Lets talk about the Claims system.
First off, I love what it does to the game. The fact that you get negative status for every claim you take means that you get into more trouble as your reach expands, which is fun! The hefty faction status penalty also means there is meat in the status management minigame. You can choose to take claims from a variety of factions, making many enemies but avoiding the mechanical penalties of war, or picking a single enemy to bleed dry, but then having to deal with being at war and your targets preparing specifically for you. I love that stuff to bits.
But I think the status penalty being so hefty in practise means that the GM needs to narrow the space of possibilities of how you get a Claim to such actions that will produce a -2 status change. Which basically turns out to mean “eliminate all opposition at location X.”
This in turn means that engaging the Claims system overrides crew playbooks stylistically to a degree – whether you’re Hawkers or Thieves or a Cult, you’re now doing gang-on-gang violence.
Which is fun, but I’d like for stuff like infiltrating the leadership of the gang, or negotiating for a cut, and etcetera to be more viable options to getting claims. But that likely means less of a status hit (or if it’s still the full penalty for this sort of stuff, there’s a bit of an incongruity on what status actually means), and that might take the teeth out of the claims system.
How does your group tend to get new claims? Is my experience of the rules in play off-base here, perhaps? If you’re already doing non-gang violence ways of getting new claims, how did that work out?
In my current game our crew of Shadows found a luxury fence that had a shipment incoming they were trying to move. What we did was covertly stole the shipment without our identities being revealed then approached the fence and offered to be his new business associates in the face of the failure of the last people he was working with. We even offered to steal some back what was lost from him!
In an old breaker crew I played a Slide, and we found a brothel to use as a cover operation and I went in and half sweet talked half seduced the madam into letting us be her new protection racket.
First session my group posed as fake building inspectors and deceived the group into thinking all the buildings were unsafe – thus gaining the turf. (they also rolled really well). (They posed as the Fire Brigade(?), faction name alludes me. Started a clock for when they’d be pissed off about it)
Eventually through entanglements they wanted (and got) the turf back, but no violence was done at all.
I also remember a while ago seeing something about Claims as LTPs, which I allowed for a Luxury Fence – though I didn’t add many faction strings to that one… possibly an oversight on my part.
If the crew is part of a larger organization they could just be given a claim or two (with big strings attached). For some claims, you might be able to blame the score on someone else, although this sounds pretty hard. A troublesome or low-value claim might be worth less status penalty; maybe the crew undermined the claim using a long-term plan.
This does raise an interesting idea of “How many claims do factions usually have?” Is there some rule of thumb for scale to claims when you combine like “Tier 2 Weak has 2-4 claims” but a “Tier 1 Firm has 3-5 claims” type thing? Similar to the gang size stuff I guess.
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I kinda play fast and loose with the faction status effects from Claims, matching it to what happens in game. In one of the games I’m running, the crew did a two-score tandem event to take over a Turf claim, and pulled it off in such a way that the original owners didn’t know that the PCs were the ones who got them kicked out(though they can figure out that the PCs are there now, and they might backtrack evidence to put the pieces together later…). I didn’t give them a faction status hit for this. In another game, though, the PCs outright attacked a Claim held by another faction(after convincing the other gang they’d hired for protection to buzz off) and murdered everyone. They got a faction status hit. 😛
I ran a game where the PCs and another faction (Dockworkers Union) ended up sort of sharing a claim.
The PCs cult infiltrated the Crow’s Foot union house and hypnotized/recruited/blackmailed the leaders to the point where it was their Turf and the majority of union members were also cult members.
That said, they never kicked the union out of the building and union business went on more or less as usual (with a little bit of fraud and skimming off the top to fund the cult).
The faction penalty represented the friction between the union leadership and the PCs/local branch, but they were mostly on good terms with the union members.
All in all, a weird and complex situation with a lot of twisting loyalties. Good times.
My cult has basically been doing sort of what you are suggesting. They’ve gotten two claims under the condition of limited or equal usage. Their offeratory (+2 coin when doing an occult plan) was gained by borrowing a printing press from the Lamp blacks, saying that they will use it in exchange for info on the red sashes. They’ve also negotiated deals on claims for 50% ownership after a war.