Faction Feedback

[*Cibernadie]

I happen to be familiar with a similar case to this dilemma.
Back in NWN1 i played in a server that had some very basic faction system. There was the good city, the evil city, and the neutral city. You got a complimentary necklace after signing up, and sometimes when killing things, tokens would drop that you could exchange them for "face points" with the faction, and dms rewarded players with face points during faction-involved events. You'd clear enough of those, and you'd get benefits, the necklace would gain bonuses chosen by you, get some unique spells per day, even emit some effects now and then depending on the faction. There was an implicit but stone solid agreement that if you had those on you, it meant you belonged to that faction, no hand wave away.

At various points the "evil" city got into infighting where people splintered, but still used the necklace so everyone treated them as member of the faction because the association was so ingrained in their heads. It also had the benefit that for the necklaces to have any real advantage players would deem acceptable you'd have to work up the face points and work with the faction icly for a while, since you'd get them from dms more than grinding tokens. They were useful at their highest, more than a regular crafted thing, but not so that it'd make the crafted thing worthless in comparison, and it took a while to get to that point anyway so it was somewhat harmonious with the factionless population. A periodical buff, chance of resurrection after death, teleport to base HQ, unique quests within the faction, access to faction-only merchants. It was more ease-of-life advantages than mechanical, but it had those too.

The system worked well enough, but it had it's problems like anything. Most of the staff gravitated to the "good" city so they kind of hoarded the attention and spotlight for events and whatnot. Grinders with little to no activity within the factions did grind up there with mere tokens and attempted to "take over" thinking the face point meant actual political power. At some point the Dms appointed "faction leaders" to reward players of their choosing with face points once per reset, but it became a black market. Trial and error.


Anyway, Mechanical advantages are the easiest way to drive people towards a faction like it was previously said, but there has to be some sort of safeguard that ensures the faction belonging is always present and impossible to do away with. Faction quests are a good idea to generate a bit of participation within the ranks, and also familiarize factioneers with one another. Maybe adjust the badges's current things too, like summoning placeables and npcs. More variety of placeables, and actual useful npcs.
Anyway, i hope this barely on-topic ramble helps think of something.

[*Xndar]

I think that the most often griped-about aspect of Faction RP here isn't the Factions themselves, its the fact that your advancement in the faction is entirely dependent upon whether or not you happen to have an active DM when you're active that happens to notice your actions and happens to decide that they merit a promotion.

I don't speak as a bitter outsider here by the way, I had one PC that made it to Factor, so I've worked my way up in this way before. Its not impossible, but it is SUPER haphazard and can turn folks off Faction RP pretty quick.

I think that it would be good to have hard-and-fast criteria (that is publicly known) for what merits a promotion from Namer to Factotum. Something like:

Factotum status will be granted if any of the following has been completed by a Namer, and an application for promotion filed:

-Recruited at least 5 new Namers who verify you as the recruiting factioneer. (Provide screenshots of recruitment convo)
-4 Factotums recommend promotion either in screen-capped conversation or forum posts.
-Participated in 2 EM/DM events representing the Faction in a proper manner. (Screenshots, along with EM/DM approval)
-Subject to Factol veto (if you've done all the above, but ICly managed to piss off some very important faction folks, might complicate things :P To be used very sparingly.)

The above could vary significantly for Factions like the Harmonium or Guvners that have a much more nuanced ranking system than just Namer -> Factotum -> Factor -> Factol, and could also be tailored to the function of the Faction. Harmonium could have established arrest/fine quotas to get to their next promotion, Takers could have a set amount of taxes they have to collect IG to be promoted etc.

I think this approach would take a lot of the guesswork out of the Faction advancement RP for both parties...DMs/EMs wouldn't have to keep logbooks of everyone's little actions to try and determine who merits promotions, and players would have clear and laid out expectations of what staff wants to see before they get to Factotum.

Most importantly, it would give players a clear set of goals to strive for and drive RP in the absence of an active EM looking into their Faction or starting events for them.

[*Tomekk]

-Recruited at least 5 new Namers who verify you as the recruiting factioneer. (Provide screenshots of recruitment convo)
-4 Factotums recommend promotion either in screen-capped conversation or forum posts.
-Participated in 2 EM/DM events representing the Faction in a proper manner. (Screenshots, along with EM/DM approval)
-Subject to Factol veto (if you've done all the above, but ICly managed to piss off some very important faction folks, might complicate things :P To be used very sparingly.)

That's a bit steep considering not every character is sociable enough to recruit people... :-\ And its quite a challenge to find a faction with 4 active Factotums at once. :P

[*Xndar]

The point was more the concept and less the specifics (which would be ironed out by the Admins, DMs and EMs I imagine).

[*Clangeddin]

My opinion is that if you want to add something "mechanical" to factions, they should give rewards that are obtainable elsewhere with just a little tiny more effort.
For example, faction questlines (at the end of which you unlock a repeateble daily quest. Like the normal quests we have in Sigil right now) that grant just fixed EXP and GOLD. for example 1000 exp and 1000 gold. So being in a faction could just make it a bit faster to level up and that's it (in addition to seeing a few cutscenes during the questline).
I agree with Ember that giving mechanical exclusive/permanent advantages to factions is very dangerous and may lead to serious trouble, especially if the mechanical bonuses vary from faction to faction, that's the worst case scenario and could lead to all kind of distorsions that really would detract from what a faction should be about (immersion and RP opportunity).

[*Mr_Otyugh]

Xndar: Your concept is somewhat alonglines a suggestion of mine from few years back. Can't for life remember the details though and I think the only copies of it are in EM and DM forums. :P But more or less a pyramid model of recruitment and requirement of there being enough "subordinates" to have the rank matter.

[*rapsam2003]

Also, it might help if each faction had an active DM.  :rolleyes:

It might help, but the idea of making factions collaborate can help dealing with that issue, so DMs can have a plot rather than an "assignment".

This would be amazing. Honestly, having to grab whatever DM is available for your "Faction RP" is a bit lacking. If the plots were to involve a few different elements: such (for example) undead problem, a god of undeath, and requiring an item to beat the minor avatar of the undeath god. Ok, so now we have 3 different factions: Dustmen, Athar, & Godsmen. Point is, more involvement is excellent.

[*Strawberry Jam]

Sigilia underground railway?! Aleis for president!

Next we drive the tracks thru a portal to mechanus and invade it with fey on a party carriage to slide it's alignment and liberate modrons from their steel body cages. =)



I do think some things should be addressed separately. Like the harmonium presence in the bazaar, it's an area made to a fraction of the scale it should normally have. The lore all says that it's packed with indeps and that it's the one place they're safe in numbers. The harmonium presence in the bazaar, not just at the transition point, gives an entirely different impression tho.


I think Athar tends to give spiritual guidance in Sigil, more of a philosophical religion or atheism with a bitter and mean streak.

Vague forgotten factions like the bleakers actually have a solid role too. Bleakers are generally healers and run soup kitchens for the poor.

It would be nice if they had more mechanical bonuses for factions, like skill focus or one of the passive feats that nobody ever takes, like silver palm or thug.

Scripted missions would probably be neat too, especially if completion requires working together. It doesn't need to be a great design but if there were logged faction progress you could tweak some variables to give persistent benefits. Like if Harmonium controls bazaar give harmonium characters a "wage" of 100gp per reset, but if indeps control bazaar give a "wage" of 300gp per reset. Maybe faction merchants that give special faction only items or resources, maybe crafting resources depending on which locations in the planes faction members have secured.

If you make it interesting and keep ppl busy they will roleplay with factions far more anyways. Nothing that replaces dm plots but it wouldn't hurt to entice participation and give something to do without a dm on. =)

[*Embersworn]

It would be nice if they had more mechanical bonuses for factions, like skill focus or one of the passive feats that nobody ever takes, like silver palm or thug.

Scripted missions would probably be neat too, especially if completion requires working together. It doesn't need to be a great design but if there were logged faction progress you could tweak some variables to give persistent benefits. Like if Harmonium controls bazaar give harmonium characters a "wage" of 100gp per reset, but if indeps control bazaar give a "wage" of 300gp per reset. Maybe faction merchants that give special faction only items or resources, maybe crafting resources depending on which locations in the planes faction members have secured.

Mechanical bonuses for factions, even very small bonuses, is a very bad idea.

It would be basically a say "you must partake and must have a faction, else you suck".

Plus, it would open the way to people taking a faction only for the mechanical benefit (because it's totally not happening with Harmonium full plate these days :X).

No. Just no.

RP flavor things do NOT need mechanical bonuses.


Let's not do MMO factions out of it, because it's not an MMO and factions here have different purpose than "oh, well, nothing else to do let's grind some dailies at the Argent Tournament".

[*Strawberry Jam]

Not quite, it would just be saying "you're in a better situation if you join a faction" which is true in rp and lore, but easy to ignore. The only time you need to be a faction member is for a main plot or as others have said before to avoid getting jailed or for protection. In which case that later option is more "you suck" and in your face than offering participation rewards for those that are members.

If you don't like mechanics reflecting a setting or rp that's fine, but mechanics reflecting those things isn't a bad idea really. D&D does this too actually, making some feats and classes only selectable after rp as a prerequisite. The original Planescape source books also did this too by rewarding unique faction powers and so on, also noting that joining a faction is the normal way to a paid income. While 3.5 planes books and Dragon magazine all detail faction prestige classes, and I think the semi officially endorsed unofficial fan planescape 3.5 setting did something similar. So those suggestions isn't turning it into anything it wasn't already before in official content.

If you only want to rely on DM and player support and events that's fine too. However then you have to rely on the human and real world elements which makes support and participation unreliable. So then you kinda make a choice for that, and things like what Hydra is talking about are simply the logical consequence.