Have any of you simulated factions/organizations in your Solo RPGs? How did you do it? I'm thinking of running a tale of an order of paladins and I want to have organic possibilities of things like corrupting influence on the order, or having it expand its reach into new provinces.
Possibilities that come to mind off the top of my head for keeping rules to a minimum: Dungeon World Steadings, The Fate Fractal, or just stating the faction up like a character with FU...
Anyway, tl;dr, - Please share your experiences formalizing faction/organization mechanics in a Solo RPG!
Factions rules in Stars Without Number may be useful for you, I think
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip! Does that system create faction stats that you can interact with and change, or just a description to get you started?
ReplyDeleteRobert Wiesehan yes, there are factions' stats and they can be changed through the actions of rival factions and/or PCs.
ReplyDeleteBTW, there's a free version on DriveThruRpg, so you can read it yourself
Николай Голубев I'll check it out!
ReplyDeleteYou can also take a tip from Lacuna and have a Static table. The Static table is a list of events that progresses over time. It can be clues, news, red herrings, unrelated strangeness, or in this case, a faction moving forward with their agenda. To make it more chaotic and less scripted sounding, have thresholds and advance a counter by random intervals so you're not sure when an event will trigger (or perhaps even get skipped.)
ReplyDeleteFor example, the PCs do nothing - add 1d6 static per scene, if they poke the faction - advance it by 2d6.
10 - Faction appears in the news
15 - A flight of ravens takes off behind the PCs
20 - An informant leaves a message.
30 - The informant turns up dead.
35 - Faction begins their move.
40 - The Faction encounters unexpected resistance.
45 - Collateral damage that direct impacts the PCs
50 - The Faction achieve their goal if not stopped.
Similar to Lacuna, Apocalypse world/Dungeon world has a "Front" system, with a countdown timer.
ReplyDeleteI've been thinking about this in context of solo play, since I've done several group plays with factions and it's really one of the things that interests me the most. I am leaning towards Godbound's Faction rules. Very simple, very effective, easy to keep up with. Reign also has nice faction rules that are more numbers-based. Using Godbound/SWN and any flavor of oracle, i think it'd be pretty trivial to roll up an event (or chance of an event) on every Faction turn!
ReplyDelete