Faction Unification Brainstorming (Guilds)

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As we move towards eventually finishing up our faction questlines on the mainland, we need to consider how our factions will interact or be related to the ones in the vanilla game. This thread is specifically for handling the guilds.

Current rough brainstorming from Discord chat:

Kaziem: “Okay, let me see if I have this right. For guilds, we will have one big guild for the entirety of MW. You can advance by doing quests anywhere. The original Mages Guild/etc quests will be left alone, but we might edit dialogue slightly to aknowledge guild halls on the mainland. We might update the "advancement" counter to take into account that there's more to do. The "guild leaders" on VV will be assumed to either just be VV-district leaders or will be assumed to be leaders of MW overall.”

Gnomey: “On the advancement counter, ie. faction reputation, I don't think we need to change the counter for vanilla.We just need to have increased reputation threshold for our own faction advancement.”

Atrayonis: “I think we absolutely need to change the counter for vanilla, otherwise the whole questflow breaks.”

Gnomey:  “I mean we don't need to change how many points of faction rep quests award the player, but rather how many points are required to advance."

We also decided that discussing how the Morrowind Mages Guild interacts with, for example, the Skyrim Mages guild, needs to happen. Our current suggestions are:

  • They’re totally separate places with totally separate ranks. Your rank doesn’t carry over.
  • They’re totally separate, but you can have your rank carried over.
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Having the ranks carry over feels better from a in character perspective, but I also could see this running into issues with the quest flow. 

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Also you run into problems with the higher ranks.  While I believe a swordsman in Skyrim may be a swordsman in Morrowind, I do not think a guardian’s rank would necessarily carry over.  The Champion and Master ranks especially wouldn't carry over.  If there will be inter-provincial unification, that will be an issue for the far future. 

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Are we talking about carrying over from mainland to Vvardenfell, or with our Project Tamriel partners in other provinces? As the latter I think would be really hard to implement, plus, we could always just hand-waive it by saying different provinces, different hierarchy. 

Vvarrdenfell versus the mainland is harder to justify that way though. 

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I'm pretty sure the meeting today decided to have one Imperial faction for the whole of Morrowind, and for there to be no division between VV and the Mainland.

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Ah, have been at work all day today, haven’t had time to look at the meeting notes.

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Are you all planning on creating a unified province-wide questline for each guild? Or will each branch have localized stories, with the player not necessarily having to complete every quest in every guild hall to become the guildmaster?

I think that, both for development and for player experience, the second option might be better. You are essentially making a game which is three times the size of Morrowind, an already enormous game. Given the scope of your lore, and sheer size of your game world, it seems like it would be very hard to plan a single storyline for a guild which encompasses the entirity of Morrowind, and which explores each faction’s relationship with every other faction without it becoming clumsy and unweildy. From the player’s perspective, having to complete a quest line which is 4 times as long as Morrowind’s guild quest line feels exhausting.

I suppose you could avoid editting vanilla too much by rewriting dialogue so that the Vvardenfell guilds are just one branch of the larger province-wide guild body. So, to take the Fighter’s Guild as an example, Sjoring Hard-heart would become the ‘champion’ of the Vvardenfell branch of the Fighter’s Guild. You would also have Fighter’s Guild branches in each mainland district.

These wouldn’t be separate factions. Lore-wise, they’d be a beurocratic distinction (which, realistically, would have to exist for any organization to operate in an area as large as Morrowind.) For the developers, it would be a way to make planning the quest line more manageable. One district’s quests could focus on the relationship between the Fighter’s Guild and a particular house. Another could focus on internal divisions within the Fighter’s Guild. The player could advance through the ranks in any district or districts, eventually becoming the ‘champion’ of a particular district, at which point a special set of quests would become available which lead to the player becoming the guildmaster.

And perhaps this schema would allow you to release portions of the questlines before the entire questline is complete, as a way to playtest your ideas and build excitement for your releases.

Anyway, I know I’m backseat developing, so please feel free to ignore this post. Just throwing in my 5 cents.

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I think that's the general plan.  Different districts will have different questlines which would culminate in a faction-wide finale, but for the majority of the faction the player will be engaging in more local affairs.  So essentially what you said. There won't be an Oblivion style questline, where each quest contributes to one story. 

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Yes, that is indeed the plan for the Imperial guilds. Mechanically one faction, but narratively divided into separate district branches. Until now TR does seem to have been in favour of having an overarching guild storyline, but as Apotheosis writes I think it should build upon the district questlines and the overarching bit should basically be slimmer than the more monolythic Great House questlines.

As for between provinces, I don’t think a high-ranking member of one province branch should be expected to climb up the ranks of another province’s branch. I think TR’s former approach to the mainland/Vvardenfell divide of having the Vvardenfell rank translate to a lesser mainland rank is unnecessarily cumbersome. I personally think one-to-one rank translation between provinces is the thing to aim for, with flavour dialogue acknowledging where the player rose to the current rank.
There might still be some natural barriers to the player; mechanically, the factions are (I assume for SHotN and P:C) separate, so faction reputation will not translate over between provinces, which makes sense. So if you want to continue advancing in rank in another province, you’ll need to do a lot of drudge work to build up reputation in that province. The player will only be able to attain the highest rank – head of the whole faction – in Cyrodiil, I assume, so players who completed the questlines in other provinces will have to kowtow to the Cyrodiil branch before they can attain the true highest rank.

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The only problem with transferring rank one-to-one across provincial lines is that you can effectively cut off a significant amount of quests. That might be interesting narratively and  make sense, but we have to ask if that’s a good thing for game-play.

I think the finale should synthesize  the core themes introduced in the lesser, local questlines with the final quests resulting in the player becoming head of the guild.
The only problem with P:C is that if the player is named Arch-Mage of Tamriel, then it makes no sense for him to become Arch-Mage in the provinces as well.  Admittedly though, we can just supend disbelief and handwave it away.  Regardless, it won’t be very relevant until far in the future. 

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Apotheosis

The only problem with P:C is that if the player is named Arch-Mage of Tamriel, then it makes no sense for him to become Arch-Mage in the provinces as well.  Admittedly though, we can just supend disbelief and handwave it away.  Regardless, it won’t be very relevant until far in the future. 

This shouldn’t really be a problem. For all the discussions on this subject, I’ve never been particularly concerned with the guild hierarchy thing. People assume that every guild is part of some grand, continent-wide hierarchy, which, given the medieval-esque level of civilization, communication and technology, is actually pretty unlikely.

Compare this to actual medieval guilds, like, say, a carpenter’s guild or a painter’s guild. Every guild across Europe would be set up in more or less the same way, with its own internal hierarchy which governs who has the rights of a master and who gets to ply their trade in the local city. Guild culture, shared history and ways of teaching were broadly comparable. Apprentices and journeymen could travel between cities to learn their trade, but a member of the guild from one city shouldn’t expect to have the same status and privileges in every city he visits: if he has a workshop or a business in one city, that doesn’t mean he gets to keep his place in the pecking order elsewhere (after all, the local carpenters would want to protect their monopoly against foreigners). Even if the leader of a guild from a major city would visit a different, smaller city, he would not be able to contest the authority of the local guild master.

The guilds seem to operate as franchises, in which key members (ambitious mages, thieves, and mercenaries) set up new provincial branches in times past, and have since been able to procure privileges and their own base of authority away from the original organization. Morrowind would be slightly different, because the guild is still new and dependent on homeland support (which explains why the Vvardenfell archmage was an assignment). But the archmage of Cyrodiil would, in general terms, have little influence over other provinces.

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And I assume the player has total freedom if he decides for example, as a journeyman of the mages guild of Vvarrdenfell, to travel to Skyrim and take some orders from there, if he feels like it? So it needs some kind of scheme that works both ways, even if the player decides to not do them in chronological order, when he travels around helping each guild which have each their own problems, and they acknowledge ranks from ohter guilds, so the player could, with a high enough rank, skip the more mundane tasks if he wants too and jump right to the gist of the current problem the guild is facing in that region.

Assuming that Province Cyrodiil is also creating the university of mages, my suggestion would be to take a similar route that Oblivion did, just on a bigger scale. The player could in return for helping the local guilds with their problem, and getting almost the highest rank in that guild, get a recommendation from the local arch mage, so like in Oblivion, if he has three recommendations he is deemed worthy enough to get acess to the university.
Around the university could also then start something like the grand, final missions, but the motivation for the player would be, that he learns trough the course of doing missions for the guilds, of this magical place where all knowledge of Tamriel is stored, where he can possibly become the mightiest of mages with the mightiest of spells or enchanted gear and where he could maybe learn about other mighty mages, good ones and bad ones, and go and search them, to measure his power against them.

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I think being the head of one province branch should effectively lock you out from joining the other branches, as you would already be acknowledged as having the equivalent top rank, except for the Cyrodiil branch where the last rank should ideally still be available. (Which is admittedly where things get a bit less tidy).
Which would just mean that players wanting to rise to the top of several branches should join all of those branches before fully completing any one of them; basically establish themselves as a member of the local branch before becoming the leader of a different one.
That isn’t necessarily to say the player would be locked out from all of the other province branch’s quests; that really depends on how the quests are mechanically implemented. Quests that build heavily upon prior quests (as in part of a storyline) should probably check that the prior quests have been completed first, which I think is generally already the case. So the player entering a questline midway through it shouldn’t really be a problem. Otherwise, high-ranking players should probably not be asked to complete the lowest level quests, but I don’t think that’s terribly important as long as the player isn’t required to complete them.

Edit: I wrote this a while before remembering to post it, so it hasn’t taken the last two posts into account.
Edit after reading aforementioned two posts: having the province guild branches completely separate might really be the best solution indeed; I don’t think it’s entirely realistic that the player’s rank would not factor in at all, but then, all solutions that try to avoid becoming needlessly complicated end up unrealistic in one way, and the one-to-one rank conversion I suggested is no different there despite being more complicated.
Personally, I did get the impression from the Bethesda games that the guilds were supposed to be more centralized in nature, but to my knowledge it was never clearly established, and I frankly wouldn’t consider it terribly important even if it were established.

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@Ateiggaer: no, that’s the opposite of what I meant. What I am trying to say is that guilds do not acknowledge the rank you have in other provinces or districts. Each provincial guild is its own, independent organization: they acknowledge each other through shared history and agreements, but they are under no obligation to submit to another guild’s authority, any more than that, say, the carpenters’ guild in one medieval city would have to submit to that of another (even if the first guild was originally founded by members of the latter). To a provincial guild, a player with a high rank in another guild remains an outsider: giving him a position of authority weakens their own autonomy towards the other guild, undermines the local political scene, and would anger other members who are competing to reach these ranks within their own guild.

I do not think that the archmage in Cyrodiil should be higher-ranked than other archmages. In academic terms, the Cyrodiil archmage is a primus inter pares, the first among equals thanks to his political connections and the power of the Arcane University. Even then, the university is not that unique: Skyrim and High Rock can boast of Winterhold College and Gwylim University, and there is probably a similar institution in Alinor.

Ultimately, any attempt at merging all guilds across provinces into one overarching organization would be both extremely difficult and completely unnecessary. Everything in the way the games have portrayed the guilds up until now shows them working mostly independent of one another. Also, any of these systems would only work by excluding players from content: locking off other provincial branches because the player has mastered one branch would eliminate vast swathes of gameplay, who elevating player based on ranks also excludes them from doing these early quests. Any decision that stops players from experiencing gameplay or taking part in storylines (excluding clear, signposted choices like the Great House struggle) is automatically a bad one.