Factions in RPGs

[Username17]

Having your players all be from the same Harry Potter House / Lo5R Clan / Planescape Faction is completely out of the question. Look at the OSSRs of the latter two to see why. People like different stuff. Furthermore, players gravitate to different character archetypes. If your Houses / Clans / whatever are described as even more important within the school environment than character classes, player will try to pick different ones. If your IP-scrubbed game advertises itself with WOW LOOK AT ALL THOSE THINGS YOU CAN BE!!1! AWESOMESAUCE!!1! and then immediately shut people down, they're going to be offended, and rightly so.

I'm splitting this off from the schoolgirls thread, because I don't think it should be lost in Prak's giant walls of text about how he doesn't understand how a one-off event in the past is a bad in-group signifier for the protagonists of a campaign of serial cooperative storytelling which will quite likely add or remove characters as players enter or leave the game or just decide they want to play a different character for whatever reason. I simply don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit anymore.

But the issue of factions is an interesting one. Obviously, factions make the worldbuilding more interesting. Equally obviously, since there is no story without conflict, factions should be in conflict. That's just good world building. And yet... in a cooperative storytelling game, that has a tendency to be really really shit.

Simply put: the player characters are played by real people who want their character to be different from the other characters. If there is a fork in the road of character generation, you're going to want to take the path least taken, and so is everyone else keeping in mind the path you just took. So if you write up five different factions that hate each other, that might make a good tabletop wargame or card game or whatever, but it's severely painful in a Role Playing Game, because all five players will want to play a different faction! Like to the point that players will actively say shit like "Oh, you're playing faction X? I guess I'll play faction Y."


You pretty much have to assume that the different players will not be on the same page, because they are actively trying to be different from each other.

This means that when you're designing a role playing game your task is fundamentally different than when you're designing a setting for a strategy game or a novel or really any other medium I can think of. Your goal is to make a series of factions that are meaningfully distinct and have different capabilities; and yet, individuals from these factions have to be in a tight knit adventuring group together. They have to, it's not fucking optional.

Shadowrun and Shadowfist had a pretty good means of walking that line, which is to have the players all be renegades by default. So your character might be a cyborg from one faction or a shaman from another, but at the start of the game you are a member of the anarchist renegades either way.

New World of Darkness attempted to walk this line by having characters be members of a bloodline (one of five) and a study group (one of five), but then be a predator's taint locked coterie of four to six vampires that was where your primary loyalties presumably lied. This was... almost there. It ran into big conceptual problems with the covenants not being things you cared about enough if you accepted the hypothesis that the players didn't have loyalty to them and severely undermined the table cohesion if you didn't. Basically, the game undersold the idea that there was a reason for you to care about being a member of the faction in a way that didn't make you want to betray the party. But you could certainly imagine something like this working in the sense that people have nationalities without being encouraged to betray their friends over it. New World of Darkness had bigger problems than just not being able to decide whether it was trying to be a Grimes video or a Blutengel video, and the failure of the product does not mean that individual ideas couldn't have been workable.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Well the easy answer is to set things up so that all the playable factions have political disagreements with each other - but face existential threat from the nonplayable enemies.

The first problem here is that this can feel trite since it was pretty much the deal with Elves, Humans, Dwarves and Hobbits in LotR, whose influence permeates so many RPGs.

The second problem here is the potential conflict between campaign duration and feeling of accomplishment. If the PCs can overcome the big existential threat, then what keeps them from turning on each other afterwards? If they cannot overcome the big existential threat, then how is it even possible for them to "win" the game? If the first existential threat is replaced by another, then how do you keep the game from feeling like a treadmill?

[echoVanguard]

The second problem here is the potential conflict between campaign duration and feeling of accomplishment. If the PCs can overcome the big existential threat, then what keeps them from turning on each other afterwards? If they cannot overcome the big existential threat, then how is it even possible for them to "win" the game? If the first existential threat is replaced by another, then how do you keep the game from feeling like a treadmill?

Generally speaking, you shouldn't be able to remove the big existential threat. You should be able to manage it, beat it back, secure your team some breathing room, and then spend some time building new walls or researching new technologies or whatever you do when you're not actively battling it. Eventually, however, the big existential threat either overcomes your efforts to manage it and forces you back into direct conflict, or is replaced by another threat that does. This is why even longer-term D&D games might have kingdom management phases but there is still an overarching conflict to be resolved.

echo

[Mechalich]

The playable factions don't even have to face an existential threat. They can simply share a broad set of overall goals but go about working towards those goals in different ways.

This works fairly well in Technocracy games: the five different sub-factions have very different approaches but they're all trying to bring about a techno-utopia in the long run. So the different groups can trade off resources and time on each others behalf and still feel like they're accomplishing something.

[PhoneLobster]

If you were designing a setting for a role playing game the probably best option is to just have a bunch of sub factions that all work together as part of some greater faction and their conflicts are not within that greater faction but instead with some other greater faction/s.

So at the beginning of the game the party all decides they are part of the Empire of Blue greater faction, and they pick sub factions for their characters from the Church of the Blue Thingo, the Knights of McKnight Face, the secret order of secret guys, the Royal Family of Blue Pants, and the great school of thunder wizardry.

And they go on adventures against the evil Kingdom of Red and their various sub factions.

Internally the sub factions can be as diverse as you like as long as they have no or next to no conflict, if they ever give out special "Screw the other guys we are allied with we have our own conflicting agenda!" missions at all they are super inoffensive like "the other guys don't care and may consider it a waste of time but while you are destroying evil red kingdom castle number 5 can you bring us back this specific fancy hat they stole off us" sort of thing.

I mean there are certainly other ways to do things and various other things to do. But for the most broad and direct utility "share a greater faction, pick an allied subfaction" is the obvious primary go to solution here.

[hyzmarca]

Well the easy answer is to set things up so that all the playable factions have political disagreements with each other - but face existential threat from the nonplayable enemies.

The problem with that is that a lot of people would want to join the nonplayable factions. Given the choice, I'd much rather play on Team Sauron than Team Elf. I like the cut of his jib, and Sauruman's industrialization policies. Knowing that the one true god of the setting opposes that course of action gives me pause, but in a setting with multiple equally valid gods of opposing moral alignments, I'm going to give Team Evil serious consideration.

There is a reason why White Wolf eventually had to publish a Sabbat sourcebook, after all.

This, of course, led to a depravity spiral, due to the need for the evil non-playable faction to be more evil than your evilest playable faction. So if the cannibal rapists are suddenly playable then your bad guys need to be incestuous cannibal rapists. And it gets worse from there, because someone will want to play the incest cannibal rapists. So you end up with the incestuous cannibal rapists who literally want to destroy the entire universe being playable.

But there is really no reason not to have a bunch of different campaign factions and just declare that the group is a member of one. You can totally say that you're group is Alliance, or that it's Hoard, with little problem. Some players might want to play an Alliance Troll or a Hoard Night Elf and that's okay, because player characters are player characters and they get to be unusual.

But it's fairly easy to just declare that you're playing an Alliance game, or a Camarrila game, and require that all the PCs be members, even if not in good standing.

The problem occurs when you restrict the ideaspace and tie character concepts to factions. If you declare that only a member of the Bladereach faction can be an Elothar Warrior, you suddenly force everyone who wants to be an Elothar Warrior to choose Bladereach as their faction. This is absolutely not what you want.

[PhoneLobster]

If you declare that only a member of the Bladereach faction can be an Elothar Warrior, you suddenly force everyone who wants to be an Elothar Warrior to choose Bladereach as their faction. This is absolutely not what you want.

Well I'd hope that IF you did decide to do that it IS what you want to do. I mean why would anyone do that if they absolutely didn't want to, well, do that?

Well yeah, ok, RPG designers often couldn't find own their ass with both hands while seemingly deliberately ramming it into a bed of nails they said they were totally trying to avoid but I hope you get my point here.

And by all means don't restrict character concepts in some way by faction if you also at the same time... don't want to do that.

Meanwhile on the other hand if you want the dudeman warrior faction to be a thing and want the dudeman warrior character concept to also not need direct loyalty to the faction, you by no means need to tie the faction to the character concept by means of totally needless iron clad absolutist fuckyouisms like paying your membership dues or you lose your abilities.

Dudeman warrior techniques can be common to a faction or even (optionally) exclusively originate from a faction without that meaning that everyone who knows Dudeman warrior techniques is currently in the faction or has ever themselves personally been in that faction.

[Blade]

I think it's not only relevant for factions.

For example the Shadowrun creation rules let you create a registered brain surgeon. You could even create one of the best brain surgeons in the world. And even if your brain surgeon doesn't belong to a different faction from the spy-for-hire everyone else is playing, it still makes no sense for him to join the group in their mission.

[GâtFromKI]

Your goal is to make a series of factions that are meaningfully distinct and have different capabilities; and yet, individuals from these factions have to be in a tight knit adventuring group together. They have to, it's not fucking optional.

That's only true in the "factions are classes" paradigm.

You cite Shadowrun: in Shadowrun, factions are factions, and classes are classes. A character can be a corporate decker, or a corporate face, or a corporate cyborg, or a corporate wizard... "Being a corporate" or "being a renegade" tells nothing about the capacities of the character. In that paradigm, it's easy to impose a faction at the beginning, because this doesn't limit the character concept.

In vampire, if you want to play a face character, you have to be in a face faction, and if you want to play a sneaky character, you have to be in a sneaky faction. If no face faction can get along with any of the sneaky factions, then you have the problem you explain: some player will want a face character and some other will want a sneaky character and the game tells them they shouldn't cooperate.


Anyway, many "factions are classes"-RPGs work because of some "über-factions" that are more opposed than the initial factions (and each über-faction contains many different factions/classes). A Vampire coterie work together because they are all in the camarilla, and they are opposed to the sabbat, the werewolfs, and other stuff. In L5R, the PC are supposed to be emerald magistrates, a neutral über-faction (they are supposed to work for the emperor and the Empire instead of their clans). etc.

If at some point, you have to create some über-faction that are über-opposed to tie together the PCs, it probably means the initial factions weren't necessary: they could as well be classes instead of factions, and each faction contains members of each classes...

What I'm saying is that Vampire introduced this "factions are classes" paradigm, it looked like a good idea at the time, but it's actually a shitty one and it has to die in a fire.

[hogarth]

What I'm saying is that Vampire introduced this "factions are classes" paradigm, it looked like a good idea at the time, but it's actually a shitty one and it has to die in a fire.

Well, the idea that paladins are good and assassins are evil and they're not allowed to hang out together predates Vampire, for what it's worth.

[PhoneLobster]

What I'm saying is that Vampire introduced this "factions are classes" paradigm, it looked like a good idea at the time, but it's actually a shitty one and it has to die in a fire.

I generally prefer a classless system, and I'd generally prefer more sensible open faction related abilities such that at the very least if factions were classes you wouldn't get bullshit like losing your class for leaving the faction.

But aside from that... why would factions are classes be a problem?

You can have an argument about how tightly associated specific classes to specific factions might want to be in any given setting/system. But aside from that the only arguments against at least loosely associating at least some if not all classes with factions only really works out if you are arguing against classes period or against factions period.

The combination of the two only really has to do anything completely ass if either of the two primary components is itself completely ass.

[Username17]

That's only true in the "factions are classes" paradigm.

You cite Shadowrun: in Shadowrun, factions are factions, and classes are classes.

Well, in Shadowrun peoples factions are almost always "Shadowrunner" with their skillset being determined by what group they used to belong to. So you have characters who are "former wage mage" or "former special forces soldier" and so on and so forth. And yes, if you play a Sioux tribal shaman in that game, other players will be highly incentivized to go play something else.

But what this is all at when you get down to the bottom is that it is highly valuable to be able to get as much information as possible about your character into a single sentence. Because often you only get one sentence before the MC thumbs downs your character concept or another player wants to talk about their character. Saying "I want to play a Boar Clan Samurai" is probably as much preamble as you get. Saying "My character is a Storm Lord Werewolf from the World Crime League" is all the speaking time you get when doing the initial round of table introductions. Just as "I'm playing a Dwarven Adventurer named Carlos" is all the time you get before Todd wants to tell the new player about how he's playing a Sorcerer of Light.

The fact that being Boar clan means you like to dress in black and tan, look ethnically Zhuang, and have relatives who do flood control maintenance, and are proficient with the war spear is all to the good. It means you can get all that information across with just the sentence fragment "Boar Clan" stuck into the sentence somewhere. And you can do all that because stereotypes are fucking awesome for transmitting information.

Where stereotypes fail us is when they present sources of discord. The "no Paladins and Assassins in the same party" rule from AD&D was about as bad as it gets, but even the "it's bad roleplaying for Wood Elves to not treat non-Elf characters like shit" thing from the Master Race's Handbook was and is pretty fucking bad. Our aforementioned Boar Clan Samurai has to have primary loyalty to the same Daimyo as the other player characters rather than to some distant Boar Clan leader who is at war with the Carp Clan that other player characters might be members of.

-Username17

[Longes]

What I'm saying is that Vampire introduced this "factions are classes" paradigm, it looked like a good idea at the time, but it's actually a shitty one and it has to die in a fire.

It actually was a good idea at the time because early on all vampires were members of a single faction called "Camarilla" and fought vampires from the other faction called "Sabbat". Of course then clanbooks and setting bloat happened and membership (and the very existence of) Camarilla became something you don't really think about. But early on clans worked well as stereotypes and then you just stabbed everyone whose ankh is pointier than yours.

[hogarth]

My pet peeve about RPG factions is that the campaign setting writers almost always end up with at least one faction being Team Asshole, and in my experience there are enough asshole players in this world that you don't need to provide any extra encouragement to play an asshole PC.

Inevitably I end up meeting a player who says "Gee, I'm not being an asshole; I'm just playing a member of House Slytherin/the Xaositects/the Malkavians/team Chaotic Neutral/House Cheliax/the Baby Rapists/etc. like the game intended!"

I'm also not a big fan of side quests where most of the party sits around while Joe Blow does his sooper sekrit faction mission.

[Nath]

The fact that being Boar clan means you like to dress in black and tan, look ethnically Zhuang, and have relatives who do flood control maintenance, and are proficient with the war spear is all to the good. It means you can get all that information across with just the sentence fragment "Boar Clan" stuck into the sentence somewhere. And you can do all that because stereotypes are fucking awesome for transmitting information.

Where stereotypes fail us is when they present sources of discord. The "no Paladins and Assassins in the same party" rule from AD&D was about as bad as it gets, but even the "it's bad roleplaying for Wood Elves to not treat non-Elf characters like shit" thing from the Master Race's Handbook was and is pretty fucking bad. Our aforementioned Boar Clan Samurai has to have primary loyalty to the same Daimyo as the other player characters rather than to some distant Boar Clan leader who is at war with the Carp Clan that other player characters might be members of.-Username17

It is somewhat serviceable to provide archetypes/stereotypes (more and that later) for the GM and players to refer to about the characters involved. Such archetypes ought to encompass at least abilities and behaviors. As far as the game is concerned, a given set of abilities will induce a given behavior (hammer, problems and nails, you know the saying). Including appearance as well make such archetype even easier to introduce and use.

So the problem would arise when authors offer the players-characters the same archetypes they are using or are going to use to introduce characters and groups into the setting. Some willingly turn those archetypes into political factions, thus with distinct, defined objectives. Other may think they are only introducing some NPC with defined objectives (so as to meaningfully interact with the setting) based on one archetype, but may slowly establish the perception of several political factions by doing so.

The distinction between archetype and stereotype may be significant here. As far as I understand, archetypes are patterns people/fictional characters tend to follow because of outside factors. While the word "stereotype" was borrowed from typographic duplication, in psychology it refers to patterns based on observation. Basically, there is a reason for an archetype to generate multiples copies, while there is a purpose for a stereotype to establish a grouping. Known archetypes can be used as stereotypes, but not all stereotypes are archetypes.

For instance, character creation rules will often result in various specialist archetypes as the efficiency cost actively discourage generalists. And there would be corresponding stereotypes that (efficient) characters must be specialists (which may not true when the GM ignore standard creation and progression rules to stat a NPC or a player happen to use an obscure build that happens to be effective in several domains). On the other hand, there can be stereotypes that are not backed by any archetypes (Italian character must have mob connection, Asian character must know martial arts, ...).

But the writer can forcefully establish archetypes in the setting, by linking specific abilities with ethnicity for instance. But that can also be done with factions and their goals. While factions indeed are good ground for stereotyping, as stereotypes precisely serve to identify groups, such "archetypal faction" would imply characters are forced into adopting one set of political goals.

[Dogbert]

If we're discussing games which are specifically about power games between factions, then there can be no such thing as a party since I have yet to see a Masquerade game with two players of a same clan (let alone same agenda).

I can do Paranoia, I can do Masquerade... I just won't delude myself into thinking the game will be anything other than the compendium of N single-player campaigns (where N=number of players at the table).

On the other hand, if we were discussing games where factions are not antagonical to each other and no cloak&dagger games are at play between then, then none of this is an issue to party cohesion as long as the game's factions are designed for proper interaction (no "team asshole," no fishmalks, etc).

[JonSetanta]

I tried multiple factions for multiple players in a homebrew 3.5e setting once.
The players soon tried to kill each other and it became five times more effort on my part to run the sessions.

[Mechalich]

A faction - if we're talking a political unit or nation or large NGO or whatever - needs to be able to allow all potential classes. Mostly, because that's what factions do. Even if your faction is the FBI, it includes lawyers and administrative assistants and trainers and nurses and all the rest. Once it attains a certain size a faction encompasses all possible roles, though not necessarily at the same frequency.

So if you're going to limit the kind of roles characters have you don't limit it by saying that the various factions don't provide them. You don't eliminate the exist of monks by failing to make a monk faction you eliminate the existence of monks by banning the monk class. Similarly if you're doing an all samurai game, there are going to be non-samurai in whatever clan your character belongs to, it's just that you aren't playing as those people.

The tricky part is to prevent faction membership from providing an overwhelming advantage to some class within that faction that causes all characters built in the game to default to a specific faction+class combination. That's actually the problem Vampire has, that the abilities provided to the various clans made only certain archetypes worth bothering for each clan was stupid. D&D kind of has the same problem in that certain races are appropriate matches only for certain classes.

It seems to me that in order to have factions and roles work together, each faction needs to boost each role in a way that is different, but equally effective. unfortunately that means you have to handle # Factions X # Classes as a table of things to keep balanced, which is going to get difficult really fast.