Gaming | Politics
Election Day: Political Mechanics for Tabletop Roleplaying Games
Also, The Ugly Monster endorses Kamala Harris
“It’s election day. While the characters go about their business, complete their quests or plan their next misdeed, the place where they live is the stage for an important election, not necessarily directly related to the adventure you’re playing. But here’s something to make it unpredictable.”
— from ‘Election Day’ by Nicolas “Gulix” Ronvel
As far as I know, there are NO tabletop roleplaying games with election mechanics. Some games have politician character splats — like Underground and Moonpunk — and Shadowrun has story hooks and whatnot for dirty election tactics, but that’s about it.
Election Day fixes that oversight. It’s a rules fragment you can install in most any TTRPG. Getting it to work with the game in question is left up to you.
The whole thing is only a page long. Election Day guides the GM in determining each candidate’s “marks”, which abstracts “voting
intentions”. The GM determines if each Candidate is Neck and Neck, Slightly Ahead, Better Placed, or Way Ahead compared to each other. That determines their starting marks. After that, let the system work.
Each player can introduce a story Vignette related to the election once per game session. They can also try to Influence the Vote as their character. Both of these actions add marks to the candidates’ totals. On election day, the GM adds the result of a D6 to each candidate’s mark total and declares a winner.
For example, a player’s Vignette might describe how John Kelly, Trump’s Chief of Staff, called him a fascist in an interview with the New York Times. Afterward, each player would give one mark to any candidate, reflecting how this event shapes the election.
Meanwhile, a player-character could try to Influence the Vote by going to a crowded restaurant and talking — in a very loud voice — about how General Mark Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called Trump “fascist to the core”, and that “fascist” basically means “nazi”. If the character is successful, Harris would get one or more marks.
Influence the Vote actions are about above-board influence, not election interference or election fraud. Because this is meant to run mostly in the background, these elections are assumed to be free and fair by default. Then again, you might be playing Shadowrun.
Here are some examples on how Election Day might interact with specific games.
#iHunt: The RPG
It’s #iHunt. Regardless of who wins, you’ll still be a gig worker being paid peanuts for killing monsters. The most you can hope for is electing the lesser evil, as France and UK are discovering after voting in supposedly left-ish governments. Still, it might be interesting background noise and it gives the NPCs something new to chat about.
But if you’re REALLY into #iHunt and have The Anarchist’s Meal Kit Delivery Service, Election Day provides an excuse for all the civil unrest that supplement introduces.
Cryptomancer
Fantasy is inherently pro-monarchy and anti-democracy. That said, a world with a magitech psychic internet might invent — or discover? — democracy quicker than usual.
Cryptomancer doesn’t detail much of its world, except for one city-state: Prantis. Prantis is ruled by a Regent who is elected by the heads of five noble houses. That’s election-ish, but you’d probably need a revolution to institute anything that looks like democracy, and the Risk Eaters may not like that. Or, the Risk Eaters could embrace democracy as a way of faking grass-roots support for whatever it is they want to enact.
Cyberpunk RED
Megacorps buy elections, but sometimes things go wrong. The GM could put a “bad guy” candidate WAY out in front mark-wise to represent their vast war chests and connections with media outlets and election officials.
The Influencing the Vote action puts Rockers and Medias in a whole new boat, mainly because they have built-in audiences.
DIE: The Roleplaying Game
DIE is technically fantasy, but some of the regions of Die — the world, not the game — could be based on more modern settings. A Dictator — the character class, not Trump’s aspiration — could wreck havoc on that election, and the world would have another reason to hate Dictators.
Election Day provides a new angle to DIE’s Great Game mechanic, which prompts events in the larger world. Elections can happen within a Faction, a Great Power, or an entire Region.
Elections in DIE could take on deeper meaning, considering how NPCs and monsters and whatnot echo people from the characters’ “real” lives. The Paragons might not normally care about elections in a “make-believe” world, but that Lich running for president looks and acts a lot like JD Vance. Could the Paragons live with themselves if they let him win?
G.I. Joe Roleplaying Game
What if a candidate is secretly a Cobra agent or sympathizer? Does that mean the Joes should Influence the Vote? Yes. Yes it does. And what if that candidate wins anyway?
And that’s assuming Cobra wouldn’t straight-up try to steal the election, which it totally would. How do the Joes counter this without committing election fraud themselves? How much can you counter election fraud until you’re also committing election fraud?
Lancer
Union is heavily implied to be a democracy. How it works is anyone’s guess, so you could interpret Election Day’s process as a first-past-the-post election, ranked-choice voting, or something else entirely.
Like in Cyberpunk RED, Lancer has at least one splat — the Celebrity background — that might Influence the Vote more than others.
Moonpunk
Moonpunk has a Politician playbook. That begs for an election scenario, and that election could be the Politician’s. What happens if they lose? There are no mechanics for changing Playbooks.
What’s really weird is that only one of the Politician’s Specialties — Incumbent — implies actually being in office. But if the Politician doesn’t actually have to hold office to have access to “political” abilities, where does government fit into all this? And if just running for office makes you relevant enough to fight The Man, what’s the point of the office?
Then again, Moonpunk is about direct action, which is an anarchistic idea. Maybe the designers are trying to make a point here.
Risus: The Anything RPG
Risus has no default setting. There’s no reason you can’t run it as a dark comedy mashup of Wag the Dog, Burn After Reading, and The Dead Zone.
Shadowrun
Shadowrun is already stuffed with politics. As is, Dunkelzahn wins the 2057 UCAS presidential election no matter what the players do. But by plugging in Election Day, the players might actually rock the vote.
A few of Shadowrun’s supplements provide narrative on-ramps for an election scenario. Dirty Tricks is all about skeezy campaign tactics. Super Tuesday is a collection of scenarios that lead up to the election of a dragon as president. Better Than Bad details activist work.
If election skulduggery ensues, the GM can use Election Day’s mark mechanic to measure how effective the various underhanded tactics in Dirty Tricks are.
Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists
The America of Sigmata is a fascist dictatorship, but there might be sham elections for the House and Senate. Exploring a sham election in the game might be interesting.
Since Sigmata is about an armed rebellion, an election probably won’t be what topples the Regime. If there’s a chance a Loyalist won’t win an election, that election is suspended.
Star Trek Adventures
How does the Federation run elections? It might be time to find out. While the player-characters won’t be running for office — politics is beneath Star Fleet — depicting a Federation election would cover new territory.
But you could go deeper with this. It’s been said that the Federation IS Star Fleet, and vice-versa. How much do Federation politics ever affect Star Fleet, and is it a good or a bad thing when they don’t?
Underground
About half of Underground’s archetypes would and could Influence the Vote effectively. The Bureaucrat. The Cyber-Celeb. The Political Hardcore. Maybe the Spokesman. And that’s just the core rulebook.
Election Day can interact with Underground’s Parameter system in a few fascinating ways. Parameters are basically an area’s stats: Quality of Life, Safety, Take Home Pay, etc. Player-characters can alter these stats with a combination of experience points and launching relevant missions.
An off-to-the-side election could bump one of the parameters without direct action from the players. Or, starting marks could be influenced by the area’s Government Purity parameter.
Or maybe the whole endeavor could prove that the best way to fix anything is to blow up megacorporations.
I think I’ve written about more explicitly political tabletop roleplaying games than anyone else on Earth. I do this for the same reasons others read dystopian fiction. I want to be mentally prepared for how catastrophically horrific a second Trump presidency would be. I look to games because most of the facts are exposed, at least to the gamemaster. Snowpiercer and Andor tell good — and sadly relevant — stories, but an analog game exposes and details a dystopia’s rotten infrastructure, not just the surface conditions.
ARC is a parable about climate, nuclear, and other man-made apocalypse. Trump’s actions prompted The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists to move the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight TWICE — in 2017 and 2018. Trump’s disbelief in global warming and his withdraw from the Paris Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, and the INF Treaty were specifically cited for the moves.
Cryptomancer examines the importance of information privacy, and what happens when you don’t actually have it. Trump couldn’t care less about your online privacy.
Cy_Borg depicts a world in which the rich live in guarded communities and everyone else is in debt due to unregulated corporations and unfettered greed. Trump’s stupidly simplistic economic policies will damn Americans to high unemployment and no safety net.
Odd Gobs presents a world with no job security, and you’re a gig worker. Trump will delete anything that looks like it protects workers, especially union workers.
Sigmata conjectures an America in which Goldwater won in 1964 and accelerated fascism in the US. Trump will enact every Hitler-esque policy ever conceived as he arrests and punishes everyone who ever criticized or mocked him.
Underground is about superhuman veterans who are forgotten by the government. Trump thinks our veterans are suckers and losers.
And this is why The Ugly Monster endorses Kamala Harris. Vote for Kamala Harris, if for no other reason than that she’s not the fascist. And by “fascist” I mean “nazi”.
Then, go download the name-your-own-priced copy of Election Day from Itch.io.
