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unionize? no. one party, we were doing LMoP. i fucking hate LMoP. I took the boring ass prerolled character the DM made me play (because other people don’t know dnd and thus it wouldn’t be fair to let me play a character i wanted to play) and twisted the premade backstory from him saving some mistreated workers into him leading a communist revolution.
Why do you play with them then? It’s super easy to find another group if you live in an urban area. Even suburbs have a game shop here and there.
i played two sessions and realized they only wanted me at their table to give free therapy to the wife of one of the guys in the group who the dm has been trying to hook up with for like 20 years. i left very quickly, have not spoken to the dm or that couple since.
Sounds like a great party to do an Acq Inc campaign. They play as their own business and can have evil corporations as enemies. It’s great fun
If you don’t have a copy of the little red songbook, can you really call yourself a bard?
Player: I want to ask this road worker about their job.
GM: They tell you that they are perfectly happy with their job. They say they work short hours, get paid well and have a contract with very favourable terms that prevent them from being fired arbitrarily. All of their colleagues seem to feel the same way.
Player: Hm, what if they’re lying?
They’re absolutely lying get the pamphlets and cast a zone of truth.
You know what that’s called, right? It’s class consciousness. When people’s power fantasies are union organizing, that implies there is a degree of cultural hegemony going on and that’s pretty neat.
I played with a group that defeated a boss by unionizing his minions against him so they could have a worker owned dungeon. I played another campaign where i turned a kingdom over to its field workers and abdicated and destroyed the monarchy after defeating its ruler.
😈
My favorite one-shot that I’ve ever ran involved the PCs being hired by a city to go kill some kobolds. The kobolds had taken over their mine, had fortified the place, and were violently rejecting any attempts to make them leave.
When the PCs arrive, it’s basically as described: The mine is overrun with kobolds, who have erected makeshift barricades and are armed with crossbows.
In actuality, the city had hired the kobolds to mine the ore for them, but then refused to pay them after taking delivery. It’s a labor dispute, and the PCs had been hired to kill them because nobody would question some adventurers killing some kobolds. The players discovered this and were upset enough about being lied to that they joined the kobolds’ side and basically acted as the (very well-armed and aggressive) union reps, negotiating better pay and more favorable terms for them. Was a great time.
This is the best sort of rpg story, in my humble opinion.
JDPON Bard leading a protracted people’s war against the despotic empire.
My next character actually
Remeber, kids: Laws are threats made by the dominate socio-economic ethnic group in a given nation. It’s just the promise of violence and police are basically an occupying army.
Yeah, my character is realizing that the nobles that want to depose the king in favor of a ruling council are themselves just as corrupt if not more, and that the only real answer is a worker’s revolution. So this might end up being a bit of an influence in this weekend’s events.
Had to go find a clip of this because the delivery makes it even better, like a militant socialist afterschool special:
The delivery sells it entirely. He’s like the guy coming in to talk about drugs with a baseball cap and sitting backwards in the chair, but it’s about cops and molotovs instead.
Thank you for sharing, didn’t know about this
I mean, we use different terms (“social contract”, “law and order”, “state monopoly on violence”), but that’s what it boils down to.
This but actually. Dnd is not the best system to live out the group’s actual fantasy of social revolution, and that’s what my groups tend to want to do.
Come to think of it, can anyone here suggest a good rpg system to simulate working people siezing the means of production from the bourgeoisie?
Cthulhu RPG except the workers are cultists and the means of production old ass artifacts that summon non-euclidean deities.
If they want to walk the revolutionary road, then they better prepare some backup characters. The forces that built the world are never keen on allowing some scrappy rat-cachers to poke and prod at its foundations.
The campaigns I have run rarely see someones first character making it to the end. I am glad to have players who are okay with this.
That’s my kind of game. The “let’s not be political (even though it is political)” flavor is less appealing.
Hey, you’re the one underpaying your fictional workers in the first place
im all for supplying them with that hope, but probably through a meta conversation so that they don’t attempt to unionize everything they see and instead make it a story they want to partake in
Now, would this work? Or embolden them to instead begin protracted warfare against the kingdom of the lvl 12 mage?
Oh no, I have a really easy means of getting my players organically motivated in my story. :(
