Sick of the Grand Conspiracy?

[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.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by Johnny1A.2

But a political machine like Tammany isn't exactly a conspiracy.

If you bother to check, you will find Tammany Hall is exactly the textbook definition of conspiracy, complete with secrecy and illegality.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[digoraccoon]

Without a grand conspiracy... yeah we'd have just the little potatoes. Maybe a few conspiracies that don't exist but many people think they do.

[jeff_wilson]

Originally Posted by digoraccoon

Without a grand conspiracy... yeah we'd have just the little potatoes. Maybe a few conspiracies that don't exist but many people think they do.

You can still have small-c conspiracy with global scope, in particular the LBJ and Nixon administrations' exposed manipulations of domestic and world opinion. Watergate is also a textbook example of under-coordinated conspiracies, where indeed a relatively minor crime leads ultimately to the involvement of most powerful men in the world.