4e Faction Membership

Let me add, by the way, that I'm still preferring the Pathfinder conversion route -- and it's probably what I would/will game with. It's just that there's so much less work involved with that one that 4e is taking up more thought cycles. Bigger problems, more opportunity for creatively addressing them. How many XP do I get for slaying the entire game system?

Okay, that said, there was a good question asked in the "will anyone use it" thread:

So, thought about this for a bit. Couple of ideas. They don't even rate as alpha draft yet, I'd imagine -- Clueless hasn't even proposed guidelines for the conversion process yet.

The goal here is to make sure that faction membership is a choice. It's an add-on to class abilities, but it costs effort and investment on the PC's part, which is only a net plus if he would be making efforts toward that philosophical goal anyway. Players who aren't part of a faction yet, or who choose not to be, aren't penalized (except maybe slightly, socially), especially in terms of class advancement.

Belief points. Power faction abilities off of a belief point system. For those of you unfamiliar with belief points, they are like experience points, though much harder to achieve, requiring significant sacrifice and coming in singletons rather than thousands. Essentially, faction abilities are abilities anyone always has, so everyone has equal access and there's no class imbalance. The gray ooze you're fighting could access the Sensate ability you're about to use, theoretically, except that it has accumulated no Sensate belief points. Nobody needs to list it on their character sheet if they're not going around accumulating the belief points to use it. (A mechanically similar system has the ability tied to a one-time monetary or XP investment, like a Ring-Giver's accumulation of favors. Any use requires a past investment, but you retain the ability indefinitely.)

Low-level abilities, like a Guvner's comprehend languages ability, might even use up fractional belief points, in the form of an invested point serving up "charges" of an ability. So no, you don't always have it, but it's expected that a PC member of the Fraternity will be adhering to his code well enough to earn a Fraternity belief point fairly regularly. Alternatively, and perhaps more appropriately for a Xaositect, use of a low-level ability might trigger a die roll for whether the point is lost: e.g., the Chaosman has a belief point; he uses babble, rolls 1d10, and on a 1 he loses the belief point. So on average, a point would power 10 uses.

Affiliation requirements. That might work for use-based abilities, which we can write up as daily, encounter, at-will, etc. But what about ongoing abilities like the Dead Truce, or a (human) Sensate's infravision, or an Indep's Bazaar contacts? I would say that ongoing abilities should require ongoing investment. There are two possibilities for this. One is requiring faction memership: the power, which again is presumed to be implicit on every character sheet in the Universe, would read something like, "If you are a member of the Dustmen in good standing, which requires signing up in Sigil, adhering to a given code of belief and behavior, and doing a certain amount of duties for the faction, you are ignored by undead...". There's already a section on 4e character sheets that I've seen for race and class features, and this is basically a feature of 'you are a being of a race capable of valuing this philosophy.' The implicit understanding is that the DM is free to revoke the power if you fail to meet the requirements. Some abilities might require, say, tithing treasure -- this being suitable for social abilities like contacts or rank.

Basically, this adds a new descriptor to powers, like "Implement" -- only instead of "your wand or holy symbol must be in your hand," it's "Affiliation," and it means "you must be a member in good standing of the faction," whatever that costs.

Class ability replacement. And here's the other one. Some abilities are going to just plain represent a choice of training, or a learned ability that even losing faction membership or losing your beliefs isn't going to take away. If you've caught the trick of how to use infravision, or the Doomguard trained you in how to use a sword, that's something that's going to stay with you even if you're booted from the faction or decide entropy's not such a hot goal. Of course, a wizard that has learned how to use a sword has spent some time training on this that he hasn't spent studying complex tomes. So what has he lost? Perhaps an investment of skill ranks from his most recent odd level? A feat?

Thoughts, comments, etc.