bloody knight who conquered her kingdom (who actually harbors dreams of rebellion) under orders from his lord. Genre is full of fun melodramatic relationship webs.