[silvarilon]

I pretty much agree with everything Genesis said, the explanations on my comments are pretty much where my thought process was heading.

That's not surprising, as we both come from the "Skotos games" so there has already been a lot of cross-pollination of ideas about roleplaying and politics between the games.

I do still think that although our thoughts are similar, and we both know what we mean when we say "political RP" there are still many players (from our games and others) that mean something completely different.

(Genesis: I'm always open to more ideas on handling political RP. It's Azrael from ICO here...)

(Also, to clarify the Mass Effects comparison, it's a game that switches between walking around talking to NPCs (with the usual "select a response from this list" interactions) and combat scenes. Throughout the game, whether in RP or Combat, you get to make choices, some bigger than others. You find the last remaining queen alien of a hostile race. Do you kill it, eliminating the threat, or release it, avoiding genocide but releasing a new threat? Other choices are more political - do you side with the police service, or the gangsters, do you snoop for information for the reporter? Do you try to defend the shuttle full of diplomats, or attack the armada flagship? Two members of your team are seperated, you can only save one. Which one? They try to avoid having a "right" choice, so the player can make their choices based on the personality of their character. The choices change the outcome of the story, but don't change the gameplay itself.
It's the equivalent of asking the players if they want to support Big Bad or Morganna, and then sending them into a virtual instance to kill NPCs either way, but the virtual instance and NPCs you kill would depend on the choice you made.)