Designing A Detailed And Flexible Procedural/Emergent Fantasy RPGish SocialSimulation

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Opinions And Flavors Of Opinion For Characters

Character Personalities, Interests, And Desires

Gameplay Experience Of An Average Turn For Characters

Relationships, Interactions, Actions, And Dissonance Between Actions And Personality

Raising Children And Childhood Experience

Hosting And Attending Social Occasions And Managing Social Event Calenders

Special Ally And Retainer Family/House/Dynasty Social Agreemens Plus Oaths And Vows

Ideology, Happinnes, quality Of Life And General Opinion For Characters And Populations

Above are a series of links to connected game mechanics and systems I have described on my design blog. I will try to summarize these effectively for the purposes of this thread but I provide these for reference. I chose not to link all the Intrigue/Intelligence posts since those are slightly less relevant and because there are already so many posts.

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The goal of Axioms Of Dominion is to effectively combine aspects of management/city builder/tycoon games with aspects of RPGs, strategy games, social simulations, and also [D][P] Diplomacy, Intrigue, Politics mechanics in as seemless a way as possible. And then blast it full of magic, obviously.

You should be able to play as an intrigue focused character, or a diplomatic/political one, or an economic character, or a powerful mage or mercenary captain or merchant, in just as interesting a way as so many games allow you to play a general. No half-assing it or having those experiences be inferior or imagined.

And they should overlap. There is a post, not linked above but available on my substack, about planning for a military campaign and a few other posts, all subtitled "Everything But The Stabby Stuff" about equipment, logistics, transport, organization, holding war councils remeniscent of iconic fantasy stories.

In my opinion the Crusader Kings series leaves a pile to be desired as far as a Character focused social simulation. You can't build real individual relationships, your character is not distinctive, and neither are any of the NPCs, as a person/ality. This is clarified a lot in the link titled Character Personalities, Interests, And Desires.

Similarly SimRPGs and visual novels are also lacking in many ways like freedom and scope. The cost to improve on this situation is to scrape off scripted narratives, hand written dialogue, and too much illustration, shockingly even in the case of CK3 since they went for graphics over mechanics.

I have a new post coming out tomorrow about being evil in Axioms. I took that issue very seriously. Lucky having a fully fleshed out and integrated social simulation gives me most of the key tools and the extra work is only in a few key areas.

Aside from cute or witty dialogue you should really be able to feel like a character in a fantasy novel as far as how you can interact and the flexibility and scope. Setting it all inside a map and menu strategy game gives context to the RPG and social simulation aspects. You are part of a living world where "choice and consequence" as the Codex Crew is always chanting, are actually meaningful.

Briefly one of the above posts describe hosting Social Occasions where you actually provide food, resources, decoration, and activities and then engage is large group and small group and even individual social interaction. This is all text and icons due to the emergent/procedural nature. Characters however have Interests, Desires, Secrets, and Personalities in a way no strategy adjacent game has ever enabled which helps with variety.

Turns are 10 day weeks, with 40 per year, and you have the ability, thanks to the Attention Point system, described in a blog post with that title on my Substack, to allocate part of your weekly attention budget, say 1000 points a week for this example, to go to Social Occasions, engage in Activities with friends or cliques, allow for family life, and so forth. These Attention Points are actually required at different quantities for all game actions.

Characters have different demands on their Attention Points based on their position in the game. So high nobles with lots of land, vassals, advisors, intelligence/intrigue work, wars to wage, administration, and so forth must focus their socializing on characters a tier or two above or below to be efficient. Much less "important" characters can have more numerous important relationships or spend time crafting, training, learning, adventuring, and so forth.

Depends on the specifics of their native polity and surroundings children might attend Academagia or other school sim style academies, socializing with other young scions, learning magic or martial skills or craftings and trades. If you read the child raising link you'll understand the specific way characters from 0-~22 are treated gaining independence but also responsibilities as they age.

Axioms represents "laws", languages, various kinds of knowledge, political and diplomatic stuff including relations between nobles/magistrates/etc and the populations they manage/control, city builder like economics, a special citybuilder/srpg/mmo fusion crafting system, and so forth. Details can be found in other substack posts. Conquest, integration, social acceptance, assimilation, etc. All the stuff CK2-3/Imperator/Vicky3 deal with.

That is the strategy/politics simulation aspect. I'm focusing on the rpg/social simulation aspect here for obvious reasons.
 
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Hey, I noticed you are posting the same news in both the RPG and Non-rpg categories. Is your game an RPG or not?
 
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Hey, I noticed you are posting the same news in both the RPG and Non-rpg categories. Is your game an RPG or not?

Well, the game "The SIM's Medieval" has a similar problem : It is an RPG, but since people think it's rather a SIMs game, I guess that it is rather categorized there by more people, I guess.
 
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Well, the game "The SIM's Medieval" has a similar problem : It is an RPG, but since people think it's rather a SIMs game, I guess that it is rather categorized there by more people, I guess.

I originally posted in non-rpg. But then I realized that while it is half strategy the RPG part is comparably important. And this being an rpg site, the rpg section is just more prominent and trafficked.

As for the guy who asked is it rpg or not. Woo boy, loaded question. Certainly isn't a jrpg or something and not a blobber.
 
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I don't like to discourage you but this sounds way too big for a single person.
 
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I don't like to discourage you but this sounds way too big for a single person.

Afraid I don't follow. All this stuff is pretty easy to do individually. Any given aspect of the game is pretty simple. The value, in theory, comes from the emergent combination. There's nothing super fancy programming wise going on at a technical level.
 
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