Wowza, A Better Faction System??
I read this fantastic post over at elmc.at about managing factions in a sandbox game today and just love it. It's not wildly dissimilar to the simple faction system I've been using so far, but the addition of multi- tiered faction goals really hits the bullseye on the issue I've been having with making my factions feel ALIVE. I especially love the incorporation of the Landmark, Hidden, and Secret hierarchy from DIY & Dragons into the faction goals.
I have also started to build out organizational charts for each of the factions. It's fun for me, and makes my life easier if my players encounter these factions on a random encounter table or something. It is a nice coincidental side effect that these org charts line up perfectly with the aforementioned goal system. Together they provide me with the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How of these faction activities.
I still like the mechanic I have for the faction's overall power, and intend to keep it. It's an easily parsed metric that tells me how to represent the faction in the world when my players meet them, and determines how likely they are to achieve their goals.
In light of all this I've designed myself a nice faction sheet to print off that tracks a single faction's power, members, goals, holdings, and which PCs they have met. I could have spent more time letting this design percolate, but if I think of improvements I'll update the image in this post.
