On the Importance of Factions

 

I've recently dropped a poll for the first of the Westerly Clan (and it might be a mistake, as I seem to have triggered analysis paralysis among my backers, but if you're a backer, go check it out. In the very least, it should offer a lot of ideas for the design of a clan or faction!), and as I worked on this, I found myself reflecting on the importance of factions.

I noticed it in a different context too. I have a problem with Warhammer 40k at the moment. In part, it's because I don't agree with some of the direction Games Workshop has been taking lately, but a lot of it is a drive to explore lesser known works, both to cultivate variety and to support the efforts of less famous creators.  But I've noticed that I keep being drawn back into the gravity of 40k.  I keep thinking of armies I'd like to try, or concepts I'd like to explore.  In particular, I've thought about building a Xenos army from one of the less well-known races (Rak'Gols or Khrave and man, that second name is great) because I think it would be fun to let someone's Space Marine army beat up on one of these groups out of legend and lore.  I noticed that I was trying to fall back into 40k, and reoriented towards one of my newer games: Rogue Stars.  Rogue Stars is a generic minis wargame that will let you design anything, so of course I could design an alien army of any type I wanted. But who cares? It lacks that particular context that gives it its verge and zing.  I would have to create and invent that context and get the other player invested in it before they would enjoy it.

That's not impossible. I've been playing a mobile game that's mechanically almost identical to Star Wars: Galaxy of Heroes, but fantasy and its own characters and lore, and because it tells its story well (or, at least, has a somewhat reasonable, comprehensible story, which is remarkable for the low standards of mobile games) I gain the context of what the characters are like, so I'm able to get invested.

Now a lot of this could be classified more broadly under the notion that "Players like lore." People want a context to operate in.  I just had a discussion with someone about the mechanics of GURPS vs the mechanics of D&D and she expressed disappointment that the mechanics of GURPS are as abstract as the mechanics of D&D.  This is, of course, not true, but unless we're discussing a specific context, we must describe the abstract.  But the human mind does not grasp the abstract nearly as well as the concrdisengeniousete.  We want things to be visceral.

"Faction" is just one example of a context.  It's a social context. I have an anecdote lying around somewhere that the only reason that Cultist Simulator has its dreamscape is because the developers met an RPG creator who told them that they needed a map, and it's become the most iconic aspect of Cultist Simulator.  I think we want maps because we intuitively use maps to navigate the physical world. In a similar way, we use factions to navigate a social world.  Maps tell us about the layout of a world: here be forests, there be mountains, and there is a far-away, wondrous land that you can aim at, if you can cross the forests and mountains. But factions tells us who lives there and why we should care about it.

I think this is because we are tribal.  We want to have a group to belong to, a group to hate, and a group that allies with us, but is distinct and different from us, so we can compare ourselves to them, and find rivals and perhaps "outsider" love interests.  Or, for a more explicit context, we as humans want to have dwarves and elves as allies, and we want to be fighting orcs, demons and the undead.  That immediately creates a context, and we already begin to imagine what the different heroes and enemies of those factions might look like, how love interests might vary across them, and what sort of disadvantages we might exploit (or seek to guard, in the case of our allies).

What I noticed as I searched over various works to find ideas for my Westerly Clans was how few games actually do this.  It seems to me that this was one of White Wolf's major contributions to the gaming scene: hard, concrete, stereotypical factions that a player could belong to, that had rivalries and opinions on other factions, and that shaped your gameplay.  I have a hard time finding that in most D&D works outside of race or highly specific settings books (and even those seem to favor the generic and abstract; I don't see much in the way of special rules for the paladins of country X, or the unique sorcerers of country Y. They may exist, but I haven't found them).  

GURPS doesn't really do this either: GURPS is very much the "Rogue Stars" to White Wolf's "40k." Sure, you can create a faction, but the players have no context as to why they should care about that faction.  This doesn't mean you can't do the work to get them to care, but you have to do that work.  I notice that the factions I've built for Psi-Wars, especially the Maradonian Houses, are wildly successful, some of the most successful elements I've ever built, and I think it's a combination of both working on the factions paired with having a context in which to ground them.  I also wonder if when people complain about GURPS lacking a setting, this is what they mean. I wonder how far you'd get with making a map, taking the wizard schools from DF Fantasy Magic, and creating some specific cultures/tribes/factions and giving them a few specific organizations (from DF organizations), and a few special power-ups for the classes that faction specializes in, and how many people would finally celebrate that you had "a setting?" Instead, GURPS authors seem to spend all their time in things they care about, which is deep nuance, like the specifics of history, or how Banestorm can still be low-fantasy while bringing in people with guns, or fine, filigreed detail on cultural descriptions.  I care about that too, but I wonder if we wouldn't get more bang for our buck from a highly simplified setting that just hit the high points that players cared about.

Making a Faction

Most of this post has been me musing on why factions are important, but perhaps this post would be more useful if I offered ideas on how to actually go about making a faction.

Hang it on Something

When you create a faction, it usually exists in a broader context. Pick a broader context and define factions within that context.  For example, you might a specific historical context and define your factions as parallels to that. 7th Sea does this with historical Europe.  You can also pick a set of related themes, such as the four elements or the five MtG colors, or the Chinese elements, or the four directions, and define the characters within that context.  We may have a southern swamp clans and the northern mountain clans, and the eastern forest clans and the western island clans, and they revolve around the grand steppe empire at the center, for example.  A lot of people also just steal from other works, and this is fine, just hide your tracks a little. It's perfectly fine to base your post-apocalyptic murder-tribes on the four houses of Harry Potter if you want.

This gives you a starting place to begin exploring.

Find Contrasts

Factions that all look the same serve no purpose, even though in reality most real-world factions were gradations of culture rather than stark contrasts (the French and the Germans aren't so different if you're in Alsace-Lorraine). So pick some clear contrasts and see if you can fit them onto groups, especially those groups that you want as antithesis from one another.  It doesn't really matter what contrasts you pick. They should be something that in your mind creates clear and obvious contrasts, and then you can use this to fuel your design.

The Masculine and the Feminine: humans are hardwired by Darwinian evolution to seek differences in sex so as to find a mate with whom to propagate the species. Many of those differences have been artificially heightened by cultural elements, but looking at those cultural elements can still serve as an intuitive hook for thinking about a particular faction.

The D&D Alignment System: this is a bit close to "find something to hang it on" advice above, but the D&D alignment system is very driven by contrasts. "Good vs Evil" is less interesting, in my experience, except in the sense that you likely have protagonist factions and antagonist factions, but "light vs dark" works well, or the Mass Effect "paragon vs renegade." But I mostly bring it up for the Law vs Chaos split, which probably the most effective contrast of the alignment set.

Magic vs Technology: or nature vs industry.  Over time, we've accumulated new world views, and we can (somewhat artificially) contrast those world views. This is personally not a favorite of mine, because in a lot of ways magic started as a way of trying to understand the world, and technology is the practical application of understanding the world.  Even so, it cropped up a lot in the 90s (Mage: the Ascension and Arcanum) and it still crops up from time to time.  This is often a core difference between depictions of elves (magic) and dwarves (technology).

Map to the Player

All of these are nice, but they need to matter to the player.  Look for big, obvious, chunky things that you can assign to a particular group.  This faction has access to these class templates, or has these particular lenses on those class templates and that faction has access to a unique magic system and special gear, etc. The faction description acts as a sort of a label for a container, a way of separating out narrative and mechanical ideas into compartments, and then you fill the container with actual mechanical bits, which is how the player actually interfaces with the world.

So the Mountain Barbarian Clans of the North have access to The Guild of Iron Mages and rage-based Barbarians, while the Island Merchant Clans of the West have access to the Sisters and Brothers of Echoes and a special Swashbuckler Lens, and the Empire of the Steppe has access unique to the Justiciar template and simple "shattersand" firearms, etc.

Breathe Life

The point of a faction is not just as a container for player bits, but as something that exists in the setting and drives the story.  There should be some history, some organizations and perhaps some political power.  There should also be relationships, and there should be people, living breathing people who exemplify the faction.

The history should be mostly focused on recent history (ancient factions are fine, but consider a few "dead" factions; not factions of the undead, but factions that once existed and interacted with history, but are long since gone, like the Templars or the Akkadians, leaving only their markers on history and in ruins), and ideally leave some hooks: the leader of this faction is on his deathbed and people are concerned about the succession crisis; that faction is on the verge of extinction and has sent out its finest people to its allied factions looking for help, etc.

Speaking of which, how do the factions interconnect? A lot of people seem quite fond of White Wolf's approach of a little snarky snippet of opinion on other factions.  A simple web of alliances can also do a lot for story hooks.  Realize too that faction politics may be driven by particular figures.  Perhaps One faction goes to war with another faction mostly because an influential person within the faction wants the glory of winning an easy war, but the rank and file don't much care one way or the other.

Those influential people represent personifications of the faction. They are the "rubber meets the road" of what the faction is.  If elves are snobby, then there should be at least one snobby elf. If elves are beautiful, there should be at least one beautiful elf. You can subvert your own tropes, of course, but in practice they start to represent something fundamental about the faction: if every member of the evil Dark Elf faction that the players meet are, in fact, heroic good-guys, then the impression the players will have of the evil Dark Elf faction is that they're actually good guys: your declarations that they are evil will seem disingenuous.

Most attempts at subversion are really about adding multiple facets to a group. If every elf is beautiful and snobby, then they become boring, so we need to think more carefully about how we can express beauty and snobbery in different ways: perhaps some elves are ugly, but have beautiful, creative souls.  Perhaps "snobbery" is about precision and deep preference, so an elven smith might be willing to drink beer rather than wine, but is extremely detail-oriented and precise about the craft of his weapons.

Thinking this way sort of brings us back full circle to re-examine the structures we hung our inspiration on, and the forms we used to build contrast.  These need to serve us in the creation of actual characters and actual organizations for the PCs to interact with. If it hems us in, we need to find ways to expand and explore it.  For example, if we say that elves are "feminine" and dwarves are "masculine," that's well and good... but are there not masculine elves, and feminine dwarves?  Jokes about "all dwarves are male" stem from this overreliance on a single aspect. So we might stop and ponder how dwarves could be feminine and still feel like dwarves, and how elves can be masculine and still feel like elves.

Of course, you can take this nuance too far. The reason factions often seem to be caricatures is because caricatures are useful. These are tools to clearly outline narrative themes to the player, and to allow him or her to pick a tribe to belong to, and grants them a context to interact with. By their nature, they are more useful when exaggerated.  But still, they should help you in creating characters, and if all characters in a faction start to look like carbon copies, there's probably not enough nuance.