Last time we gave an overview of how the Godbound game uses the Dominion system to allow players to enact large-scale changes in the world. Today, I would like to talk about how those changes will often break another core component of the game - the Faction system.
If you'd like to read the sourcebook for yourself, there is a free edition of Godbound available that contains about 95% of the full release's content in it.
The Faction System
The Faction System is a way for the players and the GM to simulate how various cities, nations and organisations would interact with one another and with the Godbounds as a whole.
Each Faction is defined by their Size (from a village to an empire), Cohesion (essentially, health points), Trouble (a gaige of how bad things are), Features (what the Faction can offer - "an abundant farmland", or "The Witch-Queens have mighty magics") and Trouble (various problems the Faction has - "Their lord taxes them cruelly", or "Neighbours fear and hate them").
Each month every Faction can undertake various actions as a part of their Faction Turn - building up resources, try to fix some problems, attacking someone, etc. Overall, it can take a few Turns before a major change takes place, and wars can drag on for even longer.
Overall, the system is very simplified. There are no elements of a grand strategy here - you don't move units on a hex map, you don't have to balance an economy or the like. The system is more about giving players an overall sense of the place and some clear goals for them to work towards - "let's cure this plague that is haunting the city", or "I want to build a mighty citadel to protect the civilians" and so on.
How PCs break the Factions
As the demigods they are, PCs in Godbound will hold sway on a number of factions and be able to influence many more. From their cults, to the villages they come by, up to the nations that they will conquer sooner or later, they have the power to mould them as they see fit. However, this comes at a cost.
When a Godbound of weapons will start arming the populace, those freshly minted warriors might get a bit cocky and start strong arming other villagers. Or maybe the local lord will become less than pleased with the peasant revolt waiting to happen. Or perhaps there will be a food shortage as there weren't enough farmhands to tend to the fields. When large-scale change is happening really fast, something will have to give.
As mentioned in the previous article, Godbound can spend Dominion to "Enact Change" - Change Facts, Solve Problems, or Create Features.
The first one is more aesthetic than anything, so it doesn't have an impact on the game mechanically.
The second is beneficial to a faction - the Godbound uses their divine powers to cure a disease, or stop famine, or bring peace and so on. This Change removes a Problem from a Faction, thus decreasing Trouble.
The third one is the crux of the problem. The Godbound creates something new to impose onto the Faction - they add a new, beneficial Feature, like creating a garrison of warrior monks, or a perpetual forge, or a fountain of gold. However, each time a new Feature is created this way, it also generates a Problem and increases Trouble.
The same also happens when a Godbound uses Influence in lieu of Dominion. Rallying a small army up just in time for battle will cause internal strife, but unlike a Dominion expenditure, once the PCs leave the area, the new Feature they pumped up will fizzle away, while the Problem and Trouble will remain!
Trouble as a general concept measures how dysfunctional a Faction is. The higher it is, the more often the Faction will fail at some important tasks. A Faction might try to collect money, but fail because raiders would steal the payment, or people would be too sick to pay, or the broken economy would make that money worthless. Or it might try raising an army with those funds but fail because someone would pocket too much for themselves, or the population is too afraid to volunteer.
All in all, you don't want this to raise too much. So the players would learn to balance Creating Features with Solving Problems. However, this usually means some of the following - either you focus mainly on Solving Problems and try leaving once you put everything in order, or you spend Dominion to both Create a Feature and Solve a Problem, basically paying double, or you Create a Feature and do a quest to Solve a Problem, making you spend more game time babysitting a faction essentially.
Moreover, the players are often driven to Create Features rather than Solve Problem since it's frankly more fun and cool. You want to build something new and exciting - raise armies, do great works and so on. It's much more fun to be the god that created an academy of wizards, than the god that made sure people weren't embezzling the taxes.
Finally, the players are every now and then forced to dump their Dominion into something in order to level up. This usually isn't an issue for diligent players that engage with the Factions on a regular basis, but if you have a few PCs that have done nothing in the last few sessions suddenly having to dump enough Dominion to jumpstart a medieval society into the modern age, you can be in for a lot of trouble.
How does this work in a real game?
I've played in two somewhat long games that used the Faction / Dominion system - Princes of the Universe and The Living Years. The first one only switched to Godbound midway through, meaning a lot of the mechanics were glossed over, but the second one used the system from the beginning.
In my experience, you will run into a few problems with the Faction / Dominion system.
First, you will be playing a game of wack-a-mole with the Problems. You will come into a town, fix a few key issues up, then proceed to make it better, creating more Problems than you originally started with. You will then have to solve them again and so on. A session's worth of Dominion will often be able to create more Problems than you'll be able to solve in a session by questing, especially if the problems get diverse in scope and causes.
Secondly, you will either have to create random Problems, or risk running into the same issue over and over. We had an order of knights that got buffed to be veterans. They got bossy and started strong arming the local population. After dealing with that, we decided to give them superhuman strength, and make them charismatic and commanding. It would be very easy to just make the initial Problem come back since it's a natural fit for what was going on... In the end, when we couldn't think of smart Problem ideas we resorted to using news headlines and tweaking them a bit.
Thirdly, you will run into some players that will tend to dump their Dominion in large chunks right as they need to level and that will be a wave of new Problems to deal with. You often are starved for Shards, so you won't be able to just dump that Dominion into Artefacts, and Solving Problems usually is more creatively demanding than just Creating Features.
Fourthly, it's often hard to increase Faction's Scope (making it bigger), which will often be a limiting factor as to what you can do with it. You can't just toss Dominion at a small town to make it bloom into a densely populated megacity so you can have more worshippers. Creating projects larger than the Factions you have at your disposal will be tempting, but it will also be tricky at the same time.
Lastly, the players will want to create their little walled gardens of a Faction. They will want to make their Cult great, or they will have a favourite Faction to build up. This might make it a little bit more hard how to give then Problems that wouldn't ruin things on one hand or be too blase on the other hand.
Conclusions
The Godbound Dominion and Faction systems create an interesting intertwined mechanic. It is, however, not without its own problems. The system might feel too shallow for people that want to have a system with strategic depth. It also falls too easily into a wack-a-mole cycle of PCs creating Features that generate Problems only to spend time and resources dealing with the Problems before being able to "get to the real game" and subsequently dumping more Dominion into the problem afterwards. At the same time it's a very thematic mechanic that allows the PCs to do large-scale changes to the world in a very approachable way.
No comments:
Post a Comment