Trigger-based dynamic trait changes

Started by Gaesatae, January 27, 2015, 09:16:27 AM

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Gaesatae

I was thinking in some improvements for a mod I'm working on when I stepped into this idea and I thought I should post it here, as I think it may be a nice addition to the game story-like feeling. I don't know if this has been proposed before, but I didn't find anything similar after a quick search.

Basically, the idea is to use some traits as level traits that may change given the right circumstances. A simple example, the NaturalMood trait (sanguine/depressive):

You have a sanguine colonist fighting against a raid. The colonist get hit and loses a leg. He'll be sanguine after what happened?  He may have some time to think while he is waiting for a new leg… So we add a trigger to the pawn.NewlyDowned, which is for example (0.25/[degree of NaturalMood]), and there will be a small chance for this colonist to lose one level in NaturalMood and become optimistic.

This opens a variety of options to increase the diversity of the colonists' traits after a couple of years. Take the same example as before, substitute the NaturalMood trait for a new one called HateAfraid(hates faction/afraid of faction). If the colonist lose a leg when a certain faction is attacking, he may get a "Hates [faction name]" or "Afraid of [faction name]", each one giving certain modifiers when the specific faction in attacking.

It doesn't need to be something complex or fancy, that's not the point; a simple mood modifier might be enough. The point is, you'll be able to see that this colonist had some history with some faction because of something that happened in your game. You can get the picture, after a couple of years when you look at your colonists' traits you'll see that some colonist were affected to a certain degree by the game events, for better or worse.

I think the traits pool is kind of small, right now, for this to be taken into serious consideration. But with some traits additions I believe the story feeling will be improved.

Of course, I'm reinventing the wheel here, this is the way some TotalWar games manage traits. I tried to do it myself, as a test, but I couldn't set the triggers in the right places, but in theory I don't believe it'll be too hard.

Kagemusha

I really like the sound of these ideas.
Anything that creates an altering landscape is a nice addition.

Would enhance the natural story generating dynamics in the game very nicely.