Making Good Factions

tim-cain fallout game-design factions rpg-design npcs

Abstract

Problem: How do you design factions that feel alive, support multiple playstyles, and enrich your game world?

Approach: Tim Cain shares his faction design philosophy using Fallout as a case study, focusing on internal diversity, realistic goals, and player engagement.

Findings: Great factions are non-monolithic — they contain varied characters with distinct personalities who all support the faction's goal in their own way. This diversity supports different player builds, player preferences, and story needs simultaneously.

Key insight: A faction should never be a uniform block. The more varied its members, the more playstyles, player types, and story threads it can serve.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7Q2m-82r4c

Factions Must Not Be Monolithic

The cardinal rule: no faction should be a simple, uniform entity where everyone acts the same way and treats the player the same way. Every faction needs room for a variety of characters.

Fallout Examples

  • The Mutants: The Master and the Lieutenant are intelligent, scheming leaders — completely different from the "dumb mutants" encountered in random combat. This contrast makes the faction feel layered.
  • Brotherhood of Steel: Vree the scientist, Rhombus the military leader, and Cabbot at the front door are all wildly different from a generic Brotherhood grunt in power armor.
  • The Hub and Junktown: Filled with distinct personalities rather than interchangeable townsfolk.

Give Factions Realistic, Discoverable Goals

Each faction needs a goal that makes sense when the player finally uncovers it. The discovery itself should create an "aha" moment.

The Mutants' Goal

On the surface, mutants seem to just be raiding towns randomly. But as you dig deeper, you learn they're specifically looking for "Prime humans" — people with low radiation exposure who produce better super mutants when dipped in FEV vats. This explains why they target towns (where some residents rarely leave and have less radiation exposure) and why the Master became obsessed with finding sealed Vaults — they're full of unexposed humans.

The layered reveal — random raids → targeted raids → the Prime human theory → the Vault hunt — makes the faction feel intelligent and purposeful.

The Brotherhood's Goal

Their mission is to find and preserve technology. They destroy anything they leave behind so it doesn't "fall into the wrong hands." From their perspective, the entire apocalypse was caused by technology in the wrong hands — and the only right hands are theirs. They're insular, secretive about their base location, and never act as a police force for human settlements. They only venture out to acquire tech, blueprints, or working examples — and to destroy the rest.

A Digression on Writing Characters

Tim takes a pointed detour on character writing: stop defaulting to sarcasm. He describes sarcasm as the most overused character trait in game writing — the lazy go-to that narrative designers reach for first. He actively rejected sarcastic characters during development, telling writers "we have enough of those, figure something else out."

Better Character Archetypes

  • The Intellectual: Thinks like a scientist, wants data, approaches everything logically
  • The Fool: Genuinely dumb characters who are fun to outsmart (or in Fallout's case, "out-dumb")
  • The Violent: Hair-trigger aggression, insular, hostile to outsiders
  • The Passive: Easily convinced, goes along with the player — great targets for speech-skill-based gameplay

Why This Matters: Supporting Everything at Once

Rich, non-monolithic factions serve multiple design purposes simultaneously:

Supporting the Story

When factions have goals and diverse members, any storyline can find NPCs within each faction who would naturally help or oppose the player. The faction becomes a story engine rather than a static obstacle.

Supporting Player Builds

  • Combat characters need tough opponents — the Hub has powerful guards, mutants in armor with miniguns, the Brotherhood is a formidable combat challenge
  • Talkers need conversation partners — the Hub is full of people to talk to, the Lieutenant can be engaged intellectually, the Cathedral followers can be reasoned with
  • Stealth characters need big maps with things to steal and people to pickpocket — all Fallout factions have large, loot-rich areas designed for this

Supporting Player Preferences

Beyond builds, different players (not player characters) have different tastes:

  • Some love humor and funny NPCs
  • Some enjoy mean NPCs — either because they identify with them or because meanness justifies taking them out
  • Some want complex moral choices

Tim cites Fallout: New Vegas as the gold standard for this. He couldn't decide which faction to support, so he replayed the game multiple times — siding with House, Yes Man, Caesar's Legion, and the NCR. He liked people in all of them. He even blew up the Brotherhood of Steel once — felt bad about it, but wanted to see what would happen.

The TL;DW

  1. Have multiple factions in your game
  2. Fill each faction with lots of different kinds of characters
  3. Give each faction a realistic goal that all members support in their own way
  4. The character variety ensures different player builds can engage with every faction
  5. The character variety ensures different kinds of players find something they enjoy in every faction

References