More on Player-based Factions

Players can certainly go alone. Depending on your design, they might not get far, but they can always try. Being that as it may, we humans are social creatures and even the most misanthropic among us will join with others now and then. Indeed there is something innately social about the fundamentals of our psychology. Evolutionary biologists attribute this to our primative roots in the truest sense: from when we were as but the more base of primates. So we humans are organically ``wired'' to seek the company of others.

Demographers, sociologists, and ethnographers have identified several sorts of groupings. Some of the greatest minds have studied the phenomenom and most elegantly articulated their findings. Very little of that matters in terms of a Mud. Oh, there are certainly functional aspects which will come into play, but because the players and you, the designer, are not actually founding any Real World society charged with establishing Real World Justice, or preserving Real World Life, many of the forms and trappings are purely non sequitur. The structural differences between Nation-States vs City-States vs Tribes in neither here nor there in this endevour. This is because it is extremely unlikely any functional grouping of players will ever exceed the degree of Tribe. Moreover, if your virtual world is a living and breathing world, the players of any given faction will have ties to several other factions. Some which the sociologist might call ``strong'' and some ``weak'', but more than just a few. Just as each faction impacts every other faction through their own culture and the shared culture of your virtual world, the greater culture of the virtual world both shapes and is shaped by these factions in an autocatalytic way. Therefore a good understanding of ``what is a faction?'' is in order.

In both his Designing Virtual Worlds and his MMOs From the Inside Out, Dr. Richard Bartle cleanly identifies two key properties of player-based factions which dominate, if not completely govern, the mechanics of any system. You must understand that before we get into the sorts of factions there might be, what their purposes and powers ought to be, their functions and forms, etc., indeed before we even ask the question ``Should we even have factions?'', we must first ask of ourselves ``Just what is a player-based faction?''.

A player-based faction would be any group of 2 or more players activing collectively. Assuming there is any sort of public chat, anyone can announce ``25 Fighter LFG for MC''. This is the parlance for announcing ``25th level Fighter is looking for a group to raid Monster Capitol''. Now w/o coding any functionality, most people should be able to just follow others around, and if you don't do any of that extra work then you have the default mode of in-context support for factions: none. Alice and Bob can agree to team up, but there if is no formal mechanism in the game enforcing loot or XP is shared out then Alice and Bob will have to come to some agreement about loot shares and, depending on support for PvP, there may be nothing either can do if the other breaks their word.

A greater level of support might be a formalized ``fellowship'' of a squad of players. In Tolkien's The Fellowship of the Ring and The Hobbit, we see a small group of adventurers set forth to do their business as a single unit. You might think this idea is simply smashing, and want to encourage such formations in-context by coding in functionality. You might code up automatic loot-sharing mechanics (dice rolls, or only treasure masters can collect for redistribution later, etc.) or you might permit some sort of ``team name''. This field is ripe for innovation, but the gist is you've added code to the virtual world, which means there are now in-context physics supporting these things. Just as gravity is a fundamental force in Real World Physics, you've now made ``fellowships'' (or whatever you call them) a fundamental force in your Virtual World Physics.

This addition of code now creates its own set of properties by which we can measure and qualify factions. This can range from ``none at all'' to some rather complicated systems involving elections and property redistribution and so forth. The fundamental aspects we have fall along the lines of permanance and authority. There is a third notion, ``hardwired vs softwired'' which we really do not consider and will only be discussed but briefly at the end.

The axis of permanance concerns the very existence of the group itself. If all the members log off, does the group still exist? Quick ``pick-up'' groups blink right out of existence if everyone were to log out. There may even be a mechanism to disband a faction, such as the captain announcing ``Ok, we defeated the Ogre so our adventure is complete.'' Another group, perhaps a trade federation of all the tailors in your virtual world, might best continue to exist even if every tailor were to disconnect. Because that which is fine for one is not necessarily fine for another, the designer does need to consider this mechanic carefully. He may very well want to support both sorts of permanance, but unless he is thinking directly about the issue itself, if he just checks items from a list, he won't get what he likes. So fellowships and PUGs would have very low permanance while great trade guilds or mercenary companies might have a great degree of permanance.

The authority axis details who can do what within the faction. This isn't about titles, such as ``Fred is Captain of The Wolf Guards'', but along the lines of invoking underlying code by exercising faction-powers in-context. For example, if your faction is ``invitation-only'', then can just anyone extend an invitation, or is that power granted only to specific ``recruiters''? Can just anyone withdraw from the vault? Is access to the alchemist a privilige of rank, or is it a perquisite available to any member? Can just anyone disband the faction?

Understanding the authority axis involves enumerating a specific number of faction related features/functions, and then determining who can and cannot invoke them. EVE Online, for example, even considers delegation as a specific authority. For example, the CFO has the authority to withdraw funds but also may delegate that authority to others, and ultimately the Grand Poobah may even delegate delegation itself, thus forming his trusted cotier of trusted lieutenants (``officers'' in EVE). This enumeration is prone to inflation and inclusion ``just because'', so great care must be taken to ensure one is not adding things just because some other game has them, or because they sound cool. These are functions, which mean they serve a material purpose in your physics. What functions or features support your greater design? Implement them and leave the remaining by the wayside.

So these are the mechanics of factions. The next article will address their costs and benefits so we can better approach the question ``Do we even want player-based factions in the first place?''