Games for the Mind

I’m sure I’m not the only player who picked up Vampire when it first came out way back when, read through the material, thought it was so interesting and different than what had been going in gaming, and then sat down to discover I had no idea how to run or play the political intrigue that supposedly drove the game.

And it crossed my mind there might be a way to structure those interactions a little more.  The biggest thing is to give political and social bonds some sort of mechanical weight.  Here is a basic idea:

Social conflicts always have enduring consequences.  If you lose a battle of wills, you get a consequence recorded directly onto your character sheet regarding your relationship to the winner.  That becomes a demand your character must meet or pay some resource to ignore (back in the day, Willpower).

Ideally, over time, there would emergent tensions in those consequences, perhaps even to the extent that a single player would have conflicting injunctions. 

Some extra fiddly bits might be useful, like giving the victorious character a pool of resources they can offer their subject for following their injunction.  That sets up a follow and get rewarded or disobey and have to burn resources.

Of course, any given player should have a limit on how much bounty they can distribute in a single session, so that a player with lots of social power is in the position of having to play favorites.