Hello everyone! Summer break is now wrapping up in Sweden and everyone's coming back into the office, so now's the time to start diving into our dev diaries for our upcoming event pack, Wards & Wardens! Today's DD comes from one of our Game Designers working on Crusader Kings III, and covers what you can expect to see with the new Eccentric trait and Adoption systems coming to the game with W&W later this August.
► Discuss Dev Diary #132 on our forums!
Eccentric
Hello hello hello, welcome to another Wards and Wardens dev diary! Today I'm going to be talking you through two new features: adoption and the Eccentric trait! We'll start off with the simpler of the two features: Eccentricity.
Why add a new trait in Wards and Wardens?
Friends and Foes added the Loyal and Disloyal traits, but unfortunately these came quite late in development and as a consequence they were quite under-utilized, so we decided to have the discussion around new traits quite early this time around and we went over a few different ideas including Superstitious, Silly vs Serious, but we kind of knew all along that what we really wanted was something analogous to the Wild Wasteland trait in Fallout or CK2 Lunatic.
For those unfamiliar, Lunacy in CK2 was usually where we made our more… out there content. There are still echoes of this here and there in CK3, but for the most part, Lunacy isn't really the same as it was.
The decision was made quite early in CK3's development that the lunatic trait would be analogous to real-world mental illness so this kind of content was typically deemed inappropriate. As a result of that decision, we've not really had an easy way to gate the sillier side of things when it comes to the player character. This has been a bit of a divisive subject on the forums, so we felt we needed some way to gate the content without resorting to game rules.
What is Eccentric? Who is Eccentric?
Eccentric is a personality trait meaning it is an essential part of a character's personality. Eccentrics are erratic and irrational, but there is a method to the madness so they may be able to see things that other characters don’t.
Numbers are subject to balancing
Wards and Wardens being all about children and childhood made it the perfect fit for a new Personality trait, and as with all other Personality traits in the game, Eccentric can be acquired during childhood.
People have been known to lose their marbles later in life, so a particularly stressed character may have a mental break which causes them to start seeing things in a more Eccentric way.
As you can see in the below screenshot, a non-Eccentric child would just guess at the options presented to them, but an eccentric may think of something a bit more creative.
There has also been an audit of some existing content to add checks for the Eccentric trait where sensible. The now-infamous Cat-apult event, for example, has now been made into an Eccentric event.
Something I'd like to nip in the bud quite early is that the Eccentric trait is not intended to reflect any real-world disabilities, illnesses, or neurodivergence. I think it's wonderful if you are able to project some of your own experiences onto the trait, but making a direct and conscious effort to make the Lunatic trait analogous to real-world mental illnesses is the reason why we ended up making Eccentric to begin with and we'd rather not have to come up with another trait for our silly content.
Eccentric is a free feature and will be available to everyone, but some unique content related to the trait will be exclusive for DLC-owners.
Adoption
Now onto the next feature of this diary and one that's quite exciting to me personally is the Adoption interaction! Now many many patches ago we introduced the Same-Sex marriage rule and ever since then it's just kind of been there and we've yet to introduce a way to actually make same-sex play… well, playable.
Who can adopt?
Under the default game rules, Adoption is available to characters who are in a same-sex marriage, the childless and elderly/infertile, and Compassionate characters. Compassionate has long been a bit of a weak trait to have, so it's nice to give them a powerful way to secure succession and bring talented orphans into the family.
Who can be adopted?
Children can be adopted as long as: they're not a ruler, they're not in prison or otherwise unavailable, nobody in their family is a ruler, they're not already part of your house, and they're not in the realm of someone of their dynasty. This does mean you're technically allowed to adopt noble children, and children whose parents are still alive, but they are highly reluctant to accept adoption in those circumstances.
Noble Adoption
If you want to role-play a culture where adoption is commonplace (as it was in some off-map and out-of-period cultures), you can take up the Noble Adoption cultural tradition!
Hold on a minute, isn't this anachronistic?
Sort of! While adoption amongst nobility was exceptionally rare, it wasn't completely unheard of. As such, we've restricted access to adoption quite a lot as described and the AI is quite reluctant to do it.
Can the restrictions be loosened?
Absolutely! Adoption comes with three new game rules that can forbid it or make it easier!
Just like the Eccentric trait, Adoption is part of the free update releasing with Wards & Wardens on August 22nd. Next week we will talk about the new Court position and share more details on what to expect from this event pack. See you then!
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