First and foremost, I hope everyone reading this is staying safe and well. The isolation and disruption is hard, to say nothing of those suffering the disease itself. Despite the difficulty, we will make it through though! Speaking personally here, I developed a bit of a cough the last few days, so I've put myself in as much isolation as is possible, even beyond what had been called for before that. It's likely nothing, but we all need to do our part to minimize contagion.
Anyway, on to video games!
No Fully Good or Bad Traits
When composing any interactive narrative, it is very easy to fall into a trap of making “good” and “bad” choices. When a choice is presented but there is an answer that is under all circumstances always right or always wrong, that is a false choice. It is instead a test to see if the player knows the event or not. This is something that I have actively tried to avoid in Dei Gratia Rex. Thinking about that led me to further endeavor to make no trait wholly good or bad. An example might help:
Here our grim king has been laying waste to the lands of his enemies. However up until that point, he had been a very kind man. This presents a personal contradiction. The king can accept that he may be more cruel than he thought. He could also waste precious willpower to table the matter, at least until the war is over. However, if he is not particularly bright, he might not even understand the conflict between his commitment to kindness and his tactics in war. It is generally better to be smart, but it's not always good!
Here our wayfaring king has chanced upon a village in Wiltshire which is operating a market without a charter. Naturally shutting down the market will cause economic damage. However, the burgesses exist in relative comfort due to their hard-won economic privileges; grating a new charter or else accepting a bribe to ignore will also quite naturally annoy them. The king in this case however is sufficiently shy that he can simply avoid the gathering altogether. This allows the market to continue, but also allows the king to prevent making a hard choice. For someone who has to deal with large amounts of people frequently, being shy is a curse. But not always!
I do want to make clear however, in light of both this and the previous entry about trait-constrained roleplaying, some options will only show up at all subject to certain conditions. The shyness example is such a case. If you are not already shy, you cannot will yourself to panic at the sight of the crowd.
I made a Tweet demonstrating this a while ago, using the debug REPL. I planned on including it directly in this update, but my only option for moving pictures here is .gif files at 3 MB or less. It just wasn't going to happen in any way that was legible.
What's Next
I must admit that the changes to routine have cost me some time. There's a reason I pay for a (very) tiny office after all, despite having essentially no money. All that's to say, there is still a bit more war content left to write. I really hope to have something beyond that to talk about next time!