Colony Ship factions & you

[PorkyThePaladin]

I think it makes sense in a lot of settings. Factions being a lot wealthier than individuals (or they should be anyway), they should be able to provide much better equipment to their members than should be scavengable. If you think in historical terms for example, typically a Roman soldier would be much better equipped than some mercenary scavenging pieces of armor here and there.

Not if that merc kills an officer or makes enough people looting and pillaging (everyone's favorite pastime in RPGs) to buy expensive armor. In Gothic this dilemma had a simple solution: can neither loot armor nor buy the next rank's armor or 'third party' armor. This setup fits Gothic's unique atmosphere like a glove but won't work for most RPGs.

You could tie that into a game though, in an organic way. Armor would have certain stats, and maybe sometimes looted armor would have better stats than your faction armor at that point, but 1) you would know that faction armor can be upgraded later, unlike the one-off looted armor, so there is more of an attachment to it, and 2) faction armor would have distinct social advantages over looted armor. People from your faction would respond better if you looked like one of them, and imagine how cool it would be if someone saw you coming in a higher-end faction armor, and said something to the effect of "oh that guy must be a real bad-ass". Wearing looted armor might get you in trouble if it belonged to the enemy faction. On the other hand, it might come in handy during stealth/infiltration missions.