Looking for advices for political games

[Darinas]

So, I am trying to do political intrigues and scheming antagonists for my players, particularly for Vampires (for obvious reasons) and Changelings (court intrigue - my plot involves a extremist branch of the Summer Court trying take over the entire Court). Problem is.... I got absolutely no idea how to do this exactly. IRL I am absolutely clueless in political games, and a lot of the ideas I can think of I tend to discard them either because I am worried about too much happening offscreen, or I am worried the antagonists would look too clumsy by pulling stuff that would be too obvious or too easy to track back to them (such as Uriah's Gambit or attempted assassinations).

Hence I come here looking for any tip, suggestion or advice. Has anyone of you run this kind of game before? How did you handle it? What would you advice?

[Satchel]

Here's a thread I made asking a similar question a few years back, which got a couple of answers.

I'd also add at this point that secrets, leverage, and secondary consequences (planned or unplanned) all go a long way toward figuring out what a scheme can hide in its explicit directions, particularly if you can double up on outcomes. Hard to pin the elder for infringing on your territory when all they did was ghoul a company VP's secretary and now they effectively run the business in the middle of your feeding grounds; easy to deny involvement in a spiritual catastrophe that you happened to get good data from when you know the direct culprit's deepest fears and can steer them toward action without announcing yourself; pain to be had if the Summer King got you to say you'd help with a raid in the heat of the moment during a drinking party and being sober has you wanting to back out.

Politics is about social power in its various forms. Having a long-term strategy for a character will go quite a ways as long as you can keep more tactical truisms in mind as well — knowledge is power, secrecy is generally to your advantage, and having reliable tools to work with (e.g. loyal followers, arguments that can sway specific categories of people, catspaws who don't have any reason to believe you're taking advantage of them, ownership of resources that others would lose access to if you went away, etc.) will give you a general apparatus for making moves on the city stage or greater.

[Darinas]

Thank you Satchel^^ That helps a lot. I will go check that thread and keep your advices in mind.

[Iguazu]

I'll give you the definition of, Politics, my poli-sci professor gave me: Politics is who gets what, when, where and how.

Decide the, "Who", by figuring out which NPCs/PCs are involved and what do they want? How do they plan to get it?

The best way to go about it is to create the actors involved, and think about their motives and what they would, can or can't do.