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Factions and their influence.
I just wanted to ask a quick question. I was just reading the section on Paizo’s website where the Factions are described. It mentions that the year is 4708, and that the factions while all on equal footing, and are all involved in a shadow war to gain subtle control of and influence over Absolom.
I’m assuming Season 0 corresponds to 4708, Season 1, 4708, and Season 2 ( the year of the shadow war) 4710.
In the two years the pathfinder organized society has been running, has any of the factions accumulated more “prestige points” then any other? My impression is that Andoran has accumulated the most. And for that matter, has any of the factions gained more “influence “ then any of the others? “
Will the ascendancy of any faction be reflected in future published products? Perhaps the changes will be published in the Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized Play.
Thank you.
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I think the initial goal was to have factions scored and have a rank order but think that goal has been abandoned, at least for now.
I am hoping Hyrum and Mark will consider looking to revive it somehow, though I know their are arguments that it leads to some underhanded play by a few players. However, I think if it is done right and DMs control the PvP, it would make for a more rich background to the faction missions.
I will say publicly this is one of my primary goals as a newly-appointed Venture-Captain. I want to see some real, tangible change to the faction system, and eventually an overhaul that means something.
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It would be nice to be building *towards* something.
For instance, it would be a wonderful roleplaying backdrop if one faction engaged in open warfare with another, and certainly realistic. Perhaps it could be a low level warfare; certainly there exists an almost cold war between Cheliax and Andoran, and Qadira and Taldor
Historically, those who are at war often end up with a certain begrudging mutual respect of one another which makes for interesting dynamics; U.S.-U.S.S.R, English-French, Western Europe-Middle East.
Or it could merely be non-violent political leveraging.
Another option would be for certain "special events" when a certain factions completes a certain number of missions/garner enough PA worldwide.
For me, the factions are the best part of PF RPG. Otherwise, it becomes a somewhat 2-dimensional role-playing experience.
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Adding the Shadow Lodge as a Faction might be interesting as would a Varisian faction that is interested in making sure no other faction gains too much power (thus being able to dominate them). In older scenarios they would pick whichever faction mission is not being played (i.e. they are doing favors for the established factions in order to keep them balanced). It's CN alignment would also give a lot of CG characters a natural 'home' alignment wise other then Andor, thus evening out the character numbers.
Just some thoughts.
I also nominate my Paladin as the new Andoran faction leader.
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For me, the factions are the best part of PF RPG. Otherwise, it becomes a somewhat 2-dimensional role-playing experience.
Pathfinder Society organised play - The Cold War - now with
Come, see the new and biggest thrill - larger then life! Extraplanar entities, horrible things halflings were not meant to know, coming soon to a theater near you!
But once the main feature is over and you go home remember to hide your wives and children and don't trust your neighbors; agents of those Corrupt Chelaxians/Andorans Anarchists may be hiding anywhere! And remember, make sure your kids practice duck and cover - who knows when the Big One could be summoned!
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Thank you for all of your posts. To me, the faction system and, by extension the prestige system, while it adds an interesting extra goal for your character, is now merely a means to gain access to magic items. As a GM I find the faction system to be a bit of a pain in the neck. Particularly in the early modules, the locations of the faction’s goals were often deeply buried in the text, and were often difficult to find.
I will say on the plus side, the Prestige system neatly takes care access to magical items. To me it seems to strike a good balance between too much and two little. The magical items my characters have mean more to me because I feel that I have earned them, rather then simply purchased them.
Michael Brock, First congratulations on being appointed Venture Captain. I hope something does change with the faction system. Perhaps a simple change might be, at the end of the year if one faction has accumulated the most prestige, perhaps the players of a particular faction could be awarded a small bonus. Lets say a +1 to their diplomacy and /or intimidate and /or Knowledge Local skill based on every 5 prestige points they have.
LazerX your perceptions I think are right on the mark, with the missions serving the petty needs of the faction’s handlers. And yes I think rival Mafia gangs seem quite apt. I seem to remember watching somewhere on the history channel, they compared the local baron and his Knights probably had much more in common with Tony Soprano, then they did with King Author and his round table.
Tangorra, I agree while I may gripe about the faction and prestige system I do like it. Your point about cold ware is a good one. While I do like the idea of special events, and I got a chance to play in “year of the shadow war” back in august in Raleigh at the Game Theory store, and had allot of fun; I do however think that our current prestige point system should be adequate for determining which faction is in ascendance or decline.
Keryney, I think the introduction of the shadow lodge is an interesting development. What would make it more fascinating is if we players were allowed to make a choice between pathfinder lodge and shadow lodge. Then we each could have yet another “faction mission” yeah!. No seriously, it would be interesting to see which way the society would go based on the players picking one side or the other. Perhaps we could simply choose Pathfinder lodge, or Shadow lodge, like we choose our factions. If at the end of the year if most players had chosen one side or the other, there could be another special event where, either the Decemverate is pulled down, and a new decemvirate takes their place, or conversely, we have to storm the last shadow lodge stronghold.
Im not sure I understand why a “Varisian faction” would even be interested in Absolom. Varisia is a long way from Absolom.. As for evening out the numberts, People choose which faction they want their characters to belong to. Andoran seems to be the most popular. People can only do a replay of a scenario if they have a different character of a different faction. This alone encourages people to have characters of different factions.
Again thank you for your thoughts and replies.
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I don't know, I think in some ways you guys are being a bit too harsh on the faction goals. Its true that in some, especially if you play a few of them in a row, that you see some really petty goals all lumped together.
On the other hand, there are tons of missions where you are delivering messages and establishing contacts . . . exactly the kind of things you would do with long term political maneuvering. Its not like Taldor is going to have a faction mission to place a magic nuke in Katheer or something of that level of import.
On top of that, some of these missions could very well be testing an agent to make sure they will do what needs to be done, and there have even been a few where the GM has been told as much in his side of the adventure material.
Now, despite defending the overall system, I will say that I feel like there was a run of really annoying faction missions that were poorly worded, overly simplistic, or intentionally "cute," (i.e. playing against the factions normal personality).
Now that I've been on the non-GM side of the screen, however, the faction missions I've seen seem like low level spy kind of missions, and that's not upsetting to me at all. Your character is a spy on the side, a Pathfinder first. I do think that, overall, reading faction goals and the people dispensing the missions has done a lot to fairly quickly bring the player base up to speed on a lot of the major countries of the setting.
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My over simplified view of faction missions is that were first going to have an impact in game. After each year each faction would increase or decrease their influence depending on how the players scored.
Very cool idea, but it lead to PvP and other problems so it isn't used for that end any more.
Faction missions remain so ALL the mods don't have to be rewritten, while continueing to provide flavor and background for PCs.
I am hoping Hyrum and Mark will consider looking to revive it somehow...
This is definitely something we're talking about and something I consider to be a priority.
Hyrum.
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I think the important thing to note is that most people who want some kind of "purpose" to the faction missions just want to see it mean something, not mean something earth-shattering or game-changing or even "drive" PVP.
I know it's been discussed in the past that maybe it's simply a "congrats" yearly on the site, or maybe it's that there will be a special module the next year set in the winning faction's region, or maybe it's that one of the fiction novels will cover the going's on of an adventurer from that faction. It doesn't have to be a player reward or even something that we will notice in-game, an out-of-game or thematic reward is all I think many of us would like, just to give our faction missions a little more meaning.
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I think the important thing to note is that most people who want some kind of "purpose" to the faction missions just want to see it mean something, not mean something earth-shattering or game-changing or even "drive" PVP.
I know it's been discussed in the past that maybe it's simply a "congrats" yearly on the site, or maybe it's that there will be a special module the next year set in the winning faction's region, or maybe it's that one of the fiction novels will cover the going's on of an adventurer from that faction. It doesn't have to be a player reward or even something that we will notice in-game, an out-of-game or thematic reward is all I think many of us would like, just to give our faction missions a little more meaning.
Yup, there are lots of cool things that people would love to see even when they don't have direct in game benefits. Some people like to play on the winning team. Some people like to be the underdog.
What would be cool I think from a production schedule (and in game benefit) would be having something like 1/2 (round up to 15) the mods for a Season scheduled for faction countries. That means you would have 3 each explicitly set in Cheliax, Andoran, Taldor, Qadira and Osirion. The remaining 13 s/could be set in unaffiliated countries.
Then you could start letting the 'winning' faction start to eat into that count, so the lowest PA faction only gets 1 mod and the highest PA faction picks up those 2. Maybe the middle groups could all drop 1 so your spread ends up being 8 in the winning faction, 2 each in the middle and 1 at the bottom. Also maybe 'non winning faction' missions are slightly harder in these 8 mods (winner bias). Conversely you could also make the 'winning faction missions' harder in the remaining 7 (loser bias).
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I think that sort of setup, though, could make things become kind of cramped in whatever the winning faction nation was. Too many adventures in the same place in a given season might be difficult to work with, in all honesty.
Look at the Season 1 Summary it doesn't look too far of the mark of what I've suggested, assuming Taldor 'won' season 0.
EDIT: Before anything crazy happens...what I mean by this is that if you did a module spread similar to what I've suggested, the count of mods for Season 1 set in Taldor would be similar to a season where Taldor had one the prior season in terms of PA earned. I am not saying that Taldor won Season 0. :)
Director of Brand Strategy
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I think that sort of setup, though, could make things become kind of cramped in whatever the winning faction nation was. Too many adventures in the same place in a given season might be difficult to work with, in all honesty.Look at the Season 1 Summary it doesn't look too far of the mark of what I've suggested, assuming Taldor 'won' season 0.
In general, the release schedule assumes that each of the five faction home nations will host two scenarios, and Absalom will be the setting for five. Sometimes one nation gets more or less depending on other factors (like a 4 part series set there, in the case of Taldor last season), but this is the model I'm sticking with as I start planning out Season 2. The problem with focusing too much on these six settings is that it really reduces the amount of time we can spend exploring and defining other cool parts of the world. As it is, with 15 scenarios set in Absalom, Andoran, Cheliax, Oririon, Qadira, and Taldor, that only leaves 13 (less than half) a season's scenarios to cover cool places like Rahadoum, the Mwangi Expanse, the Worldwound, and Ustalav. Add in the introduction of a Tian Xia sourcebook next year, and the number of potential locations increases dramatically.
So long story short, we are planning to increase the impact factions have on the campaign, but probably not by devoting even more time to the "winning" nation.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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Oh for....look, we've already been down this road once. It's a pretty simple equation, actually.
If you make a 'faction' system relevant to your game (and encourage players to play for multiple different 'teams'), you will encourage infighting at the tables. This will, in the end, lead to violations of the no-PVP rule. Probably dramatic ones, depending on just how important you make this.
I unequivocably consider the faction system, in the context of the rest of PFS organized play, a fundamental mistake. In a game similar to the World of Darkness, where the factions are the game, it makes a great deal more sense. But when the basic point is that we should all be cooperating with each other, undermining it by having one team 'win' will always be fundamentally counterproductive.
I hope you have enough faith in Hyrum and I (and Erik and Jason and others in the company with organized play experience) that you'd give us the benefit of the doubt until you've tried out the system after we get done fiddling with it. We're aware of all the concerns you raise and will be bearing those in mind as we see what we can do with factions, but we're not going to eliminate them entirely. We'll be bouncing ideas off the community and our Venture-Captains as we develop this aspect of the campaign, and we welcome this sort of feedback.
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I do not know if I agree with that breakdown of player priorities for at a table. I think players on a whole are adult enough to make sure the mission is comes first.
Certainly, character advancement is tied to wealth, ergo loot and any mechanism for capping wealth advancement is going to be of major concern to the players. In practice, however, a person could complete zero missions for their faction and still up with reasonable access to equipment from mission treasure; they just wouldn't be able to build their dream weapons/armors/etc. Even the lack of access to free raise dead's could be overcome by money-saving players or generous allies, or by some sort of debt mechanic. So although PA is important, especially since the item creation mechanic has been removed, its not the end all. It's a shame that more players aren't more comfortable with this, and those that put wealth above party goals do make the game less fun for the rest of us.
Wealth concerns aside, I've never been at a table where faction priorities have overwhelmed the goals of the group. Perhaps that is careful writing on the part of the editors and authors. Certainly a number of adventures in season zero had more direct confrontations, with occasionally poor results, although no PvP ever occured that I personally saw.Now that authors have shied away from the possibility of confrontation the missions seem a bit more artificial, and as another poster said, more like the whims of VC's. It seems that at its heart the Pathfinder society is a Laissez-Faire group where personal interests are often at odd with the collective. They aren't an order of paladins or monks with a single unified purpose so it's natural that there are going to be people who butt heads.
What I find interesting is that faction missions are often perceived as falling squarely on the shoulders of the member of the faction. There isn't anything in the rules that says one player can't make a diplomacy role for another. As a player, I have (almost) no character with charisma above 8 - I have resigned myself to never making any social rolls. Instead, I engage in wheeling or dealing with other party members in order to achieve my goals, sometimes without telling them why I am doing what I am doing. Likewise, if other players are doing something mysterious at a table but are having trouble, sometimes I lend them a hand without asking why. I have debts of obligation and loyalty owed and favors to be called upon from many sources, and I think it enhances gameplay.
Let us just assume that we go with your suggestion, and completely eliminates the faction system. Now, one is completely beholden to motivations the PF society - a society ruled by masked, mysterious lords with the uninspiring aims of literary immortality and personal wealth. It's unclear to me that most characters would have the motivation to continue in service to the society.
Perhaps the elimination of factions would be good; perhaps it would allow the campaign managers to direct the stories in a more coherent, dedicated way and end up with a story that is more sophisticated and rewarding. Perhaps the woes, mishaps and tribulations of the society would draw us in and keep us on the edge of our seat.
On the other hand, if they don't do that - and the game remains merely an episodic collection of one (or two or three) shot adventures, what good has that accomplished? You've just removed a pretty good mechanism for character motivation, and a convenient framework for providing character background. It seems to me like an unwarranted simplification of the game.
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Inspite of my griping about the faction system, I still like it and I would not like to see it removed from the modules.
Knight Errant Jr.
Thank you your point about the missions being jobs a low level spy might is an excellent point.
Hrym Savage and Mark Moreland thank you both for taking the time to post on this tread. Im sure you all will come up with something excellent.
I guess it is a challenge to have competing goals within a game that is cooperative in nature, but where quite often, you have a fresh pathfinder team that hasn’t worked together before, and are not familiar with each other.
Perhaps there is a Perk that can be aarded out side the game mechanics.
One idea is a +1 to diplomacy/ intimidate and or gather information per 4 points of prestige, to the players of the wining faction.
Perhaps another possibility might be to put something in each Guide to Pathfinder Society Organized play, where it notes which faction is wielding more power, and the others are trying to restore the balance of power.
Maby another perk for the winning faction might be to hold a little lottery amongst the registered 12 level characters of the winning faction. The winner of this lottery, gets their character premoted to “Faction leader” and he gets his character published in future Pathfinder Organized society products or the Guide.
Just a thought.
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Director of Brand Strategy
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The name of the campaign is "Pathfinder Society." Reducing the Society to the level of a common fence doesn't feel right, and increasing Faction importance will just increase the disconnect.
Just wait. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the solution we've come up with. ;-)
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What I had kind of hoped for back when the switch from Season 0 and Season 1 happened was that there might be two prestige totals, one for your faction and one for the PFS, and you got a point for PFS whenever you survived a scenario and completed whatever the society wanted you to do, which would allow you to still use Season 0 scenarios, because you can just make sure anyone that survived and actually did what they were suppose to do got their PFS point.
The "other" faction point might give you a % discount on things because your faction is "subsidizing" your work, and ideally there would be some favors that you could either cull from the PFS or from your Faction (which might be fun from a RP standpoint . . . "should the Pathfinder society have me raised from the dead, or does Andoran want me back alive more?")
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The name of the campaign is "Pathfinder Society." Reducing the Society to the level of a common fence doesn't feel right, and increasing Faction importance will just increase the disconnect.Just wait. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the solution we've come up with. ;-)
hmm interesting, But Please don't make it that the character under the old system get screwed!
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hmm interesting, But Please don't make it that the character under the old system get screwed!The name of the campaign is "Pathfinder Society." Reducing the Society to the level of a common fence doesn't feel right, and increasing Faction importance will just increase the disconnect.Just wait. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the solution we've come up with. ;-)
I seriously doubt that will be the case.
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Just wait. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised with the solution we've come up with. ;-)
I will wait, and while I wait I will re-read Seekers.
As a side note to the earlier conversation, from a RP reason I don't really think of all of my 4 current PC's as pathfinders - certainly most of them. However, at least one of them I see as merely a flunky for his VC, and he serves her more then she serves the pathfinders.
Also, my anecdotal evidence for harmony in play is just that - anecdotal. I can only imagine that there are genuine in-game conflicts that occur and make life difficult for GM's and other players. (Is it possible, though, that changing the game would not actually eliminate those problems? In my experience, especially in OP, it's player dynamics and not game rules which result in cooperative vs. competitive play. There is a certain level of shenanigans that occur in any environment, people who are juvenile and like to exclude others, or feel the need to promote themselves over others.)
Certainly it would be interesting if there were a specific code of ethics and an actual minimal skill requirements to enter into the Pathfinders, or at least into different sub-branches of the Pathfinders. Certain skill ranks or so forth. It would be impractical from a logistics point of view, but it would be far more realistic given the super-explorers the pathfinders are supposed to be, and the training they are supposed to receive. There is actually a ethical code I suppose, the "Explore, Report, Cooperate" ethic, but it is pretty loose.
But I seem to digress from that of the original poster -the role of factions. :)
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hmm interesting, But Please don't make it that the character under the old system get screwed!Old system?
Current system...You know Factions... Meant Old as in soon to be Old when you change it, so at the point Characters get screwed who where in the Old System... I was using perfectly good English!!! ;)
Mark hinted and boy is it going to be awesome. 4 of us spent a little over 2 hours going over our goals for everything PFS and I can't wait to start implementing things. (Most won't happen until Season 3 though.)
Hyrum.