Factions
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I have so many Feelings about this, haha
Can it be done elegantly? I have no idea, because the places I’ve seen it done or tried to do it myself were not particularly elegant games to begin with, and also inherent in running adversarial factions is the feeling of loss.
These are my main thoughts about it:
- It’s fun to win and it sucks to lose
- The amount of empathy, perception, and emotional intelligence required to navigate point #1 is vanishingly rare in any group of humans who compete for fun, be that mushes or video games or dog sports (did you know there are hobbies with crazier people than MUs) or anything else.
People spend a lot of time on their characters, a lot of time on their games/factions, and RL is hard and shitty. All of that means that nobody wants to come home from work after a long shitty day and fail to achieve whatever it is they wanted to do because the other faction won today. It feels bad in a way people don’t like and sometimes have outsized reactions to. Sometimes it feels bad in a very personal way, and people do lash out against that.
How do we keep it fair enough that people will accept a loss without thinking it’s the end of the world? I don’t know, honestly. A few things can be tried, all with their pros and cons.
Pre-determined Staff Verdict: X will win the contest of this particular goal/fight and Y will lose
- Takes away some of the drama around player machinations
- Is somewhat boring
- People complain about staff favoritism
- People complain about railroading
Organic Player Clash: X and Y just run into each other/into the same goal they both want, and go for it via whatever measures are at least sort of understood
- Exciting
- Total fkn chaos
- If something is unclear about how to resolve a conflict, this is really going to become apparent
- People complain about the other side being unfair
Arranged Events with Strict and Orderly Rules: Staff has set specific parameters within which X and Y can compete and determine an outcome
- The rules need to be spectacularly clear with no room for doubt
- People complain about staff favoritism anyway
- People complain about any possible reason the other adversary could be better: More active players, timezone favors them, dino characters/FCs with better sheets, they have better gear we can’t get, etc etc
You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.
In terms of everyday RP, adversarial faction encounters are some of the best fun and the worst drama IMO. Everyone wants to look cool and come out on top, nobody wants to “lose”, even if it’s just social banter. Some of my favorite scenes of all time have been with opposing factions, but no amount of carrying the idiot ball, pulling punches, making sure people aren’t taken out of action, and being kind and sensitive OOC ever got everyone on board with me. Some people hated me because I was on the adversary team, and there was no way to change their minds on that.
Adversarial factions are really fun, really exciting, and I honestly do love them, just as I love PVP. But like PVP, it’s extremely hard to separate those big feelings from the drama that ensues.
I would love to see it work without the drama. If there’s a game that can do it I’d be there. Humans are messy though, and that can be difficult to sort out online. Or anywhere, lol.
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It takes actually reaching out OOC to the other players and reassuring them that you are not your character, and keeping that line open. It helps you and them keep separation between you as a person and your PC. Emotional bleed IC-OOC happens, especially if you lose more frequently than you win IC, but just knowing you have that line to reach out to the other players is often enough to make things easier.
It does take an initial investment of OOC trust on both ends, which is emotional work all on its own, we have all been burned. It’s kind of like dating, but for the purposes of making your dollies fight fair and square. It’s better than enduring a sandbox meltdown though.
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Where have you seen this done elegantly?
Is it a fundamentally flawed approach in modern MUSHing?
Can it be managed in a properly collaborative environment? Does it depend on a carefully curated playerbase?In order: Never. Yes. Theoretically, but short of playing online TT with a few friends who already know each other, I have no idea how you could possibly accomplish this on an actual game.
PVP just means Player against Player. It doesn’t imply death, or even serious consequences. I’ve seen players flip the heck out over their character being mildly embarrassed by IC pranks on a PVE game, or get bent out of shape because their PC came second in a contest with no tangible IC consequences. Everything I’ve experienced in decades of MU gaming has convinced that random strangers on the internet cannot constructively handle meaningful PVP conflict.
Can it be done without burning the game down? Sure, but I’d still expect a ton of drama.
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You can navigate around this stuff as best you can by trying to have those very clear rules, lots of transparency, and as much give and take between “winners” as the story will support. It’s just hard.
I have actually seen this done well, exactly once. Or, rather, it could’ve been done well, except then one staffer decided to intervene to screw with the outcome on the very thinnest premise and based entirely on her dislike of a player.
It was an L5R game where were people were vying for a very clear and very specific goal that would impact the next arc of the story and where it was set. The win conditions were made very clear and actions taken towards achieving that outcome were pretty public once they were made final because the influence mechanic outlined meant posting on the game forum in specific threads. It required player coordination and while this favored larger factions than others, no single faction on the game was large enough to take the prize on their own. They’d have to negotiate with other factions to win, and several factions if they wanted to be really, really sure.
The problem was that one staffer who is to this day, more than fifteen years later, one of three staffers I hold up as the epitome of What Not to Be as a Gamerunner (and frankly just as a person) did not like our faction head at all. About three-quarters of the way through the process, when this has been going on for weeks and we’re running out of time to do much than has already been done, she declared that what the faction was backing wasn’t actually appropriate to the next arc’s setting and had to be swapped out to something else. It was something she could’ve warned us about literally weeks earlier, had seen and replied to, but waited until pretty close to the last minute.
Everyone supporting the faction changed their votes, except for one character. Whose player was on vacation, had acted early knowing that, and couldn’t be reached to switch it in time. The faction was also betrayed by someone they’d negotiated with, which was entirely fitting IC…
But meant that the deciding factor came down to that one player and their unchanged vote, with said staffer ruling that no, no, not changing it meant they were continuing to support something they’d declared totally inappropriate IC rather than working to the benefit of their faction. So the faction lost, based entirely on that ruling.
Naturally, people were pissed–to the point that several players in the winning faction felt pretty gross about it and were surprisingly apologetic. A few people in the losing faction actually just straight up quit the game. And honestly? I don’t blame them for it. Everybody’d been playing by the rules outlined, except for one staffer that decided to implode what had been, until that point, a case of PVP that had stayed pretty neatly within the lines of IC-only. The one upside I can think of that still came out of how that’d been set up? It was really, really obvious when she pulled that stunt and it warned the playerbase of what they were actually dealing with.
So I do think that it’s possible, but it has to be clearly outlined in advance, as transparent as you can make it, and–here’s the kicker–actually carried out fairly and consistently according to the rules that were laid down at the beginning. Because as much as we hate to admit it, sometimes the problem with PVP isn’t just the players engaging in it. Sometimes it can be the people adjudicating it, too, even when their bias is way less obvious.
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I really like Faction conflict play. In my opinion it’s better to fight with somebody based on being in opposite factions, than it is to fight with somebody based on your character hating theirs. Players really struggle to stomach being targeted with conflict, and knowing they’re consistently going to be targeted by Faction A for reasons that are completely impersonal is reassuring.
In practice, there’s always some kind of snafu and I haven’t seen it work right. Often a bunch of players sign up for faction play and end up being totally disinterested in it, or worse, get really upset when they get affected by faction conflict they explicitly signed up for. Don’t do that. There are so many games that don’t feature competitive play that you could be playing.
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@MisterBoring said in Factions:
I’ve seen them done well in LARPs
I am on record saying with the 1:1 time scale, MUs should operate more like LARPs (maybe even use LARP +sheets?)
@MisterBoring said in Factions:
include full PVP situations and PC death, but again, it requires a level of collaboration that is unheard of in most modern MUs.
Time is an investment for XP and such, so maybe 100% transfer upon death could hwlp soften the blow? Alternatively, make death not the end of the character. X-Men have the Krakoa resurrection, Eclipse Phase has backup clones. Something like that baked in.
Mummy Pun? MUMMY PUN!
She/her -
@Jennkryst said in Factions:
Time is an investment for XP and such, so maybe 100% transfer upon death could hwlp soften the blow? Alternatively, make death not the end of the character. X-Men have the Krakoa resurrection, Eclipse Phase has backup clones. Something like that baked in.
It’s called transferring to Wraith or Mummy.
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It’s very easy to avoid PC death if you just set up the game so it doesn’t happen until a certain point. Could be as simple as vtr vampires never taking violence past torpor due to centuries of their culture valuing hostage taking instead of killing their Kindred. Or there is a supernatural reason as mentioned, like for some reason injuries never quite are enough for final death in the setting due to some blanket Fortitude effect. Or in your setting, it’s just way harder to truly kill a vampire. Don’t be afraid to break the dead hand of “canon” if its needed.
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In Silent Heaven, characters can’t die (for spoilery reasons). There are many ways to have a contest, but one of the fastest ways to defuse a situation is with a little violence. There aren’t many downsides to engaging in combat, although the downsides scale slightly higher for more experienced characters that have a greater chance of winning (longer recovery times, and so on). I often encourage players with combat-capable characters to resolve things by fighting out their differences and calling it a day. It really does reduce tensions to have a climactic beat in the story.
Conflicts aren’t supposed to fester passively. In the game’s policies, it’s a social contract of all players to ensure feuds are resolved in a timely manner that’s agreeable to all parties involved.
Additionally, there are factions for players who are into combat, and they can effectively throw hands whenever they please, for the fun of it.
It works, for the most part. The biggest flaw is one I never expected. There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.” This completely sucks the fun out of any conflict. You need to nip those anti-fun practices before they spread. Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)
That kind of play makes victories feel hollow, and losses inconsequential. It almost feels like metagaming.
In order for conflict resolution between players to be amicable through contests (strength, art, cooking, and so on), I feel like players have to agree to do a few things:
- Use the tools available to have such contests.
- Actually try to win.
- Make the reward for winning and the penalty for losing feel small. (This one is largely enforced by the theme and occasionally STs.)
There are probably more things I’m forgetting. But it does feel pretty similar to playing a board game with friends.
Game-runner of Silent Heaven, a small-town horror MU.
https://silentheaven.org -
I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.
I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?
I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.
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I’ve never seen this done successfully in a public game. Nor have I seen it last well in a game that turned from private to open invite.
I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?
I too am eager to hear of examples where it was able to last, especially post-open-invite or when the size grew to more medium+ sized MU instead of glorified table top or very small community.
I will say that right until that one staffer crapped all over it, the conflict I saw happening was managed really well. Had it not been for that one move, I don’t think it would’ve been too much of a problem except for one bit of OOC side-eyeing about how the IC betrayal went down, but that was also resolved IC with a duel because it was set in an honor-based culture.
The takeaways from there were basically:
- The conflict was over a single, clearly defined outcome.
- All of the players knew what the win condition was.
- All of the players knew the mechanics behind the win condition.
- How characters achieved the win condition was left open IC, so it actively generated a lot of RP without being as strictly dictated as the mechanics were.
- The conflict didn’t totally devalue other groups outside the two main rivals. On the contrary, it made working with them critical to winning.
- The outcome was something that had a measurable impact on the world, but was limited by the time frame of how long it would affect the game. Since it was only for one season, that meant about two months of RP on a game set to run for roughly 15-18 months. As a result, winning or losing wasn’t going to make or break the entirety of the game for anyone and everyone knew that going in.
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@Jumpscare said in Factions:
Once, in a medium-combat faction, I had the boss NPC of the faction desire a spar with one of the PCs as a way of making up for the PC’s transgression against the faction. The idea being that they fight and all is made right in the end, regardless of who wins the fight. The PC decided to be a pacifist, passed all his combat turns, and said things like, “This won’t solve anything.” (It literally would have solved everything.)
And that’s just a spar, not even a real attack! Such a bummer.
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@Jumpscare said in Factions:
There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.”
I’m curious if they only did this when they knew they were involved in a punitive conflict, like the one you described. If they’re fully up for it when they’re “in the right”, then it’s totally anti-fun.
If the character is trying to portray a complete pacifist who holds to that even when they are in the direct path of harm, then it’s a whole different thing that isn’t anti-fun if recognized early and embraced.
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@MisterBoring said in Factions:
@Jumpscare said in Factions:
There have been players who have agreed to fights but say they “won’t fight back.”
I’m curious if they only did this when they knew they were involved in a punitive conflict, like the one you described. If they’re fully up for it when they’re “in the right”, then it’s totally anti-fun.
If the character is trying to portray a complete pacifist who holds to that even when they are in the direct path of harm, then it’s a whole different thing that isn’t anti-fun if recognized early and embraced.
The character was part of a combat faction. When a fellow faction member called for help fighting off a monster, the character avoided the fight. So the NPC leader felt it necessary to test the character’s combat capabilities. If he lost, that could prompt the leader to tell him to get stronger. If he won, then the leader could relent and accept him. Either way, I wasn’t going to boot the character from the faction. It was less of a punitive fight and more of a restorative fight.
Sometimes an IC challenge can be a practical way of asking the player if they’re actually having fun in the role they’ve chosen.
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I can’t really put my finger on it, because it wasn’t that the game was swarmed by evil people or anything weird like that. I am thinking perhaps it’s easier to mind small burps before they turn into catastrophic spew with a small number of players?
At the risk of overreading my experiences, I’m not sure it takes much more than a small handful of people who treat faction conflict as OOCly competitive rather than cooperative. Someone decides they’re going to get a definitive win over the enemy by leveraging their superior game stats to permanently eliminate someone on the other team, and now everyone’s thinking about that possibility.
People who are competitive by nature have something to point to to rationalize pushing their own stats further (and once you have that hammer, you start to look for nails). People who aren’t suddenly realize that their investment in the character is at risk from people with more system mastery, and become less willing to engage outside their comfort zone. And so on.
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I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.
My only experience, as stated, was punchy campy Transformers games. And they managed factions just fine. I think people more or less accepted that things wouldn’t always be fair, and the enjoyment they got out of doing flashy signature moves outweighed most negative vibes. The only dramatic ooc blow ups I recall were purely player-based over staff decisions, rather than anyone getting upset that Megatron and his gang got away with stealing a national monument or something.
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I wonder how this plays out in oWoD games where these factions are absolutely enemies. From what I gather, that’s what the layer of secrecy is for. You just have to live with the possibility that it all might go to shit if people find out. Maybe that’s part of the thrill.
That is a HUGE part of what the layer of secrecy is for and also why crossover tends to go very badly. Because the thing is, it’s well within the theme of the game for that crossover to exist. It’s explicitly written into the setting, especially the second edition of oWoD…
But it’s also well within the theme of the game for every vampire that’s met Brujah Bob and every Werewolf that’s met Shadow Lord Sally to look at the two of them making a pact to do a thing and go, “Uhhhh, excuse me. What the fuck is this? Are you out of your mind? Also, good job on breaking the Big Law of Secrecy, which is now an excuse for anyone in authority to issue you a very public punishment.”
It’s part of why I think single-splat games are generally better for WoD than multi-splat ones. Then if crossover happens, it’s entirely part of a controlled narrative and makes sense within a story. It’s way less likely to read as declaring a pack of players’ RPing with their friends as wrong-fun when it’s perfectly within the theme as written, especially considering that (ICly) declaring it wrong-fun is also part of the theme. That only results in a situation where, in varying degrees depending on the specifics of the situation, everyone is kind of right but also everyone kind of sucks here.
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I have seen factions done. I have seen it done in an… okay manner. It was baked into the theme. But there were always players who took things too hard, and went too hard, and made it less fun for those around them.
I do think that it’s possible to do CvC (but not PvP) antagonism, so long as it’s managed very carefully.
As others on this thread have pointed out, I think it starts with transparency, includes making outcomes not involve character death, and then I think that it moves on to making it clear that the conflict is Characters vs Character, and that the players are all there to work together to make a fun story. Even then, all it takes is one sore loser or sore winner and things can spiral out of hand.
As far as transparency is concerned, I think that it’s important for players to know what they’re getting into, how the conflict will be adjudicated, and what the possible outcomes will be. The example that @Aria gave is a great one – up until the one Staffer changed things up.
When character death is on the line, players get twitchy. I think that if you can make sure that death isn’t on the line, people are more likely to engage in CvC conflict in good faith. Starting a new character from scratch when you liked the deceased one, or they had some cool gear/stats, or they had great connections – it can be incredibly frustrating, and people will act in bad faith to avoid that frustration.
I do also think that one thing that can help is making sure that the opposing factions are fighting past each other, not fighting against each other. As an example, way back on KotOR MUSH, we had the Sith and the Republic fighting over a neutral system. Except they couldn’t attack each other, because if they did, then the neutral system would support whichever side was attacked. So each side had to work to make the other side look bad, and themselves look good, without ever actually fighting one another.
It’s been long enough that I don’t honestly remember how it turned out – it may have collapsed into complete crap – but I like the general idea of it as an opportunity for CvC antagonism. It means that no PC is directly beating up another PC, so there’s no chance of death (or even maiming).
Formerly known as Seraphim73 (he/him)
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Honestly it is hard enough getting shit together enough to run one faction smoothly, you want MORE? i’m turning this car around, we got food at home.
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I almost feel that even if factions aren’t baked into the setting, you inevitably get factions anyway when some major plot point comes up that creates ideological division among the characters. If you can somehow guide the characters to all fall in line across all of the major plot decisions that come up, you could potentially avoid that, but at the same time, I feel like that’s gonna end up making the game boring as all of the characters sort of begin to run together in thought and action.
