Quote Originally Posted by Prime32 View Post
Nah, affiliations were in a few places, and the Knowledge Affiliation from Complete Champion at least is pretty well known for its ability that lets you turn off enemies' powers. The issue is most of their requirements are things like "attend meetings at HQ every week" or "perform a lengthy quest for your superiors". Basically you can't use them unless the DM writes a campaign centred around them. If the game was initiated by the DM then he almost certainly has a pre-existing concept that it will be hard to integrate them into, but the affiliation mechanics aren't interesting enough that many players would specifically ask for a game that uses them.

EDIT: There's also the issue that few affiliations will benefit all members of the party equally, but giving each party member a different affiliation increases the difficulty in working everything into the story, and can make it hard to justify why the PCs are even working together.
I wasn't arguing that they don't get used in CharOp forums, sorry. I was arguing I don't see them used in actual game tables. Also, you can very much use them without writing a campaign around them - you just don't get a sky high affiliation score.