Jordan Kouzmanoff
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Dev Diary #7: Characters
🕑 Added 2022-06-18 18:37:18 +0000 UTC
Hello and welcome to the 7th development diary of Grey Eminence!
In today’s edition, we’re going to take a look at one of the more intimate systems in the game: characters. They’re the primary agents of change across the world and as such are something you’ll be interacting with frequently over the course of the game.
Let’s start with a recap of what we’ve said about characters so far: they represent people with agency (or with the potential for agency), which usually means rulers, elites or their families. Their behavior is driven by explicit goals, which are in turn determined by their personality and life circumstances. Every character has a culture they identify with, a religious denomination they profess, and at least one language they can speak. In addition, characters also have a sexuality and health (which, when reduced to 0, results in their death). They are always physically located in a tile and can travel around. Crucially, they can own buildings and even have their own retinues.
Traits
At the core of every character is their set of traits. There are three types of traits: personality, lifestyle and physical. The most important are personality traits, so we’ll start with those.
Every character always has five personality traits, which are that character’s particular placement along five different behavioral dimensions: courage, generosity, lenience, piety, and sincerity. Each dimension can range in value from -2 to +2, with each step corresponding to a specific personality trait that you can observe for every character.
Courage affects how a character evaluates and acts upon opportunities to fulfill their goals. Importantly, it doesn’t outright prevent or force action, respectively, for very cowardly or very brave characters. Instead, it makes them over/underestimate what they need to achieve their goals. Courage has the biggest impact on political and material goals, e.g. a cowardly vassal plotting a coup would only take action if the numbers are heavily in their favor.
Generosity determines how much a character favors themselves rather than others in situations. Again, this isn't absolute (alas, there’s no such thing as true selflessness) and it isn’t purely about money either. Rather, generosity aims to represent the character’s mental balance between altruism and selfishness. This parameter has wide-ranging effects: from how the character evaluates the favors they’re owed (or that they owe) to how much assistance they’ll provide to other characters in need.
Lenience represents a character’s predilections for forgiveness, change, and other points of view. It has the most apparent effect in the sense that it heavily influences the character’s behavior towards other cultures & religions. It also has a meta-impact on character behavior because it determines how easily and under what circumstances their personality traits (including lenience itself!) can change.
Piety is the most straightforward personality dimension: it tells us the character’s attitude towards religion and general spirituality. It might seem like a strange choice compared to the other personality dimensions, but considering the monumental importance of religion in the lives of people over the six-century span of Grey Eminence, we figured to include piety here, rather than as a lifestyle trait, since it’s something virtually every character will have an attitude towards.
The last personality dimension is sincerity. It has the widest potential impact on character behavior because it allows characters to lie and misrepresent themselves. For example, characters with low sincerity might engage in sexual relations with characters they’re not attracted to in order to gain an advantage. Or they might promise you they’d do something, but then not do it, to which you’ll then have to respond in turn. Sincerity ties in closely with the game’s intrigue system, but we’ll cover that in another dev diary.
Unlike personality traits, lifestyle traits are not a fixed number and tend to accumulate over time. One of the processes through which characters gain lifestyle traits is education. By default, all characters undergo a balanced education to prepare them for what society expects of them (this varies significantly between cultures and religions). You can influence this process and prioritize specific areas of study: for example, if you’re aiming for an expansionist playthrough, it’ll make sense to educate your country’s heirs in the art of war. There are a plethora of events and circumstances which lead to lifestyle traits: characters that participate in war will (usually) become more proficient at it, while characters constantly plotting against their liege might develop paranoia.
Like lifestyle traits, physical traits are also variable. Some are genetic - though, notably, not all are expressed at birth, so in some cases you may be in for nasty surprises if you haven’t diversified your ruling bloodline enough - but most are acquired over time via events and circumstances. Notable examples include diseases (which tie into the disease system for populations, but that’s another topic), wounds, disfigurement, and a lot of other physical conditions of varying pleasantness.
Edward “the Black Prince” is arguably the most famous Englishman alive in 1356. At just 26 years of age, he was already Prince of Wales, a renowned knight, and proven commander known for his fierce chevauchée raids. Had he not died of dysentery in 1376, he would have ascended to the throne of England.
Goals
In most cases, characters have specific goals they want to achieve. The goals are determined by the circumstances of the character’s life, while how they go about achieving their goals is dictated by their personality. Goals can fall into one of four categories: personal, social, political, and material.
Personal goals originate from a character’s relationships with other characters. For example, a vindictive character that was bullied when they were younger might try to seek vengeance later in life. As we mentioned previously, personality isn’t an absolute determinant; causing the death of someone’s parents or children is likely to evoke strong responses even from characters with high lenience and low courage. Personal goals can manifest not just in one-time actions, but also as relationships themselves: establishing a love affair can then lead to the goal of keeping it secret.
Social goals represent a character’s push to change something about how society works. Such goals are rarer, yet can have significantly larger consequences: when multiple characters share the same social goal, they can form a faction to enact their desires, which you can then try to suppress or assist. Social goals usually emerge alongside new ideas (represented in-game as technologies), but can also come about via events and other, rarer circumstances.
Political goals are the primary driver of change in Grey Eminence. In a very broad sense, wars are fought because someone wants something they don’t have and are willing to spend lives and money to obtain it. The classic example of a political goal is a character’s desire to become ruler of a country due to having a dynastic claim. Such claims originate from belonging to a dynasty that once ruled said country, though they can also be fabricated. We’ll dedicate a full dev diary to the exact workings of the claims system, so stay tuned. Other political goals might be to centralize the realm or to outright change its form of government (usually leading to revolution). Keeping an eye out for all the political goals in your country is vital if you want to stay on top of things; and if you like the way some characters are thinking, encouraging them to form a faction is a great way to kickstart change!
Material goals reflect a character’s desire to impact the physical world. The most banal such goal would be the accumulation of wealth, but there are other, more interesting ones. A pious character might have it as their goal to erect a great cathedral, while a lenient merchant might sponsor road construction in heathen lands to better facilitate trade. Such goals are not necessary for a character with wealth to start spending it, but they definitely take priority when they appear. Notably, they might not always make economic sense, but alas, not everyone is an economist.
Attitudes
How a character feels towards another character is represented as a specific attitude. Most character relations and some political/diplomatic ones require certain attitudes between both parties, so it’s an important parameter to watch: after all, it’s difficult to seek an alliance with someone who hates your ruler’s guts.
The attitude between two characters mostly depends on how their goals and personalities line up. For example, when two characters have conflicting political goals, they might turn hostile towards each other even if they’d be best friends otherwise. To repeat, this isn’t absolute: if both characters happen to be very lenient, their conflicting goals might not be enough to drive them to mutual hatred if their personalities align.
Attitudes also depend on existing relationships between characters. For example, if one character is the vassal of another, their attitude won’t be merely friendly, but will instead be loyal. Or, if your ruler happens to cheat on his wife frequently, her attitude won’t be default hostility, but rather jealousy. Thanks to being context-specific, we can add specific behavior patterns to attitudes that make them a more realistic depiction of actual person-to-person conduct.
Relations
Characters don’t exist in isolation: they have families, which are their core relationships as they grow up, and over time will also make friends, enemies, and maybe even vassals or lieges. Family relationships are implicit and (almost always) immutable, whereas friends and enemies can come and go. Some friendships emerge via events, others via common circumstances. Leading a successful war alongside a fellow knight might result in a blossoming friendship among all the carnage, whereas constantly facing the same opponent on the battlefield might create a rivalry.
Some relationships are reflections of non-personal circumstances. We already mentioned vassalage: that’s a political relationship between countries, which also establishes a personal connection between the rulers of the two countries. Importantly, while the personal relationship might impact the political one (e.g. a vassal who hates your ruler might try to gain independence), the political one always takes precedence. A character may die, but the country they ruled remains.
The Black Prince had many siblings: his mother, Philippa of Hainault, had 9 children by 1356 and would go on to bear another 4. As the eldest son and heir apparent, Edward was beloved by his family.
Moddability
The character system - like almost all systems in Grey Eminence - was designed with moddability in mind. You can of course add new personality, lifestyle, or physical traits, but the much cooler part is making changes to the system itself. Under the hood, characters have processes happening to them (like education), which you can change, add, remove, or redirect. You can, for example, add a conscription process and tie it to country laws: that way, you can simulate characters going through compulsory military training alongside the rest of the population. You can also tie events to these systems or to other triggers; magic would be a good candidate here (e.g. only characters with certain traits can trigger certain events). There’s lots of potential here and we’re excited to see what you all will come up with!
That’s all this time around. Keep an eye out for the next dev diary on May 7, and until then make sure you’ve joined our Discord and Subreddit, and follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Thanks for reading!
