Intent
Segregate characters into opposing groups to promote in-game conflict.
Also Known As
Clan, Code
Related Patterns
Alignment, Idiom
Motivation
A faction is a group or category to which characters belong. A faction may be
represented as an organization, such as a mob family or police department. Or, it may be abstract, as is represented by the concepts of “good” and “evil.” What is important is that factions adopt codes of conduct, either explicitly or implicitly, that come into opposition with what the game’s other factions consider acceptable. Then, when a player has a character perform acts in accordance with his faction’s code, a counter response is demanded by characters of other factions. This generates conflict to drive the story forward.
In a game with many factions, it is possible for different factions to have common goals at times. In these cases, two or more factions may actually cooperate with one another for their mutual interests. However, a well-designed faction system ensures that some factions exist that will take exception to virtually any action. So, even though some factions may cooperate with one another on occasion, their collective opposing factions are likely to unite against them.
For example, in a modern-era game exploring the inhumanity of America’s underworld, a terrorist organization might link up with organized crime in order to obtain black-market weapons. Neither of these groups trusts one another, and neither would go out of its way to support the other. They might even come into conflict with one another on occasion. But, the terrorists’ need for weapons and the black-market’s need for cash bring them together to serve their mutual goals. However, an arms deal of this nature is likely to attract the attention of not only the local police force and the FBI, but also that of the CIA and Homeland Security.
Applicability
Conflict is the heart and soul of role-playing games. The faction pattern does a good job of generating inter-group conflict but does a poor job of generating inter-personal conflict. If your game is more about person-to-person conflict rather than group-to-group conflict, you may want to avoid introducing factions into your game.
Consequences
The Faction pattern introduces tension between characters in different factions merely by the fact that the characters belong to different opposing groups. When characters perform actions that support their own factions, they often oppose the interests of other factions and conflict inevitably results.
Implementation Concerns
The Faction pattern does its job of promoting conflict between groups. Characters in different factions will conflict with one another. So, if you want to encourage
cooperation between player characters, you need to either avoid using this pattern altogether or ensure that player characters all belong to the same faction. At the very least, you need to restrict characters to a sub-set of highly-similar factions that generally get along well, even though minor differences will inevitably cause some degree of conflict to arise, however small.
You also need to specify each faction’s code of behavior, making sure that characters following that code necessarily oppose the interests of other factions. This demarcation is critical. Suppose you hear of a game where characters belong to law enforcement agencies such as the FBI, CIA, local police, or Homeland Security. Would that tell you enough to let you know where the game’s major source of conflict arose? Hardly.
Such a game could be designed such that all player characters are member of the “Law Enforcement” faction, working harmoniously in conjunction with one another to oppose crime in all its forms regardless of the specific organization to which each character belonged. Or, it might be all about inter-agency competition where gaining credit for a
“collar” was all-important, regardless of which agency actually deserved it. In such a game, the actual solving of a crime might be of secondary importance. Most likely, though, it would fall somewhere in-between these two extremes.
Factions can have either a minor effect on your game or a major one. This ultimately depends on how much you reward players for having their characters support their factions in opposition to other factions. The rewards can come in many forms.
However, if you want a character’s faction to have a significant influence on how players role-play their characters, make sure that the rewards given for supporting a faction are either
1) Entirely independent of other reward systems.
2) Or, the primary means of obtaining a given reward.
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Once again, if you want factions to have only a minor effect on play, you probably should reconsider using this pattern altogether. After all, why introduce complexity into your game for a minor benefit? Strip it out and focus the rules purely on the game’s central core.
Samples
Suppose we want to create a game about the American Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. In doing so, we could create several factions modeled after historical groups involved in the movement and require that each character in our game be a member of one of them. Some of the groups and their beliefs might be described as follows:
Followers of Martin Luther King, Jr.
1) All races are equal.
2) All races should live together peacefully.
3) Violence is unacceptable as a means to victory.
Followers of Malcolm X 1) All races are equal.
2) The black race should form its own separate nation.
3) Violence is acceptable as a means to victory.
The Ku Klux Klan
1) The white race is superior to all other races.
2) Blacks and whites should be segregated.
3) Violence is acceptable as a means to victory.
Known Uses
Nobilis has five “Affiliations” that act as factions. These are “Heaven,” “Hell,”
“Light,” “Dark,” and the “Wild.” Each of these factions has its own “Code” and these Codes come into direct conflict with those of other factions. For example, the highest principles of each of these codes are
1) “Beauty is the highest principle.” (Heaven) 2) “Corruption is the highest principle.” (Hell) 3) “Humanity must live, and live forever.” (Light)
4) “Humans should destroy themselves, individually.” (Dark) 5) “Freedom is the highest principle.” (Wild)
The primary reward system of the game involves awarding Miracle Points to players for having their characters follow their code in situations where doing so involves conflict.
The World of Darkness actually contains two forms of faction in Vampire: the Requiem. One faction involves a vampire’s “Clan,” which represents a character’s particular breed of vampire. Players must choose one of five clans: “Daeva,”
“Gangrel,” “Mekhet,” “Nosferatu,” and “Ventrue.” (Clans also follow the Template
pattern, in that they provide characters with skills.) Each of the clans has “Stereotypes”
of how they view the other clans. These stereotypes are universally derogatory, although each clan varies in the degree to which it looks down upon the others. The other faction category involves a character’s “Covenant.” A covenant is a vampire organization or government. Players may choose from “The Carthinians,” “The Circle of the Crone,” “The Invictus,” “The Lancea Sanctum,” and “The Ordo Dracul.” Each of these covenants has its own aspirations and is involved in political maneuverings against the others. So, the game is brimming with built-in conflict.
Idiom
Intent
Provide players with a character aspect that mechanically rewards them for role-playing a previously declared personality type.
Also Known As
Humanity, Path, Spiritual Attributes
Related Patterns
Alignment
Motivation
The Idiom pattern rewards players for accurate portrayal of a character’s persona. A game follows the Idiom pattern if it does the following:
1) Provides characters with a standard of behavior. (Whether that standard is chosen by the character’s player, another player, the entire gaming group, or the game itself is irrelevant to identifying the pattern.)
2) Gives characters a gauge whose value raises or lowers based on how well the characters’ actions conform to that standard. Commonly, values are numerical but this is not demanded by the pattern.
Idioms may be associated with attributes, traits, skills, or any other graduated gauge used in a game. Although the Idiom pattern does not require it, some games also restrict the situations to which an Idiom’s value applies, such as when a character’s morals or emotions come into play. Thus, players are encouraged to seek out situations in which the characteristic(s) apply.
The idea is to give players rational and potent reasons to portray their characters with real human emotions and personalities. Players following Idiom guidelines will continually seek out opportunities to act on their characters’ emotions even if those actions would appear irrational to an outside observer. The Idiom pattern amply
rewards players that pay attention to their character’s passions and beliefs, so even
near-Role-Playing Patterns (Idiom) 137
suicidal actions to attain selfless goals can make sense from a game mechanics standpoint.
Applicability
You should consider the Idiom pattern for your game if your goals include:
1) A desire to have players imbue their characters with strong beliefs and/or complex human emotions,
2) A willingness to give character “feelings” a real mechanical impact on game play.
Consequences
The Idiom pattern is a potent means to encourage players to portray character beliefs and emotions. In fact, players will often remain faithful to them even in circumstances where doing so has detrimental consequences to the character’s well being. Such actions can have great dramatic impact, because they make a strong statement about what makes a character “tick.”
Idioms can easily become a central focus of any game incorporating them. This quality can be quite useful if your game is about some core moral or emotional issue or strives to make each character’s persona unique. However, its use could be detrimental to games having other agendas. As Jack Aidley observed in his game Great Ork Gods,
“No Ork Is A Unique And Special Butterfly.” In such a game, giving an ork an Idiom would merely distract play from the mayhem and destruction that the game is all about.
Implementation Concerns
To ensure that an Idiom has a fair representation of a player’s role-playing history with his character, opportunities for Idiom values decreasing should approximately match the opportunities for it increasing. Incidentally, that does not mean that the values actually will decrease as often as they increase because player choice becomes the deciding factor on which direction it will go. What is important is that real choices be presented to players so that they have actual decisions to make concerning their character’s actions.
If the Idiom is a resource, you should also strive to make role-playing opportunities for Idiom gain approximately equal from character to character. That is, a character with one type of Idiom should not automatically get opportunities to raise his Idiom by twice the value as characters with differing Idioms over an extended period. (If all characters have the same Idiom in your game, this point is moot.) Doing so will unfairly
advantage the character with the rapidly advancing Idiom merely because of the Idiom he chose rather than from any role-playing merit. The character will be more successful because he will have greater resources from which to draw and the players of other characters may feel cheated. Unfortunately, you may find it difficult or impossible to balance the frequency of Idiom raising opportunities among all Idiom types. If this is the case, you can alleviate the problem by varying the number of points that can be
raised by a single Idiom raising opportunity or, if Idiom values are raised through some kind of random roll, by varying the odds of increasing a character’s Idiom value.
Likewise, you should strive to make the opportunities to apply the Idiom’s value approximately equal from player to player. Failure to do so will again unfairly favor one Idiom type over another, which could easily lead to many players selecting the same Idioms for their characters. If you want your game to support many different Idiom types, this can be a difficult issue to balance properly. Unfortunately, such issues are likely to remain hidden until some significant play testing of the Idiom system has been undertaken. Fixes for this problem include narrowing the applicability of “overly active” Idioms and expanding the applicability of others.
Samples
In a game about mythological heroes, the game could give each character an Idiom Attribute named Fate. One possible Idiom for such a game would be the following: