User:Anarril/Organisations (3.5e Other)

Author: Anarril (talk) Date Created: June 2, 2013 Status: In Progress Editing: Clarity edits only please

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Introduction/Motivation

While looking for inspiration for the (more sandbox-like) follow-up of a Red Hand of Doom campaign I realized that two systems I read about (see Inspiration) could be combined very nicely and even expanded with self written material. Both of these systems gave Organizations and the way PC's interacted with them a little more mechanics which would really help me when populating a world with groups of good and bad guys. So here we are!

Groups of creatures working together are a constant background feature of most d&d campaigns. From the lowly village in need of saving to the tyrannical order of evil dragons and from the world spanning druidic network that requires help with a minor problem to the group of kobolds that plagues the local highway, lots of creatures find value in cooperatively working towards common goals. But when it comes to PC's, all of that is just background to their grand adventure. Organizations are there to be a threat or as something to be helped, but never in a way players can get a grip on: the organization hates or loves them just as much as the adventure/DM dictates. And if players try something unexpected (like infiltrate the evil army to assassinate its leaders instead of fight a retreating battle with a culminating battle) the DM must improvise wildly and often the resulting adventures turn out wildly easier or harder than originally intended. This supplement intends to change that by giving rules that govern how organizations organize themselves, how their internal and external relations work and how PC's can interact with all of this.

Goals/What this is or should become

• Create a system that allows GM's and players to create organizations that have clearly described game systems for interacting with them, both in a antagonistic and in a support role in relation to the PC's.
• These organizations should take minimal work to describe when first created but be able to grow in complexity and importance within a campaign as required.
• GM's should be able to use them as antagonists and in this role they should ease the creation of an adventure or campaign centered around fighting/destroying them.
• GM's should also be able to use them as groups supportive of PC goals (or even in need of the PC's help) and in this role they should give clear guidelines as to what kind of help such an organization needs, what kind of rewards they would be willing to pay and what kind of favors they could bestow.
• Players should be able to use them as sources of background flavor and supplemental character power.
• Some campaigns or adventures could be constructed entirly around rising in the ranks of an organisation, with all the adventuring that might entail.
• Partially as a side effect this system could allow people to create homebrew organizations for use in others campaigns.

What this is not

The following points are not goals of this design or might even be actively be avoided:

• This is not intended to simulate a business, crafting shop or similar money creating enterprise. The focus is on groups of people and how they work together, not on minigames that focus on the activities of a single individual.
• Initially I will not focus on developing the rules for running an organization. I have some fun ideas about that but my time is limited and I have need for the other rules first.
• This is not intended to become a game on its own. If it is fully developed and a group of players + DM focus fully on it, they might 'have to' take time every session managing the organizations the PC's interact with or even lead, but at some point normal d&d will kick in and the players will be back to fighting, searching and other hands-on problem solving tasks. It might be that those tasks are done at the behest of one organization or another, but the things players spend their time playing with will be the normal d&d rules, not rules from this supplement.
• This does not create whole new social rules, in the way that a revision of the Diplomacy skill might see rules for disrupting another's negotiation attempt. Some additions to existing skill might be included where appropriate but if you want to see rules for an intricate spy plot game, look somewhere else (for starters, not in d&d :-) ).
• This does not create a city/country/plane wide economics system for players to fiddle with/exploit. I will try to keep any economic activity compatible with the default assumed economic system (loot, itemshops and crafting) but I will not create rules to simulate how your trade organisation could ruin the economy of a city by influencing the income of the cities around it, etc, etc.

Affinity Score

General Explanation

This number represents a members general standing within the organization. It shows how high others members of the organization regard him or her and as such is not an innate, independent property of the member that someone could measure from just the member itself. It depends on (within the organization) freely available information about the properties, opinions and deeds of the member.

In here comes:

• expected ranges of this score
• ways it differs from the PHB II one
• differences between your general aff. score and the specific NPC-attitude a member of that org has towards you

Increasing/decreasing the score

In here comes:

• ways to influence your Affinity score
• a list of ways that can be assumed to work in most organizations, to ease creation and give some default assumptions players can make

General Effects

In here comes:

• a list of the general effects having a certain reputation has:
  • default NPC attitudes
  • requesting/ordering assistance of supplies from other members
  • getting such requests/orders yourself
  • being (wel)known within the org

Ranks

When your affinity score reaches certain numbers you have gained enough respect in the eyes of an organization as a whole to gain a promotion, along with new privileges and responsibilities. Of course, in some organizations this might not be as obvious and explicit as in a modern day army and so might take the form of a gradual change in who's orders people follow or just a change in who you work for. This system abstracts each of these various discrete levels of trust/power/leadership into a list of ranks that you can reach within an organization.

How much ranks there are, how hard it is to reach each of them and how big the benefits of each are differs between organizations. A small local thieves guild might only have informant, guild-thief and guildmaster levels where even the guildmaster's job part time while an interplanar empire might have a dozens of ranks, the highest of which require total dedication even for epic level characters to reach/maintain.

In general you can assume that most people in an organization know roughly about the specifics from 2 ranks above and below them. They also know the ranks of the people they work with.

In here comes:

• what ranks are
• their effect on characters
• how to get/change them
• rank specific benefits (both constant buffs and request-able favors (last one possibly with a diplomacy check and/or by spending one or more score points)

Leading an organisation

Can be done in two ways:

Minimal

PC's are more champions than leaders and may have a say over the general direction of the organization and can use its assets but it is not a mayor gameplay element. Is compatible with most campaigns and takes less time out of the typical d&d dungeon crawling/tactical combat than the other variant.

Extensive

Players spend some amount of actual time out of most sessions deciding things about the organization: what problems it will tackle and which ones it will ignore for the time being, what way those problems will be solved and by whom, what it will do with the resources it has and how it will get new ones, etc. This makes the PC's feel more like actual leaders of the organization, but will not work with a lot of typical d&d campaigns. It also takes more time than the other variant and gameplay focus is on different things than 'killing stuff' so not all players will enjoy this.

Note: maybe make this second one able to be played between sessions by email, or make a third 'Moderate' variant that can do that

Relations

In here comes:

• how are different ranks connected
• connections between individuals and between groups
• different kinds of connections
  • one or two way
  • direct or indirect (ie: do the two members meet in person or through some communications device)
  • hidden or overt

Inspiration

• Affiliations chapter in PHB 2 page 164
• Social network sandboxing and the links in that network (this is also useful)
• The Red Hand of Doom campaign

Example organisations

• a country, with farmers and soldiers and the king
• the army of the Red Hand
• a large thieves guild
• an large (interplanar) trading empire
• the greater kobolt tribes conglomorate
• the dragons of argonessen
• church of 'generic sun god'
• mage of the arcane order org
• the organisations described in many 3.5 books, e.g. the various organisations that fight/support Binders from Tome of Magic

Design Notes / ToDo

Things I want to add:

• the way ranks interact with the social network system
• randomly determining wheter an org has supporters in a given city
• usage guides for GM's and players
• sub-organisations
• merging/splitting orgs
• joining an org
• leaving an org
• taking over the leadership of orgs (ie: if you have the highest aff score)

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