My older daughter is 13, and although she’s good at games, she’s resistant to D&D. It seems like it’s mostly to do with the game’s combat focus—and, fair enough, combat is indisputably the part of the game where there’s the most mechanical complexity, and where the characters’ abilities are mostly oriented. So I asked her what might get her interested in a D&D game, and she said “courtly intrigue.”
An independent but related fact: There’s a new game store in my area! If you’re in central New Jersey, please check out Round 2 Gaming; they’re a lovely addition to Quaker Bridge Mall and I want them to succeed. R2G runs TTRPG nights. It struck me that a game store could be a great place to run a West Marches campaign, a sandbox-style game that (in its ideal form) organically supports an ever-shifting cast, accommodating the sort of drop-ins and disappearances you might expect from a group organized around a store. Because I can’t not embroider an idea, I started noodling on variant settings for such a campaign. Zombie apocalypse? High seas adventure in a mysterious archipelago?
… courtly intrigue?
Understand, at this point, we’re no longer necessarily targeting my daughter; I don’t know if she’d want to do R2G TTRPG night. But there’s something about the idea of treating a royal court as an exploration sandbox that I keep coming back to. Instead of the territory, your map is the social web of the court; instead of fighting monsters for gold, you’re manipulating courtiers for status. There’s no reason such a campaign couldn’t include combat—duels, assassinations, maybe some Duke will reward you if you scare off the barbarians pillaging his border? But there should be plenty of other stuff. (Which may highlight the mechanical weakness of D&D for a game like this.)
Most of the snags with this kind of game seen like they’re inherent in classic West Marches to begin with: How do you motivate characters, how do you ensure sessions end at a good stopping point (i.e., one where the active cast can change). The major one on my mind, perhaps because I’m currently watching Dimension 20’s A COURT OF FEY & FLOWERS, is the gravity of PvP in a courtly intrigue setting, which is intrinsically about one-upmanship—this feels like it could be fine in a conventional campaign but wouldn’t mix well with West Marches, where you have to roll with whoever’s at the table. In other discussions of courtly intrigue in RPGs, folks have suggested Court of Blades, which seems to solve the problem by binding the PCs’ fates together as retainers of an upstart house. Maybe that could work?
Anyway, I probably shouldn’t be DMing once a week for strangers in a campaign format I’m not familiar with, using a variation that might fall flat on its face. It’s a lot of commitment. But I can’t stop thinking about it.
Currently reading: THE CONTAINER VICTORY GARDEN, by Maggie Stuckey. (Speaking of overcommitting.)