The Campaign: When You Have To Change The Field Of Battle To Win

When you can't beat them in battle, baffle them with bullshit.

(Following from this post.)

The quest for competitive advantage in a campaign is not an end-game pursuit. As with building up a Domain, this is something that can be done right away. Players have every reason, and right, to do so.

If it is not enough to attain skills that no one else has, and if it is not enough to transform oneself or one's minions into something no one else can handle, then it is time to do something greater to gain that edge: remake the battlefield into one of your choosing.

Ordinarily, this is done literally and thus is the realm of powerful (i.e. high-level) spell-casters and warlords with massive combat engineering prowess at their disposal.

This not what I mean.

More common than you think.

Narrative And Obligation

You need not have Charm Person to be the Gray Eminence. You need not be playing a high-level Thief or Assassin (though it helps). You need only do well with Charisma, and know how to read both individual people and the networks among them in real time. If your man can work a room, then he can use the power of story and social pressure to get what he wants. (This, by the way, is another reason that Bards are terrifying; this is something they are very good at doing.)

This is the path of deception, by necessity, and even the most upfront pratictioner has to withhold and selectively reveal information because secrets and intelligence are his components and crafting narratives are his spells. A ruthless pragmatism grips such people as a cost of pursuing this way of warfare, and those that need not resort to spells to do so are the most dangerous because one cannot just throw dispel magic (etc.) at it to destroy the false perception of reality so crafted.

I mention that this is tied to social pressure for a reason. It is one thing to make someone believe something that isn't true. Parents bullshit their children daily; that doesn't mean anything. What makes this potent is crafting a narrative where adherance to the conclusions it promotes is reinforced by the pressure imposed by the target's social status (in absolute terms, or relative to the narrative crafter); you don't tell a king to go to war unless he already faces social pressure to do so.

This is the Intelligence Game. It is a game of words and images, illusion and divination, and the better organized spymaster is the one able to turn wizards and warlords into puppets that do what he wants without realizing it until it is too late.

This is dangerous, especially if the consequences of being found out have not already been blunted or rendered impotent.

If a target cannot be yoked by his vices, then he can be yoked by causing problems for his war efforts--economic sabotage--through deniable means (even better if useful pawns can be suckered into doing it) and then solving the problem by offering to assist in rebuilding what was damaged or destroyed- for mutual benefit, of course.

That leads to another form of obligation, one all too familiar to players worldwide.

The Money Power

The most ruthless of players in a campaign will seek to acquire a monopoly on money itself, following the path of historical banking from literal coin to all sorts of abstracted fiancial sorcery as seen now. Becoming the defacto central bank for everyone in the campaign, where everyone has to use your currency to make transactions, is not easy to do but it can be done. For example, imagine covertly laying a fatal curse on all coins other than those you mint, making everyone have to come to you to transact at all.

No, Lord Bond, I expect you to Save Or Die.

The obligation to repay the debt incurred by taking on a loan, or the obligation to abide by the banker's Code of Conduct or get cut off of banking services, may not seem like a big deal- unless you're in a campaign where such a player takes the time to build out a milieu-spanning guild (like a Thief would, for example; why risk getting killed robbing tombs when you can fleece entire civilizations legally through usury and currency manipulation). Pull that off, and you can quickly hit your Win Condition by turning the entire campaign into metaphorical meth addicts and you're the sole supplier.

And the worst part? The others akin to such a player's character will see it coming first and move to counter it.

Every would-be conqueror needs an Oberstein.

Why This Works

By moving the field of battle into realms that spells and swords alone can find difficult to deal with, you create a competitive advantage through control of information (which, like beliefs, are what people act upon) or the control of finances (can't level up if you can't pay the costs). Combined, along with careful reading of social norms and knowledge of the culture, you can use Sophistry and Usury as spells as potent as Geas or Quest.

Now imagine doing this while also having access to those swords and spells. Imagine if- oh, wait, someone already did back in the 1980s.

And I haven't even gotten to Clerics and Druids making full use of their position as religious leaders. Let's save that for tomorrow.