Sick of the Grand Conspiracy?

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

Because it doesn't run against psychology. And psychology matters.

Meh. Some people are afraid of taking liberties with hard sciences, but take some with psychology, while others go vice versa. Claiming that one matters and the other doesn't (in either direction) seems . . . off.

Exploring a world with same 'hard' laws of nature but different sociological ones can be as interesting as the other way around.

[Kromm]

On topic, I've run a secret-agents campaign (see .sig) weekly since May 2009. It doesn't feature a grand conspiracy . . . even though spy fiction is where people tend to expect grand conspiracy. The only deliberate conspiracy is a minor one: a privately run "righter of wrongs" foundation to which the PCs belong. It isn't grand and it isn't behind or running anything beyond a few modest legitimate businesses. And things have worked fine – we're at close to 140 sessions and the players still show up.

The opposition? Random groups who do nasty things, ranging from mobsters through terrorists to the intelligence services of nation-states. These rivals work much as they do in reality: looking out for #1, often competing, with obvious goals like "make money" and "promote our way of life." When they operate covertly or clandestinely, it's to avoid social complications, not to pull the world's strings. And these organizations have kept the PCs busy for over 100 game sessions without trying to run the world, being secretly linked, or even sharing information.

Based on that experience and several campaigns where I have used the grand conspiracy, I would say that the grand conspiracy in RPGs is attractive because it offers a simplified way to handle enemies. You can largely ignore rivalries, differing motivations, and realistic communications and command structures in favor of a monolith. Whenever you want to turn up the heat, the Secret Masters give orders, which reach minions flawlessly and are obeyed without question. When the PCs take the offensive, it's against a big, diffuse target that they can't wipe out, so it can serve as the enemy for the entire campaign.

It's a lot of work to come up with multiple enemies – some unrelated, others rivals, yet others allies of convenience – and give them plausible, fallible command structures, communications channels, and minions. And after you do all that work, you get bad guys with weak points that the PCs can strike at, possibly taking out that group and forcing the GM to do more work to create a new one. Grand conspiracies have built-in insurance against that situation – that's why I used them in past campaigns.

This isn't a value judgment at all . . . I'm just saying that the grand conspiracy is probably fine for GMs who are short on time and players who don't mind being at perpetual war with one foe. It's less good for groups that want significant verisimilitude, especially if the players get bored with everything always tracing back to the same black hole.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

Attributing things to conspiracies is normal for humans. Forging long-term conspiracies is not. The best example I can think of off-hand is the First Triumvirate.

Unions of equals make bad conspiracies; they are metastable at best. A better model is Sejanus, who steadily rose in power for at least 12 years, then was defacto emperor for 5 more. Compare the reign of J. Edgar Hoover, who was up to bad stuff for at least 48 years, and Boss Tweed was but one of a succession of bosses of the Tamany Hall political machine that ran for 180 years.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Bruno

All of them are very "personal" explanations and stink of "human" levels of petty revenge. Which is something that's pretty easy to wrap your head around - "Someone is angry, so they're being mean to me."

There is also the paradoxical ability of people to de-personify misfortune - the carnage of automotive "accidents" obviously involves human agency and choice, but relatively few humans are held to blame morally, even when there are demonstrably people with influence over more than just their own car or truck, like Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield (a former automotive dealer) switching New York from pneumatic tubes to mail trucks against the economic interests of the USPS in 1953.

[Dalillama]

Originally Posted by Classic Uncle Sam

I tend to place my shadowy organizations at about 50 or 60 years in the making and the reason players get wind of them is because they are starting to unravel a bit. That doesn't mean they are less able though.

Which doesn't stop them from claiming that they're the heirs of a 2,000 year old secret order which since time immemorial blah blah blah. All kinds of real life secret societies do that, after all.

[Johnny1A.2]

Originally Posted by jeff_wilson

and Boss Tweed was but one of a succession of bosses of the Tamany Hall political machine that ran for 180 years.

But a political machine like Tammany isn't exactly a conspiracy. It may do some things in secret, but the basic nature and existence of 'machines' is rarely any secret from any but the most sheltered/naive. Usually such organizations are less concerned with secrecy than 'deniability'.

[Johnny1A.2]

There are 2 fundamental problems with long-term conspiracies. The first is secrecy. It's an old line that if you double the number of people who know a secret, you square the chance of a leak. That's probably loosely true even if mathematically shaky.

Secrets tend to leak over time. All it takes is one major member of the Conspiracy to have a change of heart and everything can leak. That change of heart can come from a change of personal vested interests, a religious conversion, just being tired of the whole thing, etc. If the Conspiracy has 100 people world-wide in the know, and 99 of them keep the secret, then the secret has still leaked.

The other big thing is that, in the words of the old song, 'everybody wants to rule the world'. Power struggles emerge by the naure of the beast. Interests change, alliances shift. The losers of one round of power struggles have an incentive to change the terms of the deal, or to just blow up the whole thing.

It's almost inherently unstable.

[Hans Rancke-Madsen]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

Attributing things to conspiracies is normal for humans. Forging long-term conspiracies is not. The best example I can think of off-hand is the First Triumvirate.

I would say the historical Bavarian Illuminati. IMO they are a textbook example of how secret conspiracies would normally fare.


Hans

[Flyndaran]

It doesn't even have to be a purposeful leak. The world is full of nosy people that want to know everything about everyone, especially if they want privacy.
There are also many accidental leaks through incompetence or just bad luck.

[moldymaltquaffer]

The Freemasons are a staple of conspiracy theories, but they're not any more "secret" than Tammany Hall was. (And political machines are conspiracies, pretty much by definition.)

Secrecy is not all that and a bag of chips. The Catholic church is pretty opaque to outsiders. (Especially when the outsiders are Communist countries actively trying to root out the church's influence.) Do people become disaffected? Of course. Are their leaks? Of course. In most of the world, you can walk right up to one of their locations. Does it matter? Not very much. The Roman Catholic church has a lot of resources at its disposal, a purpose, and makes a pretty major impact on the world.

Or let's go in a slightly different direction. The New Age movement. It's kind of deliberately nebulous, but common core beliefs aren't hard to suss out. There's not much of a hierarchy. But a shadowy cabal actually able to practice magic could largely control the scene from behind the scenes. If someone leaks, they're cast out of their social circle, and viewed by most outsiders as just another burned out hippie. The truth is out there, but most people just don't care.

Heck, I can't walk into a pharmacy any more without seeing homeopathic "remedies" mixed in with genuine medicine. They're pretty much entirely distilled water, there's lots of evidence that they're bad medicine, and whistleblowers are commonplace. None of that matters. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. And it looks like our government is going to give it a big, sloppy seal of approval in the near future. (After all, there's a vocal demand for the service, it's cheap--and directly replaces expensive alternatives, and it makes people feel like they've been taken care of. The placebo effect is in full effect.) <shrug> Putting a shadowy force with a nebulous goal behind the phenomenon isn't nearly as unbelievable as the phenomenon itself.

Communism has been as thoroughly debunked as it's possible for an economic/political theory to be. It's track record is so bad that apologists are stuck trotting out the architect of the gulag system (Trotsky) and the Butcher of La Cabaña (Che) as mythic ideals. You can read the foundational texts at nearly any public library (plus lots and lots of cutting critiques). Yet you can find the true believers of the doctrine congregated at nearly every college in our country, often in positions of power. The CPUSA may have largely died when the USSR stopped funding it, but large numbers of informal networks exist.

Ross Perot wasn't exactly stable, and even many of his sympathizers admitted it. In 1992, his highly unorthodox campaign managed to take nearly one out of every five votes cast. His success(?) was largely based on the same themes of limited government and national debt that currently animate the Tea Party. There were (largely polite and legal) rebellions based on the same themes against Clinton and Bush W. Still, a lot of commentators have an unbreakable belief that the Tea Party is novel and rooted in racism against the current president, rather than a continuing point on an established trend. (And one that seems to be in decline.) There are nearly countless groups fighting for influence within the movement. That said, the right person in the right place could influence millions and bring the fractious powerplayers at least roughly into line.
On the flipside, there's a large audience that's happy to believe the worst of the Tea Party movement. Lost of outrageous claims against them have been enthusiastically swallowed by roughly a quarter of our population. It's a situation ripe for demagogues, and there's never a shortage of those in politics or media. There's plenty of room for mischief here, too.
Or you could take it farther, and go for the "paranoid middle". After all, it's the moderates who decide elections. Most are low-information voters that tend to be quite paranoid about those who are passionately involved in the political process. Whichever side best manipulates them wins the election, and they know it. ;) But it's much better gaming if the tail is wagging the dog.

Now, I don't tend to go for overarching world-controlling conspiracies. But smaller ones are all over the place, and many of them dream big.
Are they unstable? Heck yeah. Chronic backstabbing disorder? Check. Most won't outlast whatever recent fad they're cashing in on. But they can change the world, at least a bit. And they *could* just be unwitting tools of a sinister puppetmaster who takes a very long view.