Is a world primarily focused on intrigue and politics widely sustainable?

[Vrock Bait]

This seems really cool. I guess it depends what your players are into.

I thought so too, which is exactly why it’s so skewed to intrigue. Mostly I’m developing it for future online games, since everybody in my town plays my least favorite edition of D&D.

Some observations:

-First, there are less "Default" enemies to fight unless a country is at war. One way to adapt would be to give other types of enemies elsewhere- criminals, maybe players can find some sort of equivalent to a privateer arrangement. If you opt to reduce combats significantly, you might want to shop around for systems a bit- D&D's noncombat rules are pretty anemic, and it's very much built around a paradigm of dungeons and "dungeons". For example, the mechanism of spells-per-day and "rests" (system-dependent) is designed for a particular scale of time pressure which may not exist in an intrigue game.

Honestly, the idea was that you’re perfectly able to start a war. You don’t have too, but if you want, you can. If you want to be a peacemaker, sure, go for diplomacy, but I’ve statted and written out a ton of armies, allegiances, and what-if wars for my inner epic conflict nerd.

-Second, an environment in which a single group of adventurers can set off a war by accident puts players under a lot of pressure if they have to continuously worry about setting off a war- they might simply resolve the issue by not caring about it rather than considering all the ramifications involved. A game where you can't do anything for fear of setting off the much stronger powers-that-be is no fun. You might consider providing some cushion before a full-scale war erupts, and let them know about tensions as they rise so they have some time to back off or reconsider.

I’m ok with them not caring - the point of the setting is that every action has consequences. If I really to boot them out of a Rope Trick or some such ignore-the-NPCs nonsense, I’ll just send a few angry armies their way. Magic is prevalent enough for that.

But honestly, I don’t want to cushion them. Part of the fun of accidentally causing a war is fighting it.

-Eliminating alignment is pretty easy to do- it either does nothing in some editions, or requires some minor class/spell tweaks in others.

I’m thinking of still keeping Law/Chaos though, since I’d still like to make sure no paladins are chaotic and stuff like that.