This works for the employer/quest giver NPC, which by design is intended to be on the same side as the PC (even double cross require the PC to side with the employer at least initially). This is not a case where working with the NPC and working with the rest of the team is going to be mutually exclusive.FrankTrollman wrote:Nath, even as formulated that isn't a problem. Imagine for the moment we were talking about Shadowrun. Every character has their own contacts, and any particular character has a modest preference for taking jobs from their own contacts (in that doing so improves the loyalty of one of their contacts in addition to whatever money is paid). Are you prepared to say that this is a problem? Because I'm pretty sure it is a feature.
It is simply genuinely a good thing that player characters have different contacts that they can turn to for information and quests. It lets players be proactive and self starting and other buzzwords when it comes to getting and completing quests.
You keep pointing at the fact that players might have motivation to do one thing over another thing and saying that's bad. How could that possibly be bad?
The problem is going to appear if using (loyal) members of the PC faction as antagonists. I'm talking about player characters having different contacts that may passively or actively try to make them betray the rest of the party, which I don't think is a genuinely good thing.
Shadowrun has ten major megacorporations, dozens of smaller ones, major criminal syndicates, gangs, secret organizations... So the gamemaster has some to room to avoid the issue. But it's because it exists that you have to avoid it.
I never encountered a party where more than one or two PC who'd have actual ties to megacorporations - connection to crime syndicates or national law enforcement or security agencies being slightly more common. It was just common sense to simply not play or write an adventure which featured their chosen faction as an antagonist. Still, that means there are plots I simply couldn't use (and, after a few years and a number of changes inside a group, both players and characters, a tangled web of relationships that was getting increasingly difficult to navigate through to find an employer and an antagonist everyone could accept). It even happened to me once to have a player asking to play a character from Aztlan, which basically made it impossible to pursue the ongoing campaign; I had to force him into rewriting what otherwise was, setting-wise, a perfectly valid character concept.
And that's Shadowrun, where you literally have an entire, modern world to play with, and where most authors and gamemasters nonetheless rely on a number of designated evil factions (Aztechnology, Humanis...).
Here, we're talking about an oriental empire where it is mandatory for every PC and almost all major NPC to belong to one in only a dozen or so of clans (and my understanding is that introducing a designated evil clan would be a mockery of the original intent).
The occasional intra-team betrayal can be fun to play. When every game has one waiting to happen, I expect a lot of GM will switch to a designated evil for the rest of the campaign out of boredom.
To have the rules and the setting strictly enforce that a standing order of the daimyo must be followed may be solving this issue. But having a solution to a problem is different from the problem not existing at all. In this case, it put a requirement on adventure starting with an order from the daimyo.