I'm splitting this off from the schoolgirls thread, because I don't think it should be lost in Prak's giant walls of text about how he doesn't understand how a one-off event in the past is a bad in-group signifier for the protagonists of a campaign of serial cooperative storytelling which will quite likely add or remove characters as players enter or leave the game or just decide they want to play a different character for whatever reason. I simply don't have the patience for that kind of bullshit anymore.Starmaker wrote:Having your players all be from the same Harry Potter House / Lo5R Clan / Planescape Faction is completely out of the question. Look at the OSSRs of the latter two to see why. People like different stuff. Furthermore, players gravitate to different character archetypes. If your Houses / Clans / whatever are described as even more important within the school environment than character classes, player will try to pick different ones. If your IP-scrubbed game advertises itself with WOW LOOK AT ALL THOSE THINGS YOU CAN BE!!1! AWESOMESAUCE!!1! and then immediately shut people down, they're going to be offended, and rightly so.
But the issue of factions is an interesting one. Obviously, factions make the worldbuilding more interesting. Equally obviously, since there is no story without conflict, factions should be in conflict. That's just good world building. And yet... in a cooperative storytelling game, that has a tendency to be really really shit.
Simply put: the player characters are played by real people who want their character to be different from the other characters. If there is a fork in the road of character generation, you're going to want to take the path least taken, and so is everyone else keeping in mind the path you just took. So if you write up five different factions that hate each other, that might make a good tabletop wargame or card game or whatever, but it's severely painful in a Role Playing Game, because all five players will want to play a different faction! Like to the point that players will actively say shit like "Oh, you're playing faction X? I guess I'll play faction Y."
You pretty much have to assume that the different players will not be on the same page, because they are actively trying to be different from each other.
This means that when you're designing a role playing game your task is fundamentally different than when you're designing a setting for a strategy game or a novel or really any other medium I can think of. Your goal is to make a series of factions that are meaningfully distinct and have different capabilities; and yet, individuals from these factions have to be in a tight knit adventuring group together. They have to, it's not fucking optional.
Shadowrun and Shadowfist had a pretty good means of walking that line, which is to have the players all be renegades by default. So your character might be a cyborg from one faction or a shaman from another, but at the start of the game you are a member of the anarchist renegades either way.
New World of Darkness attempted to walk this line by having characters be members of a bloodline (one of five) and a study group (one of five), but then be a predator's taint locked coterie of four to six vampires that was where your primary loyalties presumably lied. This was... almost there. It ran into big conceptual problems with the covenants not being things you cared about enough if you accepted the hypothesis that the players didn't have loyalty to them and severely undermined the table cohesion if you didn't. Basically, the game undersold the idea that there was a reason for you to care about being a member of the faction in a way that didn't make you want to betray the party. But you could certainly imagine something like this working in the sense that people have nationalities without being encouraged to betray their friends over it. New World of Darkness had bigger problems than just not being able to decide whether it was trying to be a Grimes video or a Blutengel video, and the failure of the product does not mean that individual ideas couldn't have been workable.
-Username17