Factions
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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.
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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.
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@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.
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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.
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T Tez forked this topic
