The Value of Being Factionless

[skerritthegreen]

I'm starting this as a separate thread because I wanted to ask a few questions without it being lost in the other discussion (and muddy the waters of both). Please note that I will be focusing on Expeditions/Epics because its whats we can control. The published adventures are a whole different thing.

1) Other than RP choices, should there be more/any benefits to being factionless? The original intent was to form investment and community by having characters being part of a faction (and thus have something/someone to fight for that adventures could plan for).

2) If there should be benefits, what would they be? They would need to be less (and less frequent) than the benefits of having a faction, since we want characters to be in a faction.

3) What else could we do to encourage players to choose a faction for their characters? (I often suggest that if you are unsure because you just want to be a generic adventurer, you want Lords Alliance since they hire lots of mercenaries and pay well).

 

[sigfile]

I'd come at it from another angle - what are the downsides to faction affiliation? I can't think of any, really, which is unfortunate. A major positive part of being factionless ought to be staying clear of faction politics and rivalries (if there were any).

Special adventures (like for a "Weekend in the Realms") could be keyed to various factions - tables of Zhents do part A, tables of Harpers get part B, etc. "Factionless" could have a role there as wildcards (participating at any table) or dealing with those that don't trust any of the factions or their representatives.

I could also picture events where faction representatives actively attempt to recruit experienced and unaffiliated adventurers.

 

[Pauper]

Agree with sigfile; the main benefit to staying out of the factions should be avoiding the political complications of being in a faction. Unfortunately, the 'community' style factions are all upside, so there's nothing to be gained by not choosing a faction. Heck, I've been at more than one table where an objective is described as being mutually exclusive between factions (two different factions each want the artifact the party is searching for, for example), and the DM simply hand-waved the outcome so that each faction was satisfied, allowing all the characters present to gain their renown points.

Ideally, there should be the potential for conflict between the factions. There should be ways to mess up your faction-assigned mission so badly that you get a warning that another such screw-up will get you kicked out of your faction. There should be power bases in the Moonsea that don't trust any of the factions and that actively reward adventurers who help those power bases stay independent of the factions. In fact, 'independence' would be a good short description of the main benefit of not aligning with a faction.

In short, it should be such a pain in the butt to be in a faction sometimes that it would be an obvious decision for some characters to avoid faction membership, because for those characters, the benefits would not be worth the opportunity costs. The way the factions are currently constituted, though, it doesn't seem likely that any long-term downside to faction membership will be instituted.

--
Pauper

 

[skerritthegreen]

In short, it should be such a pain in the butt to be in a faction sometimes that it would be an obvious decision for some characters to avoid faction membership, because for those characters, the benefits would not be worth the opportunity costs. The way the factions are currently constituted, though, it doesn't seem likely that any long-term downside to faction membership will be instituted.

Are you saying it should sometimes be bad to be in a faction, or if we want being factionless to be a reasonable option, it should sometimes be bad?

 

[tila]

Are you saying it should sometimes be bad to be in a faction, or if we want being factionless to be a reasonable option, it should sometimes be bad?

I agree with him to a point. Being a faction member should NOT be all roses and kittens. Especially the Zhents. Maybe there is a benefit and detriment for each season.

The detriment can be if a player fails at a special mission, they have to roll a Faction saving throw with their rank as a bonus in order to smooth over the havoc they have created and save their position in the faction. They MAY also be able to spend gold and downtown days to smooth over the mistake.

 

[Pauper]

Are you saying it should sometimes be bad to be in a faction, or if we want being factionless to be a reasonable option, it should sometimes be bad?

The latter. Unless you want to have to come up with a lot of cool powers/abilities that come from not being in a faction, which is probably possible but doesn't make a whole lot of sense in isolation, you balance being in a faction with not being in a faction by making being in a faction sometimes not worth the cool abilities you get from it.

(Edit: just realized you might have been asking if I thought *not* being in a faction should be bad -- to be clear, the downside of not being in a faction is not getting the cool perks of being in a faction, like the free rez for low-level characters. The upside is that you get the freedom to resolve issues in ways the factions don't want, because you're not beholden to them. Done right, that would be a very powerful motivator for certain characters to remain factionless.)

I personally think it should just generally be bad sometimes to be in a faction; that if you mess up, you should be able to lose renown and/or even be expelled from a faction, but I can see where that would be a challenge to implement in an OP campaign (though I notice that the Cloaks in Season 2 ended up being a faction that was both worth joining as well as worth not joining, if your character wasn't the sort to belong to that kind of organization).

--
Pauper

 

[kalani]

I agree. While the factions may have put their differences aside for the purpose of defeating a greater evil - they still have their own secret agenda's, and would be more than willing to get ahead politically if the opportunity presents itself. The Zhent for example, might send their agents on missions to recover weapons, equipment, or magic items which would increase their power - something the harpers would want to prevent. Likewise, one faction might want to rescue a prisoner or defector, while another might seek to eliminate them in order to tie up loose ends.

Unfortunately, while having faction assignments which put two factions at odds is in keeping with the factions - it wouldn't play out well at the table and would likely result in open conflict between PCs. Perhaps a better solution would be to have the PCs aid an NPC to complete some secondary objectives, without explaining any details. On the surface, these secondary objectives seem innocuous (bribe a guard here, destroy some weapons there), but at the end of the adventure - something should occur which shows how instrumental to a major plot those objectives were - such as a raid on a rival factions stronghold by unaffiliated mercenaries (plausable deniability).

Likewise, there should be missions that are more difficult if members of X, or Y faction are openly present (or known) to be in the party - such as an adventure in which the party must enlist the aid of a Harper agent might cause the DC of all charisma checks to increase by 5 if there are Zhentarim in the party, while Zhent's make their checks at disadvantage. Should the party fail to enlist the aid of said individual, the mission becomes that much harder, as they lack a key advantage to overcome a single specific obstacle.

Other missions might involve the Emerald Enclave seeking to protect a grove, which is upsetting the Lords Alliance and Order of the Gauntlet as they plan on building a military outpost to defend the city there as it occupies a key strategic location, the grove itself also acting as a point of weakness allowing enemy forces to come very close to the city walls without detection. Which side does the party aid? Such a mission should have three outcomes; one favoring each faction, and one in which both factions come to a compromise but at the expense of some adventure rewards (magic items, renown, etc).

 

[Pauper]

Here's another thing -- we still don't know what the actual benefit of rank 4 'be a faction mentor' actually means in play, especially since rank 4 characters aren't going to be adventuring with lower-tier characters who would most likely benefit from having a mentor.

The thing is, though, if the benefit is one that is positive for both the mentor and the characters interacting with the mentor, that's yet another perk for being a member of a faction (if the benefit is good enough, it will all by itself cause new characters to want to join that faction in a given play area, simply to be able to avail themselves of the benefits of being mentored).

If you want being factionless to seem like a reasonable alternative, you either need to come up with an equivalent benefit for not being a member of a faction (which seems silly, as not joining a faction means you're specifically avoiding joining an organization with the structure to mentor lower-tier characters), or you're going to have to incorporate a significant downside to the mentor benefit, which will tend to make people feel as though spending all the time and effort to gain rank 4 in a faction wasn't worthwhile.

(Edit: as an example, one thing I think would be very reasonable for a faction mentor to have to do would be to provide some amount of support for lower-tier faction members who need to make use of Faction Charity; whenever a Harper in a given play area, for example, needs to be brought back from the dead and can't afford it, the Harper mentors in that area pony up some portion of the expense. It's reasonable, and it provides a cash sink for treasure that's otherwise largely unusable by higher level characters, but would likely be seen by the mentor players as being punative rather than supportive of their faction.)

--
Pauper

 

[kalani]

Honestly, I think the best way to introduce drawbacks to the factions - is to introduce encounters which are complicated by the presence of one or more factions. On the flip side, there should also be encounters which are easier if a member of X faction is present. This is best used in branching storylines, in which the presence of X or Y faction might close off one option entirely, or greatly increase the difficulty of choosing one branch over the other.

Factionless characters should not have any benefit. Since such characters do not earn renown, they should not be rewarded with benefits which require the completion of secret missions, X renown, and X levels. The benefit should be that such characters have a neutral influence on how an adventure progresses. On the other hand, there might also be the occasional adventure which rewards factionless characters - such as a contact which distrusts the factions, and is only willing to aid the party if one (or more) factionless PCs are present, and the factionless PC takes point.

Were I to write such storylines, I would probably introduce such a character in a tier 2 adventure, and might even go so far as to create a factionless sidequest (akin to a faction secret mission), except that the only rewards are XP, treasure, and consumables. I might even go so far as to write a single adventure in which the party cannot gain the permanent magic item unless there are factionless PCs present (such as the item only being available in said side quest).

 

[MwaO]

Something I'd look at doing is giving the renown point for members of the faction and then giving 1/4th of a renown point to non-members of a faction who participated in X, but didn't have any other opportunity for renown points in the mod.

As an example, there's an artifact which both the Zhents and Harpers want. Another faction doesn't care about it and that PC helps it get to the Zhents. So the Zhent PC gets 1 renown point with the Zhents, the Harper PC gets 0(because he failed), and the member of the other faction gets 1/4 renown point with the Zhents.

Then the benefit of being non-affiliated is that you by definition don't have anything else to do, so you accumulate renown points for all the factions more quickly. Basically, "Hey, that mercenary friend of Zoloth the Unclean keeps helping us out anytime Zoloth is on a mission for us. Don't trust him too much, but he might be a person to ask a favor of here and there..."