Crusader Kings 3 Experiment Shows Why Removing a Senile Leader Is Nearly Impossible

PC Gamer's Josh Wolens recently ran an experiment in Crusader Kings 3 that feels uncomfortably relevant: he built an 80-year-old lecherous lunatic named Wenzel, gave him the Holy Roman Empire, and then tried every trick in the medieval playbook to remove him from power. The results were not encouraging. Wolens played as a minor vassal — a forgettable noble prone to tuberculosis — and attempted flattery, bribery, election manipulation, marriage alliances, and finally open warfare. Every path failed, often in ways that felt less like strategy and more like the game itself refusing to cooperate.

The experiment began with the kind of soft power that political theorists love: sway schemes, gifts, and fawning letters to powerful vassals. Wolens showered Wenzel with compliments and tribute, lowering the risk of sudden land redistribution and buying himself survival time. He courted the world's movers and shakers with "munificent worshipfulness" and every diplomatic tool at his disposal. For a while, it looked like niceness might actually work — influential figures came around, the kaiser grew fond of his sycophant, and the path to heir designation or co-rulership seemed open. Then the game reminded him that Crusader Kings 3 is a simulator of chaos, not civics.

"I've quite genuinely forgotten his name, but he had very few traits and was prone to tuberculosis."

That vassal, the player character himself, became a walking medical crisis when Wenzel somehow triggered a plague — dubbed "Wenzel's Cough" — that swept through the player's family and counties. The disease mechanics turned the political drama into a survival horror: Wolens' wife, children, and eventually the player character all contracted the illness. A personal physician resorted to locking the ruler in a room with "a trillion bees," an actual in-game treatment that somehow provided major relief from consumption. One son died, the rest recovered, but the player's own condition worsened until the "Dying" notification returned, all while the rest of the family laughed in recovered health.

The Diplomatic Path Collapses Under Its Own Weight

While the plague raged, the diplomatic ground shifted. Wenzel acquired "Irritable" and "Withering mind" traits, cementing his decline, but he also refused to name an heir or share power. The player's carefully cultivated vassal network proved useless when it mattered most — none would support the player for the throne. The breakthrough seemed to come when a powerful Tuscan duchess named Matilda entered the picture. With a decent army and potential as a marriage alliance (the player's tuberculous wife being a convenient obstacle), she looked like the key to a faction strong enough to challenge Wenzel's 7,000 men against the player's 1,400. Then Matilda did what AI vassals do best: she declared an independence war on her own, without the player, guaranteeing her defeat and removing the only viable military ally from the board.

The lesson Wolens draws is blunt: powerful people pursue their own stupid ends, and you cannot rely on their tender feelings to hand you salvation. The game's simulation of feudal politics captures something real about coalition-building — allies have agency, and their agency frequently undermines your plans. Matilda's suicide war wasn't a bug; it was the system working as designed. Feudal vassals don't coordinate like modern political parties. They calculate their own survival first, and that calculation often leads them to act against the very coalition that needs them.

War, Plague, and the Stubborn Refusal to Die

With diplomacy exhausted and the military option evaporated, the situation devolved into farce. Wenzel's cough abated, the city gates reopened, and the world moved on — except for the player, still dying in a locked room while notifications celebrated each family member's recovery. "The sound of laughter echoes in your halls again," the game beamed, while simultaneously asking if the player wanted last rites or a trip to hell. Matilda lost her war and faced imprisonment or execution. Wenzel, now sporting high blood pressure and a faulty heart, continued tottering through palatial corridors, muttering to himself as a new plague marched north toward him. He refused to die. The player died first, having achieved nothing.

This is where the simulation bites hardest. Crusader Kings 3 models biological persistence with cruel accuracy — an 80-year-old lunatic with multiple organ failures can linger for years while healthy 40-year-olds drop dead from bee stings or bad luck. The game doesn't care about narrative satisfaction or political necessity. It cares about probability distributions, and the probability distribution for "senile ruler dies conveniently" has a long, fat tail. Wolens' experiment accidentally demonstrates why real-world term limits and succession laws exist: without structural mechanisms to force transition, you are betting on actuarial tables that don't respect your timeline.

What the Simulation Gets Right About Power

The experiment's value isn't in its predictive power for American elections — Wolens explicitly disclaims any direct analogue, and the Holy Roman Empire's elective monarchy bears little resemblance to the US system. Its value is in exposing the structural friction of removing entrenched power without institutional pathways. In CK3, as in many real systems, the tools for peaceful removal (elections, heir designation, regency councils) require cooperation from the very person you're trying to displace. The tools for forced removal (factions, wars, assassination) require military superiority that the incumbent usually holds by definition. The gap between those two realities is where regimes calcify.

Wolens' vassal perspective is important here. He wasn't playing the emperor or a kingmaker duke — he was a minor noble with tuberculosis and 1,400 levies. That constraint forced him to work through intermediaries, and those intermediaries had their own agendas. The game simulates the principal-agent problem at every level: your vassals scheme for themselves, your allies defect for independence, your family dies at narratively inconvenient moments. The only character who behaves with perfect consistency is Wenzel, whose lunacy is a trait, not a choice. He doesn't need to be competent to survive; he just needs to outlive everyone trying to replace him.

The dark comedy of the bee treatment — locking a consumptive ruler in a room with "a trillion bees" for therapeutic effect — captures the game's blend of historical simulation and absurdity. That this actually worked, curing the player long enough to return to politics before the "Dying" status returned, speaks to the depth of CK3's event chains. But it also underscores the randomness that governs the simulation. A trillion bees. The player survived that, only to choke out his last on his deathbed while his recovered family watched. Wenzel, the target of the entire experiment, kept tottering.

The experiment ends where it began: with a senile moron on the throne and the would-be reformer dead in the mud. "Well, good luck America," Wolens signs off, and the joke lands because the frustration is genuine. Crusader Kings 3 doesn't offer a cheat code for succession crises. It offers a thousand ways for them to go wrong, and exactly zero guarantees they'll go right. That's not a bug in the game design — it's the most honest thing about it. Power doesn't relinquish itself conveniently. It lingers, it rots, it survives plagues and bee treatments and rebellious duchesses, and it only leaves when the biology finally gives out or the structure forces it. The rest is just narrative we tell ourselves while waiting.