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Organisations and Favour

Whilst colonial currency is used by some and barter is used by others neither of these tend to be sufficient to achieve any of the sorts of things that are actually useful to adventurers. What instead becomes important is the network of favours and goodwill owed by organisations you have worked with before or helped to establish.

Favour is specific to the organisation it was earned with and is inherently impractical to negotiate for given it represents a sense of good will and indebtedness on the part of the owing organisation.

A character may take advantage of favour with an organisation in one of two ways. Firstly if they have a long term relationship with an organisation their established reputation will allow them to call in appropriate favours every adventure. Secondly they may simply burn the reputation on one off favours. Larger more powerful organisations are more difficult to rise in the ranks of but are commensurately capable of doing a wider variety of things for their members. A normal character may only hold a working relationship with up to 3 organisations.

Organisations have 3 important properties:

  • Ethos: What does the organisation on average tend to think its purpose is. An organisation will be much more forthcoming with assistance when the end goal of an action matches its ethos.
  • Scale/Reach: Where does the organisation operate. With advanced planning or distance communication an organisation can reach beyond its scale but that will be much more difficult.
  • Power/Scope: What the organisation actually does. Organisations can attempt to arrange assistance outside of their scope but are unlikely to be particularly competent at it.

Membership of Organisations

A normal character can be a member of up to 3 organisations and has a rank appropriate to their current reputation level within them. Organisations have a cost per membership rank listed, if you are a member of that organisation then your rank at the start of an adventure is equal to your current reputation with them divided by their membership rank cost rounding down with a maximum of five which represents essentially leading the organisation. This is also the amount of free favour available to spend on the adventure without permanently burning favour, if not spent this does not transfer to future adventures. This can be supplemented by burning reputation as usual to make up the difference between what they can freely afford and the total cost of the favour.

A players membership level always tracks to their favour at the start of the adventure. If a player actively participates in a large event to increase scale or power of an organisation (and thereby the membership cost) then they may choose to forego any favour reward in order to set their favour to the minimum level required to maintain their current rank within the organisation minus any favour they had burned with them this adventure.

A player may not lead an organisation over cost 11 without retiring (having no time to adventure), if the organisation grows underneath them to this point when they are already leading it they may begin to delegate the vast majority of their roles being effectively rank 4 in everything but title (and if push came to shove their voice would no longer be the deciding voice).

What can organisations do?

What organisations can effectively do is highly dependant on the organisations themselves though what they can attempt fall into 3 major categories.

  • Provide Alchemical consumables
  • Broad narrative actions requiring GM adjudication
  • Provide resources to aid another organisation, effectively transferring favour

The cost in favour of any action is affected by how well the action fits within the organisation's reach and how well the apparent goals match with their ethos.

Whether an organisation is willing to perform a favour is judged based on your current level of favour and the apparent description of the task, the eventual favour cost is judged after the fact by the actual outcome of the situation from the organisation's perspective.

All favours have a baseline cost for an organisation acting somewhere within its reach towards a goal aligning with its ethos. An organisation acting outside of its reach or out of alignment with its ethos will increase the case of the favour.

  • If the action is within the organisation’s reach there is no additional cost, if the organisation has to reach beyond its normal scale the favour cost is multiplied by (1 plus the number of steps scale difference).
  • If an action is firmly within an organisation’s ethos there is no additional cost. If the action is indifferent to the organisations ethos then the cost is doubled. If the action appears directly contrary to the organisations ethos then the cost is quadrupled, this represents a friend inside the organisation sticking their neck out for you.

Acquiring Consumables

Acquiring consumables at baseline gives 4 points worth of Basic or Advanced Alchemy per point of favour spent, multipliers in cost from scope or ethos that evenly allow that to be divided can allow you to acquire less than 4 points of alchemy for a single point of favour.

Currently a single point of favour could also arrange the loan of an Ennarian Medkit to be returned if not used that adventure.

Narrative Uses

Requests from organisations have a base cost depending on what the action is, basic things cost one favour but greater things can cost up to 3. One favour requests are encounter scale things, two favour requests are adventure scale things, three favour requests are campaign scale things.

If the action is within the organisation’s scope it will be done well, otherwise it will be in some way diminished from what you had expected. Things moderately out of scope are liable to go better than things entirely unrelated to the scope of the organisation.

Transferring Favour

Between adventures reputation can be effectively transferred between organisations by essentially calling in favour to directly help the other organisation on your behalf. This is done with the with the following methodology:

  • One reputation is wasted on general logistics of transfer and letting it be known that this is on your behalf.
  • Judge whether the giving organisation can actually do something in scope to appreciably benefit the receiving organisation, if so move the favour to the next step if not halve it and move it to the next step.
  • Judge whether the transfer can be done in a way that matches the giving organisations ethos, if so move the favour to the next step if not halve it and move it to the next step (it is presumed that sufficient obfuscating intermediaries can be arranged to never make it look like the receiving organisation is directly contrary to the giving organisation’s ethos).
  • Take the remaining reputation and subtract favour for any gaps between the reach of the two organisations, that being the smallest increase to the reach of either organisation to make one reach the other.
  • The remaining reputation is now simply reputation with the receiving organisation and in general will also act to grow the organisation.

General levels of Reputation Reward

  • 1 Rep: Useful stuff for minimal personal cost handed over in debrief that matches with the organisation’s scope/ethos
  • 2 Rep: Hand over things of moderate value that match with the organisation’s scope/ethos
  • 5-10 Rep: Typical reward for successfully doing an adventure for the organisation

Growing Organisations

Events of adventures that benefit an organisation in some way should in general cause it to grow proportional to that benefit.

Currently as a guideline the effort required should be similar to the difference in cost to become a rank 5 member of the organisation at the two sizes filtered through appropriate favours.

Example a 5 person party goes out and successfully performs an adventure to grow the influence of the Baker Street Gang by taking over other territories and driving city guards out of the area. The Baker Street Gang thought that this was worth about 8 reputation per player with the level of success they had. Since the adventure was purely about helping the Baker Street Gang they grow by increasing both scope and reach this is worth 8*5=40 points to the organisation growing. It is currently a 1x2x5=10 point organisation and can then grow to a 3x3x5=45 point organisation becoming the de-facto law over the vast majority of the nation. Potentially this is excessive but equally adventures that are explicitly to benefit an organisation are relatively rare and so in most cases the benefit will only be tangential giving only a fraction of the overall reward to growing organisation rather than all of it.

Were one player for example the leader of the organisation they could choose to at the end of the adventure rather than adding the normal reputation reward to their previous stockpile simply set their reputation level to 45, the minimum level to remain leader minus any reputation they had spent with them during the adventure.

Generating an Organisation

This is mostly for GMs and players generating characters from distant nations. Organisations should always be at least 2 membership cost as extremely focussed tiny organisations produce strange interactions with membership.

Scale/Reach

  1. Neighbourhood
  2. Town/District
  3. Small-Nation
  4. Large-Nation/Coalition
  5. The Continent

Power/Scope

An organisation has at most 5 points worth of scope, any larger than this and it will tend to splinter into two smaller but closely related organisations due to internal politics.

Acquire Things

1 point specific type of thing (eg. alchemy), 2 points almost anything

Acquire Information

1 point limited topic, 2 points massively broad

Military/Law Enforcement/Gang Enforcement

1 point (contested thugs), 2 points (de-facto in charge), 3 points (unquestionably in charge)

Govern/Logistics/Travel (people who make things happen)

1 point can make encounter scale things happen, 2 points can make adventure scale things happen, 3 points can make campaign scale things happen

For general organisations the cost to raise membership rank is equal to (Power*Scale)

system/favour.1516489497.txt.gz · Last modified: 2018/01/20 23:04 (external edit)