this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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I am a bit surprised by the premise. Indeed D&D misses a good faction play, but it's one RPG among thousands of others.
Many if not most RPG do have faction/reputation mechanics. Vampire or L5R comes immediately to my mind. Playing any kind of cyberpunk game involve a form of faction as you need to manage not being arrested by cops or corpo, if you move to the 2010's Eclipse phase has this pretty interesting reputation economics, and then Blade in the dark came with fun faction/downtime rule at the point for some players it's mostly a faction management game
The thing is, I don't think D&D misses faction play because of the designers. I think it misses it because it's not what players wanted. If you look at the 5e core rulebooks from 2014 and the early adventures and the Adventurer's League organised play, they seem to be pushing their 5 Forgotten Realms factions pretty hard. The Zhents and Harpers have a long and storied history, but the Emerald Enclave, Order of the Gauntlet, and Lord's Alliance are much less well attested prior to 5e. But the community never really seemed interested in this aspect of play, and I don't think WotC kept it up after very long.