THEORYCRAFT!

AN INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF FACTION DEVELOPMENT

AKA "Faction Development"

By Nick Foster

So there are these four factions in the Dungeons & Dragons Miniatures Game. One for each of the four cardinal alignments, lawful good, lawful evil, chaotic good and chaotic evil. I look at the way they're broken up and the different theories behind each faction and I think to myself: "Why didn't I steal this idea before?"

I originally devised a complicated faction system of eight unique factions with names, race, class and alignment restrictions and goals, and guess what happens: it all blows up in my face. I'm looking at these different factions and saying to myself "What backstory! What flavor!" and I turn around, a few months later, and then I groan "What a royal, bloody mess!"

The idea was to have different ideological groups with their own storylines and goals in mind, which could mingle and diverge with each other; ally with and betray one another. And then I got into putting it together. I found that creating characters for the "monster faction" was more fun than anything else, with virtually the only restriction being a chaotic evil alignment. That didn't work out well for the rest of the factions, which were getting few characters and precious little screen time. Also, with the wildly unbalanced sides, I couldn't imagine any but the few, dedicated souls actually picking up a character from any other factions. Let's face it: people dig the monsters.

So I participated in a DDM Prerelease Tournament. I had a blast, I wound up getting a stomach ache from bad fast food and a splitting headache from the terrible lighting but I picked up quite a few ideas from the games we played and some very clear ideas about how to make my tournaments better. This is something I'm very appreciative of... as much as I hate the DDM game, I can easily learn from WotCs mistakes.

Running the Xen'drik Expeditions Campaign for the RPGA was another eye-opener. Never before had it occurred to me to drop the racial Hit Dice from certain savage humanoid races to make them playable characters. "XenEx" also convinced me that drow could be an ECL 2 race after all. And soon, their darkness spell-like ability will give way to DDMs "Conceal 6" ability. Drow will likely be the only race to benefit from such an ability, but other instances of concealment will be made into an equivalent "Conceal" value.

So, when it comes to designing the different factions now, I decided to start from the outside and work my way inward. I started with monstrous races and savage humanoids that could be found in sources like the Monster Manual, Frostburn, Sandstorm, and Stormwrack. Since I was already in the process of incorporating variant magic systems from Magic of Incarnum, Tome of Magic and Expanded Psionics Handbook, I expect to add their races to the factions' rosters shortly.

Currently, things are weighing very heavily in favor of the evil factions, the Chaotic Evil faction in particular. If one even casually glances at the list of races I've gone through so far, it's easy to see that I've been working on the monstrous races primarily, so it really should be no surprise that there are more evil creatures now than anything else. Namely bugbears, drow and gnolls, which have the largest contributions to the Chaotic Evil faction. Now, duergar and hobgoblins add significantly to the Lawful Evil faction and dusklings, lizardfolk, rilkans and skarn have their small contributions. If it looks like the factions are unevenly slanted towards chaos and evil right now, just wait 'til I throw orcs into the mix...

So once I've moved through all the outer sourcebooks, eventually arriving back at the Core rulebooks, I'll use the races in the Player's Handbook to balance the factions out; the theory here being that "Heroes rise to the occasion" and I'm assuming that the factions will be heavily towards evil by the time I get to the PHB.

As to the nature of restricting certain classes to certain factions, I can say there was a fair amount of investigative work involved. I carefully read the descriptions provided in each class and I noted three things in particular: the typical alignment of the class (especially actual alignment restrictions), the typical races dedicated to the class, and the way the class interacted with other classes. The first two were the most instrumental in the process. For example, a bard or a barbarian cannot be lawful. A paladin must be lawful good. A hexblade may not be good. A warlock must be chaotic or evil. Typical races came in handy for certain other classes dominated by dwarves or elves, because dwarves are typically lawful, whereas elves are typically chaotic, and both are usually good. Any class that features halflings or gnomes is almost always chaotic and good. Finally, some of the biggest giveaways, if the class was pretty ambiguous as to the default alignment or race, were its interactions with other classes (and reasons for certain behavior). Binders got slated for chaotic evil because not only are they usually nonlawful and nongood, but they also don't get along with clerics, which are usually lawful and good. The binder got pushed into a corner.

I was actually a bit surprised to learn about the tendencies of clerics. I hadn't read most of the information about the cleric before, but now I have a different perspective on the class. Adventuring clerics are almost always humans or dwarves, because they are the two races that have crusaders of any type... they hold strong beliefs, and they have the tendency to wield their beliefs as a weapon. Also, there tend to be more lawful clerics than chaotic ones, because lawful religions tend to organize and attract clerics better, and there tend to be more good clerics than evil, because the good powers tend to get more of the faithful that desire to become clerics, and good tends to be a bit more widespread in their zealotry than evil (this is not to say that good is more zealous than evil, simply that it catches and spreads easier).

So creating and balancing the factions has been an interesting experience for me. I promised myself I wouldn't start building characters 'til the first draft of the faction roll sheets was finished. So far I'm adhering to that pretty well, and I've got some pretty good progress on the factions. I've covered good portions of Expanded Psionics, Magic of Incarnum, and the Monster Manual, so what's left to do is the niche races in the various Races books. Don't look for setting-specific characters from Eberron or Forgotten Realms until there are plenty enough Core-setting characters, no matter how much I want to make warforged, artificers, strongheart halflings or star elves.

The End (but for how long?)