Contagious opinions could cause spontaneous social faction conflict

[Pax_Empyrean]

At present, opinions exist pretty much entirely in isolation. It's all 1v1 stuff. But what if, when pawns spoke to one another, instead of just raising or lowering the opinion of the speaker, they could raise the other person's opinion of a random person that they like, or lower their opinion of a random person that they hate? Maybe tie it in with a Social skill check to influence the opinions of others, or base the odds of success on the listener's opinion of the speaker. Pretty simple thing, mechanically, but the potential implications are huge.

Consider the following situation: Alice and Bob are married, but their love dies like a polar bear in a desert heat wave, and they get divorced. Now they hate each other. With opinions in isolation like we have now, they'll fight each other, but that's pretty much the end of it. But what if Alice and Bob started badmouthing the other one to everyone that would listen? Now Bob's friends hate Alice, and Alice's friends hate Bob. Insults fly. The negative opinions that each group of friends have toward Alice and Bob would sour the opinions of Alice and Bob toward the other group of friends, although to a lesser degree than their dislike for one another. There would even be minor impacts on the groups of friends toward one another, with those effects diminishing the further away from the original haters you get. This kind of social conflict is cool, makes for interesting stories, is pretty realistic, and can be implemented with a pretty minor addition to the game.

Consider another situation: Alice is good friends with everyone. Bob joins the colony. He's met just about everybody and made a few friends, but he hasn't met Alice yet. Even so, he likely has a positive opinion of her just because all of his friends say good things about her.

One last scenario: Your colony has a few "Hates Men" and "Hates Women" characters running around. They each dislike about half the colony, and spread those opinions to their friends to some extent. This will lead to greater male/female conflict in the colony as a whole, instead of just having it limited to the characters with those traits (although they will definitely be generating more hate).

[Daman453]

I love this! Is it easy to do modders/devs?

[winddbourne]

I also like this idea. It might be tricky to balance those emergent effects but that is why we are in alpha! lol