Really? Because in itself, that's kind of alien to my play experience.
The way things have always worked in my experience is that upon encountering a new nation, you'll do a bit of investigation and wind up encountering a number of internal factions that want things for the nation. Usually, at least three of them will be amenable to having a deal of some kind with the PCs, though they'll usually be in at least implicit opposition so you can't just work with all of them without a bunch of effort and at least some backstabbing and political finesse (which is non-trivial). Likewise, none of them are "objectively" better for the PC than the others - one might be willing to cut them the best deal but be offensive to their moral sensibilities, while the other might be virulently anti-slavery, but also jingoistic and wanting to challenge the PCs' regional hegemony.
In essence, rather than nations being a big blob, instead each faction in a nation has a face who the PCs can associate as the representative of a given interest group and viable person to ally or align themselves with.
It's a cheap and easy way to provide easy agency to the PCs, because it immediately gives them a choice as to who they want to deal with and which arrangement is most acceptable to them. Plus, it also serves to allow you to populate a new nation with antagonists as well as heroes, because if you're going to side with one group, you're probably going to piss off their rivals. Hell, even Bioware games do it, although they usually only offer you two competing factions so one can be GOOD and the other EVIL.
Naturally, of course, this is the point where I recommend Damnation City for Vampire: the Requiem as a sourcebook on how to assemble regional and local power structures, because I'm paid by White Wolf to shill an out-of-print book it really is just that good at defining how to build up power relationships in RPGs.
Right- so most games I have been in or run have generally gone with the idea that players are
told a fair amount during the introduction to a new area or upon their interest in said area, and that they also usually have an idea of what they want to do. Remember, I Shyft, wanted to play a court-and-mercantilism game with building infrastructure. I've never really
played one before, so I don't know how except in the theorycraft I've built in my head. I can't assume Aleph or any storyteller knows what I know and vice-versa though.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that in my experience, most 'new places' were plot points, not new environments with new people and new opportunities. All of that stuff came
after the players solved plot-event-of-the-day. You go somewhere because something relevant to the story at hand is there- and remember, most of my play experience did not have codified or even generally agreed upon story structure. It was all ad-hoc and emergent. We did not sit down and go 'this is the introduction' and 'this is the [blank]' arc. We were too immature or unaware or unskilled to ask those kinds of questions.
Speaking for the games I ran, the last time I had 'factions' was... Greyfalls arc, at about the 400-600xp mark in SNG give or take. After that I stopped having the time or energy to really run multiple factions, focusing primarily on singular actors or whatnot because it was easier than juggling 4-5 player plots and personalities at a time. Note that the game ended around the 3000xp mark.
A good example from SNG was how the players decided "We're going to track down these plot-coupons held by other Exalts, using sorcery!" so they did, and one led them to wavecrest. I did not have time or energy to lay out the politics of the situation and there was no need to- they weren't there to trade, they were there to get the macguffin. I had my fun by showing them an interesting character who HAD the macguffin, and their reactions to it.
Most of my game experience simply was not episodic, nor was it safely contained by geography or other factors- players mine or otherwise were gaining access to powers or assets that let them call upon whatever NPC or move to whatever previous or new location they wanted with game-supported ease, so the mental overhead was increasing dramatically.
Remember, I chose
not to give Inks a travel spell at chargen or even learn one soon, because I wanted to keep her actual area-of-impact small for Aleph's benefit and my own.
