noble houses

[signoftheserpent]

There are a few games (Game of Thrones and Fading Suns most notably IMO) featuring players who are part of a noble house or  feudal society. Assomeone writing a game ostensibly with this setup I am finding it difficult to actually make this workable: the options really seem limited to players all being members of the same house and genrally doing the same thing. What can be done and used within this societal framework to make such a setting more open.

[timopod]

Well, the only thing i can see about this is tthat npc houses have to be up to no good. Think of dune, basicly house/feudal world setting. Of course there you also had somee cross over. Of course, whats the main theme of your game. I think that'd be a ver good place to start. Secondly whats your seettting?

[timopod]

Ack, no spell check! is there anyway to go back and edit a post after you send it, i didn't see one (sorry bout the horrible spelling)

[Josh Roby]

Look at (sorry about this) Harry Potter.  Four Houses, right?  Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin.  The important characters of the book are not restricted to one house -- because Draco, Snape, Cedric, and Cho are all important characters.  Sure, said character do not work together, and in fact often work at cross purposes, but there's no reason why you can't set up your game to work like this: with each player taking up a role in the story that is not necessarily that of a Main Character Protagonist With Friends At His Side.

Or you can, as Tim suggested, make some "Good" Houses and some "Bad" Houses.  Dune works this way.  Elder Scrolls: Morrowind works this way.  Changeling (sort of) works this way.  Embed it in the game world as the Eastern Houses against the Western Houses or the remnants of a long-ago alliance, or whatever.

Or you can take the moral ambiguity route, and make all the Houses ostensibly corrupt and scheming, at which point individual members would feel free to make alliances outside of their Houses for advantage and gain, perhaps but not necessarily with the intent to double-cross later.  The important thing is that, for each individual, there is something to be gained by allying with other Houses.

Or, seriously?  Just go with the one PC House option.  Make it House Roaring Eagle against the world.  Make it so that the players are a tight-knit family of nobles out to win recognition for their House, counter the schemes of other Houses, and dominate the Empire (or whatever).

The important thing -- and the question whose answer will show you which option to pick -- is what kind of a game experience you want to create.

[Andrew Morris]

For us to really help you, you'll need to give us more information, as Tim points out. What are your design goals? What is your game about? What type of play experience do you want players to have? That sort of stuff, nothing too detailed about the setting right now.

Without knowing what you want to do with your RPG, any answers would be pretty much opinions or just shootin' in the dark. On the other hand, if you say, "I want to encourage players to do X, would Y be a good way to go about it?" then we can give some sort of rational response.

[dindenver]

Hi!
  Many chars have strongly divided factions (l5r for instance). I think the key is to cast one or more as bad guys or have an external faction that is up to no good like Exalted. I think if you develop realistic houses, natural synergies/rivalries should be apparent.
  To me the real pitfall of highly hierarchical game settings and freeform play is freedom of choice. The lords and societal standards amy prevent players from playing their characters any way they want. This may not be a system requirement for you, but you might want to factor in, how is a character determined to have gone rogue and what are the consequences?

[Ramidel]

There are a few games (Game of Thrones and Fading Suns most notably IMO) featuring players who are part of a noble house or  feudal society. Assomeone writing a game ostensibly with this setup I am finding it difficult to actually make this workable: the options really seem limited to players all being members of the same house and genrally doing the same thing. What can be done and used within this societal framework to make such a setting more open.

I'd need a definition of "open." If you mean "allows PCs complete freedom of action and decision-making," then the answer is "you don't." If PCs are members, knights or other servants of a noble house or lord, their job and role is to obey their lord's directives. In a feudal society, rank and privilege come with responsibilities that are often more trouble than they're worth. Peasants, meanwhile, really tend not to do much that's of any interest during stable periods of a feudal society. Finally, outcasts like the standard mixed batch of armed psychos (to take a quote from Tastes Like Phoenix Games) you see in the traditional D&D game? They aren't part of the social structure, and I don't believe that a D&D-redux game was what you were implying that you wanted.

Now, one could make the case for making a house controlled by the PCs so they can run their own evil schemes against other houses, but that still isn't "open." There are still strict rules that members of the nobility must follow (in public, anyway), and in a feudal-medieval setting, they are still subjects of His Majesty the King and must obey his instructions when given, unless they have the muscle, reputation and legitimacy to challenge him.

Now, does this mean that players have limited freedom to choose their characters and characters' actions in such a setting? Yes. In Camelot, PCs are expected to uphold the values of chivalry and serve King and Country. In Legend of the Five Rings, one serves one's daimyo and obeys the rules of bushido (in public, anyway). Fading Suns is somewhat more fractured, but even then, one will usually have superiors one must obey and one will always have to keep noble etiquette in mind (again, in public).

Does this mean that there isn't ample opportunity for PCs to engage in a variety of adventures, dance between the wheels within wheels of court intrigue, romance ladies, plot dastardly skulduggery behind the scenes, and occasionally engage in a bit of constructive destruction? Of course not. Legend of the Five Rings is an excellent resource for such a setting, where the rules of bushido, one's clan, and social etiquette are what help define characters and make a group of intrepid heroes more than a simple collection of murderous misfits. And despite, or I would say because of that, the PCs are able to engage in all sorts of interesting trouble.

In short: Giving the PCs rules to follow makes for interesting and memorable storytelling when they do break them.

[signoftheserpent]

For us to really help you, you'll need to give us more information, as Tim points out. What are your design goals? What is your game about? What type of play experience do you want players to have? That sort of stuff, nothing too detailed about the setting right now.

Without knowing what you want to do with your RPG, any answers would be pretty much opinions or just shootin' in the dark. On the other hand, if you say, "I want to encourage players to do X, would Y be a good way to go about it?" then we can give some sort of rational response.

The setting is a far future, date undisclosed and irrelevant, human feudal empire. Players are characters from this empire, ostensibly from the noble houses that make up this empire. There exist a few organisations/guilds as well as the nobility but they exist as subservient to the nobility. An emperor rules the empire and comes from one of the noble houses as he always has. The nobility enjoy complex relations where some get on with others and not the rest - basically. Beyond the empire exists a number of factions, malevolent, ancient and indifferent that humanity measures up against. The issue is, with the nobility being very central to the setting, what options are available. I'm not sure if such a game would be ultimately fun; the best rpg settings to me are those that offer the most options for player ang GM alike. For instance Star Wars works better then Fading Suns for those reasons. With the latter players to me seem more or less tied to one house, no matter what their role within. More than that they are subservient to the leaders of that faction. So really what can the characters be if not tools to the regime? Dune is a little different despite the similar setting idea since the story is about (in part) the sweeping changes to that society. If that was a typical Fading Suns adventure (or adventure in mys etting) then the game might as well not exist for the changes it would cause to the setting.

[signoftheserpent]

There are a few games (Game of Thrones and Fading Suns most notably IMO) featuring players who are part of a noble house or  feudal society. Assomeone writing a game ostensibly with this setup I am finding it difficult to actually make this workable: the options really seem limited to players all being members of the same house and genrally doing the same thing. What can be done and used within this societal framework to make such a setting more open.

I'd need a definition of "open." If you mean "allows PCs complete freedom of action and decision-making," then the answer is "you don't." If PCs are members, knights or other servants of a noble house or lord, their job and role is to obey their lord's directives. In a feudal society, rank and privilege come with responsibilities that are often more trouble than they're worth. Peasants, meanwhile, really tend not to do much that's of any interest during stable periods of a feudal society. Finally, outcasts like the standard mixed batch of armed psychos (to take a quote from Tastes Like Phoenix Games) you see in the traditional D&D game? They aren't part of the social structure, and I don't believe that a D&D-redux game was what you were implying that you wanted.

Now, one could make the case for making a house controlled by the PCs so they can run their own evil schemes against other houses, but that still isn't "open." There are still strict rules that members of the nobility must follow (in public, anyway), and in a feudal-medieval setting, they are still subjects of His Majesty the King and must obey his instructions when given, unless they have the muscle, reputation and legitimacy to challenge him.

Now, does this mean that players have limited freedom to choose their characters and characters' actions in such a setting? Yes. In Camelot, PCs are expected to uphold the values of chivalry and serve King and Country. In Legend of the Five Rings, one serves one's daimyo and obeys the rules of bushido (in public, anyway). Fading Suns is somewhat more fractured, but even then, one will usually have superiors one must obey and one will always have to keep noble etiquette in mind (again, in public).

Does this mean that there isn't ample opportunity for PCs to engage in a variety of adventures, dance between the wheels within wheels of court intrigue, romance ladies, plot dastardly skulduggery behind the scenes, and occasionally engage in a bit of constructive destruction? Of course not. Legend of the Five Rings is an excellent resource for such a setting, where the rules of bushido, one's clan, and social etiquette are what help define characters and make a group of intrepid heroes more than a simple collection of murderous misfits. And despite, or I would say because of that, the PCs are able to engage in all sorts of interesting trouble.

In short: Giving the PCs rules to follow makes for interesting and memorable storytelling when they do break them.

In this case open means allowing players to play characters that feel (at least to the player since that's what matters) different than their fellows. When I play that's what I want. The setting would seem to limit that choice.

[Jack Aidley]

There are a few games (Game of Thrones and Fading Suns most notably IMO) featuring players who are part of a noble house or  feudal society. Assomeone writing a game ostensibly with this setup I am finding it difficult to actually make this workable: the options really seem limited to players all being members of the same house and genrally doing the same thing. What can be done and used within this societal framework to make such a setting more open.

Why should people in the same house be doing the same thing? A common RP trope is for each "house" to have it's thing that it does really good. This seems to me to have no real analogue in real world examples (e.g what exactly was the defining functional difference between the Lancastrians and the Yorkists?), and be limited in it's RP potential. If, instead, you set up houses as groupings of allegiance and resources, things are much freer.

Want your PCs to be doing different things, no problem! One can be a soldier, another a diplomat, a third a spy and the fourth a merchant. They've no doubt got different reasons for being part of the house but no reason why they can't all be part of the same house.

The final thing I think scuppers house play in most RPGs is the pre-existing nature of the houses. With Chanter I plan to offer systems for the players to define the house to which they belong as part of group character creation.

[Sydney Freedberg]

First, amen to Jack on thehistory: Noble houses were rarely defined by a clear "house special ability" or "house moral code" -- not in real history, not even in good literature. Romeo and Juliet: What's the distinctive difference between the Capulets and the Montagues? Nothing but the name -- and "what's in a name?"

And Romeo and Juliet helps make my second point, too: The noble houses in good literature and real histories are never monolithic. Sure, Juliet's father is in charge of the Capulets, but it's clear at several points (e.g. the party scene) that he'd like to keep the feud under control and focus on making marriage alliances with the Prince's family, whereas Tybalt (Juliet's cousin) is eager to pick fights wherever he can. Medieval nobility definitely had hierarchies, but most of medieval history happened when those hierarchies broke down, either openly -- the King of England, who was also Duke of Normandy, deciding that he didn't want to be a vassal of the King of France, but instead be King of France himself -- or behind the scenes -- all sorts of intrigue here.

The setting is a far future, date undisclosed and irrelevant, human feudal empire.....with the nobility being very central to the setting, what options are available[?]

If the setting is something you're making up, then all options are available: You choose what you want, and then retcon the history and the sociology to explain it. Maybe noble houses are rigidly hierarchical, like the modern military; maybe they're full of internal intrigue, like the houses in Dune; maybe the house leader has little actual control over junior nobles, as in Romeo and Juliet. Maybe each house has one specialty skill everyone in it has, or one moral "alignment," as in many RPGs; maybe each house picks, say, 5 things from a list of 10 noble house abilities, and then gets a special customized "signature" ability; maybe every house has pretty much the same abilities and attitudes, and the only differences are who's on what side right now.

Or better yet, maybe all of the above are possible, and -- as Jack said -- you let your players design their House in as much detail as they design their characters. I'd look at Ars Magica for one of the earliest, most influential sets of rules on how to do this.

[Jack Aidley]

Or better yet, maybe all of the above are possible, and -- as Jack said -- you let your players design their House in as much detail as they design their characters. I'd look at Ars Magica for one of the earliest, most influential sets of rules on how to do this.

I assume you are referring to the covenant creation rules here? The things Ars Magica refers to as houses are fixed, are they not? In fact, I think this example illustrates my point quite well: what matters in Ars Magica is the group to which you are aligned and the politicing involved in that group. The groups here are the covenants - which are defined purely by their membership, resources and location.

[Michael]

What if there existed a truce between the major houses/factions/etc.? However, there's also some unknown group trying to break the truce (which would result in an all-out intergalactic war). This way, PCs can be from different houses (and not even have to like each other all that much) and be working together to maintain the truce and perhaps ferret out the instigators.

Just a thought.

[tygertyger]

There are a few games (Game of Thrones and Fading Suns most notably IMO) featuring players who are part of a noble house or  feudal society. [snip] the options really seem limited to players all being members of the same house and genrally doing the same thing.

Not necessarily.  It requires a lot of work in the setup phase to make it work, though.  What you need is 1) a write-up of each house with its specialties, stereotypes, common methods and any advantages and disadvantages that accrue from membership, and 2) a flow chart for the inter-relationships between houses (as in, who is allies or enemies with whom).  It'll take some doing, but if you use house membership as a method of political factioning (similar to the way that V:tR uses Covenents) it can help to create mixed groups with complementary -- but not necessarily identical -- goals.

I recommend Steven Brust's Dragaera books for an example.

[Sydney Freedberg]

What you need is 1) a write-up of each house with its specialties, stereotypes, common methods and any advantages and disadvantages that accrue from membership, and 2) a flow chart for the inter-relationships between houses (as in, who is allies or enemies with whom).  It'll take some doing, but if you use house membership as a method of political factioning (similar to the way that V:tR uses Covenents) it can help to create mixed groups with complementary -- but not necessarily identical -- goals.

"Noooo! Don't do it!" I hate hate hate hate hate being handed a fixed menu of clans/houses/lineages/whatevers that make most of my choices as a GM or player for me.

I assume you are referring to the covenant creation rules here? The things Ars Magica refers to as houses are fixed, are they not?

Good catch, Jack: I'm talking about "covenant creation" -- not the "orders" (Tremere, Flambeau, etc.). Now, in my Actual Play experience, the player-designed "covenant" -- the group of player-characters plus allied NPCs who all lived in the same place and had the same pressing problems, even if they had very different agendas, interests, and abilities -- was way, way more important than the canonical setting-book "orders." But you're right that Ars sends a very mixed mesage about the degree to which the players get to define their own world, and it seems that in his later games, i.e. the World of Darkness series, designer Mark Rhein-Hagen emphasized the "splatbook" approach of "here is a menu of things you can be, each comes with signature abilities, predefined attitudes, and a whole bunch of NPCs who are way, way more powerful than you, so suck it up and fall in line." Which is a much-copied approach that I (surprise!) abominate.*

So, "Sign of the Serpent" (and do you mind offering us your real name to address you by?), what I'd recommend is taking the whole "splatbook" approach, grinding it to tiny pieces, and stomping on it. The real people playing your game are what matters, the setting you make up is just a tool for them to have fun with**, and your game should give the players as much power as possible to make up cool stuff about the fictional universe. I love making up setting too, but I've discovered that no matter how cool my ideas were, if I give the players the power to create, they'll come up with something even cooler that I hadn't thought of -- which is the whole point of playing a game with other people instead of sitting by myself writing novels!

* Abominate = a lovely word I learned from Ron Edwards.

** So, "IagainstI": yeah, maybe the major houses should be struggling to maintain an uneasy peace against unknown conspirators. Or maybe the major houses should be trying to kill each other dead, right now. Or maybe the major houses are all working together against the outside enemy, and aren't planning to turn on each other at all, but, y'know, the temptation to let your allies do the hard fighting while you grab the easy plunder is always there. Or maybe you could start out with one of these situations and, because of choices the players make, move to one of the other situations during the campaign. I'd like to see a system that gave the players that much power to shape the story.