In the last article, I talked about how factions should contain multiple points of view. A faction has trends (which may even be contradictory), not immutable properties.
Players’ first impressions with your factions should only be a sliver of the concept. They do not encounter the faction as a whole, they encounter the faction through specific NPCs.
Because they are not given a full picture of a faction, players will make gut-level decisions about the bigger picture. Often this will be on the basis of aesthetics, or what they associate with the few details they’re given.
For example, in my 5e adventure Crown Jewel Heist (affiliate link1; spoilers for the adventure follow), the Royal Court doesn’t make much of an appearance in the campaign, but they’re looming behind every detail. They keep the peace, but the people of Portsmouth seem to find them a hassle. (And it seems to be the merchant class that’s most bothered by them; how much do you trust them?) They’re petty and bureaucratic, but they hold things together. We don’t even get a good sense of how this government is organized.
Players always bring assumptions to the table, and we often aren’t aware of our own assumptions. Should you stick it to the man even if you don’t exactly know what they’ve done to deserve it? Can you trust the merchants of Portsmouth to have a fair assessment of the institutions regulating them? What real-world governments do players see when they think about the Royal Court? The adventure doesn’t provide these answers–both because they’re out of scope for the game happening at the table, and because I think it would be less interesting if it did.
By creating gaps with just enough information to imply an answer, players will begin fill them in with what they assume to be true. These assessments aren’t necessarily wrong; it’s how we engage with the complexities and unknowns of the real world. Our best guesses are educated guesses, but they also carry assumptions that we aren’t even aware of. Those guesses and assumptions are meaning being added in to your world, and those meanings can drive the players to make unexpected choices. (They can be used as inspiration for future plot hooks, too; players will come up with possibilities you never thought of.)
Keep secrets so you can throw curveballs
Gaps in information let gamemasters surprise players when their assumptions turn out to be wrong. We don’t necessarily want a constant series of plot twists (that can be exhausting); we want to keep players on their toes, engaged with a game world that feels more expansive than their ability to fully perceive or understand it, making new decisions rather than going through the motions. We always want there to be a little information they don’t quite have yet.
To do this, you should think about what Mike Shea at SlyFlourish calls secrets and clues: a list of small facts about the world the players don’t know, but should have the opportunity to discover.
In Crown Jewel Heist, the fact that the Dusk Network is working with the Royal Court is a pretty major secret (though players may never discover it during the single in-game week they’re allowed). It explains why the Dusk Network is playing it safe, is dedicated to the status quo, and has access to a key to the lockbox in the Royal Court’s carriage. It ties a lot of little details together, although players will likely go through the adventure without ever learning this fact.
Each of these details is also a clue, though it might not be presented as such. Ideally, players should get the feeling that something’s up with the Dusk Network, even though they can’t put their finger on it. Eventually they should wonder: is this suspicion a good or a bad sign? (Which, again, depends on your gut-level feelings about the Royal Court and the Dusk Network.)
You can use secrets to throw curveballs at your players once in a while. If players think a benevolent organization are the good guys, show how they might refuse to intervene in a complicated situation out of risk-aversion or even apathy. If they think a criminal syndicate is made up of admirable rebels, let them hear some stories about unhinged cruelty and violence during a job that went sideways. If players expect a faction to react to their choices in a certain way… you can even have the faction do nothing if it makes sense.
This is why it’s important that factions contain multitudes. Even the most earnest group of people will eventually make questionable decisions if acting on a large enough scale (if only because they can’t control all of the people needed to accomplish the goal). And just because some people in a faction understand the larger context of the players’ actions doesn’t mean everyone in that faction knows enough to react properly.
These new revelations can provide new player options. Do you press on a wedge between two different groups? Do you ally yourself with the one closest to your goals? Do you exploit the fact they don’t realize how much you know?
The goal of curveballs isn’t to mess with players’ sense of reality. A curveball should always lead to the possibility of new, interesting choices. Conversely: a curveball that completely invalidates everything the players know is just screwing them over. When players discover something new, the first question you want to prompt is: now what do we do?
Obviously, you don’t want to throw nothing but curveballs. The gradual shape of these factions should emerge as the story progresses. It should allow the players to predict how those factions will react when they move in the world. You should reward players with clearer pictures, especially as they begin testing hypotheses about the world. But the occasional curveball keeps them on their toes.
1 This is an affiliate link for Dungeon Masters Guild, and I receive an affiliate commission for any purchase made by clicking the link in the post.