Yora
Legend
I've been thinking today that for a space setting, factions might actually be more important than planets. Unless it is a setting with only a small number of planets with very distinctive environments, or specifically about the adventures of prospectors regularly fighting hostile environments as their main threat, the various conditions of planets generally don't play a meaningful role in the events that happen.
For example, Tatooine being a desert with two suns doesn't impact anything that happens in Star Wars. Hoth could have been a barren desert instead of a giant ice world and things would have played out exactly the same. Exotic and stunning environments serve hugely important roles as aesthetics, but the specific conditions are typically handwaved.
Another factor is that mapping planets just isn't feasible from a workload perspecrive, and typically character stay within walking distance of where they parked their ship. And even then, you can't really build whole cities for one time use. The same is true for different wildlife on different planets.
In contrast to that, factions are what really defines these settings. Factions are not tied to specific planets, settlements, or buildings. For many factions, they can go to just as many places throughout space as the heroes can, having all kinds of believable business to do there. And characters of these factions have reasons to know about the heroes and recognize them, and also to have any kind of interest in what they are doing. Every city on every planet had thousands of people that players could randomly run into, and almost none of them would have any reason to pay them any attention. They are just complete strangers from other worlds with no connections to local affairs. But eatablished factions are different from that.
It is possible to have run ins with generic local factions, like the police or a minor pirate gang, who have reasons to intercept snd confront the heroes. Both in space and in cities. But largely I think encounters that are not story specific scenes, but the general everyday risk of running into complications, will be much more interesting when they happen with people that have some kind of eatablished context. In heroic fantasy games, something very similar already exists with the various monster species. Running into an oger or a mind flayer does not just signal to the players what the expected combat abilities in a fight would be, but alrady inform a great deal about the creature's personality, likely behaviors, and motivations. A fantast game might have various sub-factions of orcs, but you could still treat generic "orcs" collectively as being a faction as a whole. When a game has two goblin tribes fighting with each other, that's typically seen as some infighting, not as a regular generic war between two completely unrelated groups that happen to be the same species.
That's something you don't get in settings where all NPCs are humans, or effectively humans in all ways that matter. Factions can do a good part of that workload.
For example, Tatooine being a desert with two suns doesn't impact anything that happens in Star Wars. Hoth could have been a barren desert instead of a giant ice world and things would have played out exactly the same. Exotic and stunning environments serve hugely important roles as aesthetics, but the specific conditions are typically handwaved.
Another factor is that mapping planets just isn't feasible from a workload perspecrive, and typically character stay within walking distance of where they parked their ship. And even then, you can't really build whole cities for one time use. The same is true for different wildlife on different planets.
In contrast to that, factions are what really defines these settings. Factions are not tied to specific planets, settlements, or buildings. For many factions, they can go to just as many places throughout space as the heroes can, having all kinds of believable business to do there. And characters of these factions have reasons to know about the heroes and recognize them, and also to have any kind of interest in what they are doing. Every city on every planet had thousands of people that players could randomly run into, and almost none of them would have any reason to pay them any attention. They are just complete strangers from other worlds with no connections to local affairs. But eatablished factions are different from that.
It is possible to have run ins with generic local factions, like the police or a minor pirate gang, who have reasons to intercept snd confront the heroes. Both in space and in cities. But largely I think encounters that are not story specific scenes, but the general everyday risk of running into complications, will be much more interesting when they happen with people that have some kind of eatablished context. In heroic fantasy games, something very similar already exists with the various monster species. Running into an oger or a mind flayer does not just signal to the players what the expected combat abilities in a fight would be, but alrady inform a great deal about the creature's personality, likely behaviors, and motivations. A fantast game might have various sub-factions of orcs, but you could still treat generic "orcs" collectively as being a faction as a whole. When a game has two goblin tribes fighting with each other, that's typically seen as some infighting, not as a regular generic war between two completely unrelated groups that happen to be the same species.
That's something you don't get in settings where all NPCs are humans, or effectively humans in all ways that matter. Factions can do a good part of that workload.
