How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable
How We Lost Faction Play, and Why it is Valuable
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I am a bit surprised by the premise. Indeed D&D misses a good faction play, but it's one RPG among thousands of others.
Many if not most RPG do have faction/reputation mechanics. Vampire or L5R comes immediately to my mind. Playing any kind of cyberpunk game involve a form of faction as you need to manage not being arrested by cops or corpo, if you move to the 2010's Eclipse phase has this pretty interesting reputation economics, and then Blade in the dark came with fun faction/downtime rule at the point for some players it's mostly a faction management game
The thing is, I don't think D&D misses faction play because of the designers. I think it misses it because it's not what players wanted. If you look at the 5e core rulebooks from 2014 and the early adventures and the Adventurer's League organised play, they seem to be pushing their 5 Forgotten Realms factions pretty hard. The Zhents and Harpers have a long and storied history, but the Emerald Enclave, Order of the Gauntlet, and Lord's Alliance are much less well attested prior to 5e. But the community never really seemed interested in this aspect of play, and I don't think WotC kept it up after very long.
Not a very high quality article. Makes constant reference to "faction and domain play" without adequately defining the terms for someone that didn't grow up with them. (Presumably, the target of the article.) And a lot of typos.
And a lot of typos
Some of which are so bad they completely flip the presumed meaning of the text.
There's anything wrong with the style of play
There's not anything wrong? It's not like there's anything wrong?
I've tried to run games (in a couple systems) that had complex NPC factions to engage with, and a lot of players just... don't. I think sometimes they just don't realize it's an option.
My last game was kind of picking up speed, where there was a bad megacorp (within it two main factions) and a fractured array of resistance groups. I was hoping the players would do some alliance building. It was kind of working, but then real life sort of scuttled the game.
The other problem that happens to me a lot is I think about the game between sessions, and the players don't. They don't remember much detail. So I'll be like, "And you discover he's been working with the Seers the whole time!" And they'll be like "the who? Is that bad?". It's hard to get factional stuff going if the players can't keep straight who's who.