Factions

Jumpscare

In Silent Heaven, characters can’t die (for spoilery reasons). There are many ways to have a contest, but one of the fastest ways to defuse a situation is with a little violence. There aren’t many downsides to engaging in combat, although the downsides scale slightly higher for more experienced characters that have a greater chance of winning (longer recovery times, and so on). I often encourage players with combat-capable characters to resolve things by fighting out their differences and calling it a day. It really does reduce tensions to have a climactic beat in the story.

Conflicts aren’t supposed to fester passively. In the game’s policies, it’s a social contract of all players to ensure feuds are resolved in a timely manner that’s agreeable to all parties involved.

Additionally, there are factions for players who are into combat, and they can effectively throw hands whenever they please, for the fun of it.

It works, for the most part. The biggest flaw is one I never expected. There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.” This completely sucks the fun out of any conflict. You need to nip those anti-fun practices before they spread. Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

That kind of play makes victories feel hollow, and losses inconsequential. It almost feels like metagaming.

In order for conflict resolution between players to be amicable through contests (strength, art, cooking, and so on), I feel like players have to agree to do a few things:

Use the tools available to have such contests.
Actually try to win.
Make the reward for winning and the penalty for losing feel small. (This one is largely enforced by the theme and occasionally STs.)

There are probably more things I’m forgetting. But it does feel pretty similar to playing a board game with friends.

mietze

I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.

Aria

@mietze said in Factions:

I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.

I will say that right until that one staffer crapped all over it, the conflict I saw happening was managed really well. Had it not been for that one move, I don’t think it would’ve been too much of a problem except for one bit of OOC side-eyeing about how the IC betrayal went down, but that was also resolved IC with a duel because it was set in an honor-based culture.

The takeaways from there were basically:

The conflict was over a single, clearly defined outcome.
All of the players knew what the win condition was.
All of the players knew the mechanics behind the win condition.
How characters achieved the win condition was left open IC, so it actively generated a lot of RP without being as strictly dictated as the mechanics were.
The conflict didn’t totally devalue other groups outside the two main rivals. On the contrary, it made working with them critical to winning.
The outcome was something that had a measurable impact on the world, but was limited by the time frame of how long it would affect the game. Since it was only for one season, that meant about two months of RP on a game set to run for roughly 15-18 months. As a result, winning or losing wasn’t going to make or break the entirety of the game for anyone and everyone knew that going in.

Juniper

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)

And that’s just a spar, not even a real attack! Such a bummer.

MisterBoring

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.”

I’m curious if they only did this when they knew they were involved in a punitive conflict, like the one you described. If they’re fully up for it when they’re “in the right”, then it’s totally anti-fun.

If the character is trying to portray a complete pacifist who holds to that even when they are in the direct path of harm, then it’s a whole different thing that isn’t anti-fun if recognized early and embraced.

Jumpscare

@MisterBoring said in Factions:

@Jumpscare said in Factions:

There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.”

I’m curious if they only did this when they knew they were involved in a punitive conflict, like the one you described. If they’re fully up for it when they’re “in the right”, then it’s totally anti-fun.

If the character is trying to portray a complete pacifist who holds to that even when they are in the direct path of harm, then it’s a whole different thing that isn’t anti-fun if recognized early and embraced.

The character was part of a combat faction. When a fellow faction member called for help fighting off a monster, the character avoided the fight. So the NPC leader felt it necessary to test the character’s combat capabilities. If he lost, that could prompt the leader to tell him to get stronger. If he won, then the leader could relent and accept him. Either way, I wasn’t going to boot the character from the faction. It was less of a punitive fight and more of a restorative fight.

Sometimes an IC challenge can be a practical way of asking the player if they’re actually having fun in the role they’ve chosen.

Autumn

@mietze said in Factions:

I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?

At the risk of overreading my experiences, I’m not sure it takes much more than a small handful of people who treat faction conflict as OOCly competitive rather than cooperative. Someone decides they’re going to get a definitive win over the enemy by leveraging their superior game stats to permanently eliminate someone on the other team, and now everyone’s thinking about that possibility.

People who are competitive by nature have something to point to to rationalize pushing their own stats further (and once you have that hammer, you start to look for nails). People who aren’t suddenly realize that their investment in the character is at risk from people with more system mastery, and become less willing to engage outside their comfort zone. And so on.

Yam

I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.

My only experience, as stated, was punchy campy Transformers games. And they managed factions just fine. I think people more or less accepted that things wouldn’t always be fair, and the enjoyment they got out of doing flashy signature moves outweighed most negative vibes. The only dramatic ooc blow ups I recall were purely player-based over staff decisions, rather than anyone getting upset that Megatron and his gang got away with stealing a national monument or something.

Aria

@Yam said in Factions:

I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.

That is a HUGE part of what the layer of secrecy is for and also why crossover tends to go very badly. Because the thing is, it’s well within the theme of the game for that crossover to exist. It’s explicitly written into the setting, especially the second edition of oWoD…

But it’s also well within the theme of the game for every vampire that’s met Brujah Bob and every Werewolf that’s met Shadow Lord Sally to look at the two of them making a pact to do a thing and go, “Uhhhh, excuse me. What the fuck is this? Are you out of your mind? Also, good job on breaking the Big Law of Secrecy, which is now an excuse for anyone in authority to issue you a very public punishment.”

It’s part of why I think single-splat games are generally better for WoD than multi-splat ones. Then if crossover happens, it’s entirely part of a controlled narrative and makes sense within a story. It’s way less likely to read as declaring a pack of players’ RPing with their friends as wrong-fun when it’s perfectly within the theme as written, especially considering that (ICly) declaring it wrong-fun is also part of the theme. That only results in a situation where, in varying degrees depending on the specifics of the situation, everyone is kind of right but also everyone kind of sucks here.

Roadspike

I have seen factions done. I have seen it done in an… okay manner. It was baked into the theme. But there were always players who took things too hard, and went too hard, and made it less fun for those around them.

I do think that it’s possible to do CvC (but not PvP) antagonism, so long as it’s managed very carefully.

As others on this thread have pointed out, I think it starts with transparency, includes making outcomes not involve character death, and then I think that it moves on to making it clear that the conflict is Characters vs Character, and that the players are all there to work together to make a fun story. Even then, all it takes is one sore loser or sore winner and things can spiral out of hand.

As far as transparency is concerned, I think that it’s important for players to know what they’re getting into, how the conflict will be adjudicated, and what the possible outcomes will be. The example that @Aria gave is a great one – up until the one Staffer changed things up.

When character death is on the line, players get twitchy. I think that if you can make sure that death isn’t on the line, people are more likely to engage in CvC conflict in good faith. Starting a new character from scratch when you liked the deceased one, or they had some cool gear/stats, or they had great connections – it can be incredibly frustrating, and people will act in bad faith to avoid that frustration.

I do also think that one thing that can help is making sure that the opposing factions are fighting past each other, not fighting against each other. As an example, way back on KotOR MUSH, we had the Sith and the Republic fighting over a neutral system. Except they couldn’t attack each other, because if they did, then the neutral system would support whichever side was attacked. So each side had to work to make the other side look bad, and themselves look good, without ever actually fighting one another.

It’s been long enough that I don’t honestly remember how it turned out – it may have collapsed into complete crap – but I like the general idea of it as an opportunity for CvC antagonism. It means that no PC is directly beating up another PC, so there’s no chance of death (or even maiming).

sao

Honestly it is hard enough getting shit together enough to run one faction smoothly, you want MORE? i’m turning this car around, we got food at home.

MisterBoring

I almost feel that even if factions aren’t baked into the setting, you inevitably get factions anyway when some major plot point comes up that creates ideological division among the characters. If you can somehow guide the characters to all fall in line across all of the major plot decisions that come up, you could potentially avoid that, but at the same time, I feel like that’s gonna end up making the game boring as all of the characters sort of begin to run together in thought and action.

Aria

@Roadspike said in Factions:

I do also think that one thing that can help is making sure that the opposing factions are fighting past each other, not fighting against each other. As an example, way back on KotOR MUSH, we had the Sith and the Republic fighting over a neutral system. Except they couldn’t attack each other, because if they did, then the neutral system would support whichever side was attacked. So each side had to work to make the other side look bad, and themselves look good, without ever actually fighting one another.

I really like this idea. Like, I like this idea a whole lot because I’ve spent the last several months slowly poking at a setting and thinking about ways to have two fairly large factions inherent to the gameline I’ve been looking at work without either unleashing a wave of conflict I don’t want to deal with or stripping it out of the game entirely. It may not actually matter if I can’t get this off the ground (my kingdom for a coder, I swear), but essentially, my plan was:

These two factions don’t get along canonically, but they also have a bigger, scarier enemy in common. That bigger, scarier enemy is right there, just on the other side of this geographical feature, looming as a constant threat. So it’d be baked into the theme that these two factions have a tenuous, uneasy, but extremely valuable peace that pretty much everyone–by which I mean all the NPCs, but also hopefully the PCs–have a strong incentive to keep in place because without each other, they are, to use the technical term, completely screwed.

That would mean that people wouldn’t exactly have to be friends. It would mean that sure, people might occasionally take a poke at each other. But that conflict can only escalate so far before it would potentially cause a setting-breaking rupture, and then NPCs on both sides would be looking at the people involved going “WTF is this? You better put a stop to this before we do and you’re not going to like that.”

A bit heavy-handed? Yes. But also something I’d be spelling out pretty explicitly both in the theme and the game policies, once again leaning hard into ideas of both transparency and clear consequences for stepping outside the bounds of what is or isn’t allowed. Will it work? I dunno. I’d have to actually get the game going to find out, but I think there’s at least some potential there. At the very least, it would certainly remove the prospect and thus hopefully the fear of PvP (or CvC) conflict that can’t ever be recovered from.

labsunlimited

At risk of outing myself, I do faction PVP on Silent Heaven frequently, and am the only combat character on my side so my PC often loses fights and gets beaten up as a result. It works because I know I can come back from the fight without losing anything massively inconveniencing, and dying isn’t possible in the course of day to day play. Antagonists check with me OOC to make sure I am cool with it as a player first, as is best practices when initiating a fight.

It is very much possible to have this without it devolving into OOC bad feelings and drama.