RPG-a-Day 27: ‘Fraction’
Today’s prompt for RPG-a-Day is ‘Fraction’.
In Nobilis, each character chooses a personal code to follow. There are some thoroughly unpleasant ones (the Code of the Dark) and some more ‘good’ ones. While all Nobles (who embody a certain aspect of reality) are allies in the war against the Excrucians (who want to destroy everything), you can imagine how any set of Nobles that is forced to work together may not be thrilled with the prospect if there are some of the opposing fraction.
Games where the characters have to interact with different fractions (and those interactions are not in the form of “kill everyone”) provide interesting situations, I think. Your character might detest a certain NPC, but they have to have polite interactions (or even work together!) - so how do you go about it? And if you’re basically unaligned yourself (which is the case in the Root RPG), then do you balance out your interactions with each fraction, or do you play favourites - and what do you do when the other fractions find out? There’s some real choices to be made in such settings, and I love that.
(I just realized that I might have answered this question as if the prompt was ‘faction’ instead of ‘fraction’. I will claim innocence on grounds of English not being my native language.)
Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.