The Culture: Do This To Keep Faction Play Manageable

(Following from the last two posts.)

For big picture stuff, as you see routinely in Grand Campaign play, you have the problem of Faction Play being so fast-paced that it can overwhelm both players and Referees.

I advise people to put the manuals down and turn your attention back to the real world. Real world Faction Play, when looking at big picture play, hasn't been so fast-paced until the last century because communications technology permitted that level of micro-managing over distance and in the real world even they are arguing over if this is a good idea or not.

Slow The Pace of Decision

Instead, the pace of play (if this were a game) is slower. You're not looking at gameplay loops measured in weeks; you're looking at months, seasons, or years. This is not at all hard to implement, regardless of what the campaign is, provided that you are doing things properly and using 1:1 Timekeeping to track what characters (and Factions) do and how long it takes to do them.

Mustering armies or navies takes time. Conducting research and development takes time. Building things takes time, requires resources, and employs labor. Opportunity Cost kicks in because all of that time, labor, resources, etc. used to do this cannot also be used to do anything else at the same time.

In Action

Let's say that I'm running a RIFTS campaign.

The player running The Lord of the Deep drops me a DM vis Discord and asks what it would take to make a Kaiju. After I check the statblock (RIFTS Underseas), I respond and explain that he needs to get his hand on a sizable population--in the hundreds of thousands, minimum--of creatures he could turn into minions. He must get them all more or less at once, and he will need take some additional time to properly meld so many people into a massive body.

The player and I go back and forth for a few days to hammer out the specifics, after which the player enacts The Lord of the Deep's attempt to make a Kaiju. I tell him that this will take a couple of months before he can make the attempt to farm up the necessary raw material for his fusion power, during which time others can attempt to disrupt or thwart the entire scheme.

The player and I map out this on the campaign calendar, starting in December and reaching a culmination in March. During this time, The Lord of the Deep is not actively pursuing any other course of action. The only immediate effect is that The Lord's tentacles outside the Pacific Ocean retreat back to the Pacific, and that is only communicated to seaborne Factions affected by those things (e.g. Atlantis, Naut'Yll, New Navy, Tritonia, Lemuria, Triax/NGR, etc.).

A few weeks later, Factions that deal with seaside affairs (all of the above, plus a few more) start hearing about a surge of trafficking and disappeared peoples. Those who deign to dig into these cases find cult activity tied to The Lord of the Deep; the cults are hearing from their master about the need for sacrifices and they are grabbing everyone that they can to toss into The Lord's briny grip.

A month or so in, The Lord's tentacles start engaging in diversionary attack against its known enemies to draw attention elsewhere while its minions scout out locations that its tentacles can easily reach and sweep up sacrifices from its seaside cults.

Then, at the culmination, The Lord conducts an assault on Tritonia (again) to focus attention there while most of its tentacles sweep across the shores to grasp hundreds of thousands of sacrifices and drag them under the waves.

If no other player figures out what the objective is and stops The Lord's scheme, then that player is tied up for a couple of months creating his Kaiju (and statting it up) before it's dispatched to attack someplace.

NOTE! During this time, other players running other Factions are doing the same sort of thing to advance their objectives towards completion, and as this example shows the mere enacting of a Faction-level operation organically generates playable adventure scenarios that other players may choose to engage with or not. This is proper play Working As Intended.

The Benefit of Slower Pacing

Slowing the roll means that Faction Play isn't so demanding or intense, save for specific occassions where the Faction Players' actions force such scenarios to occur- rare, but yet inevitable, when #EliteLevel players are on their game.

Using 1:1 Timekeeping, and making constant reference to how this sort of stuff really goes, ensures that this slower pace is enforced; you can't do All The Things in weekly turns, so just as AD&D1e characters can be locked down for a month or more training to level up and powered armor in RIFTS spends time being repaired, so do Factions tie up men and material (and spending time that you can't get back) Doing This Thing instead of any and all other options available to them.

Success in these actions is presumed unless outside intervention threatens failure. This is, first and foremost, a playable abstraction; it is, however, not much of one- the pattern in reality is that organizations that act unopposed tend to succeed at what they do, barring a few (but important) edge cases (e.g. original research and development).

For those players best suited for engaging in Faction Play (because not all players either want to, or are good at, doing so), a pace of decision more like how things really go (slower overall, with a few brief bursts of frantic action when requried) will be beneficial for the health of a campaign by way of making Faction Play easier to sustain over a long period of time.

This is most noticable when the players in those roles are those best suited for them- and that is a topic for tomorrow.