Seriously. Every form of entertainment has baked-in political assumptions, and that definitely includes #ttrpg . You might choose not to examine them, but this is an active choice on your part, and you don’t get to pretend that your entertainment is “free of politics”.
When I say “I don’t want politics in my gaming,” I mean it literally.
Like, I don’t care for the Star Wars prequels because they spend a lotta time just doing politics instead of space battles.
I don’t wanna sit through boring ass senate sessions listening to motions and passing votes. I wanna blow shit up!
Prequels? You don’t think the original Star Wars had tons of politics in it?
Let me introduce you to Spec Ops the Line. A game where wanting to blow stuff up is the political statement.
So, you want less bureaucracy and more warfare? That’s a pretty bold political statement right there. I’m sure there’s nothing political about war.
Imagine if you had to file paperwork for every demon killed in Doom. You’d practically never be killing demons after the first level because of all fhe paperwork from all the demons you killed in the first level!
Nah, you’d just write up the first level in an Incident Report covering multiple dead demons. And more to the point, both bureaucracy and warfare are forms of politics, so killing demons is still a form of politics, with or without paperwork.
I think there’s a middle ground where the game ‘world’ can acknowledge there are political maneuverings happening, while not forcing you to track the shipments of food and goods so you can squeeze nobles who depend on certain economic routes into complying with the king’s orders to rally troops for a cause.
Bounty orders style campaigns are fun for a short while, but there’s only so many ‘go here, kill x, biggest change is the layout of the dungeon and enemy vulnerabilities’ before the game sessions all bleed into one long blurry dice roll. That’s close to warhammer/battletech/etc territory. I want a real story to go with the campaign, and that necessitates a ‘politics’ somewhere unless you’re playing one of the barbarian/end-of-the-world games where there is no civilization or npcs at all aside from enemies.
But I think we can all agree that the “politics” of motions and passing votes is not what was being addressed by OP.
So you don’t like narratives involving politics. That’s a very different statement to “I don’t want politics in my gaming.”