I’d like to consider experimenting with the basic factional designs to improve them and see what might be able to be done. To that end, I’d like to have some open discussions about what you all think and see if we might come up with some sort of consensus. But to be most effective, this needs to have wide input from a dozen or more players rather than just the opinions of a few. Do you think we might be able to get some good participation on this subject?
My main concerns on this subject as a GM are:
- I’d like to preserve game balance across the factions as a priority. Every faction should be desirable in some way and no faction should overpower the others or be significantly under-powered by comparison.
- Since we’ll have relatively few players to begin with, we should start with as few factions as we can manage. I’d like to see 20+ clans in every faction, and if we have only a few apiece then we’re spreading them too thinly. We can add new factions as the player base increases enough to support them.
- The factions should be quite distinct from one another. Each faction should have its own reasons for existence and desirability that are not shared with the other factions. They should have interesting personalities each in their own right, so that playing in a different faction is somewhat like playing in a different game.
- These discussions should be from the point of view of an arbitrary player who is really interested in the faction, rather than oriented toward your own personal favorite faction.
- Please exclude from consideration:
[list] - Let’s consider the factional designs independent of “skills”. If we end up with skills, they should be flavorful enhancements to play rather than part of the basic factional designs.
- Likewise, let’s not yet plan for factions that make use of other game facilities that I’m not expecting to have in play to begin with – let’s save those for later. I’m thinking primarily of things like naval activities here. I expect to add support for ships and such, but I think we need to add such things later once the “land” game is more established.
- I’d also like to avoid having factions in the “chaotic” arenas for the moment. Bandits, Barbarians/Pirates, Heretics, etc. will be fun player choices in the future when we have room to expand into them, but for the time being let’s leave them as NPC opponents. That’s not to say that (especially as Independents) you can’t go out and set up an anonymous roadblock or preach about some new religion, but let’s not try to formalize them as groups yet.
[*]Very importantly, each faction should be fun to play. If a faction is not interesting or isn’t fun, then nobody will want to declare for them and it becomes dead weight to the game system.
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To define factions with those qualities, I’d like to come up with the following kinds of information for each of them:
- Factional name (obviously).
- The primary purpose for the faction to exist – what overall goal do they want to accomplish in the world? For instance, their purpose might be trade, agriculture, military specialists, domination/control of Midgard, religious supremacy, brokering peace between factions, etc.
- What distinguishing feature does this faction have, such as well-known defensive works, horse-based warriors, archery skills, construction expertise, etc.?
- Possibly related to that, what specific in-game benefit can this faction have that no other faction has? This might be the ability to influence markets, limited divination, perform military training, etc. Remember that different faction’s abilities should be relatively balanced in power.
- What makes this faction interesting and fun to play, beyond the specific benefits it provides?
- And finally, what (usually mutual) factional enemies do they have and which others do they tend to cooperate with?
To begin with, I guess we should start by looking at the Imperials, the three base families, and the three base religions. I’m expecting that if we have to eliminate any of those then players won’t consider it “Midgard” any more, will they? But then again, I see no reason why we can’t make adjustments to the traditional definitions to make them more fun or more specialized in some area (as has been discussed elsewhere). If you describe any other factions, please tell me why they should be involved before the "base" factions are filled out with clans.
To keep these discussions focused, I recommend that you start a new thread here for each proposed factional definition and discuss only that faction in that thread. We can keep this thread for cross-factional design comments, such as “what do we need to know for each faction” or “how do we maintain game balance between very different factions” or “which faction would best benefit from including fun option ‘X’ in it?”
Has anyone any thoughts on this process?